Last week, we wrote about the disturbing similarities (and differences) in the wife-beating cases of the NFL's Ray Rice, who knocked out his then-fiancée/now-wife in an Atlantic City hotel elevator in mid-February, and that of Alabama's U.S. District Court Judge Mark Fuller, who beat his wife bloody in an Atlantic City hotel room in early August.

Despite the allegations in the now-sealed 2012 divorce documents from his first wife, suggesting that he also beat her up (as well as their kids), Fuller, like Rice, is being treated as a first time offender by the court system, and being allowed to enter a pre-trial diversion program to avoid prosecution entirely. Both will avoid prosecution and have their arrest records completely expunged, as if the beatings never happened, upon completion of domestic abuse counseling. Rice has agreed to attend sessions for a year; Fuller has agreed to once-weekly domestic abuse counseling for just 24 weeks.

Rice eventually lost his job after video of his assault was published. Fuller, unless he's impeached by the U.S. Congress or chooses to resign, will keep his $200,000/year lifetime on the U.S. District Court in Alabama's Middle District. He has indicated he intends to continue his job sitting in judgment of others, stating, after the court agreed to the plea deal early this month, that he "look[s] forward to...returning to full, active status" on the federal bench.

We detailed some of the very few calls from media for Fuller to step down or be impeached, as well as the (so far) tepid reaction from elected officials --- the very same ones who have made their "outrage" known about the Rice case --- who are largely ignoring the Fuller case, even though the violence in his case was arguably much worse. According to the Atlanta Police, he struck and kicked his wife repeatedly, dragged around the hotel room by her hair, leaving bruises and blood on her face and legs, and in the hotel bathroom. According to the reported details of the desperate 911 call from his wife, asking for an ambulance, she is heard being struck and repeatedly crying: "Help me, please. Please help me. He's beating on me."

But the outrage about the wrist-slap treatment of a wife-beating federal judge seems to be growing --- very slowly, but growing --- including a scathing denunciation of Fuller by a fellow Republican federal jurist, this one a senior judge from the District of Nevada, who decries the plea deal allowed to Fuller and writes, "Given what happened in that hotel room, no one should trust his judgment in a federal trial courtroom"...

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

Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker notched a huge victory today at the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling could very well result in the controversial Governor's re-election this November --- at the expense of untold thousands of legally registered voters who may now not be able to vote at all this year.

This morning, a three-judge panel heard Walker's appeal to the federal ruling that previously struck down his Photo ID voting restriction law. By afternoon, almost immediately following the hearing, the three GOP-appointed federal judges (a Reagan appointee, and two George W. Bush appointees) restored the restrictive voting measure [PDF] in advance of the November general election.

As reported by the Journal Sentinel:

Even before the ruling came down, reports from the courtroom earlier today had suggested that it wasn't looking good for those fighting for voting rights there, and that the judges might even order the previously struck-down law to be implemented before this year's mid-term elections, where Walker faces a neck-and-neck re-election contest with his Democratic opponent, Mary Burke.

Instituting the law at this late date, the plaintiffs argued, would cause extraordinary confusion. "I think it would be extremely irresponsible for a court to do something that would so change the landscape not only for the (state Division of Motor Vehicles) but for election officials," Larry Dupuis, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin told the Journal Sentinel after today's hearing.

UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen noted the same earlier today, before the ruling had come down, explaining why it would be "a very bad idea" to implement this law "just before the election."

Making matters worse, and more confusing for voters and elections officials, the WI GOP's Photo ID voting restriction covers absentee ballots as well as polling place voting, unlike most similar laws enacted by Republicans in other states, where only in-person voting is effected. But, according to the Journal-Sentinel (in a report now replaced online by an updated version on the court's late ruling), the fact that thousands of absentee ballots have already gone out to voters this year without an explanation on them that Photo ID needs to be supplied when they are returned, could result in even more disenfranchisement in the Badger State...

In an earlier life, I played a fake news man for some years. The character, which shared my name, was a slightly dumber Colbert-type rightwinger, though it pre-dated Colbert. (As I've previously noted, the line between fake news man and real one is uncomfortably thin.) At one point during that period, there had been an epidemic of well-publicized shootings. One of them was the Columbine Massacre. I remember using the satiric character, even at the time, to rail against the media for making the killers famous by headlining their names and plastering their faces on front pages and magazine covers, etc. In other words, for giving them exactly the infamy they likely sought in the first place.

You may have noticed we haven't written much about ISIS here. One of the reasons is because that's precisely what they'd like us all to do. And, since they emerged as the latest big scary menace on the world stage a few months ago, along with glossy and often horrible PR videos and a fairly sophisticated social media presence, the mainstream media and the political world seem to be all too happy to grant them every last bit of the very publicity they seek.

As of Wednesday night, it looks as though President Obama is similarly happy to take the ISIS bait and grant them the honor of being elevated as the latest Public Enemy #1 of the United States of America. The precise direct threat they pose to the U.S. at this time remains unclear. At least I haven't been able to figure it out and Obama's speech on Wednesday night made it no clearer. But the GOP war hawks seemed to be thrilled with it all, and party-line Democrats seem to be offering few, if any, objections either. The military industrial complex is certainly rejoicing over their newest apparent windfall.

To be clear, all available evidence suggests that ISIS or ISIL or the Islamic State is most certainly dangerous (at least to those within their expanding vicinity), extremely ruthless, and extraordinarily barbaric. Still, granting them the fame or infamy they seek --- be it in the mainstream media or from the U.S. Government, much less from the bully pulpit of the Presidency --- seems to be playing precisely into their hands. I'm not interested in doing so.

It's also, at least according to this report from Associated Press published just hours before the President's speech on Wednesday, exactly what their PR masterminds have been working towards. Another very public over-reaction to a most-likely "exaggerated" threat described by the AP as "no unstoppable juggernaut" and "wield[ing] outsize influence" thanks, in no small part, to their mastery of social media...

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Part 1 of this week's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio: How the NFL's Ray Rice knocked out his wife in a hotel elevator, lost his job and outraged America --- and how U.S. District Court Judge Mark Fuller beat his wife bloody in a hotel room, will have his arrest record expunged, gets to keep his lifetime appointment to the federal bench and very few in America seem to give a damn.

Part 2: What would you do about ISIS if you were President? Callers, lots of 'em, share their thoughts. I share a few of mine in kind. Nobody gets a free pass.

Plus, Desi Doyen and the latest Green News Report, and a few more items here and there in what was a very lively show this week. You should listen to it.

Download MP3 or listen online below...

The NFL has been appropriately shamed this week for not taking substantive action immediately in the case of Baltimore Ravens' superstar Ray Rice after he knocked his wife out cold in an Atlantic City hotel elevator earlier this year.

But what about the failure of the Judicial and Congressional branches, so far, to take any action at all in the case of federal U.S. District Court Judge Mark Fuller after he beat his wife bloody in an Atlanta hotel room last month?

Both Rice and Fuller, as supposedly first-time offenders, were allowed to participate in pre-trial diversion programs to avoid prosecution entirely. Rice agreed to attend domestic abuse counseling for a year. Fuller will have his arrest record expunged after completion of once-weekly domestic abuse counseling for just 24 weeks.

Rice was eventually suspended indefinitely by the NFL.

Fuller enjoys a lifetime appointment as a federal judge --- and can only be removed from his $200,000/year job-for-life if he is impeached and found guilty by Congress.

Fuller, a Republican George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench, sits in judgment of others. For example, rather than recuse himself for blatant conflicts of interest, he sent former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman to federal prison for 6.5 years for something that 113 bipartisan former state Attorneys General argue was never a crime before the popular Democratic Governor was charged with it.

America was outraged by the video tape showing Rice knocking out his then-fiancée (now wife) in mid-February.

America hardly even knows about Judge Fuller dragging his wife around the hotel room by her hair and striking her repeatedly in the mouth, leaving blood behind on the bathroom tub in early August, despite a police report and a 911 call during which his wife begs for police and an ambulance and repeatedly says "Help me, please. Please help me. He's beating on me." The 911 dispatcher reportedly says during the call that she can hear the Judge hitting the woman.

But, of course, we have no video of Judge Fuller's violent assault on his wife. We also have no access to the records of Fuller's first wife charging that he beat her as well, because a fellow judge, in an unusual and still-unexplained move in 2012, ordered the divorce records sealed, against the wishes of that first wife.

So where is the outcry over what is going with Fuller?...

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Just another reminder for those of you who have been stooged into believing that Republican attempts to restrict Early Voting (or any voting, for that matter) has anything to do with anything other than keeping Democratic-leaning voters from being able to conveniently participate in their own democracy...

"Election law loophole" = voting opportunity. For black people. Gotta close that "loophole".

You'll note Millar doesn't call, in response to the addition of early voting in DeKalb, for more voting opportunities in districts he believes would be favorable to Republican voters. His response, instead, is to suppress the vote of perceived political opponents. Period.

Sadly, but factually, that's what the Republican Party now amounts to. Maybe someone can try and let the the New York Times know.

UPDATE 9/10/2014: In response to criticism over his comments, Millarclarifies keeps digging and doubles down, by responding:

For the record, Fullar and his voters --- the white ones that he is happy to see vote --- are more than likely Fox "News" viewers, the most misinformed news consumers in the nation, according to poll after poll...

On Monday, the U.S. Senate voted to move forward with a final vote on a joint resolution to propose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would overturn the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decision.

The 79 to 18 vote to end debate and move on to a final vote on the measure included 25 "yes" votes from Republicans. However, The Hill reports, many of the GOP Senators are expected to vote against the resolution, "but by allowing it to proceed [they] ensured that it will tie up the Senate for most of the week." The Senate, which just returned from its 5-week summer recess on Monday, is in session for just two weeks before breaking for mid-term elections. A vote on the resolution may help to run out the clock on other Democratic priorities before the next recess.

Citizens United, as we wrote just after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision, has "opened the door to the creation of a new master-class under the aegis of the most undemocratic of institutions --- the private corporation." In fact, it has proven to have opened the floodgates for would be oligarchs, like the self-described "libertarian" Koch brothers, to further undermine the very foundation of our representative form of democracy --- a strategy that has resulted in their spending as much as $300 million to win control of the U.S. Senate for Republicans in the upcoming mid-term elections alone.

"We should have debate on this important amendment," Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) declared before casting his vote for cloture, in order to end the debate on Monday. "The majority should be made to answer why they want to silence critics."

One Republican Senator who voted against cloture, who is apparently not even in favor of allowing the U.S. Senate to vote on the measure, is Kentucky's Rand Paul. The similarly "self-described libertarian" Paul, who is not up for re-election this year, but is currently a front-runner for the 2016 Republican nomination for President, joined a minority of his GOP colleagues in voting against allowing the proposed amendment to receive an up or down vote. That vote, as well as his past efforts to shield corporations from democratic and legal accountability, underscore once again that the Kentucky Senator and the infamous Koch brothers are cut from the same cloth.

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a co-sponsor of the amendment, observed, the measure entails the "major issue of our time": to wit, "whether the United States of America retains its democratic foundation or whether we devolve into an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires are able to control our political process by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who represent their interest."

If it's up to Rand Paul, clearly he favors the latter.

Monday's vote is also a reminder that the upcoming 2014 mid-term elections are far more important than ordinary citizens may realize. The long-shot resolution, S.J. Res 19, would require two-thirds approval in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives before moving on for ratification as an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by three-quarters of the state legislatures. Given that extraordinary requirement, those voters who may oppose unlimited "dark money" political spending by corporations and billionaires would have to ignore a blizzard of Koch propaganda this year and vote Democratic or independent candidates into control of both chambers of Congress in order for the Amendment to become a reality.

We've written about this problem for years here and, indeed, have spent no small part of those years repeatedly spanking papers like the New York Times for being amongst the worst repeated offenders.

Fairness is one thing. Balance, on the other hand --- particularly in cases of known, independently-verifiable, well-established facts on one side of an issue but not on the other --- is largely bullshit meant to do little more than level an unlevel playing field for bad guys. That's why Fox "News" loves the motto "Fair and Balanced", because it gives them an excuse to forward bullshit disguised as "balance", as if it was only fair to counter an established, well-supported (if not Right-leaning) view point. Never mind if that established view point has mountains of evidence and independently verifiable facts to support it. If those facts don't agree with ideological Republican dogma, they must be "biased" and "unbalanced".

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias," Stephen Colbert once famously quipped.

The New York Times has a long history of falling for, and forwarding in "the paper of record", false balance produced by those on the Right. Often, as was the case when The BRAD BLOG outed the James O'Keefe ACORN "Pimp" Hoax for being a complete fraud in 2010, the paper has sided simply with the word of Rightwingers, actual evidence-before-their-eyes be damned. Longtime readers will likely remember Greg Brock, the Times' Senior Editor for Standards(!), telling us that falsely reporting O'Keefe wore a "pimp costume" into ACORN offices (he never, ever did) was perfectly appropriate, because, as Brock explained to us in email at the time, "Our article included that description because Mr. O'Keefe himself explained how he was dressed --- and appeared on a live Fox show wearing what HE said was the same exact costume he wore to ACORN's offices."

"If there is a correction to be made," Brock incredibly added, "it seems it would start with Mr. O'Keefe himself. We believe him. Therefore there is nothing for us to correct."

After we took our complaint, and the independently verifiable facts to support them, to Clark Hoyt, the New York Times Public Editor at the time, he embarrassingly backed up Brock, despite the actual hard evidence that existed --- such as an independent investigative report from a former prosecutor and the videos themselves --- to the contrary. His remarkable defense of that egregious and damaging misreporting, repeated over a series of articles, earned Hoyt an infamous depiction as an actual "weasel" by cartoonist Tom Tomorrow. Eventually --- some six months later --- Hoyt admitted that both he and the paper were wrong, but not before the false reporting led to irreversible damage to ACORN, which had been long-vilified by the Right for little more than the crime of legally registering millions of largely low- and middle-income voters to participate in their own democracy.

So it's refreshing, finally, to see that the Times' current Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, is not only not falling for the same old crap, she's actually attempting to hold the paper accountable for inappropriately advancing false balance on Rightwing stalking horse issues like pretend GOP claims about voter fraud and global warming denialism. And she's doing so repeatedly...

While Don Siegelman continues to serve out a 6.5 year prison sentence for something that 113 bipartisan former state Attorneys General argue has never ever been a crime until the former Democratic Governor of Alabama was charged with it, the federal U.S. District Court judge who presided over the trial and sentenced him has now struck a deal to avoid his own prosecution all together after having beaten his wife bloody in an Atlanta hotel room last month.

As we reported in an update last week, Judge Mark Fuller --- appointed to a lifetime job on the federal bench by George W. Bush in 2002 --- had reportedly checked into an unspecified "treatment program" in hopes of avoiding prosecution after being charged in August with domestic battery. Police reported at the time that they discovered the federal judge had dragged his wife around the hotel room by her hair, kicked her, and struck her several times in the mouth, leaving her with lacerations on her face, bruises on her legs, and blood found on the bathroom tub.

In court on Friday, Fuller struck a pre-trial deal to avoid prosecution entirely, despite reports that he had also beaten his previous wife as well, according to records from his 2012 divorce. Those records are said to have included accusations of drug abuse, domestic violence and infidelity with his court bailiff. The divorce papers were mysteriously sealed by the court at the time against the wishes of his former wife.

According to AP this afternoon, following the arrest on domestic abuse charges with his new wife, who has similarly charged that Fuller had an affair with his law clerk, it appears that Fuller will, once again, get off the hook...

When will this 'tyranny' end?! Out today from the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation:

This statement from the ACLU follows today's federal court ruling [PDF] restoring Early Voting hours --- yet again --- in Ohio in advance of the November mid-term elections:

The ruling includes a temporary injunction on the Republican-enacted state law and on additional new restrictions on voting hours implemented by its Republican Sec. of State John Husted, finding the regulations are in violation of both the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment, as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act which bars racially discriminatory voting laws in all 50 states.

"Ohio keeps trying to cut early voting and the federal courts keep striking the cuts down," writes The Nation's Ari Berman in response to today's ruling.

It's true. This has been going on for years. State Republicans, whether in the form of the legislature or their Republican Sec. of State in Ohio, keep attempting to make it harder to vote, and the federal court keeps ruling those attempts to be in violation of federal law. It has happened over and over again over the past several years.

Berman notes, in regards to today's ruling, that "In 2012, 157,000 Ohioans cast ballots during early voting hours eliminated by the Ohio GOP" and that African-American voters in the state "voted early in person at a rate over twenty times greater than white voters," according to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights.

The expansion of early voting in Ohio was implemented following the disastrous 2004 elections there when many voters --- largely in minority areas --- were forced to wait for 6 hours or more to cast a vote under restrictions implemented by then partisan Sec. of State and co-chair of Bush/Cheney '04 Inc., J. Kenneth Blackwell. The last ballot cast in the Buckeye State that year, when the state's electoral votes would determine the Presidency, was around 2am on Wednesday morning at Kenyon College, where some students had waited on line as much as 10 hours to vote.

The new GOP restrictions cut many of the additional voting opportunities instituted in 2005, which had otherwise led to a fairly smooth election under Democratic Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner in 2008, as she described to us during an exclusive interview in 2012.

Early Absentee voting numbers had doubled between 2004 and 2008 after the expansion of voting hours, as a quick glance at the numbers starkly demonstrates...

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On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman became the first federal judge since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 Windsor decision to uphold a state marriage-equality ban. But it's hardly the first questionable ruling by Feldman.

On this week's KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast I was joined by BradBlog.com's legal analyst Ernest A. Canning to discuss his 2010 call for Feldman's impeachment after his ruling that lifted the temporary federal moratorium on off-shore drilling following the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. Feldman, it turns out, failed to disclose his many conflicts of interest in the case or recuse himself at the time.

(And speaking of corrupt federal judges with lifetime appointments who need to be impeached immediately, please do not forget this one!)

I also talked with Ernie about his belief that Photo ID voting restrictions will be struck down by the federal court in Texas, and then at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Other issues also covered on this week's show: rape and murder convictions tossed out after 30 years for two NC men on death row, thanks to DNA evidence; the CA 'recount' reform bill blocked by state Republicans after the close election in state history; the new report finding Citizens United has directly resulted in more Republicans elected to office; and much more, including, as usual, Desi Doyen and the latest Green News Report...

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 58 mins]...