After an unexpected item or two of unexpected breaking news, we continue with Part 2 of our 3-part BRAD BLOG Year in Review 2006, highlighting some (but by no means all) of the most notable moments over this extraordinary year here in our own little corner of the world. A world which seems to have grown just a bit larger, if the following headlines are any indication.

For those who think we've grown quite big enough and thus don't think we need your support, well, we wish that was the case. So once again we include a shameless plea for your support via donation as you would be stunned as to just how few folks actually send such support given the number of readers we've had over the past year, and the arguably positive contribution we've made towards the betterment of our nation. If you can help, we (that actually means "I") would much appreciate it.

With that out the way, Part 1 (Jan - Apr) is back here, and Part 2 (May - Aug) follows below...

"The Americans want him to be hanged respectfully," one of Hussein's attorneys points out, according to AP, apparently without even a hint of irony.

The oxymoron aside, for our part we don't have much to say about all of this, other than how brutally disgusting it is, how Osama still runs free, how well more than the number of Americans killed on 9/11 have now been killed in Bush's appalling revenge plot on behalf of his father, and how neither Americans in general, nor certainly the troops on the ground, are any safer due to Bush's appalling failure as a U.S. "President."

Iraq War veteran Jon Soltz, co-founder of VoteVets.org, an advocacy group representing vets of both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, issued this statement earlier today:

For George W. Bush, however, who lives in the safe confines of his well protected mobile bunker, his presiding over this barbaric ending to the life of a barbaric man is ultimately just another shameful chapter in an already tragic-beyond-description tale.

Congratulations and Happy New Year, Mr. Bush. You got your man.

UPDATE 7:50pm PT: The deed is done. Good luck washing all of that blood off your hands, Mr. Bush. Only you could turn a despicable man like Hussein into a martyr. By year's end, in a few hours, the 3000 mark may be passed for dead U.S. troops in your war. Though, as Baghdad Burning points out so movingly today, 3000 Iraqis are lost in an average month. So I guess it's no biggie. You've had quite the reign, sir.

In a ruling issued this afternoon just prior to the Holiday weekend, the presiding Florida Circuit Court Judge William L. Gary denied the plaintiffs motion to allow review of the source code for the paperless touch-screen machines used in the contested U.S. House race in Florida's 13th district between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan.

Jennings, and a number of Florida voters and Election Integrity organizations, had filed suit asking for a revote and to allow them to review the software used on the voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, Inc. (ES&S), after some 18,000 votes seemed to have disappeared in the race to fill the U.S. House seat vacated by former FL Secretary of State Katherine Harris. The state has previously certified Buchanan as the winner by a 369 vote margin.

Gary's terse ruling [PDF], issued this afternoon denying the motion to compel the company to turn over their source code, states that ES&S has a right to keep their software hidden from review by both the Jennings camp and voters, supporting the company's "right" to keep their "trade secrets" protected.

An audit of the machines was previously conducted by a panel convened by the state. The various plaintiff groups had roundly criticized both the make-up of the panel and the procedures used during the testing, characterizing it as an "exercise in futility." The panel was led by a known hard-right Republican partisan and included the state's own official responsible for voting machine certification. No independent Election Integrity advocates were included on the panel.

That audit --- to nobody's surprise --- revealed no problems in the hardware or software as tested. But the plaintiffs have argued that only an independent investigation of the source code used on the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines might reveal reasons for the inexplicably large undervote rate in the race, more than 12%, only found on Sarasota's paperless touch-screen systems. Absentee paper balloting in the county, and on voting machines in other counties which make up the FL-13 district, revealed no such anomalous undervote rate. Undervote rates on paper absentee ballots in the same race, in the same county, were just over 2.5%.

Neither the Buchanan camp, nor anyone else, has been able to give a credible explanation for the disparity.

Gary's ruling denying Plaintiffs' motion to examine the voting machine source code finds that:

The plaintiffs had been requesting a revote for the election in the Florida circuit court. Jennings has filed a contest in the U.S. Congress, under the Constitutional provision which allows the House to determine the seating of members. When the new Congress convenes in January they must decide whether to seat Buchanan as is, seat him provisionally, seat Jennings instead, or leave the seat vacant, essentially forcing a Special Election in FL-13, or take some other action.

It's been quite a year. An exhausting one at that. Even gathering up some of the "Best of" stuff from The BRAD BLOG this year turned into a much taller order than we had planned on. So tall, in fact, that we're breaking it into three bite size pieces, to be posted over the next several days, for your reviewing pleasure.

It turned out to be an impossible task to choose "Best of" stuff from this extraordinary year, so we decided to focus only on this year's Exclusives and Breaking News for the most part. Mind you, even at that, as regular readers will quickly see, what we have room to remind you of here is very much just tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. Though even just the basics, in review, make for one helluva story --- about which someone should write a book or two some day (we wonder who that someone might be).

Anyway, until that big book advance comes through, we remind you again at year's end that we appreciate whatever BRAD BLOG DONATION you may be able to make to our continuing efforts. We also remind you that 2007 could be even more spectacular by kicking it off with a monthly subscription (as always, optional, and available via the blue form on the right of every page.)

So here now, Part 1 (Jan - Apr) of our 3-part look back at a few of the most notable stories in The BRAD BLOG Year in Review 2006...

We've been accused from time to time of being, variously, a "CIA Internet Fake" or a Karl Rove plant or whatever other nonsense folks may dredge up here in Freedom of Speech land. Unfortunately, neither the CIA nor Rove nor "the Jews" have ever paid up. (Please see our blue donation form on the right of every page. We'll take whatever we can get. Even via PayPal. We're not proud.)

On that note then, NYPost reports on some of the companies who are paying bloggers in hopes of good reviews...

While we have little interest in either the Speed Channel or the PGA, we've spent the bulk of the Christmas quiet time backing up, reformatting and restoring a hard drive on our ailing computer and still have yet to either finish, or fix the problem that seemed to be there in the first place.

So with that in mind, if Office Max --- a fine, upstanding company, if ever we saw one --- wishes to help out, we certainly could use both a new monitor and, at least, one new computer.

Given the lack of donations The BRAD BLOG seems to receive, along with Office Max's reputation for offering only the best goods and services available at some of the most reasonable prices in the industry (now offering fast, free delivery on most orders over $50!), we believe it'd be the perfect fit!

At least until "the Jews" come through with the big money as promised.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Below is a sampling of statistics and fun comparisons contained within the newly released 2006 Injustice Index, which is part of the The Drum Major Institute For Public Policy's 2006 Year in Review:

See more fun stats and the entire Year in Review at the Drum Major Institute.

Tech Mag PCWorld named E-Voting #3 on their list of "The 21 Biggest Technology Mistakes of 2006"...

We've come a long way, baby.

And we also take year-end great pride in that folks look back on Princeton's Diebold Virus Hack as one of the seminal moments in this whole sordid affair. (The machine used in the research was a DRE/touch-screen system supplied to VelvetRevolution.us by a BRAD BLOG source and we then gave it to Princeton for their now-infamous study.)

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they attack you.
Then you win.

Gerald Ford 1913 - 2006

The Orlando Sentinel sends me a Christmas gift. While it's not exactly that I may have asked for, this being the charitable season I'll look the other way and be thankful for what I got. Particularly as the Sentinel (or the Slantinel as some in the Sunshine State aptly refer to it) has never been particularly democracy-friendly.

Here then, a few highlights from their weekend editorial entitled "Drop touch-screens - Our position: It's time to pull the plug on the failed experiment of electronic voting"...

We hinted at this last week when Florida's corrupt Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) expressed his obnoxious indignation over the democratic (small "d") Congressional election challenge filed by Christine Jennings (D) against Vern Buchanan (R) in the FL-13 U.S. House race. This is the contest in which the perpetually election-challenged state of Florida certified Buchanan as the winner by 369 votes, even though some 18,000 votes seem to have disappeared altogether on Sarasota County's paperless ES&S touch-screen voting machines.

The challenge brought Feeney slithering out from under his rock to charge that Jennings' Constitutional request that Congress not seat Buchanan --- who appears to have "won" only due to failures in Sarasota's voting equipment (which even ES&S's own "expert witness" admitted on the witness stand during a hearing on the election contests filed by both Jennings and voters in Florida) --- amounted to "total political dictatorship."

At least that's what Feeney told the Orlando Sentinel at the time.

What he doesn't seem to have told them is that he too is the object of a similar Constitutional challenge in Congress by his own opponent, Clint Curtis, in the race for U.S. House in Florida's 24th district.

Curtis, who originally exposed Feeney's alleged attempt to create touch-screen vote-rigging software back in 2000 (a story broken by The BRAD BLOG in 2004 and followed in detail ever since), campaigned to unseat Feeney this year for the first time, but was declared the loser. Curtis disagrees.

Warren Stewart at VoteTrustUSA covered both the Curtis and Jennings challenges on the Thursday before XMas weekend, along with a posting of the complaints filed by both candidates (Curtis' complaint here, Jennings's complaint here, both in WORD format) as filed in Congress. We've yet to review either complaint or discuss them with either candidate personally, so we'll refer to Stewart's coverage and the actual complaints for the moment and let you people do some work for a change.

The Orlando Sentinel, however, picked up on the story of Curtis's challenge on Xmas Eve in a brief post in their "This Just In" section. Here's the full item...

Stay tuned, indeed...The saga continues...

Merry frickin' Christmas.

From AP. December 25, 11:51pm ET.

The LA Times is reporting that the George W. Bush "Presidential" Library may well be built at Laura's alma mater, Dallas's Southern Methodist University.

Setting aside those in Texas and at the University who are less than thrilled with the idea of being associated with the guy, it comes as little surprise that the ground likely to be used for the library at SMU was obtained via tactics that perfectly represent the Bush Administration...

Even with the attempts by Bush's well-monied supporters to invent a less-than-humiliating legacy for him, it looks as if the library will be built on the intimidation of and land grabbed from others. Go figure.

No word on how many copies of My Pet Goat the library will be making available to researchers and visitors.

We're shocked. SHOCKED! Knock us over with a feather!

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that Georgia state officials are claiming that Kathy Rogers, the recently resigned Director of outgoing Secretary of State Cathy Cox's State Elections Division, is going to work for Diebold.

Rogers resigned on November 30th, and rumors have been swirling ever since in the state where Diebold first planted it's dirty claws with paperless touch-screen voting machines in 2002 (along with the state of Maryland). Democrats Cox and Rogers have been apologizing and covering for the deceptive and anti-democratic Voting Machine Company ever since.

Cox even went so far as to appear on a Diebold promotional brochure singing the company's praises.

"Rogers apparently will serve as a liaison between elections officials throughout the United States and Diebold," according to the AJC...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Christine Jennings and her lawyer, Kendall Coffey, appeared Wednesday on Lou Dobbs Tonight with guest host Kitty Pilgrim to discuss the latest news concerning Florida's 13th Congressional District. As BRAD BLOG has reported often (most recently here, here and here), Vern Buchanan was declared the winner in Florida's 13th after the disappearance of 18,000 votes left the Republican with a paltry 369 vote lead over his opponent Jennings. Subsequently, a handful of experts including one provided by e-voting manufacturer ES&S, concluded that the inclusion of the missing votes would have propelled Jennings to an easy victory based on an analysis of the Sarasota votes which did not spontaneously combust.

Unfortunately, the will of the people is a foreign concept among those controlling the Florida election apparatus which declared Buchanan the winner after recounting nothing a couple of times. With no paper trail (much less a paper BALLOT, and there is a big difference!), a "recount" merely refers to state election staffers testing whether a few selected machines are working properly and is entirely unrelated to the vote count. By certifying Buchanan the winner, the state forced Jennings to seek relief in the Florida courts.

This did not sit well with Sean Hannity who, with Buchanan on as a guest a few weeks ago, found the entire affair "unbelievable" and further evidence that Democrats are sore losers. Juxtaposing the Hannity clip as well as Tom Feeney's reaction to the election controversy, recounted by Brad here, to Jennings appearance on CNN (clip above right), makes for quite an interesting experiment. While hardly evidence that could be used in a court of law like the damning statistical evidence, the contrast is, nevertheless, telling.