It's been a long long time. And recent weeks offered little indication that we'd ever see one of these again.

But we are pleased --- we might even say relieved --- to offer The BRAD BLOG's too-rarely, now-almost-never bestowed "Intellectually Honest Conservative" Award to Texas Republican state Representative Sarah Davis!

We've never figured out how so many Republicans get away with calling themselves "conservative", claiming a belief in "limited government", while still supporting huge and intrusive government programs and restrictions that rob citizens of rights, chief among them, targeted restrictions on women's health issues. Want to get between private citizens and their doctors --- as Republicans pretended to abhor during their fight against health care insurance reform? The GOP has done so for years, and continues to do so in spades, all over the nation.

There are few state legislatures more aggressively inserting Big Government between citizens and their doctors than the state of Texas. With few Democrats in the body to stop them, the GOP's completely not-conservative Big Government "conservatism" continues unabated, with the state Legislature now hoping to even shut down cancer screenings at women's health facilities that they don't care for. And they are using very specifically targeted and powerful Big Government apparatus to simply put them out of business.

One Republican --- just one --- in the TX Legislature has been consistently standing up to them, and using true conservative values to do it...

Last year, the California State Supreme Court improperly nixed a ballot initiative meant to encourage state Legislators to support an amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decision, according to a court brief recently filed by several state advocacy groups.

In the summer of 2014, the California state Legislature enacted SB 1272, a ballot initiative (Prop 49), asking California voters to advise whether the state's elected representatives should pursue passage of an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would overturn Citizens United. The advisory measure, had it been allowed on the general election ballot last year, had sought to establish that corporations are not people and that the rights enshrined in our nation's founding documents apply only to living, breathing human beings.

The effort to permit voters to weigh-in on the subject was cut short when the CA Supreme Court promptly ordered then Secretary of State Debra Bowen to remove Prop 49 from the November ballot pending full briefing and argument with respect to a legal challenge filed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association ("HJTA") --- an anti-tax organization founded by Republican Howard Jarvis.

As described on the Court's docket sheet, the state Supremes removed Prop 49 from last year's ballot based on a 1984 CA Supreme Court decision, American Federation of Labor v. Eu ("Eu"), which established "that substantial harm can occur if an invalid measure is permitted to remain on the ballot."

In Eu, the CA Supremes struck down a ballot initiative that sought "to compel California's elected representatives, on penalty of loss of salary, to apply to Congress to convene a constitutional convention for the…purpose of proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution requiring a balanced federal budget." (Emphasis added).

But, according to the amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief, recently filed by Free Speech for People (FSP) and other advocacy groups, the Court's earlier decision in Eu does not support last year's decision to remove the Overturn Citizens United initiative from the 2014 ballot. The brief explains that the state Legislature does, indeed, have the constitutional authority to seek advisory instructions from the Golden State's electorate via the ballot.

FSP not only defends the legality of the Prop 49 initiative, as measured against both the U.S. and California Constitutions, but presents both historical and legal arguments that, if successful, could define the very essence of our (small "r") republican form of government (aka, representative democracy) --- a form of government that is guaranteed in every state by Article 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Sec. John Kerry slams climate change deniers in government; More whistleblowers corroborate a Florida ban on 'climate change'; Solar energy is booming, in the good, non-explosive, jobs-creating kind of way; PLUS: Great news for the oil industry! Thanks to the oil industry, Arctic sea ice heads to a record low....All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): World record-breaking 8 ft of snow in 18 hours hits Italy; Scientists near breakthrough on artificial photosynthesis; Leaked emails reveal who' who list of climate denialists; India to hide pollution data from the public; Math and myth clash in Senate hearing on Clean Power Plan; The Hydraulic Hypothesis and the 'ends' of civilization; Plastic runs through everything; Farmers take up no-till agriculture ... PLUS: Unlike temperatures, climate change deniers falling fast... and much, MUCH more! ...

After another (too-long) fund drive break at Pacifica Radio's KPFK, we were finally back today with a live and fresh BradCast!

And, if you've been following The BRAD BLOG lately, you'll know that I think so much of what's going on, in the media, in Congress, and just about everywhere else of late, is just insanely dumb.

So, on those topics today, I was delighted to be joined by our friend Eric Boehlert of Media Matters to discuss the media hypocrisy over Hillary Clinton's email "scandal" (while ignoring other, almost identical matters that actually are or were scandals) and the massive lies of Bill O'Reilly that somehow nobody seems to care about.

I also had a few words to say about the GOP's latest, embarrassing Iran idiocy, and their, um, unconvential methods of governing for the next two years, as well as the media's failure to say the words "global warming" and/or "climate change".

Yes, all of that and much more in a very lively hour! And Desi Doyen even joins us at the end for an uplifting Green News Report (sort of).

Download MP3 or listen online below...

Lots of deserved criticism of late for Arkansas' freshman U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Neocon Tea Party) for the ridiculously condescending (and, ironically, Constitutionally inaccurate) letter he authored to Iran in hopes of undermining sensitive negotiations concerning their nuclear program.

But while Cotton richly deserves all the criticism he is now roundly receiving, even from some in his own party, let's please not forget about the other 46 U.S. Senators, all Republican, who also signed onto that letter.

This was not a hundreds-of-pages-long bill or something. It was five simple paragraphs long and each Senator appears to have signed onto it by hand. They have no excuse.

You've probably heard about it, but may not have actually read it in full. Until I did, I figured it was likely another bit of obnoxiousness from the GOP, akin to inviting Netanhayu to speak to Congress without White House approval, but the outrage around it was largely a partisan attack from Democrats against Republicans who'd written the letter for the usual, silly partisan reasons.

But it's way worse than that. It's unprecedentedly obnoxious, embarrassing and just childishly condescending. And it doesn't take any particular allegiance to the Democratic Party or the White House to see that. It just jumps off the page.

Again, it's just five grafs long and rather astonishing. Read it, if you haven't. It's posted in full below or read the PDF. And remember: 47, theoretically grown-up U.S. Senators actually signed onto this thing. On purpose. Including the entire GOP leadership in the U.S. Senate, none of whom had the adult sense to stop them!...

Even prior to last Friday's announcement by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics trumpeting the higher-than-expected 295,000 jobs added in February, helping to drop the unemployment rate to 5.5%, the GOP lie that the Affordable Care Act (ACA or "Obamacare") was a "job-killer" was already quite apparent.

Why are elected officials not held accountable when they are so demonstrably wrong? Or, worse, why are they treated by the media as if they are serious people, when clearly they are not?

On March 17, 2010, just five days before Obama signed the ACA into law, as Forbes' Dan Diamond reminded us last week, even before the huge new job numbers came in, House Speaker John Boehner reiterated what pretty much every Republican opponent of Obamacare had been reciting for months by that time...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Another day, another two oil train explosions; In Florida, the first rule of global warming is don't talk about global warming; Fukushima Nuclear Disaster still a disaster, four years later; PLUS: The world's first solar-powered plane soars into aviation history....All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Rate of climate change predicted to soar in 2020s; 10 myths about fossil fuel divestment; EPA failed to warn residents about contaminated water; The promise of energy storage; Time to worry about exploding Siberian craters?; Houston Ship Channel closed after collision and MTBE spill; Millions of songbirds slaughtered in Cyprus ... PLUS: How the Merchants of Doubt push global warming denial on your television... and much, MUCH more! ...

In his "Morning Plum" round-up today at Washington Post, Greg Sargent's collection of items on legislative priorities in the new Congress reads more like a warning than anything else. Buckle up. The serious dysfunction in the Republican House and Senate is only going to get very bad before it gets better.

His opening item details the improbability of the Voting Rights Act, broken in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court, being fixed by the Republican majority in both houses any time soon. Indeed, as The Nation's Ari Berman tweets today, even on the heels of the weekend's 50th anniversary commemoration of the Bloody Sunday march for voting rights in Selma, AL, just 10 House Republicans currently support the Republican-authored bill to restore the VRA.

"There's no incentive for House Republicans to act" on it, observes Sargent. That's true, in so much as, ya know, simply doing the right thing would otherwise provide incentive to at least some lawmakers.

Similarly, Sargent notes, it seems unlikely that Republicans will be able to make much progress on immigration reform, a long-promised, so-called GOP version of health care reform, or even on their own legislative priorities, such as tax reform or trade deals, given the necessity of having to deal with Democrats to get almost anything passed in the Senate and a Democratic President who is disinclined to gut programs that "Tea Party" Republicans tend to poison their own legislation with.

But, following last week's predictable GOP brinksmanship on funding for the Dept. of Homeland Security, Sargent cites Ashley Parker at the New York Times and her round up of the long list of must-pass spending bills that are coming due soon with hard deadlines and a likelihood --- some might say certainty, at this point --- that much more governing-by-brinksmanship lies in our near future. All of that, it seems, is all but certain to take up any time that might have been used to pass bills meant to, ya know, actually help the American people...

[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

The longtime former host of the Fox 'News' media critique program, Fox News Watch, took to CNN on Sunday to blast both Fox and his former colleague Bill O'Reilly during an appearance on Brian Stelter's weekend media show, Reliable Sources.

Eric Burns, who worked at Fox for years before finally leaving in 2008, described the channel as a "cult" of "extreme right", and described O'Reilly as both the leader of that cult and a "liar."

"I think it's astonishing that that's the way they operate," Burns said, describing Fox' failure to take any action against their prime time star in light of documented evidence that O'Reilly wholly mischaracterized and/or blatantly lied about his coverage of the Falklands War, bombings in Northern Ireland, the murder of nuns in El Salvador, and the suicide of a key player in the JFK assassination saga, to name just a few cases recently brought to light by others in the non-wingnut media.

Burns went on to describe [video posted in full below] how O'Reilly has been caught telling "numerous lies" over the years by, among others, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann who used "all the evidence possible" to detail the fabrications. But, he explained, because the lies were told at Fox, nobody cared.

"No one expects much out of O'Reilly as a Fox News host," said Burns. "No one expects the truth."

The way to understand what is going on right now at Fox in the wake of the allegations against O'Reilly, Burns explained, "is to make a distinction between the words 'culture' and 'cult'"...

President Barack Obama offered a stirring speech this afternoon at the entrance to the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Bloody Sunday March in Selma, Alabama in 1965.

The brutal police violence brought against courageous, peaceful marchers that day, and the subsequent peaceful marches that followed it, led directly to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, widely regarded as one of the most important pieces of legislation in our nation's history.

The transcript of Obama's speech today is posted in full below. But, here is the portion of his remarks calling for the restoration of the VRA which was renewed for 25 years in 2006 by George W. Bush (one of very few Republican officials in attendance today), but then gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013...

The complete transcript of Obama's prepared 3/7/2015 speech commemorating the sacrifices of the 3/7/1965 Bloody Sunday March, along with many other sacrifices in our storied and continuing fight for civil rights in the U.S., follows in full below...

As we find ourselves smack dab on the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, there are some key decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, coming very soon, which may well determine whether millions of otherwise lawfully registered and disproportionately Democratic-leaning African-American and Hispanic voters will be prevented from voting in the 2016 elections.

The decision that emerges from the Supreme Court's March 20, 2015 Conference in the Wisconsin polling place photo ID case, Frank v. Walker, could well be dispositive in that regard. It also may be the last chance to avoid the legal chaos that plagued the 2014 elections, during which similar voting restrictions, in state-after-state, were implemented, struck down, restored, or, with respect to Wisconsin, blocked again. Where, last year, the Court's eleventh hour decisions preserved the right to vote in Wisconsin, that same Supreme Court, on the eve of the 2014 mid-term, eliminated the right to vote for hundreds of thousands of predominantly African-American and Hispanic voters in Texas and North Carolina. The failure of the Supreme Court to take up the issue now could produce an even darker cloud of doubt over the integrity and legitimacy of the 2016 Presidential Election.

The immediate issue now before the Court is not whether SCOTUS agrees with a U.S. District Court judge and half the judges on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeal that WI's law (aka Act 23) is both unconstitutional and violative of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. As those judge found, Act 23, if implemented in the Badger State, could disenfranchise more than 300,000 lawfully registered Wisconsin voters.

Rather, the immediate issue at the March 20 Conference is whether the Supremes will grant an ACLU petition for a writ of certiorari (aka "cert petition") and schedule oral arguments on the Constitutionality of the Republican-enacted law. Or whether, as urged by the attorneys representing WI's Republican Governor Scott Walker, the Court will defer its decision until similar legal challenges to strict photo ID laws in other states, such as North Carolina and Texas, wind their way through the trial and appellate courts.

In other words, do they hear the Wisconsin case now, as urged by the ACLU and other voting rights advocates? Or do they wait to combine the matter with several other challenges to substantively identical voting restrictions implemented by Republicans in other states, as urged by one of the men who stands to benefit from delaying such a decision as long as possible?

That decision whether to hear the case now, rather than later, may well have a huge impact on who will serve as the next President of the United States...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Gag order lifted in criminal trial of Massey Energy coal boss Don Blankenship; Sea levels rose 5 inches in 2 years in the Northeast; Oil drillers illegally dumping toxic wastewater in California; Air pollution standards cut rates of childhood asthma in half; PLUS: Republicans fail to override Obama's Keystone XL veto, but vow to try again...and again...and again... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Your shower wastes water. Here's what you can do about it; Anti-pollution documentary taking China by storm; NYC could see 6 feet of sea level rise; Revealed: secret plan to confuse public on climate change launched in 1998; Canada pushing First Nations to give up land rights; Christie's office pushed sweetheart pollution deal for Exxon; McDonald's to limit antibiotics in chicken... PLUS: K-cup founder regrets the 'environmental scourge' he invented... and much, MUCH more! ...

A federal appeals court has lifted the gag order that had been imposed by a lower court in the criminal trial of West Virginia coal baron Don Blankenship.

The appellate court's unsigned order [PDF] on Thursday was issued in response to a suit filed by a number of media outlets, including AP, the Wall Street Journal and the Charleston Gazette, challenging the gag order by U.S. District Court Judge Irene C. Berger. That order, issued last November, had also sealed all documents in the indictment of the former Massey Energy CEO, who faces four criminal counts related to the massive April 2010 explosion at the company's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine in West Virginia, resulting in the deaths of 29 miners.

Finding that the U.S. District Court had been "sincere and forthright" in its "proactive effort to ensure to the maximum extent possible that Blankenship’s right to a fair trial before an impartial jury will be protected", the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nonetheless determined that "The public enjoys a qualified right of access to criminal trials"...