Earlier today, we highlighted Rachel Maddow's latest report on the "GOP War on Voting" which, among many other important things, referenced the ridiculously close results from Ohio's GOP Presidential Primary last Tuesday as currently reported, and the fact that there are still a bunch of untallied votes there even today for some unknown reason. Her point in noting the slim margin is to underscore the very serious effect that new Republican voter-suppression laws are likely to have on not just the Presidential race this year, but also on State and local races as well.

But one of the items she does not note about Ohio's reported tally, and which I've been trying to get more information on since Tuesday night, is some of the actual reported numbers out of the U.S. House Primary race between progressive Reps. Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich. Their Congressional Districts were combined by the recent Republican redistricting there, so they were forced to face off in last Tuesday Democratic primary.

Kaptur reportedly won the race, according to the numbers posted on the Ohio Sec. of State's website. Those results, summarizing the numbers in each of the five districts which now make up Ohio's new 9th Congressional District, include these reported results out of Lucas County (Toledo):

Now Toledo is Kaptur's current district, so it might make sense for her to win a lopsided victory there. Kucinich reportedly won handily in his own Cuyahoga County district of Cleveland by a 72.5% to 24% margin.

But really? 94% to 3.7% over Kucinich in Lucas County? 22,269 votes to just 870 votes? Those are Saddam Hussein-like numbers. Are they even plausible? I've been trying to learn more and would certainly welcome any input from folks who know the politics in that area of the state better than I do. If there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for those results, I'm certainly open to hearing it.

Unfortunately, all Lucas County voters are forced to vote on 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting machines on Election Day. So whatever the numbers really should have been will ultimately remain unknown, as it's strictly impossible to determine if even one vote, ever cast on any such voting machine, for any candidate or initiative on any ballot, in any election, has ever been recorded accurately as per any voter's intent.

Some 20 to 30% of voters across the nation will still be forced --- shamefully, even after all that we now know about these oft-failed, easily-hacked machines --- to cast their ballots on the very same and other similarly 100% unverifiable voting systems on Election Day during the 2012 Presidential Election.

Last night, Rachel Maddow ran an update on the GOP War on Voting. Her report included a number of items we've covered here recently --- such as the protest by former U.S. Marine Tim Thompson who refused to show a Photo ID when trying to vote under TN's new voter suppression law on Tuesday, the Wisconsin court ruling temporarily blocking the state's Photo ID restrictions after finding it likely violates the WI Constitution's "right to vote" clause.

Here's Maddow's full report...

Maddow also covers several stories that we haven't been able to cover at The BRAD BLOG yet. Among them, the new Photo ID restriction law that was passed yesterday in the Pennsylvania Senate and is likely to become law, if not stopped somehow, this November. As Pennsylvania is not one of the "covered jurisdictions" subject to preclearance of new election laws by Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act, it would be another excellent candidate, like the one in Wisconsin, for challenge by the DoJ under Section 2 of that act, as our own legal analyst Ernie Canning persuasively argued recently.

Another story in Maddow's otherwise excellent report, however, is the one about the 86-year old WWII Vet in Ohio who was unable to vote on a normal ballot Tuesday, because his Veteran's ID didn't have his address on it. According to the The Plain Dealer's coverage:

It's a horrible story, but on this one, Maddow appears to have been in slight error in her coverage...

Sean Hannity makes a living dishing it out --- perhaps I should say shoveling it --- but he seems to have trouble taking it in return.

If you missed his "EXCLUSIVE!" Fox "News" interview last night with two young Breitbart rubes, featuring the shocking, unedited version of the video of Barack Obama in his 1991 Harvard days that the late Andrew Breitbart had long promised would help destroy the President, well, you didn't miss much. Not much more than a "smoking hug" and the latest embarrassing moment from the Rightwing's current collective nervous breakdown, anyway.

I happened to catch it though. And I enjoyed it so much, I tweeted mercifully about it while watching. For example, as it ended, I observed...

After a month off for KPFK's latest fund drive, The BradCast was finally back today in its normal Wednesday 3pm slot on Pacifica Radio's L.A. affiliate (and on other fine networks as well.)

On today's show I was joined by Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel.net to discuss the madness of Obama's policies for targeting U.S. citizens as "terrorists" without due process, as discussed by AG Eric Holder earlier this week; a Green News Report segment with a major audio glitch and Desi Doyen live in studio; PLUS: the story of IN Sec. of State Charlie White getting off virtually scot-free for three counts of felony voter fraud, the former U.S. Marine who pushed back against the GOP's polling place Photo ID restrictions in TN this week, the good news out of WI concerning that state GOP's own attempt to suppress Democratic-leaning voters and MUCH MORE! Enjoy!

Download MP3 or listen online right here [appx 58 mins]...

P.S. I don't always get to post archive for The BradCast here, but you can subscribe to the RSS feed for free right here, or otherwise check the KPFK archive page for the show right here.

Wow. This must be one of those videos of Barack Obama during his wild-eyed leftist college days at Harvard that the late Andrew Breitbart had promised to shock the world with this year before --- as so many Rightwingers have told me since the day he died --- he was obviously murdered in order to keep the disturbing truth about Obama's radical past from seeing the light of day!

Thankfully, the folks at BuzzFeed have courageously been able to face down the threat of Obama's thugs in order to help get some of that disturbing truth out to the American people who deserve to know just what kind of a far-Left radical now has his finger on the button!

Now that I've seen this remarkable proof, I understand how Breitbart was totally right! Obama and his leftist friends are just "totalitarian freaks"! What more evidence is needed? In this video, we finally see him, at long last, at his most dangerously radical! As President of the Harvard Law Review (Communist organ, obviously), he is exposed here as posing a menacing threat to all those who don't agree that women and African-Americans should enjoy the same equal rights to tenure at the university as everyone else. Shocking!...

(In all seriousness, it's rather remarkable how the guy in this video from twenty years ago appears to be pretty much the exact same guy now sitting in the Oval Office. I can't imagine I would hold up so well against twenty-year old video. But I'm sure Breitbart would have been able to offer the very same video with a more, um, enlightening context for us all...had he not been murdered to keep him from being able to do so, of course!)

UPDATE 8:29pm PT: The Breitbarters are yammering that the above video was "selectively edited!!!" Setting aside the hypocrisy of that "outrage", the complete video in question seems to come from a PBS Frontline segment. That shocking segment, plus damning raw video taken for it, is now posted in full below...Sigh...

Great news for voters today in Wisconsin, via Project Vote...

In granting the temporary injunction, Flanagan's 11-page order [PDF] "concludes that the plaintiffs have demonstrated the probability of success as well as the likelihood of irreperable harm," in their original complaint which is set for trial beginning next month. The case, Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP v. Scott Walker, is based solely on the argument that Act 23 is in violation of the WI state constitution. Flanagan's ruling is grounded in a fundamentally conservative interpretation of the state constitution's guaranteed right to vote, and on historic precendents where the state Supreme Court has decided in favor of that right over legislative laws affecting that right to the disadvantage of the voter.

Today's ruling is the first judicial blow against the vote suppressing law passed by Republicans in the wake of their 2010 electoral victory in the Badger State. There are now at least four different legal complaints filed against Wisconsin's Act 23 challenging both the state and federal Constitutionality of the law. The most recent suit was filed late last month, and detailed by our own Ernest Canning who also calls for the U.S. Dept. of Justice to intervene in the case in order to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Wisconsin, on the basis of racial discrimination.

Late last year the ACLU filed a 54-page federal class action complaint on behalf of some 17 named plaintiffs, including elderly, student, minority and even veteran voters, all of whom may otherwise be unable to cast their once-legal vote under the state's new law passed by its GOP legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2011.

The lead plaintiff in that case, 86-year old Ruthelle Frank, is disabled and was born at home. She never had a birth certificate. Though she's been legally voting in every election since 1948 and is an elected member of the Brokaw Village Board, she may have to pay more than $200 in order to have a birth certificate created and typos in her name, as recorded by the state registrar, corrected before she can receive the "free" state-issued Photo ID that would allow her to vote under the new law.

Even younger, more able-bodied voters have had problems jumping through some of the hoops required to obtain a so-called "free" ID in Wisconsin, as documented on video tape last summer by a woman attempting to help her son obtain one from the state DMV.

In a small primary in the state late last month, the first full implementation of the statute, a number of voters were reportedly denied their right to vote --- at polling places where they had legally voted for years prior --- after they were unable to present Photo ID which met the state's new draconian restrictions. For now, at least for the upcoming April primary in Wisconsin, those restrictions will mercifully be on hold.

UPDATE: Flanagan's ruling was extremely powerful and likely very difficult to rebut, short of an out-and-out activist ruling by the Right-leaning state Supreme Court. (They've done it before, so I wouldn't put it past them.) I've posted a few additional snippets from Flanagan's must-read decision in comments below. Our legal analyst Ernest Canning, who has been closely covering the WI challenges to Act 23, has also now rung in with a few more thoughts on Flanagan's decision there as well.

55-year old former U.S. Marine Tim Thompson was turned away from the polls today, Super Tuesday 2012, in the state of Tennessee, after refusing to present a photo ID before voting, as required by a new law recently passed by Republicans.

Thompson was documented by videographers attempting to cast his vote under the new polling place Photo ID restrictions instituted by TN's Republican-majority legislature and signed into law last year by the state's Republican Gov. Bill Haslam.

The former Lance Corporal, who left the service in 1978, has lived in Nashville since 2004 when he first cast his vote at the same precinct where he was turned away today. In an act of protest, planned in advance and video-taped by a number of media outlets, Thompson refused to show any more than the voter registration card he has previously used for voting in the state.

Video of the confrontation that ensued is posted below.

"This is my voter registration card," Thompson said as he challenged the poll supervisor. "I've used this for 37 years. This was good enough for my father. This was good enough for my grandfather, and I refuse to show you a picture ID"...

Late on Friday, the U.S. Dept. of Justice filed an objection in Washington D.C. federal court to new laws limiting voting and voter registration rights in the state of Florida. TPM's Ryan Reilly broke the news just before midnight last night.

The DoJ is said to be calling for a trial in the D.C. court, where the state of Florida had previously filed suit in order to avoid the federal "preclearance" process under the Voting Rights Process for its new restrictive election laws. The new laws institute harsh penalties for third-party voter registration organizations and individuals who fail to turn in new voter registration forms to elections officials within 48 hours of them being completed. The statute would also cut early voting hours nearly in half.

The new voter registration restrictions, passed by Republicans in the state following the 2010 election, has led groups like the non-partisan Florida League of Women Voters, which had been registering new voters in the state for some 70 years, to cancel their registration program citing stiff new penalties which, they say, put the organization and its registration workers at great legal risk. Both the Florida LWV and Rock the Vote, which focuses on voter registration for young voters, have previously filed their own lawsuit challenging the Constitutionality of the new voter registration laws in the state of Florida.

Over the past several months, a number of high-school teachers, incredibly enough, have been charged under the new law for registering their own students to vote. Last November, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow covered the topic in an interview with the Supervisor of Elections of Volusia County, FL, who, though she is a Republican, said she felt "sick to her stomach" after being forced to turn in one of those teachers to law enforcement officials.

On Thursday night, Comedy Central's The Colbert Report ran a somewhat more amusing, if equally disturbing, take on the issue, focusing on one of the teacher's snagged by Florida law enforcement for "voter registration fraud" under the draconian new restrictions...

Section 5 the Voting Rights Act (VRA), requires certain jurisdictions, including parts or all of 16 different states with a history of racial discrimination, to receive "preclearance" from the DoJ for all new election-related laws, or otherwise receive approval for the new laws from the federal district court in D.C. During the DoJ preclearance process for Florida's new laws, the agency requested more information about them from the state, which includes five difference "covered" counties. Instead of responding, Florida decided to avoid DoJ judgment all together by taking their case directly to the D.C. court instead.

According to TPM's Reilly, the DoJ stated in their filing in that same court last night...

I can't tell you how bored I am with the current, endless, ridiculous, if occasionally hilarious, GOP nomination process. Oops, I just did.

So with that, I'll note here that I've been predicting for months --- long before anybody seemed to be mentioning it (as I now hear it more and more each day), and when I was even ridiculed for the suggestion --- that there was a better than 50% chance we'd see a brokered GOP convention in Tampa this August. I have long been further suggesting that there was also a better than 50% chance that the ultimate nominee would be someone other than the 10 or so lead candidates running at the time of my original prediction.

I see no reason to modify any of those fairly conservative and, I think, pretty reasonable, predictions now. But let's see what you guys think. We can look back at your thoughts once the convention rolls around...

I was on The Young Turks' panel show The Point this week. "Sexy Liberal" comedian (and one of your best bets on Twitter), John Fugelsang, was guest-hosting for Cenk Uygur and the show was largely election and voting related. So, as you can imagine, occasionally, I had an opinion or two.

Topics ranged from Rocky Anderson to Ron Paul to why elections are held on Tuesday and if they still should be, among other things. The other panelists (both Right-leaning) included PJTV's Alexis Garcia and comedian Avi Liberman. Enjoy!...

UPDATE 3/2/12, 9:40am PT: "The Amazing Atheist's" legion of fans (yes, he's some sort of YouTube star, as noted during the show) are furious with me, apparently, for my remarks directed towards TAA's comments in his video clip as seen during the show above. They have taken to YouTube comments to express their derision, including many on my lack of understanding of our system of democracy, etc, etc. BTW, to be fair, since I didn't get to specifically answer the Electoral College question during the panel discussion, and otherwise wasn't able to fully expound on my third-party thoughts there (and neither was TAA able to respond directly at all to any of our thoughts, due to the way the format works on The Point), I've let TAA, as well as the The Young Turks folks know that I'm more than happy to go one-on-one with TAA and his legion of followers live, anytime, if they are ever interested and feel like hosting such an affair.

On the day that news of Sen. Ted Kennedy's death hit after decades of service to his nation, Andrew Breitbart took to Twitter to call him a "duplicitous bastard," "a prick," and, "a special pile of human excrement."

Breitbart died here in Los Angeles last night, reportedly of "natural causes," sometime after midnight. He leaves behind a wife and four children. He was 43.

His legacy will speak for itself. It need not be embellished. Though, undoubtedly, it will be. Just not by us. We don't do that here.

We've covered his work honestly, accurately and fairly over the years in more articles than we care to remember and certainly more than we cared to write. It was a courtesy he did not reciprocate. Each time we wrote about him or even spoke of him, it was reluctantly, as it is today. Our interest in Breitbart was never in him, no matter his, or his followers, misguided beliefs to the contrary. Our interest was only in the failures of the mainstream corporate media that he, ironically enough, helped to highlight, and in our hopes of standing up for those he'd harmed.

While pretending to point out "liberal media" bias, what Breitbart ultimately served to do was highlight the corporate media's cowardice, laziness and penchant for trusting in scoundrels. Oddly, that may have been exactly what he wanted to do --- just not in the way he had hoped...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below! Enjoy 'em!]

Mike has the night off! So we're back tonight guest-hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show! And it's primary night in MI and AZ and we'll have not one, but two Presidential candidates as guests tonight!

We'll be BradCasting, as usual, 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):

• MI & AZ PRIMARY RESULTS, or what they are reported to be, anyway. Also, just some of the reasons why you should be concerned that those reported results may not be what they are reported to be!
• GOV. BUDDY ROEMER, who is on GOP Presidential ballot both MI & AZ tonight, but who has recently left the party for a Reform Party candidacy and a run for the Americans Elect nomination.
• FRED KARGER, who is on the GOP Presidential ballot in MI and, unlike Roemer, still a member of the party for some reason. He's also the first openly gay Presidential candidate and the guy who alerted the world to Mitt Romney's apparent voter fraud in MA!
• PLUS! Depending on how MI and AZ is looking, some additional, last minute guests; lost op-scan votes in NY; Indiana's GOP Sec. of State getting off scot-free for voter fraud; "Webster's Follies" in Maine; no dead voters in SC; criminal probe closing in on Scott Walker in WI; and more you need to know about! 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 affiliate KPTR 1450 in Palm Springs or at WhiteRose Society or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Maybe someone had a bit too much caffeine today. Well, in any case, it led to a pretty high energy show! And lots of circus music! You can check it all out now for yourself, sans commercials, in the high-octane archives now posted below. Enjoy!...

Tomorrow (Tuesday), there's yet another "make-or-break" set of Primaries for the GOP establishment's preferred front-runner Mitt Romney in both Arizona and his home-state of Michigan. While pre-election polls suggest Romney's the run-away favorite in AZ, he reportedly has only a marginal lead in MI. Should he lose that state tomorrow, his party, and their nomination process, could well descend into complete chaos (even more so than it already is.)

But here's the good news for Election Integrity fans keeping an eye on the race track for tomorrow's horse race: Both Arizona and Michigan allow all voters to vote on paper ballots at the polling place if they wish. So there's actually something to count that reflects the voters' intent.

The bad news: Rather than count those ballots, the states will run them through oft-failed, easily-manipulated optical-scan computer systems and report whatever it is that the computers announce as "the results."

While many Americans mistakenly place faith in these systems, a report in today's New York Daily News illustrates --- yet again --- how foolhardy that is. And this one is a doozy (yes, yet another one)...

My full story on this is at Salon today. But, here's the skinny.

It looks like Indiana's now-former Republican Sec. of State, Charlie White, who was found guilty of three voter fraud felonies and three other felonies early this month, has now been sentenced.

And it also looks like the old adage --- It's Okay If You're a Republican (IOKIYAR) --- continues to ring true in the Hoosier State. Despite being the top election official in the very first state in the union to institute disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restrictions, Charlie White has gotten off with a slap on the wrist, essentially, for three intentional voter fraud felonies, and the three others he was found guilty of as well.

His sentencing hearing was held last week. He pretended to be contrite before the judge (unlike when he appeared days earlier on Fox "News"), so it turns out he'll serve just one year in home detention for all of his crimes. The sentencing, naturally, has left him "elated."

The fates of other, less Republican, less high-ranking folks however, such as those who were prosecuted with the full force of the federal government during the George W. Bush Administration's unprecedented, if failed attempt to ferret out "voter fraud" crimes, were not quite as lucky. Unfortunately, they were used as fodder to help Republicans push for those polling place Photo ID laws (which would have failed to deter either them or White from committing voter fraud) by Bush's wholly politicized Dept. of Justice.

For folks like Wisconsin's Kimberly Prude and Florida's Usman Ali, to name just two examples of those who were caught in that buzz-saw, and who each committed far less egregious --- far far far less egregious --- crimes than those intentionally committed by White, the legal system was not nearly as kind.

Prude, who tried to rescind her own absentee vote before the 2004 election, immediately after learning from her probation officer that she was not allowed to vote --- despite never having served time in jail and being on felony probation for having passed a bad check four years earlier --- was forced to serve more than a year in prison. Ali, who never even voted at all, had it even worse. He was deported to Pakistan where he hadn't live in more than 10 years, destroying his life in this country for not just himself, but for his American wife and daughter as well.

I tell the whole story --- of White's virtually scot-free sentencing, as compared to Prude's and Ali's --- in my story today at Salon. Please give it a read.

As you might expect, the moral, once again, is: IOKIYAR.

I actually didn't mean this to be a commercial. I was simply going to share Mike Malloy's brief "Podcast Trivia" question from last Friday night's show since I found it so hilarious and a classic example of why a free world needs Mike Malloy.

In grabbing it from the archives to post the segment here, I also heard his earlier plea for folks to consider subscribing to the Mike Malloy Show podcasts to help the show continue to stay on the air. So I've tacked that to the front of the clip I'd planned to run here below.

I hope you will consider subscribing, if only as a way to help support Progressive Radio over our public airwaves, since those airwaves have been, by and large, "bought" up by mega-corporations who have removed all true market competition from them (here's just one recent, appalling example), and we have a government either too cowardly or too corrupt to protect them for its citizenry.

So it's up to folks like you and me to do whatever we can. Thanks in advance for your help!

And now, here's the clip that had me LOL'ing on the way home from dinner last Friday night, along with the quick plea from Malloy added to the top. Don't worry. The whole thing is barely four minutes long...

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a regular guest host for the Mike Malloy Show, and will be filling in once again this Tuesday night (9p-Mid ET), on the night of the Michigan and Arizona primaries. If the gods are with us, I'll have not one, but two different Presidential candidates as my guests that night! So I hope you'll tune in! As ever, we'll have streaming audio links (and a live chat room) during showtime right here at The BRAD BLOG, if you're not lucky enough to live in a town where you can hear Mike Malloy, for free, over our public airwaves (or haven't chosen to pay money to hear him on SiriusXM's channel 127.)