Record ocean heat bleaching corals worldwide; EV charging roads in Indiana; Biden raising drilling, mining royalties for first time in a century; PLUS: A marine mystery in Florida...
10th hottest month ever in a row; Swiss climate inaction violates human rights; PLUS: EPA crack down on airborne chemical plant pollution, 'forever chemicals' in drinking water...
A CA three-way!; Polls shift toward Biden; RW scam artists pay the price; Trump rejected again in NY criminal case, facing trouble for phony $175M bond in NY civil case...
Big hurricane season coming; Colorado River used mostly for cattle; Good news for CA snowpack, for now; PLUS: Disney's Tomorrowland says goodbye to Yesterdayville...
No Labels out; Soft sentence for vote fraudster; WI reconsiders drop-boxes; NE nixes Elctrl College change; Biden v. Israel; Sanders, Biden tout drug price success...
Felony charges dropped against VA Republican caught trashing voter registrations before last year's election. Did GOP AG, Prosecutor conflicts of interest play role?...
State investigators widening criminal probe of man arrested destroying registration forms, said now looking at violations of law by Nathan Sproul's RNC-hired firm...
Arrest of RNC/Sproul man caught destroying registration forms brings official calls for wider criminal probe from compromised VA AG Cuccinelli and U.S. AG Holder...
'RNC official' charged on 13 counts, for allegely trashing voter registration forms in a dumpster, worked for Romney consultant, 'fired' GOP operative Nathan Sproul...
So much for the RNC's 'zero tolerance' policy, as discredited Republican registration fraud operative still hiring for dozens of GOP 'Get Out The Vote' campaigns...
The other companies of Romney's GOP operative Nathan Sproul, at center of Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, still at it; Congressional Dems seek answers...
The belated and begrudging coverage by Fox' Eric Shawn includes two different video reports featuring an interview with The BRAD BLOG's Brad Friedman...
FL Dept. of Law Enforcement confirms 'enough evidence to warrant full-blown investigation'; Election officials told fraudulent forms 'may become evidence in court'...
Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) sends blistering letter to Gov. Rick Scott (R) demanding bi-partisan reg fraud probe in FL; Slams 'shocking and hypocritical' silence, lack of action...
After FL & NC GOP fire Romney-tied group, RNC does same; Dead people found reg'd as new voters; RNC paid firm over $3m over 2 months in 5 battleground states...
After fraudulent registration forms from Romney-tied GOP firm found in Palm Beach, Election Supe says state's 'fraud'-obsessed top election official failed to return call...
IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Porn is dirty, but coal is clean, says the Republican Party platform; Senate Democrats call out the 'web' of professional climate deniers; June 2016 was the hottest on record for the U.S.; PLUS: Another fracking explosion, this time in New Mexico... All that and more in today's Green News Report!
Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.
IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Republicans just escalated the war over ExxonMobil and climate change; Once-respected science group has one more chance to reject Exxon Mobil funding; Transportation Dept. proposes new oil train rules; Puget Sound to close another coal plant; State's Delta smelt plan calls for more water flowing to sea; Fake bio-diesel factory made millions; Loneliest natural gas terminal bucks pipeline trend; Number of Americans “alarmed” by climate change rises in latest poll... PLUS: Clean energy investment in 2016 undershoots last year’s record... and much, MUCH more! ...
On today's very busy, very lively BradCast (and extra, special, surprise, bonus hour of The BradCast!), we cover the results of the latest (and, thankfully, final for this cycle) 'Super Tuesday' primary contests in California, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico and Montana yesterday. [Audio links to both hours posted below!]
After coverage of responses from all three remaining candidates (Trump, Clinton and Sanders) to last night's reported results, and where they will each go from here, we take a look at some of the reported problems that folks had casting their votes, particularly here in Los Angeles County (the nation's largest voting jurisdiction).
Are the problems being reported in California as "just chaos" (LATimes) and "mired in voting problems" (HuffPo) as bad as some are reporting them to be? The main concerns, at this hour, seem to involve failed electronic ballot readers at L.A. polling places (which don't actually tabulate votes anyway) and voters forced to cast Provisional Ballots (some 240k in LA County alone) for a variety of reasons, some legit, some a bit more troubling.
Both voters and poll workers --- lots of them! --- call in today to report on polling problems from Tuesday, views on the primary in general, on AP reporting the Democratic contest as over on Monday before voters even voted on Tuesday, and much much more on today's show. In fact, the phone lines were so busy, with so many callers, that KPFK asked us to continue on for an unprecedented second hour of our special coverage! Both of which are now posted below...
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I usually try to avoid talk about elections on election days themselves, but the AP, NBC, CNN and all the rest in the corporate media gave me little choice on today's BradCast, even as millions of voters go to the polls today in California, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. [Audio link to show is posted below.]
Last night, just after we got off air, Associated Press decided to declare that Hillary Clinton had "clinched" the Democratic nomination. Their reporting was based on conversations with unpledged Super Delegates who do not actually cast their vote in the nominating process until the end of July (July 25th, to be specific), at the Democratic National Convention. So, with their misleading, inaccurate pronouncements of the Democrats having 'selected a female nominee for the first time in history' (they haven't --- yet), I offer a word or two today --- okay, a rant or two --- on the amazing disservice those news organizations have done to voters (not to mention the Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns, their supporters, the DNC and American democracy itself) with their inaccurate and misleading misreporting.
Then, I'm joined by Jonathan H. Adler, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Business Law & Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, to discuss the strange bedfellows who've joined forces in support of onerous new FDA regulations on life-saving vaping (e-cigarette) technology. We've discussed the topic on the show on a number of occasions in the past (most recently here), not only because half a million Americans still die each year, unnecessarily, from cigarette smoking, but because, bizarrely, it has largely been Democrats and other supposedly anti-tobacco crusaders who have been leading the deadly campaign against vaping, making it much harder for smokers to quit smoking in the bargain.
Why would Dems be fighting --- alongside Big Tobacco(!) --- to kill the vaping industry, despite scientific studies finding e-cigarettes to be at least 95% safer than smoking and the UK's Royal College of Physicians (the equivalent of the office of the Surgeon General in the U.S.) recent pronouncement: "in the interests of public health it is important to promote the use of e-cigarettes...as widely as possible as a substitute for smoking"?
In her recent article, "Democrats Work With Big Tobacco and Big Pharma to Choke the Vaping Industry," at the American Media Institute (and at the NY Observer), journalist Monica Showalter offers an answer. She details the "strange bedfellows against vaping," citing both Big Tobacco's support of the crippling new FDA regulations, along with massive donations given by Big Pharma to big name Democrats in the U.S. Senate, just as those politicians came out in favor of restrictions on vaping. The Big Pharma companies include those which control the multi-billion dollar smoking-cessation nicotine industry that produces products such as nicotine gums, patches and, yes, inhalers!
Adler, the co-author of a study titled "Baptists, Bootleggers and E-Cigarettes", joins us to explain the strange coalition, and the powerful history of the "Baptist and Bootleggers" political/economic theory, where seemingly opposing groups, such as bootleggers and religious opponents of alcohol, worked together to keep Prohibition going as long as possible in the U.S. in the early part of the 20th century.
A similarly fascinating and powerful (and bizarre) political and financial coalition seems to be at work here, as Adler explains, to blunt the nascent and life-saving e-cigarette industry, despite recent studies showing, for example, "that when restrictions are imposed upon electronic cigarettes that either make them harder to get or make them more expensive, teen smoking rates go up. The idea that we could adopt policies in the name of public health that increase teen smoking rates should really be frightening."
Also, what should be similarly frightening to Democrats and others who claim to be against smoking, according to Adler, is that the Big Tobacco companies have been very supportive of the onerous FDA regulations no being applied to vaping products. Those are costly new rules that Big Tobacco can afford to comply with, but Mom and Pop vaping shops, currently leading the industry in the U.S., simply cannot. "The major tobacco companies asked [for] and supported the FDA's proposals to regulate e-cigarettes," Adler tells me. "Indeed, Phillip Morris is largely credited with helping to write the statute under which these regulations were adopted."
Finally, we end another very busy BradCast today with our latest very busy Green News Report!...
While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!
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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Tropical Storm Colin batters Florida, as Paris begins to dry out; Oil train explodes in Oregon, railroad keeps running trains right by it; Alaska wildfires now a 'significant contributor' to global warming; Chile has so much solar energy it's giving it away; PLUS: The Libertarian Party has its presidential nominee --- we have his position on climate change...All that and more in today's Green News Report!
Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.
IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): EU Countries Refuse To Back New License For Glyphosate Weed-Killer; Groups Urge U.S. Congress To Reject TPP Over Environmental Concerns; Environmental groups reject Rep. Lamar Smith's request for information on Exxon Mobil climate case; Rand Paul Withdraws Block On Chemical Safety Bill; The western US grid is fragmented; The land transfer movement's great public-lands hoax; Poo-to-Power Breakthrough Appears in China... PLUS: For Oil Industry, Smog Fight Was Dress Rehearsal for Climate Denial... and much, MUCH more! ...
On today's BradCast, I'm back! My huge thanks to both Angie Coiro of In Deep Radio and Peter B. Collins of The Peter B. Collins Show for filling in for me while I was on the road for a few days!
After the bad news (for you) of my return is out of the way on today's show, we get caught back up with late developments before next week's big Primary Elections in California (and New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana), as the polls for both the Primary and General elections continue to tighten; some Republicans continue to scramble for a Trump alternative; voters continue to try and oversee their own public elections; and listeners call in with their closing arguments for their favored candidate before next Tuesday's last big primary day of the 2016 Presidential cycle.
While it's "last call" before the California (and New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana) Primary on June 7, and some voters are already facing confusion (and error) in the Golden State with CA's absurdly confusing multi-party primary system. Documentary filmmaker and VideoTheVote.org co-creator John Wellington Ennis joins us to discuss efforts to recruit volunteers to oversee the polls in Los Angeles at SaveOurElections.org to document whatever happens next Tuesday.
Then, we go to the phones to hear from tons of listeners on who they will support next Tuesday (and beyond) and why. Lots of great calls with voices and opinions not usually heard, if ever, on our corporatized mainstream public airwaves!
While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!
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GUEST: Salon's Amanda Marcotte on the latest GOP effort to stop The Donald | PLUS: The landmark Paris Agreement signed; Another mass shooting weekend; And thinking big about progressive policy...
On today's BradCast [audio link below] we return to Republican Presidential politics for the first time in a while, as Ted Cruz and John Kasich announce a plan to team up, sort of, against Donald Trump. (Good luck with that.) But, first, a few stories that haven't received nearly the coverage they deserve from the corporate mainstream media over the weekend.
On Friday, Earth Day, world leaders gathered at the U.N. for the largest-ever first day signing of a worldwide global agreement. The signing of the landmark Paris Agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions comes not a moment too soon, as the world smashes heat record after heat record and faces a likely rise in temperatures that will far exceed the targets of the agreement unless further voluntary measures are taken. Desi Doyen joins us to explain it all, and how the Obama Administration plans to get around both ratification by the GOP's denier-controlled U.S. Senate and how the pact was designed to keep the next U.S. President from being able to easily undo it.
Also, another spate of mass shootings took place over the weekend in Republican-controlled states, from OH to GA to AL to WI to AZ, but, as with the Paris Agreement, the corporate mainstream barely noticed as such mass gun deaths have simply become commonplace in these Locked and Loaded States of America.
Then we're joined by Salon political writerAmanda Marcotte to discuss the new alliance between Cruz and Kasich in their desperate bid to take down the GOP front-runner Donald Trump. Marcotte, who describes the plan, much-ballyhooed by the corporate media, as "comically pathetic", explains why the GOP's latest "conspiracy" is unlikely to derail The Donald as hoped.
She says the scheme, which includes Kasich pulling campaign resources out of Indiana in exchange for Cruz pulling resources out of New Mexico and Oregon, doesn't even include telling their own voters to vote for the other guy in those states. "They're not even going that far. That's how dumb this plan is. They're not taking their name off the ballot or doing anything that might actually cause anyone to change their vote. They're just not campaigning in each other's chosen states."
Marcotte believes the move is even likely to help Trump. "For weeks now, Donald Trump has been running around the country claiming that he's a victim of an elite conspiracy to shut him out of his rightful nomination...And here they have come out with great fanfare and announce they are conspiring against him!"
She also tells me about what she sees as "a complete tornado of incompetence" in the Republican Party in general, including from its great white hope in Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan. "The Republican Party has a bunch of ideologues, but they don't have anybody who knows how to do anything. Like basic politics, basic governance," Marcotte explains. "Donald Trump is one of the luckiest people alive because he just sort of wandered into this situation where everyone else is so bad he looks good in comparison."
But is all of this GOP dysfunction and a crumbling Republican Party actually good for Democrats and progressives? Tune in for that discussion and more.
Finally, as voters head to the polls on Tuesday in PA, MD, CT, DE and RI, a closing thought on Democrats "thinking big" about progressive policy, as shared by both Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden...
While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!
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On today's BradCast, we cover the 'credible threat' of terror said to have been received by Los Angeles school officials out here, leading to today's unprecedented, complete shutdown of the second largest school district in the nation.
I'm joined by Ernesto Arce, News Director at our flagship radio station here in Los Angeles, Pacifica Radio'sKPFK, for the latest, including the growing belief that the entire matter was little more than a hoax; that there have been more than 150 reports of hate crimes against Muslims here in Southern California since the San Bernardino shootings two weeks ago; and that today's panic suggests, once again, that you don't have to fire a shot or set off a bomb to terrorize Americans.
Also today, the sentencing of the latest Republican Sec. of State --- New Mexico's Dianna Duran --- to be found guilty of election fraud crimes, even as the GOP still pretends that Democrats are committing massive "voter fraud"; I finally figure out a way that Donald Trump could be knocked off his throne and maybe not win the GOP 2016 nomination after all (maybe); And Desi Doyen joins us for special Green News Report coverage of the historic UN climate agreement that was finalized unanimously by almost 200 nations over the weekend in Paris...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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On today's BradCast we catch up with a bunch of news, breaking and otherwise, at week's end.
Among the stories covered --- with much gusto and an occasional bit of snark --- on today's program...
• The stuff that actually mattered from Hillary Clinton's testimony at Thursday's disastrous Benghazi Hearing in the U.S. House;
• Record-breaking Hurricane Patricia barreling towards Mexico;
• New Mexico's Sec. of State Dianna Duran --- a longtime Republican "voter fraud" fraudster --- resigns after pleading guilty to multiple counts of election fraud and embezzlement;
• Ben Carson overtakes Donald Trump in two Iowa polls;
• Jeb Bush's campaign death rattle continues;
• Paul Ryan's attempt to become House Speaker could still be thwarted by "conservatives" ready to primary other "conservatives";
• And some listener mail on our Richard Viguerie interview...
There's a few more important news items littered throughout today's very lively and busy program, but you'll have to listen to learn about 'em...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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On today's BradCast, I'm joined by climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University, to discuss the historic flooding event now ongoing in South Carolina, even as Hurricane Joaquin missed the state by hundreds of miles.
The award-winning Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, offers a sobering explanation of the relationship between climate change and record flooding in SC. He also discusses what is actually meant by the phrase "1000-year flood", as so casually cited by SC Gov. Nikki Hailey (R) over the weekend, even as more than half of her state now faces unprecedented disaster.
"When you hear a statistic like that, 'it's a 1000-year event', that's based on the assumption that what's happening right now is no different from the sorts of things that were happening in the distant past, that the climate isn't changing. And it is," Mann tells me. "Climate change is very detectably increasing the likelihoods of precisely these sorts of events. Things we used to call a '1000-year event' become '100-year events'. And pretty soon, if we continue on the course that we are on, what was a '100-year event' becomes a '3 or 4-year event'."
Mann goes on to explain the climatic patterns that made the SC event possible, and how we are likely to experience much more of it in the very near future. "Part of the story --- and don't let anyone tell you otherwise --- was record heat in the Atlantic, which meant there was record moisture off the coast. And it's that record level of moisture in the atmosphere giving us these record levels of rainfall."
"There's no question --- what we're seeing play out is precisely what we warned would play out decades ago," he tells me, before discussing what we may be able to expect from this year's record El Nino out West, where the ocean is also at record temperatures amidst a "1000-year drought" here in California.
He also offers some thoughts on the new blockbuster report from Inside Climate News (as I discussed with the co-author of that investigative series last week), concerning Exxon's knowledge, as early as 1977, of the catastrophic dangers of man-made global warming, thanks to the use of their product and their subsequent about-face decision to fund climate change denialist organizations beginning in the 1990s. Man describes the opportuninty for Exxon to have led us to a scientific solution long ago as both "sad" and "tragic", among other things.
Also today: Updates on the closure of DMVs in Alabama for, purportedly, "budgetary reasons", even as the shutdowns will disproportionately affect the ability of African-Americans to cast a vote in the state and could cost more in the defense of lawsuits than is saved by the closures; New Mexico's Sec. of State Dianna Duran (R) is now facing a 65th(!!!) criminal count --- this one for identify theft and forgery --- as we are reminded, once again, why simply "trusting" election officials is not a valid option in our Constitutional representative democracy; And, finally, updates on last week's shooting massacre in Oregon and how Fox 'News' and the Republicans are still doing all they can do to do nothing at all to prevent more such massacres in the future...
Download MP3 or listen to complete show online below...
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Guest: Wichita University's Beth Clarkson, PhD, on her theory and KS Sec. of State's attempt to block her citizen audit of touch-screen systems showing unexplained vote increases for the GOP in large precincts
Also: NM Sec. of State charged with 64 criminal counts...
Whether statistician Beth Clarkson, PhD, head of Wichita University's National Institute for Aviation Research, is ultimately proven correct, today's must-listen, in-depth interview with her on The BradCast should remind us all, once again, why neither election officials nor voting systems are simply to be trusted.
Without the ability to carry out public oversight, democracy vanishes. That's what's happening right now in the state of Kansas, where Sec. of State Kris Kobach is attempting to block Clarkson's legal attempt to audit touch-screen voting system "paper trails" in Sedgwick County (Wichita), the state's most populous county.
Confirming a theory initially reported by two other statisticians in 2012 [PDF], Clarkson has found that computer-reported results from larger precincts in the state, with more than 500 voters, show a "consistent" statistical increase in votes for the Republican candidates in general elections (and even a similar increase for establishment GOP candidates versus 'Tea Party' challengers during Republican primaries). Those results run counter to conventional political wisdom that Democrats perform better in larger, more urban precincts.
The larger the precinct size, she explains on today's program, the higher the percentage of the vote for the GOP candidate. Clarkson finds "that is the case, and that is a relationship that is unexplained and very troubling." Previously, statisticians Francois Choquette and James Johnson found a similarly unexplained relationship while examining reported vote totals in Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Kentucky.
Even more disturbing, in hopes of further testing her theory, Clarkson has filed a lawsuit under the state's public records act in hopes of auditing some of the so-called "paper trails" from the state's unverifiable touch-screen voting systems, but Kansas Sec. of State Kris Kobach (a long-time GOP vote suppression champion) is fighting her access to those records in court. Kobach's full response is here [PDF]. The response from the Sedgewick County Election Commissioner Tabatha Lehman is here.
Clarkson tells me she believes the statistical pattern she confirms in KS is evidence of rigged elections.
"There have been a few theories advanced," to explain the statistical pattern. "The one I find most probable is that the voting machines are being manipulated. Their vulnerability seems to me a fairly high-probability explanation for this particular pattern. It fits exactly what you'd expect to see if people are flipping the votes within voting machines."
While I've been skeptical of the general theory for some time, for reasons that I explain during the program, Clarkson makes a compelling case, particularly for the ability of the public to oversee their own elections by examining the voting systems in question. If the public is not allowed to examine the so-called "paper trail" of these god-forsaken machines, what good are they?
"Suspicion isn't proof," Clarkson is careful to note. "The reason I'm suing for the paper records is because an audit can provide proof. Statistics are not going to be convincing to most people over the long term because they don't understand the math, and you don't believe what you don't understand. But an audit is fairly straightforward and the results should be fairly definitive."
She adds that Kobach's attempt to keep her from examining paper logs and tapes makes little sense, particularly when they concern elections which are long enough ago that the results may no longer be officially contested. "Voting is important and we want to keep those records secure so we can be assured of the accuracy of the count. But they're so secure now, nobody gets to see them."
Also today, as if we needed yet another reminder of why neither electronic voting systems nor election officials are simply to be "trusted", on Friday, New Mexico's Republican Sec. of State Dianna Duran --- like Kobach, also a long time "voter fraud" fraudster --- was charged with 64 criminal counts related to embezzlement, fraud, money laundering, violations of the Campaign Practice Act, tampering with public records, conspiracy, and a Governmental Conduct Act violation.
Download MP3 or listen online to the complete show below...
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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Toxic mine spill contaminates waterways across three Southwest states; Only one mention of climate change in both Fox 'News' debates last week; Ohio Gov. John Kasich backtracks on global warming; PLUS: Shell Oil breaks up with ALEC... All that and more in today's Green News Report!
Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.
IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): US Carbon Pollution From Power Plants Hits 27-Year Low; Scotland To Ban Growing of Genetically Modified Crops; Hot Enough for You? This Is Just the Beginning; Inside Shell’s Extreme Plan to Drill for Oil in the Arctic; Toxic Algae Blooming in Pacific from California to Alaska Is Affecting Your Seafood; Japan Restarts Reactor After Break Due To Fukushima... PLUS: Australia unveils emissions reduction target ahead of Paris talks, is immediately criticized... and much, MUCH more! ...
On today's BradCast, we catch up and clean up a number of messes that got buried --- or, in the case of one story, flowed down stream --- amid last week's incredibly busy news week.
Desi Doyen joins me to cover a whole bunch of stories today: from Jon Stewart's final Daily Show; to the jury's verdict in the sentencing phase for the Aurora, CO movie theater shooter; to the shootings that didn't happen at a movie theater in TN last week; to a few comments from the Fox 'News'/GOP debate that the media didn't focus on because the comments didn't have anything to do with Donald Trump (although one really important one did).
Plus: Breaking news out of Ferguson, MO today and the new toxic mess now fouling waterways in the U.S. Southwest. Buckle up and enjoy!...
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Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court severely curtailed the government's ability to utilize a routine traffic stop as an excuse to subject motorists to a canine-sniff of their vehicles as a precursor to a search for narcotics.
In Rodriguez v. United States, the Court ruled that the right of "seizure" during a routine traffic stop extends only for the length of time necessary to effectuate the purpose of the stop --- a purpose that ends with the issuance of a citation or warning for the routine stop. While the time needed to effectuate the purpose of the stop includes such measures as necessary to protect an officer’s safety, it does not, according to the Supremes, include a "dog sniff" which, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote on behalf of the court's majority, relates to "the Government’s endeavor to detect crime in general or drug trafficking in particular."
While the 6 to 3 decision (Justices Thomas, Alito and Kennedy dissenting) was handed down in a case in which a motorist was caught transporting methamphetamine inside his car, it also serves to protect the rights of those who are innocent, such as 63-year old Dennis Eckhart, whose nightmarish plight --- including multiple, invasive, forced medical procedures --- all came about as the result of a routine traffic stop and wholly unfounded suspicion by local police...
It's been happening for years now. On the day after elections like last Tuesday's, media figures begin navel gazing to figure out how pre-election polls, created by dozens of independent pollsters using dozens of different methodologies, could all find the same thing but turn out to be so wrong once the election results are in.
The presumption is that the results are always right, and if they don't match the pre-election polling, its the polling that must be wrong, as opposed to the election results.
On Wednesday morning, after Tuesday's mid-term election surprise in which Republicans reportedly won handily in race after race despite pre-election polls almost unanimously predicting much closer races or outright Democratic victories, FiveThirtyEight statistics guru Nate Silver declared "The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats".
His analysis of aggregated averages from dozens of different pollsters and polls this year found that the performance of Democrats was overestimated by approximately 4 percentage points in Senate races and 3.4 points in gubernatorial contests. Silver's assessment relies on a "simple average of all polls released in the final three weeks of the campaign," as compared to the (unofficial and almost entirely unverified) election results reported on Tuesday night. He doesn't suggest there was anything nefarious in the polling bias towards Dems this year, simply that the pollsters got it wrong for a number of speculative reasons.
Citing the fact that nearly all of the polls suggested Democrats would do much better than they ultimately did, when compared to the reported election results, Silver asserts it wasn't that the polls were more wrong that usual, per se, but that almost all of them were wrong in a way that appears to have overestimated Democratic performance on Election Day.
"This year's polls were not especially inaccurate," he explains. "Between gubernatorial and Senate races, the average poll missed the final result by an average of about 5 percentage points --- well in line with the recent average. The problem is that almost all of the misses were in the same direction."
Silver is much smarter than I when it comes to numbers; I'm happy to presume he has the basic math right. But he seems to have a blind spot in his presumption that the pre-election polls were wrong and the election results were right. That, despite the lack of verification of virtually any of the results from Tuesday night, despite myriad and widespread if almost completely ignored problems and failures at polls across the country that day, and despite systematic voter suppression and dirty tricks that almost certainly resulted in election results (verified or otherwise) that were skewed toward Republicans...
No doubt this is precisely the sort of thing that Chris Christie, New Jersey's governor, chair of the Republican Governors Association and 2016 Republican Presidential hopeful, was talking about last week when discussing the need for Republicans to be in charge of the "voting mechanisms" in 2016.
New Mexico, certain to be a key swing state once again in the 2016 Presidential election, currently has both a Republican Governor, the popular Susana Martinez, and a Republican Secretary of State, Dianna Duran. Both are up for re-election this year. Duran is in a neck-and-neck race against her Democratic opponent Maggie Toulouse Oliver.
Duran is one of those GOP "voter fraud" fraudsters who likes to pretend there is a massive epidemic of voter fraud that needs correcting via polling place Photo ID restrictions, even though such measures prevent far more legal (largely Democratic-leaning) votes from being cast than fraudulent ones --- and even though she's been able to find next to none since taking office four years ago.
At the same time, Duran appears to be slow-walking thousands of perfectly legal new voter registrations from being processed by the state Motor Vehicle Department (MVD), despite a 2010 court order issued after a settlement with the federal government requiring New Mexico to comply with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the so-called "Motor Voter" law.
When I moved to Santa Fe this summer, one of the first things I did was apply for a New Mexico driver's license. At the same time, I registered to vote using a paper form. This week, I learned from the secretary of state's registration information website that my voter registration was never processed. I received no notification of any problems with my registration.
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About Brad Friedman...
Brad is an independent investigative
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expert on issues of election integrity,
and a Commonweal Institute Fellow.