We know how atrociously and shamefully Fox "News" has covered the Foley scandal. This superb and detailed article from Jamison Foser at Media Matters demonstrates how CNN's coverage has been just as bad and, arguably, far worse.

The piece underscores the case we've been making here for years. Corporate media no longer report news, They do nothing more than repeat it. And only when they are given direct orders to do so by the politicians they pretend to be covering. (And, by and large, only when those politicians are Republicans.)

"The most trusted name in news?!" What an utter debacle.

ALSO IN THIS NEWSWEEK POLL HEADLINED "GOP IN MELTDOWN":

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

"In Friday's Democracy at Risk segment Lou and Kitty look into the story from New York state where counties are beginning to question whether their voters should be forced to vote on electronic voting machines. Why should they not be able to keep the machines that have served them well for decades?

The text-transcript of Friday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

From Reuters...

More detailed AP coverage now here...

UPDATE 3:39pm PT: Back in early January of this year, VelvetRevolution.us ran an article on Ralston calling on her to fess up to authorities concerning information she has on the 2004 Presidential Election "Miracle"...

More at VR...

Editor & Publisher published a comment today from the Executive Producer of Fox "News'" O'Reilly Factor on their having run a title under video of Rep. Mark Foley --- three different times, in two different segments --- which labeled the now-disgraced, now-former Republican Congressman as a Democrat:

The BRAD BLOG orginally broke the story of Fox's egregious "error" last Tuesday.

We followed up with a report on AP having done a similar thing the next day, though they had the journalistic integrity (unlike Fox "News") to issue a correction statement when the problem was found.

Yesterday ran we ran another follow-up on O'Reilly and Fox's failure to publicly correct or even acknowledge the "error," indisputably closing any further debate on whether Fox is actually a news organization. It isn't. We included links to videos of both The Daily Show's and MSNBC Countdown's coverage of same in that last report.

UPDATE 10/10/06 4:52pm PT: Now NewsMax.com says Foley a "Democrat"!...

UPDATE 2/8/08: Fox now shows presumptive Republican Presidential candidate John McCain also as a Democrat! Screenshot...

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting today that over 1,500 ballots were sent out to absentee voters with the party designation swapped on one race.

According to Plain Dealer:

Some good reporting from The Tennessean today on what appears to be some voter registration fraud, possibly tied to the Republican National Committee.

You'll note that Tennessee, a state which had previously been represented by outgoing Bill Frist and thought to have been a shoe-in for Republicans, is now an exceedingly tight race, with the Democratic candidate for that Senate seat, Rep. Harold Ford, beginning to pull ahead...but just barely...A few votes in a single state, at this point, could make the difference in control of the Senate this year.

With that in mind, and what we know about GOP willingness to game elections every which way possible --- extra-legal or otherwise --- please note the following tea leaf from today's Tennessean today...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

"A growing number of communities all across the country are now saying they simply want nothing to do with electronic voting machines. They've decided not to spend a dime of their taxpayers' money on those machines until they can guarantee that the votes of their citizens will count on Election Day and that those votes can actually be recounted with confidence." said Lou Dobbs at the top of Thursday's "Democracy At Risk" segment. The Lou finishes with this understatement, "Cook County [IL] saying it usually takes three or four elections to get it right. You are just writing off three or four elections? That's an insane statement."

The text-transcript of Thursday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Francine Busby and Brian Bilbray will meet again in November's election for the 50th Congressional District in San Diego County, California. Because Bilbray was declared the winner of the Special Election on June 6, he will be running as an incumbent this time. However, there has not yet been a trustworthy count of the votes that reportedly brought him into Congress after the initial disputed election. The court case challenging his victory has yet to be resolved.

San Diego voters Barbara Gail Jacobsen and Lillian Ritt filed an election contest challenging Bilbray's reported victory based on a number of factors including the now-infamous Diebold electronic voting machine sleepovers. Judge Yuri Hofmann dismissed that suit after intervention by Republican Congressional leaders claiming that once Bilbray was sworn in, California courts had no jurisdiction to rule on California's election, even though swearing in took place before the election was certified in California. That dismissal is now being appealed by California attorney Ken Simpkins and election attorney Paul Lehto on behalf of Jacobsen and Ritt.

According to Simpkins, this "was a unique situation because they actually swore Bilbray in before we got certification of this election, before all the votes were counted. Congress is basically saying we're going to swear in whoever we want to swear in, it doesn't matter if the election has been completed or not. That's another treading on the state's constitutional right to determine the time, place and manner of elections," he said.

A campaign mailing received by a hundred thousand Florida voters today would seem to indicate that the corrupt, and apparently desperate U.S. Congressman from Oviedo, Florida, Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff), is willing to do everything within his power to lose his congressional race this year against challenger Clint Curtis.

"Don't send smut to my mailbox," the New Smyrna Beach, Florida. mother says in a video report at Florida's WFTV Channel 9, "It's not really something I want my 9-year-old walking out to the mailbox and bringing to me and asking me questions about."

The mailing, of dubious taste, is the latest chapter in Feeney's bizarre smear campaign against his former colleague, vote-rigging whistleblower turned Congressional opponent Clint Curtis.

We highly recommend the article at the WFTV Channel 9 website (which also includes a video of their coverage on tonight's evening news.)

In the mailing --- sent by Feeney to more than 100,000 voters in Florida's 24th Congressional district and featuring a poorly-doctored photograph of Curtis dressed as Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner --- Feeney claims he's attempting to "alert" voters that Curtis has been endorsed by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.

So far, Feeney's bizarre attempts to garner support have included a rudimentary smear website named "Crazy Clint Curtis," featuring doctored photos of Curtis and other dubious claims, and a blogsite repeating those claims citing "evidence" that actually seems to belie the strange assertions. (e.g., See our coverage of on Feeney's odd 9/11 conspiracy theory.) The smear blog, however, has no indication that it's paid for by the Feeney campaign.

The disingenous references to Hustler in the mailing, including a doctored cover from the salacious magazine, are in reference to an article of ours [PDF - WARNING: Includes graphic photos from death scene!] on the mysterious death of Florida Inspector Raymond Lemme, which the magazine ran some months ago.

Lemme, as we originally reported at BRAD BLOG, was found dead in a Valdosta, Georgia hotel room during the course of investigating Curtis' whistleblower claims against Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), an Oviedo, Florida, software firm with top-security state and NASA contracts.

Curtis had worked as a programmer at YEI while Feeney was their general counsel and registered lobbyist.

Feeney was also the Speaker of the Florida House at the time when Curtis claims YEI had employeed illegal Chinese aliens (spying on America), overbilled the state on contracts, and had requested that Curtis create a vote-rigging software prototype at the behest of the Congressman. The charges of Chinese spies and state overbilling have since been confirmed, by both state and federal investigations and reports.

Hustler ran a sidebar with our article written by someone named Mark Johnson. That sidebar, titled "Vote for Clint!" describes Curtis' early plans at the time to run for Congress and urges readers to support the effort at www.ClintCurtis.com.

Feeney's new mailer, however, looks like it may have done little more than succeed in angering Florida families and voters who had never even heard of either Feeney or Curtis before. The mother in the report indicates that it has led her to not vote for Feeney this November.

Adding to the poorly timed association of sex and politics --- in light of the recent revelations of sexual improprieties by Feeney's Florida GOP House colleague Mark Foley --- it looks like another triumphant disaster for Feeney.

From WFTV's report:

The article and video (both of which we couldn't recommend more!) go on to say that Feeney claims our Hustler article about Lemme's death charges that "Feeney was involved in a suspicious death in Georgia."

Since we actually wrote that article, we can tell you that no such allegation was made of involvement by Feeney in the death of Lemme. WFTV should correct that point for the record. (NOTE: We've contacted the WFTV reporter, Josh Einiger, who did an otherwise very good job on the story and he says he'll be attempting to correct the inaccuracy on their website shortly. Apparently, he was just repeating what Feeney, and the mailing, had incorrectly claimed.)

Hey Tom, in the next mailing, why don't you include photos of yourself posing with a bunch of Congressional pages? Voters in the 24th need to know how much you care about our nation's youth!

So Fox "News" labelled an apparent sexual predator as a "Democrat", despite the indisputable fact that the man, disgraced Congressman Mark Foley, is a Republican.

As THE BRAD BLOG originally reported the day before last, Fox did so three different times during Tuesday's O'Reilly Factor and have never admitted this outrageous misreporting. They simply disappeared the issue on the subsequent rebroadcasts of the program after they were caught having done it.

The next day the Associated Press --- who appear to be a real news organization --- did something similar. However, they did the right thing within hours, and admitted the error in subsequent corrected versions of their original article, which had labelled the REPUBLICAN Mark Foley as a Democrat.

Everyone in the world, it seems, has now picked up on the story of Fox's outrageous "error." (Including Comedy Central's The Daily Show and MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann --- both videos now linked below.) Everyone, it seems, except for Fox. To our knowledge, Fox has not taken responsibility or accountability in any way.

For now, we'll presume that's the end of this particular story, which sheds additional light (as if any further was needed) on the absurd claims that the Fox "News" Channel is actually a "news" organization. It is not. It is a Propoganda Ministry beyond the reach of the accountability and responsibility under which any self-respecting and true news organization would normally operate.

We can only imagine the uproar from the "conservative" community, and the heads which would have been forced to roll had the situation been reversed and CNN, or anybody else in the media, labelled a Democratic sexual predator as a Republican. Three times. Without apology or correction.

As mentioned, both Stewart and Olbermann ran with the story yesterday. Here are links to each clip, both courtesy of Crooks & Liars...

Countdown with Keith Olbermann video clip...

Daily Show with John Stewart video clip...

UPDATE 10/6/06 3:49pm PT: O'Reilly Executive Producer now says 'no on-air correction necessary.' Full details...

More VoterAction.org lawsuits and complaints are now being filed to stop the use and/or purchase of electronic voting systems around the country. On Wednesday, two more. One in California, another in Wisconsin.

In Alameda County, CA a suit was filed to stop of the use of Sequoia Voting Systems touch-screen DRE's, alleging the county "has not performed independent, expert security vulnerability testing on its new Sequoia voting equipment. The group claims such testing was a prerequisite stipulated by county supervisors before the county would issue payment for the system." ...

Of course, we've heard such reports during Primary Elections around the country already this year (see this one, where the Diebold touch-screen voting machine gave a voter a ballot for the wrong election, noticed only because he happened to be an eagle-eyed talk radio political reporter.)

Now, this just in yesterday from "bonobo", a blogger at dKos, on the first day of Early Voting on the same unreliable, hackable Diebold touch-screen voting machines, but this time in Franklin County, Ohio. And, again, from someone who happened to be politically involved enough to notice the "error"!...

It looks like AP picked up on Fox's "error" yesterday in labelling Mark Foley as a Democrat!

From Josh Marshall today...

Indeed Josh would appear to be correct. As of a quick Google search moments ago, there were still several articles indexed as showing Foley as a "(D-Florida)":

The stories listed by Google above now seem to have corrected the text in their online versions. No clue how many actually made it into newsprint that way.

Several of the outlets who ran AP's original "Foley is a Dem" version now have this correction notice at the bottom of their articles:

To our knowledge, no such admission has been issued by either O'Reilly or Fox "News", despite having run the most egregious version of this "error" (three times in total) during the initial primetime broadcast of The O'Reilly Factor last night as we originally reported just after it aired. They simply scrubbed the "error" by removing that title card during the later re-broadcasts of the program (the ones with the smaller viewerships).

(Hat-tip Joseph Cannon)

UPDATE: Eagle-eyed BRAD BLOG commenter "Fred T" notes that Hastert is also labelled as a Democrat in the AP story listed in the Google search graphic above!

UPDATE 10/10/06 4:52pm PT: Now NewsMax.com says Foley a "Democrat"!...