Guest blogged by Daniel Borchers of Citizens for Principled Conservatism

Ann Coulter exceeded expectations at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the nation’s largest annual gathering of conservatives. Coulter’s potty-mouth once again scandalized the conference, upstaging presidential candidates and political leaders alike. Coulter’s rabid rhetoric took many by surprise as she said:

“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so [gasps, laughter, applause] so I’m kind of at an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”
– Ann Coulter, CPAC, 3/2/07

Every year, Coulter’s vicious words overshadow the theme and tone of CPAC, but this time Coulter personally felt the heat for her venomous folly. At least eight newspapers have dropped Coulter’s syndicated column, her website has lost advertising revenue, and at last count 43 conservative bloggers have written an open letter protesting the keynote speech.

To prevent her career from totally bottoming out, the October release of Coulter’s sixth book was promptly announced. Will her efforts at damage control, sans apology, actually work? Cynicism suggests, yes. ...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Robert Fisk, the seven time winner of the British Press Awards' International Journalist of the Year, reads from his latest book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. This clip (4:13) is from a March 4, 2007 event hosted by the Lannan Foundation and The Nation Institute that aired on BookTV over the weekend.

(Good God is this toon on the money. Can barely come up for air while trying to keep up with it all...This is amazing...)

Hallelujah!

Voters with disabilities are finally beginning to speak out against the use of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, often known as "touch-screen") voting systems!

After years of DRE supporters, and indeed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, using the canard that blind and disabled voters must use DREs to vote privately and independently, a number of leaders in the disabilities community are speaking out against their having been used as a wedge to force the nationwide implementation of such disenfranchising, dangerous voting systems.

Two different landmark statements on the issue have now been released, The BRAD BLOG has learned. One statement [PDF] released last week by the Disability Law Center and the ACLU speaks in support of the decision by the Massachusetts Secretary of State to approve the use of ballot marking devices, as opposed to DREs, for use by the state's disabled voters.

The second, released today to The BRAD BLOG in advance of Congressional subcommittee hearings tomorrow, is signed so far by more than 20 leaders of the blind and disabled communities and calls for "an immediate ban" on DRE voting systems. Like the release from the Disability Law Center, the newly released statement crushes the long-overused myth that such unsecure, disenfranchising, failed technology is required for disabled access to private, independent voting. (The complete statement is posted at the end of this item.)

"Providing secure voting machines for voters with disabilities is part and parcel of protecting [disabilities voters'] rights to equal access to the ballot and to having their votes reliably counted," said Stanley J. Eicher, Executive Director of the Disability Law Center in their March 5th statement.

"The decision by the Secretary shows that it is both possible and essential to build common ground between the disability rights community and the growing number of citizens who are concerned that many of the proposed new technologies are subject to tampering and error," said Eichner, adding notably, "We must debunk the myth that we have to choose between accessible voting and verifiable voting. Democracy requires that we have both."

The brief but no-uncertain-terms statement today from the disabilities advocates calls for a nationwide ban on the use of DRE technology.

"Electronic ballot systems such as the direct record electronic (DRE) machines...now in use," the statement reads, "have quickly proven to be neither fully accessible to all voters nor secure and accurate methods of recording, tallying, and reporting votes. While the goal of private voting has been achieved by some voters, this has often been without meaningful assurance that our votes have been counted as cast."

The disabilities leaders go on to point out that verification of ballots and the accuracy of their tabulation need not be sacrificed for accessibility or privacy. A similar point was at the heart of a report recently released by one of the letter's authors, blind technology expert Noel H. Runyan. His report, published simultaneously by both Demos and VoterAction.org, concerns the failure of DRE systems to meet both HAVA requirements and the accessibility and verification needs of disabled voters.

The statement further describes DRE electronic balloting systems as "inappropriate for use" and calls on "all disability rights groups, other civil rights groups, election protection groups, and elected officials to recognize the necessity for an immediate ban" on such dangerous, unreliable, and unsecure technology:

This new and most welcome statement from this particular community is in stark contrast to the only other major voices previously allowed to testify before Congress on such matters, such as the National Federal for the Blind (NFB) and Jim Dickson of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD).

Despite both of those groups having received large donations from voting machine companies such as Diebold, Inc., both have been granted extraordinary access to Congress and have leveraged that access to call for the use of DRE systems for their communities (and even paperless ones at that).

The NFB received $1 million from Diebold, and Jim Dickson's group, although he lied to The BRAD BLOG about it previously, received at least $16,000 from the voting machine vendors, according to the New York Times.

We are happy to see new, uncompromised voices from this important community finally speaking up and adding their concerns to others such as Johns Hopkins computer scientist Avi Rubin, who testified last week that DRE systems, with or without a so-called "voter verified paper audit trail," are "not a reasonable voting system."

It would be nice if Runyan and some of the other signatories were invited to testify before Congress as well, and equally nice if Congress held hearings devoted to the issue of the safety, accuracy and accessibility of DRE systems before moving forward on Election Reform bills such as Rep. Rush Holt's HR811, which unfortunately falls short of banning DRE technology in American democracy.

NOTE: We will be Guest Hosting Cynthia Black's Action Point this Sunday 3/18/07 @ 3pm ET (12noon PT) on Phoenix's Air America/NovaM affiliate 1480 KPHX. We hope to have Runyan as one of our featured guests.

UPDATE: Here is my interview on on Action Point with Noel Runyan. MP3 appx. 30 minutes

The complete statement from the disabilities leaders, including Runyan and many others, follow in full below...

Guest Blogged by Luke Ryland

Last week, more than thirty 'good government' groups including the ACLU, POGO, CREW, Liberty Coalition, and September 11th Advocates called on Henry Waxman's Committee "to hold public hearings into the case of FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, and the erroneous use of the State Secrets Privilege to shut down all court proceedings in her case."

Sibel Edmonds says: "Thanks to Brad and Bradblog readers. Exactly twelve months ago, Bradblog helped launch this petition and we had a great response. Fifteen thousand people signed the petition and we have delivered it to Congress. Now we'd like to ask for your help again."

We've had solid indications that Waxman is ready and willing to hold public, open hearings into Sibel's case. We need to give Waxman a final push and get him to commit to a date, in May or June, and that's where you come in. We want you to call the offices of Congressmen Henry Waxman, John Conyers, Patrick Leahy, and Charles Grassley and demand, beg, and implore them to publicly announce that they will have hearings.

Sibel has already told her story in classified briefings to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, Henry Waxman's staff, and the 911 Commission, and her case has been investigated by the Department of Justice Inspector General. All of them have verified Sibel's claims. As Republican Senator Charles Grassley said (YouTube) on 60 Minutes in 2002: "Absolutely, she's credible. And the reason I feel she's very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story." ...

From AP...

And I can't help but feel the two election officials should have been sentenced to 18 years instead of months (though we understand that to be the max sentence), given the number of folks who have died in Bush's War since the 2004 Election and the fact that there were enough votes in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) alone to give the race to Kerry instead of Bush had the election been administered legitimately.

Just for the record, only 6 votes registered for Kerry instead of Bush in each of Ohio's precincts would have changed the result of that election.

Must run, so we'll refer you to our previous coverage when the two Ohio elections officials were found guilty in January for more details.

NOTE: Hat-Tip to "Ninepatch" over at DailyKos for tipping us off to the news of the sentencing. It's a rather sigh-inducing irony to get the news from dKos given it's proprietor Markos Moulitsas Zúniga had once shamefully banned all diarists, and purged their diaries, for daring to discuss and/or investigate the Ohio 2004 Presidential Election conspiracy. Thank you for continuing to make noise on these matters anyway those of you who have done so at dKos!

UPDATE: AP now has more on the sentencing and concerns by both the Judge and prosecutor that the conspiracy goes higher:

Melinda Henneberger at Huffington Post runs a news item today concerning an August 2006 letter from the voting machine company ES&S to Florida Elections officials warning about a defect in the iVotronic touch-screen voting machine which succeeded in losing the votes of some 18,000 voters in the razor-thin election between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan (R) in Florida's 13th U.S. House Congressional district. Buchanan was provisionally seated, pending a Congressional challenge and state lawsuit filed by Jennings, after he was declared the "winner" by 369 votes.

The Sarasota, FL, Election Supervisor, Kathy Dent, decided against both having their machines patched to take care of the defect and posting a warning notice for voters as advised by ES&S. "No one in the State of Florida updated," their machines after receiving the letter, Dent told Henneberger. "That's because it was too close to the election. It was a state decision that it was too late to make changes."

Notably, as you'll see in the full letter as posted below, it was CC'd to David Drury, the Chief of Florida's Bureau of Voting Systems Certification. Drury, responsible for overseeing state certification of voting systems, in an extraordinary conflict of interest as we've noted several times previously, was part of the state team commissioned to audit the iVotronic systems used in the election. The commission was empaneled after the state was forced to relent and launch such an investigation in light of the controversy after their initial denials that there was any problem at all with the extraordinarily high undervote rate in the Sarasota-only section of the race.

The ES&S letter, as Henneberger noted, was only seen recently by Jennings's attorneys since "it was not provided to them by election officials as it should have been under discovery motions in the case," according to one of her attorneys.

Instead, the legal team came across the document only recently as posted "on a North Carolina-based website on election reform," according to Henneberger.

That website, as it turns out, is the NC Coalition for Verified Voting as founded by Election Integrity advocate Joyce McCloy. McCloy had attempted, both before and after the election, to get the attention of elections officials and the Jennings legal team. The letter, not linked by Henneberger, is posted here [PDF]. We've also posted the letter in full, as well, at the bottom of this article.

McCloy wrote The BRAD BLOG today expressing her frustration at trying to get anyone in Florida to take notice of the letter warning of "slow response times" to voters' attempts to select candidates on the ballot.

"I sent that memo (and my concerns) to anyone I could think of," McCloy explained in her email, "and this year to every election reform list serve that I could, posted it on political message boards. I asked and asked - has this bug been fixed?"

Apparently the answer is no; the bug was neither fixed, nor did Dent bother to warn voters in Sarasota about the problem as had been advised in the letter by ES&S.

As Henneberger reports today...

The good Catherine Crier of Court TV's Catherine Crier LIVE let's loose tonight on a number of the now nearly too-numerous-to-count Bush Administration scandals/failures.

Crier, a former Texas judge, who in a previous "Crier Wire" commentary last year filed perhaps the all-time best televised editorials on the insane dangers of e-voting, unleashes tonight on everything from the U.S. Attorney firing scandals, to the Libby case, to Halliburton's recent announcement that they're ditching America in favor of their real friends, the Arab nation of Dubai.

In tonight's piece which begins "something stinks in Washington D.C.", the Fox "News" escapee and former Dallas County district judge opines: "the more we dig, the more the Department [of Justice] looks like a mob of self interested, self protecting thugs."

The producers of the show were kind enough to rush us a transcript (blame them for the ALL CAPS), which we've posted in full at the end of this item. We'll try to post a video of the commentary as an update here later if we're able to trap it.

Here are a few snippets to whet your appetite:

On the America-hating Halliburton:

And, as a woman after our heart, she points out what we're forced to point out far too frequently: These are not issues of "Right and Left" but rather "Right and Wrong." That, even as both bad guys and the guys who ought to know better continue to incorrectly characterize the reporting of such issues --- and indeed this blog --- as "partisan". What a ridiculous world. About which Crier concludes:

The transcript from Crier's complete special "Crier Wire" commentary follows in full...

It's been amusing --- if exasperating --- to watch the latest like-clockwork contortions of the wingnuts in their desperate, if predictable, attempt to spin the U.S. Attorney firing scandal into a "voter fraud" scandal. That, they tell us in lock-step is the "real scandal" that the "liberal media" is conveniently overlooking in their attempts to victimize poor poor George W. Bush.

As we previously noted, we are unaware of any actual "voter fraud" alleged in the New Mexico case, but rather voter registration fraud. And even those allegations seems to have little, if any, substance behind them.

All the while, the dead-end wingnutters happily ignore the fact that their own continuing attempts to forward the myth of a "voter fraud" epidemic (and a Democratic-based one at that) have failed time and again. The most recent attempt was a report on "voter fraud" as officially sanctioned by the partisan-comprised U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Despite desperate attempts to show such an epidemic, the study came up embarrassingly empty handed on the issue and so the EAC subsequently refused to release their final report.

(NOTE: EAC Chairwoman Donetta Davidson promised to turn over the spiked report last week to Congress during a hearing in which was called to testify. We'll keep our eye out for that report, as we are still waiting for Davidson to send us another report which they promised to us nearly two weeks ago on a related story we've been working on.)

The Bush Apologist Bloggers also happily ignore one of the only clear and actually documented cases of voter fraud: That which was actually committed by rightwing sycophant/hate-monger, Ann Coulter in Florida.

Nonetheless, in the wingnuts blogosphere's continuing quest to remain in utter denial of Reality, they're reaching for a new set of straws. Here's a few chuckle-worthy examples...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

That Iran and al-Qaeda have been the prime beneficiaries of George W's foreign policy is incontrovertible. Another beneficiary is China which has exploited anti-American sentiment in Latin America to sign major trade and arms deals with our neighbors. To add insult to injury, not only has Bush opened the door to stronger China - Latin American ties, but his economic policies are financing China's efforts.

McLaughlin Group clip runs 5:39 with Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift comments (03/10/07).

Hysterical...

(Thanks Paul B. for the link!)

Guest blogged by DES

Apparently the right-wing mouthpiece Fox "News" Channel is a little freaked out over getting fired as hosts of a Democratic presidential debate in Nevada. FNC management has responded to the drubbing by putting out a thinly-veiled threat to other Democratic presidential candidates and their media coordinators to keep Fox "News" on speed-dial (with Roger Ailes's newest bitch-slap here). My, my, such a hissy fit just because they finally got called on the carpet for being the Republican Fox in the henhouse.

As they continue to wring their hands and stamp their feet over such shoddy treatment, Mort Kondracke let drop this amusing little bit of cluelessness:

See the full clip here at Think Progress. Hat tip to John Aravosis at Americablog.com for pointing out this little gem.

Additional thought from Brad: Dear Fox 'News' Whining Cry-Baby Sore-Losers: You lost. Move on. Get over it.

As we alluded late last week, we'd say this new report further underscores our recommendation to keep an eye on Waxman's Congressional Oversight Committee and his investigation into the Iraq uranium/yellowcake scam by the White House...

*** Special to The BRAD BLOG
*** by Libby/CIA Leak Trial Correspondent Margie Burns

After sitting in on the Libby trial every other day and posting about it on BRAD BLOG, I had intended not to write further about the matter barring new developments. Unfortunately, the rightwing spin machine has launched a new campaign of misstatements that sound intentional.

So much for respecting authority, upholding the law, and appreciating honest hard work: now that a conscientious jury has rendered a verdict of guilty on four of five counts of perjury and obstructing justice for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the GOP noise machine is vilifying the prosecution and smarmily denying any wrongdoing, any at all, in the CIA leak.

So much for conservatism.

Well, bad sports are bad sports, anywhere on the political spectrum. Still, the brazen willingness of commentators subsidized by Rupert Murdoch or the Bradley Foundation to falsify every significant fact in the Libby matter, usually without having sat even one day in court for the trial, is pretty much typical of their work ethic and intellectual rigor.

Sunday morning’s talk shows were representative. George F. Will and Torie Clarke on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos downplayed the CIA leak matter by saying the whole thing “all arose from one column” (Will), a column not very important at that (Clarke).

The right wing is trying hard to keep this one alive. But trial evidence and testimony have revealed that the attempt to “leak” – actually, plant – Mrs. Wilson's name with the media began BEFORE Wilson’s column was published.

Wonder why GOP supporters of George W. Bush find that so uninteresting....

The Los Angeles Times continues to beg readers to cancel their subscriptions altogether.

Their latest plan: Dump the progressive, interesting, non-white comic strips.

Last week, the Times decided to dump both Candorville, whose strip we've been running here from time to time --- the only one, mind you, that we're aware of which dealt with the e-voting issue directly. La Cucaracha, the paper's only Latino-based strip (in LA!), was dumped at the same time.

The latter was re-instated after a flood of reader complaints. So far, no return of Candorville, however, the last African-American related strip of note in the once-great Los Angeles newspaper, now gutted by its conservative Chicago Tribune owners/rapists. The Trib also recently canceled the strip as well.

We've gotten to know Darrin Bell, the strip's creator, a bit over the last year or so. He sent The BRAD BLOG the following announcement a few days ago on the latest corporate-media idiocy, noting that though his strip has been dumped, "Blondie and Marmaduke are still safe" at the Times.

The only good news in the bargain: The world's unfunniest "comic strip," Mallard Fillmore, has been put out of our misery. Finally. A dead duck we can all be happy about.

"Without at least one of these two papers," Bell writes in regard to the cancellations at both the Times and the Trib, "Candorville can't continue to annoy the knuckledraggers in two of our most important cities, and the strip itself may not be long for this world."

He also asks that complaints be sent to readers.rep@latimes.com. We join him in that request, and are happy to post his note in full below...