[Now UPDATED with commercial-free audio archives below!...]

Mike has the night off! So we're back guest hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show, and that means it's the RETURN OF "Friday the 13th! Nightmare on Malloy Street!"...

We'll be BradCasting all the horrors, LIVE from 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG, as usual, while we are on the air. Please stop by and join the fun while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Scheduled tonight (so far):

• SHARON HARRINGTON, Republican Supervisor of Elections of Lee County, FL on her "rogue" purge of purportedly "non-citizens" voters on the heels of Gov. Rick Scott failed and often dishonest attempt to purge some 182,000 "potential non-citizens" from the voting rolls.
• MARGY LAMBERT (Democrat) working with WisconsonWave.org and JOHN WASHBURN (Republican) on the effort to handcount the paper ballots from WI's June 5th Gubernatorial Recall election between Gov. Scott Walker and his challenger Tom Barrett (D) via open records requests, in light of concerns about the computer-reported results.
• JASON LEOPOLD, investigative journalist from Truthout.org on his exclusive this week, written with Jeffrey Kaye, on the forced drugging of detainees held by the U.S.
• PLUS! All the other nightmares of the day, along with your phone calls over your public airwaves at 877-520-1150 and your tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and also on SiriusXM Ch. 127. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at our Sante Fe affiliate KTRC 1260, or our Minnesota affiliate KTNF 950 (use code 55447 when asked). Also, you should be able to listen live at WhiteRose Society if the radio gods are with us.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: It was a nightmare indeed! You'll not want to miss a single, terrifying second! Lucky for you, all of those seconds are now posted below, commercial-free! It was a jam-packed show, with a LOT of good stuff! And, Mike returns Monday! Enjoy 'em all below...

In case you're wondering, it's not just The BRAD BLOG trying to warn folks on the Right, Left and everywhere in between of the pending disasters of our oft-failed, almost always wholly-unverified and quickly disappearing system of once-overseeable, theoretically-democratic system of electoral self-governance.

As Steven Rosenfeld, veteran journalist of the 2004 Ohio mess, writes this week at Alternet in "Not Again! How Our Voting System Is Ripe For Theft and Meltdown in 2012" [emphasis added]:

Rosenfeld covers a lot of ground in his piece, so you should read it in full.

That said, as much ground as he covers, he and the experts he quotes still manage to understate the concerns, while failing to define what, in nearly a decade on this beat we have found, so far, to be the only apparent solution: Hand-marked paper ballots counted publicly, by hand, on Election Night, at the precinct, in front of all parties, observers and video cameras, with decentralized results posted at those precincts, before ballots are allowed to move anywhere.

You have been warned. Again.

Now back to your bickering about off-shore bank accounts and "socialism", or whatever it is you feel your time is better spent on between now and November 6.

We had a jam-packed hour on today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio. We covered this afternoon's latest breaking news from MS to TX to WI.

Then we spoke with Dr. Daniel A. Smith, political scientist and election expert from the University of Florida, and with our own legal analyst Ernest Canning about the latest revelations in Gov. Rick Scott's Florida Voter Purge Deception.

Next up was journalist Jason Leopold discussing his new Truthout.org exclusive today, written with Jeffrey Kaye, on the forced drugging of detainees held by the U.S. And, of course, as always, our own Desi Doyen checked in with the latest Green News Report.

And, if you listen closely, you'll get a heads up on who is likely to be our guest on next Wednesday's show. Yup. Him. Really.

Download MP3 or listen online below...

By the way...I'll be sitting in to guest host the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show again this Friday night. So you know what that means, dontcha?...

If you don't have HBO, now's a very good time to subscribe. No, this ain't a paid endorsement. It's just a fact.

Even if it's the only thing you'll watch on the channel, their new show, The Newsroom, from creator Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, A Few Good Men, etc.) is worth the price of admission. As a matter of fact, by the time we got to Episode 3 last night, I've gotta say, I couldn't believe what I was seeing on my television. (Yeah, I know, "It's not TV, it's HBO.")

They've posted the complete Episode 1 on YouTube here if you'd like to give it a look. There doesn't seem to be any clips from this week's Episode 3 unfortunately, but that episode in particular, along with 1 and 2, are well worth your time.

Here's the first scene from the first episode, which might just be enough to make the case...

If you need more convincing, see below...

Was gonna headline it "Three GOP Con-Man and a Baby", but that didn't seem fair to the the one of them who finally grew up. And we'd hate to overlook all the other opportunistic GOP con-men we'd have left out in the bargain.

Unless civil rights groups suing, incredibly enough, for the right of legal voters to cast their legal vote in Pennsylvania this year are successful in blocking the new GOP law, hundreds of thousands of voters --- of all parties, but disproportionately Democratic-leaning --- could be disenfranchised in the Keystone State alone this November, under the Republicans' new polling place Photo ID restriction.

At the same time, AP reports today that based on its study of recent elections in Indiana, Georgia and Tennessee --- states where GOP-backed polling place Photo ID restrictions have already been in effect for some time --- "legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent."

That, of course, is the point.

As the AP story points out in its opening grafs, perfectly legal votes of Republican voters will also be tossed out (in the story they mention a 90-year old WWII veteran and his wife who had no idea their votes for Romney in this year's Indiana primary were never counted) along with the disenfranchisement of untold numbers who don't even bother to show up to vote at all because they don't own one of the very narrowly defined state-issued Photo IDs approved for use under these new voter suppression laws.

And, yes, when Republicans lose their right to vote, it pisses us off just as much as when Democrats lose their right to vote, even when it happens under voter suppression laws passed by Republicans.

We can think of little that is more blatantly and appallingly anti-American than what the GOP is now doing in hopes of purposely and systematically undermining the very core of democracy in this nation.

Far be it for me to call TPM's Josh Marshall "stupid". It just makes a more eye-catching headline in this case. And it also happens to be a fact, as I see it, that Romney's refusal to release his tax returns from any year prior to 2010, and especially his local state return from 2010, is about hiding evidence of a felony crime, as much or likely more than it is about hiding embarrassing details of off-shore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Switzerland, etc.

Josh argued yesterday that the latter is the reason for the presumptive GOP nominee's continuing refusal to publicly disclose those tax returns. It's almost certainly a part of the campaign's calculations and, as he posits convincingly in his blog item headlined "Kryptonite", hard visual confirmation of Romney's foreign tax shelters would be difficult to shake off with explanations to Mr. and Mrs. America.

But the use of legal off-shore tax shelters can be massaged through the "conservative" "messaging" machine with a legitimate-sounding case that avoidance of federal taxes is somehow a patriotic "conservative" duty and/or otherwise yet another example of Romney's keen business insight and smart, fully legal fiscal discipline which every American should someday aspire to.

What cannot be so easily brushed off or propagandized away --- not without completely undermining the current culmination of the GOP's nearly-decade long effort in creating the imaginary notion of massive Democratic "voter fraud" which must be rectified immediately with polling place Photo ID restrictions (actually little more than the GOP's attempt to suppress the legitimate Democratic-leaning vote while preventing almost no existing voter fraud) --- is the likelihood that those tax returns would reveal indisputable evidence that this year's GOP standard-bearer is an actual voter fraud felon himself...

Now they're concerned about unsealed ballots bags? Really?! Good! But where were they last year?

On the night of Wisconsin's historic June 5th recall elections, The BRAD BLOG detailed how Scott Walker's "win," as reported by the media that night, was completely unverified by any actual human beings to be accurate in any way, shape, or form. Though voters across the state mostly used verifiable hand-marked paper ballots to vote, we explained, almost none of them are actually checked by anybody afterwards to make sure the oft-failed, easily-manipulated computer tabulator systems used across the state actually tallied the results accurately.

That was particularly important given the very same machines used in the Wisconsin recalls had, in other states in the very recent past, tallied results inaccurately (for example, check out what happened in Palm Beach County, FL, just this past March, when the very same system used to tally ballots in Waukesha County, WI, were discovered, thanks to a post-election hand count spot-check, to have named several losing candidates to be the "winners" in several municipal elections.)

The lack of verification of any of the ballots was even more disturbing given the fact that all reports by the mainstream media at the close of polls on Election Night had declared the Gubernatorial recall race to be a "dead heat," as based on raw Exit Polling data that the MSM are allowed to review throughout the day.

The next morning, after John Lehman, the Democratic challenger in the state Senate's District 21 recall election against incumbent Republican Van Wanggaard, declared premature "victory" with just under an 800-vote margin, we opined that Wanggaard should demand a full hand count of all paper ballots, and that Lehman should agree to one in order to assure the person with the most votes was actually the one declared the winner of the race. After all, majority control of the state Senate was hanging in the balance and, in any case, as in the other recall races that day, voters deserve to know for certain who lost and who won any such election, at least if we are to ever see legitimate Constitutional self-governance in this country.

Well, we've got some good news on the District 21 state Senate race, some bad news, and some extraordinarily hypocritical news to report today in our long-overdue update...

Andy Griffith, 1926 - 2012

But beyond the beloved Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry and, later, Matlock, there is another reason to remember the importance of Griffith to American culture today: Elia Kazan's under-appreciated and hauntingly prescient 1957 classic A Face in the Crowd...

In it, Griffith portrays small-time Memphis singer and former jailbird Larry Rhodes who ends up, through a lucky turn of events, becoming a national sensation as "Lonesome Rhodes" before turning his newly-found celebrity power towards political influence.

"What follows suggests the influence of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," writes Aisha Harris at Slate today, "and foreshadows the enormous role celebrity has played in American culture in the half-century since the movie's release. Rhodes becomes an overnight star so powerful that he can no longer be contained by small-town television. His influence carries over to a national audience and, more dangerously, into politics, as a media coach to an aspiring presidential candidate"...

Rhodes' "descent into monstrosity," as described by Harris and captured on film decades ahead of it's time, captures the essence of the con by far too many political-celebrity demagogues a full 50 years later. Suffice to say, Glenn Beck will probably not be mentioning this film today.

We'll also echo Harris' recommendation: "If you've never watched A Face in the Crowd before, do yourself a favor this July 4, and spend a couple hours with some Independence Day counter-programming: a dark vision of the country brought gloriously to the screen by one of America's favorite sons."

I guess Desi Doyen, co-host and managing editor of The BRAD BLOG's Green News Report, was such a smash in her TYT guest hosting debut on Thursday with regular host Ana Kasparian, they just had to have her back again on Friday to guest host again, this time with The Young Turks' 'Top Turk', Cenk Uygur.

Of course, it's just my opinion, and I suspect I'm biased, but, frankly, she killed.

See the evidence and judge for yourself in a few clips posted by The Turks below, on the Rightwing blaming Obama for CO's wildfires (seriously), the banning of "sea level rise" by VA and NC legislatures and...wait for it...talking urinal cakes. Yes. Talking urinal cakes...

In completely related news...Yesterday, the NYTimes' statistical wunderkind Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight tweeted: "Our model currently projects ... an exact tie in Florida. #SignsOfMayanApocalypse".

Little wonder then that Florida's Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Sec. of State Ken Detzner are more than happy to blatantly mislead the public, the media and the federal court system, as The BRAD BLOG detailed exclusively last week, about their attempted purge of suspected "non-citizens" from the voting rolls.

And it's similarly no surprise that, as University of Florida political scientist and founder of ElectionSmith, Dr. Daniel A. Smith detailed on Friday, the "Failed Florida Secretary of State's Voter Purge" has, to date, earned a 98.4% failure rate in its initial list of 2,625 voters identified as "potential non-citizens."

That, of course, is if you take the Sec. of State's word for it that the 41 registered voters they claim to have confirmed as "non-citizens" actually are. (How many of them even knew they were registered or actually ever voted is another question.) To date, the state has provided no actual evidence to verify those 41 non-citizens voters they say they've identified. And given both Scott and Detzner's documented track record of blatant dishonesty, we see no reason to give either of them the benefit of the doubt.

Breaking from today's Irish Times...

To help put those costs in perspective, 55 million Euro --- the cost of the systems to the state of Ireland to date --- is about $69.5 million.

In this country, the U.S. wasted almost $4 billion (with a "b"), via the Help American Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, on the very same type of worthless, unreliable, easily hacked machines that the Irish are smart enough to get rid of entirely...

Clearly, those "Turks" are just trying to steal her away from us!

Once again, the delightful Desi Doyen, co-host and managing editor of The BRAD BLOG's Green News Report was sitting in to guest host on The Young Turks yesterday along with longtime TYTer, Ana Kasparian.

They were both joined in the first hour, devoted to yesterday's stunning Supreme Court health care ruling, by Current TV's Jacki Schechner (an expert in health care legislation issues). The second hour, it was just Desi and Ana.

(By the way, Des will once again be sitting in today, Friday, co-hosting along with TYT top dog Cenk Uygur during the 4p-5p ET / 1p-2p PT hour. I'll try to remember to post the LIVE FEED here at The BRAD BLOG, but either way you can watch the full hour live at TheYoungTurks.com.)

A bunch of highlights from yesterday's two hours, on a bunch of topics covered --- from the health care ruling, to the RW push to close the last abortion clinic in Mississippi, to eating bugs to save the world, to new news on the Miami 'zombie' who tried to eat a guy's face --- all follow below. Enjoy!...

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL-19) joined me live on today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio to discuss two things:

1) Our exclusive from earlier this week on FL Gov. Rick Scott's voter purge/DHS database deception (an issue which Deutch has been raising hell about for several weeks) and 2) His OCCUPIED Amendment to get corporate money the hell out of our electoral system, particularly in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Montana's 100-year old anti-corruption law on Monday.

I was delighted to hear the Congressman was nearly as furious about both as I was. He also confirmed that nobody has been able to verify the "100 or so" alleged "non-citizens" that Scott says have been found on the rolls (out of 182,000 identified in the initial purge list and out of 11.2 million voters), and also that there are still three FL counties --- Lee, Collier and Bay --- where the Supervisors of Elections may still be carrying out the faulty and disenfranchising systematic purge.

My rant explaining Scott's scam kicks off the show, before Deutch then joins us. Then, Desi Doyen joins us with the latest Green News Report and we take a couple of quick amusing calls.

Oh, and though I mentioned it at the top of the show, I forgot to reiterate it again at the end of the show, so I'll do so now: FL Gov. Rick Scott, FL Secretary of State Ken Detzner and/or their spokesmen were invited to appear on the show to offer their response to our Monday exposé. They declined to even respond to the invitation.

Download MP3 or listen online below...

I was on Thom Hartmann's Big Picture yesterday to discuss The BRAD BLOG's special exclusive report on Monday in which counselor Canning and I detailed how Gov. Rick Scott (R) and the state of Florida is attempting to deceive the media, the public, and apparently even the federal court system about this year's attempted voter purge in the Sunshine State. The Dept. of Justice has filed suit alleging that the systematic removal of voters within 90 days before Florida's federal primary is a violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

As documented in our investigative report, claims being made by Scott, his Sec. of State Ken Detzner and their surrogates in a recent media blitz, charging that the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security was purposely restricting them from access to a federal immigration database in order to keep the state from using it, appear to be baseless. FL had hoped to use the SAVE database to help purge some 182,000 "potential non-citizen" voters they claim are on the rolls.

But FL's claims (which is used to underscore a dark conspiracy the actions of the federal government are all being done to enhance President Obama's re-election prospects), are belied by documented email concessions from the FL Dept. of State's Asst. General Counsel Maria Matthews who acknowledged, as long ago as October of 2011, that the state simply didn't have the unique numeric identifiers required by DHS to check those "suspected non-citizens" against their immigration and citizenship database.

Here's my conversation with Hartmann last night about our story...

For more on all of the above, see our original investigative report, including email documentation from public records requests, etc., revealing Florida's attempted deception. We have now also added a Timeline page for the entire story right here.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I will be discussing all of the above and more with Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL-19) on my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show today (Wednesday) at 6p ET/3p PT. You can listen live at http://KPFK.org/listen-live.html.