Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Yesterday, OpEdNews published an astonishing article by David Dill, Doug Jones and Barbara Simons, an article which blows the lid off the shenanigans that have been going on between Diebold and the State of Maryland.

Wise men say "Consider the source." That's always a good idea. In this case, all three authors have very impressive credentials:

Turning to the article itself, here are the first few paragraphs:

So manipulating an election is against the law? Who'da thunk it?

Sorry! I couldn't help myself.

The remainder of the article, unaccompanied by smart remarks, follows:

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Not for nothing is Chris Floyd one of my favorite journalists. He's one of my favorite bloggers too.

Why? Because he cares so much, because he writes so well, because he pays such close attention. And because he never fails to mention things like this:

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Brad has been too busy lately to remind us that his investigations, his blog, and everything else he does nowadays are funded by a few ads and a few donations. Too few donations, if the truth be known.

He's usually too modest to say what this means to him personally, but I'm not.

Brad used to have a career in which he made money. But that is no longer the case.

Clearly, Brad believes the work he does now is even more important than the work he used to do; I agree with him about that, and evidently so do you. It's just a tad inconvenient that his current work does very little to help him pay the rent.

If you appreciate the work Brad does, if you like reading (and maybe even commenting) on his blog, if you would like to see his investigative work continue, if you care about the future of our country, if you care about the truth and want to see more of it ... these are all good reasons to consider making a contribution.

It's easy to do --- see the blue box in the right-hand sidebar. And even if you can't contribute very much, please remember that every little bit helps.

How much does it matter? That's for you to decide. In my opinion, there is nothing at stake here except our future.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The Big Cat is still on his "vacation" (as you can tell from his appearance yesterday on "Catherine Crier Live") and the kitten who has been trying to fill his "shoes" (do cats wear shoes? mine doesn't!) is too busy to blog very much at the moment. Maybe later, as they say, but not right now.

That shouldn't deter YOU! If you have something to say, please say it here!

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

A few good news items for friends and allies of The BRAD BLOG:

Brad Friedman and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are scheduled to appear on Court TV Thursday afternoon (2PM Pacific time, 5PM Eastern) with host Catherine Crier, whose election coverage lately has been excellent!

ALSO: News Hounds covered DemocracyFest and even included a picture of Brad Friedman.

From the News Hounds item, here's a link to a website you might enjoy visiting: The CA50 Action Committee. Its "Get News" page says the first thing to do is visit The BRAD BLOG!

Cool! That's the same thing Mike Malloy kept saying the other night on Air America!

One more item of minor consequence: your lowly and nearly frozen correspondent has resumed blogging again, if only because Cynthia McKinney Is Getting Robbed And Nobody Is Even Blogging About It! So, in the words of an old familiar phrase, please don't read my blog.

UPDATE: Video of the Catherine Crier Live appearance (with RFK Jr. as well) is now online here...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Staff Writer Leslie Wolf Branscomb of the San Diego Union-Tribune actually gets some of the story right in her July 19th piece: Reliability of voting machines questioned.

Brad mentioned this story yesterday, noting that it was among "the worst" of the most recent local coverage of the Busby/Bilbray election, which, as all regular readers know, happened over a month ago and is still under a cloud of doubt.

Just before he left for his "vacation", Brad mentioned that "the reporters continue to allow Haas to pass on his knowing obfuscations, and the media is usually too lazy or ill-informed to bother to call him on it. So that's your job now!" and he also said: "Please help such media out by giving them the facts to counter Haas' ass-covering spin, misleads, red-herrings and bald-faced lies."

And so, without further ado ... after the fold you will find extended excerpts and some commentary from your lowly and nearly frozen guest-blogger.

And please also read Brad's post on the subject, if you haven't done so already.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

A timely reminder from our friend Jay:

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The Atlanta Progressive News has published a long article about a situation we were very interested in yesterday, which otherwise seems poised to fall off the map. How curious!

The APN piece is called Machine Vote-Flipping Claimed in McKinney Primary and I have found it on the net in a very few places. But I can't find any other news about this story on at all. Anywhere. Even the "McKinney for Congress" website is quiet --- it hasn't been updated since yesterday afternoon as far as I can tell.

In the interests of getting this story a bit more exposure, we provide not only a link to it (above) but we will also post generous excerpts below the fold.

By the way, according to the "official" results of the election, McKinney got more votes than any of the other candidates, but not a majority, and she will have to go through a run-off against her most successful opponent, Hank Johnson, to whom votes were being flipped yesterday according to the reports we have received.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

According to sources in the Cynthia McKinney camp, Georgia voters attempting to vote for her in today's Democratic Primary are seeing their votes flipped to her opponent, Hank Johnson.

McKinney has a well-deserved reputation for speaking truth to power, asking tough questions, and not backing down (see this video, or read this transcript).

Diebold, on the other hand, has a history of touch-screen machines flipping votes from one candidate to another --- commonly called "vote-switching" or "vote-flipping" --- and otherwise failing altogether.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Steve Viele has sent me a nice email containing his account of Saturday morning at DemocracyFest and a few pics of Brad there. Way cool.

The following is from Steve...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Israel attacks. Lebanon burns (left).

Hezbollah attacks. Haifa burns (right).

On and on it goes.

If this goes on for long enough, people might begin to ask who stands to benefit from endless war.

Meanwhile...

A very disturbing report today from The Scotsman has the Lebanese Information Minister accusing Israel of "using internationally prohibited weapons against civilians".

Is this something the Lebanese Information Minister would say even if it weren't true?

Is this something Israel would do?

How can we ever know the truth about such claims?

Meanwhile...

"We feel the entire world has left us alone to be slaughtered," said Ali al-Amin ...

To me, stuff like this transcends politics. It's either enough to knock you down and make you weep in fury, regardless of the nationality of the source, or else you need a heart transplant. IMVHO.

It's too bad we don't get much coverage like this in the USA. But oh well. No big surprise there. It's not the first time our news media have let us down, and it won't be the last.

My thoughts on the matter run like this:

May God protect the peaceful people of the Middle East, peaceful people of all countries. And may He smite the warmongers with a terrible swift sword.

Can I get an "amen"?

Thank you. Now please consider this an open thread.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Elsewhere at The BRAD BLOG we've had a very interesting discussion. Its subject matter has been all over the place (as things often are here) but in essence the discussion revolves around the traditional BRAD BLOG approach to comments (where everything is considered more or less on-topic, more or less all the time) and the question of whether this approach is still suitable for a blog which has become more and more --- some would say "entirely" --- dedicated to a single issue. It's a serious question, and at this point it seems there's no easy answer.

In the (hopefully-not-too-distant) future, The BRAD BLOG hopes to evolve into a multi-page blog, where our material can be arranged in a meaningful way (election-related news on the front page and everything else someplace else, for instance, maybe, we'll see...) but at the moment we are stuck with what we have. One page. Chronological order. All kinds of stuff. What to do?

As you know by now, Brad has hit the road for his trip to DemocracyFest, and following the traditional BRAD BLOG approach to road trips, he's left the keys to the blog with his lowly and nearly frozen friend...

... who has been thinking about the question alluded to above, and scratching his head so hard it started to bleed. But then he had a really wild idea: a totally original thought that has surely never occurred to anyone else in the entire history of blogging:

What if we had an OPEN THREAD? What if we had a place where it was decidedly OK to talk about non-election-related topics? That might even give us a chance to stay on-topic on the election-related threads. It's a truly novel idea, is it not?

It's lucky I thought of it before I bled to death! But then again I had some help.

Hat tip to Prup (aka Jim Benton), who broke a few eggs but might have started an omelette.

Special to BRAD BLOG by BTC News White House Correspondent Eric Brewer

Today during the White House briefing I asked Tony Snow this question:

Tony denied the allegation, saying:

Special to BRAD BLOG by BTC News White House Correspondent Eric Brewer

Today the U.S. government released its 2005 report on worldwide terrorism. It reveals that, compared to the 2004 figures, the number of terrorist attacks more than tripled and the number of people killed in those attacks more than doubled. The hard data: last year saw 14,602 killed in 11,111 attacks.

Those are startling increases. Earlier this year, I reported on a different data set, compiled by the RAND Corporation, which showed much lower, but still substantial, increases of 36% in the number of deaths and 51% in the number of attacks.

Why the big differences? Essentially, what the Bush administration has been doing, ever since terrorism numbers started to shoot up after the invasion of Iraq, is try to obfuscate and spin the numbers in order to disguise the increases.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

As usual, there's a great deal of important new material on the blog at the moment and I wouldn't want to distract you from it. But on the other hand I thought you might like to know [even a bit belatedly] that Buzzflash has published the second installment of Maureen Farrell's three-part essay about the history of modern America.

As loyal BRAD BLOG reader and frequent commenter Robert Lockwood Mills pointed out last week, when the first part was published, it's "anecdotal history, not a narrative. But if even half of the dots connect it's very, very scary."

In my opinion, the number of dots that connect is way more than half.

If you've already read the first part, you'll have some idea of what to expect. If you haven't, please consider this a friendly reminder.

Below, a few short excerpts from part two: