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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that stealing a Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court was his crowning achievement after three decades in Congress, and he is packing the federal courts for another generation, underscoring his urgency in trying to hang on to the GOP's thin majority in the U.S. Senate in the November midterm elections. It also helps explain the bizarre situation in Montana's U.S. Senate race, where the GOP appears to have ginned up a fake Green Party candidate -- previously on the state Republican Party's payroll -- in hopes of siphoning votes away from Democratic Sen. John Tester in an otherwise very Trumpy state.\xa0 The Senate returns from their recess next week, and will begin confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, the CIA's Deputy Director, who has been tapped to take Mike Pompeo's spot as CIA chief, who is nominated to takeover Sec. of State.\xa0 Haspel was the CIA's chief of a secret U.S. prison in Thailand following the 9/11 attacks, where a number of terror suspects\xa0 were tortured in 2002. We're joined today by ERNEST A. CANNING, for whom the matter of someone alleged to have overseen torture becoming the next CIA director is very personal: Canning's father was imprisoned and waterboarded by the Japanese during WWII.\xa0 We discuss his father's experiences, why the U.S. has long held torture to be a violation of international law, and how the Democrats' failure to demand accountability of Bush-era torturers has resulted in Haspel's nomination, rather than imprisonment.\xa0 Finally, a federal judge in Massachusetts has upheld a state ban on military-style assault weapons. Plus some listener mail in response to retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' op-ed last week suggesting a repeal of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.