From Agence France-Presse...

Five American families are, today, having the worst days of their lives, thanks to their generosity in allowing their child to participate in a pointless war, built on knowing lies more than eight years ago, by men and women who have faced no consequences for those lies.

The deaths of the five soldiers in Iraq today mean that 4,459 U.S. troops have been killed to date in that particular war, while 1,610 have died in Afghanistan for reasons which remain similarly unknown on this day as well.

That's 6,069 U.S. troops killed in wars begun, but still not ended, by war criminals who have faced no consequences for their dishonest actions in illegally and dishonestly and recklessly waging wars with our blood and treasure in the name of this country. That total, of course, fails to include the number of U.S. contractors, foreign troops, and the untold number of citizens of both nations (and of the several other nations where we are waging wars as well) who have been killed in the bargain.

The carnage continues, with little hope for a real end in sight, and virtually no hope for accountability for those whose actions led directly to these tragic deaths.

On the other hand...of far more interest to both the media and nation alike...

Via TPM:

By way of reminder, George W. Bush inherited a federal budget surplus from Bill Clinton in 2000, when the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had forecast that, at that rate, the debt would be entirely wiped out by 2012.

Any questions?

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"I don’t want everybody to vote," Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, said while addressing a right-wing Christian audience in 1980. "[O]ur leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down," he added after he denigrated those who seek "good government" through maximum, informed voter participation as people who suffer from the "goo goo syndrome."

Voter suppression has long been a staple of American politics, but the tsunami of new restrictions on the polling place now being rammed through by newly-elected Republican majorities in state after state is unprecedented, certainly since the era of Jim Crow was supposed to have been ended by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

While most Americans may think of the poll tax and literacy tests as forms of voter suppression associated the Jim Crow South, the confirmation hearings of the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Renquist included sworn testimony from former U.S. Attorney James Brosnahan and others reflecting that, as an early 60's GOP activist, Renquist intimidated African-American and Hispanic voters in AZ by challenging their ability to read.

1965's Voting Rights Act outlawed both the poll tax and literacy tests. In more recent times, pursuant to a 1987 federal court consent decree, and a subsequent provision of the National Voting Rights Act of 1993, another GOP suppression tactic, "caging lists," was banned, though as documented by the BBC's Greg Palast, the Bush administration-led Plutocrats didn't let a little matter like illegality get in the way of their use.

21st Century voter suppression operates under cover. Or it had, until the new wave of legislation being passed by GOP legislatures across the country began hitting its stride. Until FL's then-governor Charlie Crist overturned it, for example, the state banned convicted felons from voting even years after they'd been released from prison. In Armed Madhouse, Palast asserts that prior to the 2000 Presidential election, FL's then Sec. of State Katherine Harris, appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother of candidate George W. Bush, purged 94,000 "felons" from the state's computerized voter rolls, though the only "crime" at least 91,000 were guilty of was "being Black, Democrat or both."

Over much of the past decade, voter suppression efforts have been bolstered by bogus "voter fraud" claims leveled at groups like ACORN, who aided in the registration of those who might be likely to vote against the GOP (minorities and the working class); "non-partisan" GOP astroturf groups like the phony American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) created after the 2004 election solely to create and spread false propaganda about a Democratic "voter fraud" epidemic; laws meant to increase the legal risk to real non-partisan organizations for assisting in registration; draconian polling place "photo ID" restriction laws, and in a reduction of opportunities for early voting.

With the tide of GOP victories at the ballot box last November, those efforts have now been ramped up and are now front and center in some 30 state legislatures across the country...

Guest blogged by David Swanson

When a United Airlines pilot of a flight I was on celebrated the killing of Osama bin Laden, and I blogged about it, my friend Emily Levy urged me to complain to the airline. So I did.

Here's their response, followed by what I had sent them...

In early 2006, Media Matters released an special report called "If It's Sunday, It's Conservative: an Analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 - 2005," which thoroughly debunked the ridiculous "Liberal Media" charge by empirically demonstrating the imbalance of Rightwing guests (politicians, pundits and journalists) dominating the Sunday morning network news shows in almost all of those years. They found, for example, that "In every year examined by the study --- 1997 - 2005 --- more panels tilted right (a greater number of Republicans/conservatives than Democrats/progressives) than tilted left. In some years, there were two, three, or even four times as many right-titled panels as left-tilted panels."

The excuse the networks offered in response was, essentially, that there was a Republican administration in the White House and Republican majorities in Congress for most of those years, so, naturally, there would be more Republican guests. And also, we were "at war." Or something.

One year later, Media Matters followed up with "If It's Sunday, It's Still Conservative: How the Right Continues to Dominate the Sunday Talk Shows," a follow-up "analysis of more than 2,000 guest appearances on the Sunday Talk shows in 2005 and 2006." Unsurprisingly, they found that while there was marginal improvement since their previous report, little had changed the Rightwing tilt of the Sunday news shows, even after the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress in November of 2006. The media excuses, again, were pathetic.

And now, in response to the news that the Democratic President Obama's Democratic administration killed Osama bin Laden the week before, there was this on this week's Sunday news shows...

If it's Sunday, it's still Republicans --- over both our public airwaves, as well as cable news --- and the myth of a "Liberal Media" remains as mythical as ever.

[Hat-tip RAW STORY]

At the end of the "New Rules" segment on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher last night, Maher called out Republicans for being "neither fiscally conservative nor strong on defense," adding "they have to tell us what exactly it is they're good at."

"How many Muslims does a black guy have to kill in one weekend before crackers climb down off his ass?" Maher asked, before offering a flashing "FACTS" light at the bottom of the screen so Fox "News" viewers would know to keep the sound turned down until it disappeared. He then went on to call out the GOP for, among other things, implementing policies over the past decade that revealed them to be anything but fiscally responsible.

"When Bill Clinton left office in 2001," Maher said, "the Congressional Budget Office predicted that by the end of the decade, we would have paid off the deficit and have a 2 trillion dollar surplus. Instead, we have a 10 trillion dollar public debt, and the difference in those two numbers is mostly because the Republicans put tax cuts for the rich, free drugs for the elderly, and two wars on the layaway plan and then bailed on the check."

Maher then criticized George W. Bush's failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, after his admission that he "didn't spend that much time on Osama, [and] that he was no longer concerned about him, just as he wasn't before 9/11 when he blew off that mysterious, inscrutable memo entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.'"

"Why focus on the terrorists who reduced Wall Street to rubble, when you can help Wall Street reduce the whole country to rubble?" the satirist asked rhetorically.

Near the end of his "New Rule," after eviscerating Republicans such as Bush for his "War on Terror" strategy, and Sen. John McCain for being "naive" in his criticism of Obama's promise to focus on bin Laden during the 2008 Presidential election, Maher went on to declare President Obama "one efficient, steely-nerved, multitasking, black ninja gangsta President." WATCH...

Reportedly a photo of President Obama and his national security team watching the U.S. Special Forces operation to capture/kill Osama bin Laden, live yesterday in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The photo is described this way on the White House Flickr stream...

UPDATE: White House reporter Paul Brandus quotes Obama's chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan (seen second from top-right) as saying about the moment in the Situation Room: "It was clearly very tense, a lot of people holding their breath."

UPDATE 7:34pm PT: More details on what was going on in that room during that picture from CBS News.

New York Times, CNN, NBC, Fox "News" are all now reporting that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. CNN reports three sources have confirmed, and that the U.S. has his body and have matched it with DNA evidence.

CNN reports: "Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in a mansion outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad along with other family members, a senior U.S. official tells CNN."

The White House has called back the press pool to make the dramatic announcement shortly. Crowds outside the the north lawn of the White House are now gathering and cheering, as we sill await the president's official announcement...

8:37pm PT:...

PRESIDENT OBAMA CONFIRMS: BIN LADEN HAS BEEN KILLED.

In live televised statement to the nation, the president says Bin Laden was killed today in Abbottabad, Pakistan after actionable intelligence led him to order an attack by the U.S. military. A fire fight ensued, though no U.S. forces were killed.

He added that the effort, ten years after the 9/11 attacks, comes as a result of one of his first acts in office two years ago, ordering that the capture or killing of the al-Qaeda leader would be the nation's top priority in the "War on Terror."

"Justice has been done," said the President...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

On Friday, a three judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in D.C. reinstated a criminal case against four of five Blackwater (now known as "Xe") mercenaries who had been indicted for voluntary manslaughter in connection with the Nov. 16, 2007 massacre of Iraqi civilians in Nisur Square.

The five guards, as reported by Reuters, were originally "charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempt to commit manslaughter and one weapons violation count over a Baghdad shooting that outraged Iraqis and strained ties between the two countries." The decision by the appellate court panel was unanimous and seen as "a victory to the U.S. Justice Department in a high-profile prosecution dating to 2008."

The five had been part of a 23 member Blackwater team known as Raven 23 who "submitted sworn written statements to the State Department using a form that included a guarantee that the statement and...evidence derived therefrom would not be used in a criminal proceeding against the signer," the court stated in its redacted opinion.

The District Court dismissed the case on the grounds that the government had failed to prove that the evidence it was relying upon was not derived or affected by the immunized statements. The Court of Appeal ruled that the District court had erred by treating all of the evidence as tainted instead of conducting an independent, line-by-line analysis as to whether the evidence was independently obtained from other sources, including Iraqis present at the massacre, noting "when armed guards shoot a number of people in a crowd, it doesn't take Hercule Poirot to start wondering what the crowd was doing."

While criminal proceedings continue against these four, low-level former Blackwater mercenaries, Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince are not amongst the accused --- this despite the never resolved, explosive allegations, discussed in our Aug. 10, 2009 article, "Blackwater = Murder, Inc." that the company and its founder had engaged in "murder, destruction of evidence, weapons smuggling" and other sordid crimes...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: One month after Japan's quake & tsunami at Fukushima, the nuclear threat level is revised --- for the worse; Deep cuts for science & the environment revealed in the federal budget "compromise"; Freeway pollution causes brain damage; PLUS: Wildfires in Texas, "Dust Bowl" in Oklahoma, as drought deepens in the Southwest ... 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): Shale natural gas worse than coal?; CA passes nation's strongest Renewable Energy Standard; US falls to 3rd in clean energy; Smartgrid boost for Pacific NW; Solar panels are 'contagious'; Community 'solar gardens' for CO; Penguins decline as Antarctic warms; Google invests $168 mil in solar plant; Coast Guard 'unprepared' for BP spill; Ranking your seafood retailers; Changing public opinion on climate change; TX may repeal natural gas tax breaks; How the Koch Bros. fund the climate change denial industry; GOP House "off the rails" on climate change; Renewables produce as much US energy as nuclear: EIA; The oil economy stains most remote civilization on earth; Natural gas worse than coal? ... PLUS: The 12 industries responsible for 75% of N. American pollution ....

- Special to The BRAD BLOG by David Swanson in Afghanistan...

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - Ramazan Bashardost finished third in 2009's openly fraudulent presidential election. When the first-place finisher, Hamid Karzai, failed to beg, borrow, or steal 50% plus one he was required to participate in a runoff. When the second-place finisher bowed out, Bashardost was entitled, under the Afghan Constitution, to be in that runoff. It never happened.

Bashardost is currently a Member of Parliament here, having previously served as Minister of Planning. Bashardost was educated in France and speaks fairly good English, as well as a number of Afghan languages. He's an opponent of war, a harsh critic of President Karzai, and someone on the inside who tries to represent the suffering people of this beat-down, kicked around country.

I interviewed Dr. Bashardost for a couple of hours in his office on April 4th, a day of some significance to US advocates of nonviolence. Bashardost is an admirer of Gandhi's model for social change. In the clip embedded below, I asked Bashardost what he would say if President Barack Obama were in the room.

Bashardost's message to Obama is that the ongoing war in Afghanistan is losing U.S. taxpayer dollars, losing U.S. soldier lives, and losing America's values.

He says that U.S. tax dollars are spent to pay U.S. soldiers to guard corrupt Afghan officials, war lords, Islamists, and criminals who rape children in fancy palaces and buy $100,000 cars. The Taliban, he says, kill U.S. soldiers even without ill-will toward the United States, because the soldiers are between them and these officials. This war, Bashardost explains, began in 1994, and American soldiers have now gotten into the middle of it.

So, who benefits? Bashardost suggests that U.S. lobbyists and President Karzai may benefit from this war, but that the people of Afghanistan do not. But, then, I suspect President Obama knew that already...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below.]

Expect another busy night tonight, as my week guest hosting for the "Spring Breaking" Malloys continues on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show tonight.

Once again, we'll be BradCasting LIVE tonight 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE and lively chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG, as usual, while we are on the air. Please stop by and join the fun while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Scheduled tonight (so far):

• JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation, LIVE from Madison, WI on the nationalized, bellwether Supreme Court election being held there today, which is being regarded as a proxy battle between the GOP/Gov. Scott Walker and the unions, the people and everybody else.
• HOWIE KLEIN of Down With Tyranny, on what today's election may portend for the rest of the nation and for the 2012 elections, and on the continuing "budget showdown" in D.C.
• TIM DECHRISTOPHER, Utah climate activist and national hero, on his remarkable attempt to disrupt an auction of 100,000 acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling during the Bush Administration, in hopes of keeping them out of corporate hands. And on his subsequent felony convictions for that act of civil disobedience, which he now intends to appeal.
• PLUS: Everything else, and there's plenty of that, along with whatever's on your mind via your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Tonight's show ended on a cliff-hanger! As the results of WI's Supreme Court election were just about 50/50 by the end of the show (and still seem to be exactly that late tonight!) Please enjoy the audio and chat archives from tonight's exciting show, both of which now follow below...

The GOP voter fraud epidemic continues unabated. The latest alleged felon? Outgoing U.S. Ambassador to China, former Utah Governor --- and potential 2012 GOP Presidential candidate --- Jon Huntsman Jr.

Teddy Partridge at FireDogLake charges (accurately) that Huntsman "Pulls a Coulter," as The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Of course, Huntsman is a Republican, so different "voter fraud" laws apply to them, in general, than to other Americans.

"It is generally illegal for voters to cast ballots using a residential address where they no longer reside," the Tribune notes before giving Huntsman a pass. "But state and federal law seem to back Huntsman’s ability to still vote using the governor’s mansion as his home because that was his last address before he left for Beijing to serve as an employee of the U.S. government."

Despite that, as the very same article notes, "Last June, Huntsman purchased a $3.6 million home in a tony D.C. neighborhood." So while he may have had cause to specify his last U.S. address as Utah prior to last June, one wonders why officials are overlooking the fact that he owned a D.C. home well prior to last November's general election, when he voted using a registration at a residence where he hadn't lived for more than a year and a half.

One doesn't have to "wonder" for long, however...

Choosing an interesting way to 'celebrate' the 8th anniversary of the launching of Tomahawk cruise missiles into Iraq kicking off our invasion there on March 19th, 2003, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama approved the launching of Tomahawk cruise missiles into Libya on the anniversary today, as a five-nation coalition began to carry out a U.N.-approved No Fly Zone mandate over yet another oil rich Middle Eastern nation.

In response, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), General Electric, The Shaw Group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the rest of the nuclear energy lobby sent a thank you note to Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Gaddafi, as the world media quickly turned their attention en masse to the new military action in the Middle East and away from the still-pending nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.

In related sarcastic and fake news, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-Koch) tore off all of his clothes and danced naked with glee in celebration, by himself, in the middle of the capital rotunda in Madison. No media were there to capture the moment.

Meanwhile, in news that is neither sarcastic nor fake, but seemingly impossible upon everything else, a giant 100-mile oil slick has been spotted in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana near the site of last year's BP deepwater oil drilling disaster. And yet with all of that, CNN has still not announced plans to scale back the 150 staff contingent they are set to deploy to cover next month's Royal Wedding in the UK.

In still more, let's call it irony, over a 100 demonstrators, including "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, were arrested at the White House Saturday, protesting all the wars we were in prior to today, as well as against the reportedly deplorable conditions of detainment for 23-year old Army Private Bradley Manning, accused of leaking classified war documents and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Many of the same protesters were arrested in a similar protest at the White House in December, also for failing to obey orders as they handcuffed themselves to the White House fence, though few media bothered to cover that demonstration either. Another rally is set for tomorrow in support of Manning, also sure to be ignored, at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia where he has been held in solitary confinement, reportedly, 23 out of 24 hours of each day for the last nine months.

At Fukushima today, only a bit more noticed, McClatchy reports that the spent fuel rod pool at reactor No. 3 is said to be "stabilized," with radiation levels dropping there after 13 hours of sea water was sprayed onto it with water cannon trucks [* See UPDATES below for more on Unit 3 issues.]; the Unit 4 fuel pool --- where, as we reported last night a "renewed nuclear chain reaction [was] feared" --- may in fact be cracked and leaking water, but with Unit 3 "stabilized" for now, fire fighters have turned the water cannon trucks onto that unit in hopes of cooling it down as well; and late last night, power was restored to Units 5 & 6, with pumps said to be working and the cooling ponds in both reactors cooling from their previously reported temperatures around 65C, back towards the desired temp of 25C. The readings there today were 37C and 41C respectively, in what can certainly be considered a bit of good news in a story desperate for some...

What do GOP superstar Ann Coulter, the head of the GOP's California voter registration firm Mark Anthony Jacoby, and, as of yesterday, Indiana's newly elected GOP Secretary of State Charlie White all have in common? Unlike the four-decade old community organization ACORN, each of the Republicans appear to have committed voter fraud and/or voter registration fraud.

Coulter's well-documented acts of voter fraud and voter registration fraud took place in 2005 in Palm Beach County, FL, and were preceded by likely acts of voter fraud in Connecticut in 2002 and 2004 as well. Jacoby's voter registration fraud in CA led to his 2008 arrest and subsequent guilty plea. And now White, the new chief election official in IN, the state with one of the most draconian voter suppression polling-place Photo ID restriction laws in the nation, has been charged with three counts of voter fraud (as well as additional counts of perjury, financial institution fraud, and theft), just two months after being sworn in last January, for having lied about his address when he voted in last year's GOP primary...