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Tamara Toles O'Laughlin: United Nations Warns Global Effort on Climate Change Inadequate, Transformational Change Urgently Needed; Norman Solomon: Corporate Democrats, Media Attack Progressive Candidates Sanders and Warren; Bert Waters: U.S. Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier Sends Annual Thanksgiving ‘Day of Mourning’ Message; Bob Nixon: This Week’s Under-reported News Summary.

Informing the public about candidates running for president is among media’s most important jobs. In a relatively crowded Democratic field, the public is looking to media to lift up issues that are important to them, and assess how various candidates might address them. They’re looking for substantive reporting on candidates’ public records. But as we record the show, the major election story seems to be about Joe Biden’s leg hair.

The late activist-essayist-novelist-historian and public intellectual, Gore Vidal, reads his "Open Letter To the Next President." Dowst hopes Elizabeth and Bernie are listening, for Vidal's "letter" is at least as timely now as it was when he spoke, shortly before the election in 2000. (That was the corruptly-counted and corruptly-decided "election" of "W".) Vidal urges dismantling the out-of-control Pentagon and the National Security State, and he denounces Congress for serving the corporations rather than the citizens.

This is a documentary film on a problem most of us did not know we had and a practice that may yet prevent us from making the urgent transition to clean energy. The first visuals in the film show clear cuts in wetland forests in the US South and Southeast, follow the logging trucks into the staging areas of electric power plants where the trees are shredded and burned as fuel – the so-called biomass. Many of these power plants formerly burned coal and need little adjustment to now burn trees. The bitter irony is that burning trees emits even more carbon than coal – as is explained in this film. BURNED tells the little-known story of the accelerating destruction of our forests for fuel, and probes the policy loopholes, huge subsidies, and blatant greenwashing of the globally expanding biomass electric power industry.

Today we feature Israeli historian Ilan Pappe speaking at the Cleveland Forum in Cleveland, Ohio. When it was announced that Pappe would be speaking at the Forum, the Israeli lobby went to work to discredit him, going so far as to call him “anti-semitic” and a “self-hating Jew” for the seminal work he has done to document, among other things, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population by the Israeli military in 1948. We are running Pappe’s full presentation, including the introduction, which speaks to the pressure the Forum was under to cancel Pappe, as well as the Q and A which he so masterfully handled in the face of this hostility.

Has it ever struck you as odd how white evangelicals in this country consistently and enthusiastically back a president with a verifiable history of strikingly lewd behavior? From multiple divorces to bragging about grabbing women by the genitals, from public affairs with porn stars to the suggestion that he’d like to date his own daughter, the man’s moral compass swings wildly away from due North. The evangelical right is historically famous for linking personal morality with fitness to govern. They attacked Bill Clinton unmercifully, for example, for his extra-marital concerns in the 1990s. But when it comes to Donald Trump, white evangelicals seem willing to reconsider this linkage, supporting him in record numbers.

NATO is a Cold War anachronism, but bureaucratic inertia and vested interests are keeping it alive. If NATO ever had any legitimacy, should it exist at all any more? Has there even been any arguable need since the demise of the Soviet Union? The expansion of NATO territory right up the the Russian border was a blatant breach of an explicit agreement, yet it continues to exist, to burn up money, to support imperialist wars, and to act as a USA proxy when convenient. Now, Trump is swinging this way and that, demanding that other NATO countries increase their financial support, then questioning USA membership in NATO. Swanson and Gibbs discuss these issues.