And a house divided is united, ever so briefly, as Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) made a surprise appearance tonight during the U.S. House vote on the contentious debt ceiling agreement. The dramatic appearance on the floor to cast her vote in favor, was her first since being shot in the head in Tucson on January 8th. The chamber erupted into applause.

"I had to be here for this vote," she said in a statement. "I could not take the chance that my absence could crash our economy."

Giffords voted against raising the ceiling previously, in December of 2009 and February of 2010, but voted in favor of it today, as her staff noted that "this vote was substantially different, with the strength of the U.S. economy hanging in the balance."

The measure passed in the House following Giffords' appearance, by a vote of 269 to 161, with most of the 74-person Progressive Caucus, the largest in the House, voting against it. Democrats ultimately split their vote 95 to 95 on the controversial bill brokered by President Obama and Republicans, featuring the largest spending cut in the nation's history. GOP members voted overwhelmingly in favor of passage, 176 to 66.

The U.S. Senate is scheduled to take up the bill tomorrow, prior to the August 2 deadline when the U.S. Government is said to be no longer able to pay all of it's obligations unless the debt ceiling is raised. Both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have already expressed their support.

UPDATE 8/2/11, 11:03am PT: Debt ceiling agreement has passed in U.S. Senate by a 74 to 26 margin. 19 Republicans and 7 Democrats voted against it. The President signed the bill, promising some $2 trillion in spending cuts, just moments ago, privately in the Oval Office. Mission Accomplished.

Please don't say we didn't try to warn you. We even caught a bit of flak from folks on the "Left" and were quoted by Brit Hume on Fox "News" for our comments at the time.

Back on April 1, 2007 --- in what wasn't an April Fools Day joke, unfortunately --- The BRAD BLOG highlighted pretty much everything you needed to know about Barack Obama. In the middle of a tense debate over a military spending bill passed by Democrats and threatened with a veto by George W. Bush since it included a requirement for the President to set timelines for a withdraw from Iraq, Obama told AP that even if Bush vetoed the bill, Senate Democrats would simply send back another bill that didn't include the timeline requirement.

In short, he sold out his own caucus by showing their hand and thus paved the way for Bush to call their bluff with a veto without consequence. That's exactly what Bush did.

As we reported at the time...

Yes, President Obama has been forced to deal with an unprecedented extremist GOP willing to use terrorists tactics to get their way, creating phony "hostage crises" time and again --- in the latest episode putting a gun to the head of the world economy. But negotiating with terrorists only ensures the likelihood of the bad guys taking another hostage in the future, which the Republicans have repeatedly done, and will continue to do. Capitulating to them, as he has now done time and again, is inexcusable.

Following whatever the resolve may be of this phony debt "crisis" created by the Republicans, the FY 2012 budget debate will very quickly begin and we're likely to see the very same tactics and Republican victory resolution played out all over again. (Bookmark this post for use in October, when the FY '12 year begins and the GOP will be staging another hostage crisis.)

What was clear to us as long ago as 2007 was that Obama was the worst. negotiator. ever. His time in office to date has done nothing to assuage us of that initial assessment, as he has negotiated with himself and capitulated to terror tactics again and again, acceding to virtually every demand of the hostage takers by the end.

From giving away the store with un-stimulating tax cuts in a much-smaller-than-needed stimulus package, to giving up away the public option (much less single payer) right off the bat in the health care reform bill, to capitulating on extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich earlier this year, and now accepting a "bargain" which tosses out everything he had formerly promised to be a "bottom line" for any debt ceiling deal, the President has done almost precisely as he projected he would 4 years ago when we pointed it out, so that we could "get a sense of how the next president will make decisions."

If you didn't notice then, please don't blame us. We tried to tell you.

On the wonky details of the President's latest capitulation...For one of the best critiques that we've seen to date, on the dangers posed to jobs and the economy by the current Dems-give-all-GOP-gives-nothing "deal," please see Krugman, who charges "The President Surrenders." He offers an argument that his "deal" will make things much worse, rather than better, both economically and politically. He says that "we're witnessing here...a catastrophe on multiple levels"...

Matthew Vadum will lie about anything he needs to in order to collect his wingnut welfare paychecks apparently. American values such as democracy be damned. It's partisan politics (and paychecks) at all costs.

Vadum has, of late, taken over from the disgraced Bush/Cheney general counsel turned fake "voting rights advocate" Thor Hearne of the fake "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR), and the disgraced liar John Fund of the Wall Street Journal as the moment's GOP master of media misinformation meant to confuse the public about polling place Photo ID restriction laws passed by the GOP in statehouses around the country over the past few months in order to suppress the legal Democratic-leaning vote in advance of 2012.

Like Hearne and Fund before him, he's very good at his job. He's very aggressive. And there is little he is unwilling to blatantly, if cleverly, lie about to fool his gullible constituency.

Vadum's latest misinformative article, as published by Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller and, predictably, echoed around the intellectually dishonest and incurious wingnut blogosphere last week, picks up where his recently published propaganda book about ACORN leaves off.

That book, which he was kind enough to send us a copy of recently, is pitched on its cover and its publicity sheet as an exposé uncovering the truth behind the former four-decade old community organization who he describes as "Ballot Box Stuffers," "Urban Terrorists," and "Gangsters."

That his silly book fails to detail even a single ballot box "stuffed" by ACORN is little surprise. There exists no actual evidence, after all, of any illegal vote ever having been cast by any voter who was improperly registered by an ACORN worker. But this is all politics as usual to partisans like Vadum. So preposterous propaganda meant to directly undermine American democracy is merely all in a days work for dudes like him.

The same disingenuous "voter fraud" sleight-of-hand used in his book is once again recycled in his latest "news" article. Like his book, the article is meant to do little more than dishonestly reinforce support for reprehensible voter suppression laws that offer an advantage to Republicans at the ballot box. As Vadum knows, it's far easier for Republicans to "win" elections by keeping their opposition from being able to cast their legal votes --- and certainly easier than risking jail time by gaming electronic voting systems --- than it would be to actually garner popular support for their actual agenda. That's the game for which Vadum gets paid.

He's a rather silly man, and its child's play, naturally, to demonstrate, using his own words --- as we've been doing similarly for years with now-disgraced 'voter fraud' fraudsters like Hearne and Fund --- how Vadum knowingly lies to his constituency. But we guess it's necessary to do it one more time here with Vadum, if only to place it on the Internet record to help those who don't know about him or his pernicious scam, and how it's meant to mislead otherwise good folks with clever "voter fraud" rhetoric that represents the problem as something far different than what it actually is....

They voted for it, before they voted against it. But that was the 7 times they voted to raise the debt ceiling when it was their "President" in the White House.

As ThinkProgress notes in their blog item accompanying the following video compilation of Republicans arguing on the House floor in 2002 and 2004 to raise the debt limit in a clean bill with no spending cuts, "no less than 98 currently serving House GOP members" voted in favor of doing exactly that --- back then --- in order to pay the bills for spending they'd previously approved.

But that was then, with a Republican in the White House, before they decided to create a fake "crisis" in order to terrorize the nation's economy in a shameful attempt to return to power. Hypocrisy on parade...

In a double-length smackdown last night, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show were as good as we've ever seen them, on the Fox "News"/Rightwing's professional ability to live in self-denial and delusion, even while consistently and hypocritically playing the victim card.

It was a collection of rather extraordinary collection of Fox clips, culminating in what Stewart aptly describes as, "some of the most free-range, organically-grown, disingenuous, ideologically-marinated, un-self-awareness I've ever seen in the wild."

Here's the must-watch segment, as broken in to two parts for some reason (they ran consecutively on the show)...

On my Pacifica Radio show today on KPFK in Los Angeles, I discussed yesterday's report at The BRAD BLOG concerning the woman who was forced to jump ridiculous hoops while trying to help her son get Photo ID at the Wisconsin DMV in the wake of the new GOP voter suppression law there which institutes polling place Photo ID restrictions before legal voters are allowed to cast their legal vote.

By the way, I spoke to the woman today --- who'd like to be identified only as Nicole --- and she made clear that her video was not secretly taped (as, for example, James O'Keefe's ACORN hoax tapes were). Her video camera was on the table and in plain sight the whole time, she told me.

As seen (and heard) in her video tape, during the process of trying to get the Photo ID for free at the DMV, as allowed by the new statute, the son's bank statements were rifled through, and questioned as to whether they showed enough "activity" on them. Also, they were almost charged $28 for the "free" ID, which brought up questions as to why the WI DMV policy is to charge applicants, unless they know to "request" the ID for no charge.

I also took the opportunity during the show to offer a bit more background context, including a 1980 sound clip from Paul Weyrich, one of the "conservative" movement godfathers, during which he calls for fewer people to be allowed to vote. "Quite candidly," he said to the convention of Baptist ministers where Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell also spoke, "our leverage in elections goes up when the voting populace goes down."

That's what all of this is about. He says it quite plainly in the video tape.

Weyrich went on to found the non-profit American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC), the group of Rightwingers said to be responsible for writing the polling place Photo ID restriction laws being passed by Republicans now in state after state. I also share some hard stats on who will actually be affected by these laws (and who will not.) And, for good measure, I tossed in some Stephen Colbert speaking about Photo ID and "voter fraud" as well.

Enjoy!

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 28 mins]...

"This is what voter suppression looks like."

Those are the words on the final title card in the video [embedded below] shot by a Wisconsin woman documenting her experience at the DMV in Madison last week. The video purports to illustrate the ridiculous extra, and invasive, efforts many previously-legal voters in the Badger State will now likely face in order to exercise their right to vote in the state since the passage of the GOP majority's newly enacted voter suppression laws.

In this case, the woman was trying to help her son get a free Photo ID at the DMV, as is his right under the new statutes. At first she was told the charge for the supposedly-free ID would be $28, and that was only after she convinced a clerk that there had been enough "activity" in her son's bank account, as used by the clerk to determine whether or not he actually resided in the state.

And that was for an affluent white resident. If you're a homeless person in WI, as the woman's interview with another clerk in the video suggests, you can pretty much just forget about being able to vote at all under the new law.

An official at the Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation confirmed to The BRAD BLOG that those seeking the Photo ID for free must actually know to request it during the application process, as required by the language, she told us, in the new state statute...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below...]

We're back in one more night, as Mike wings his way back from Seattle's weekend Progressive Voices conference, filling in to guest host the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show starting tonight (through Monday)!

We'll have another big night (unfortunately), as both President Obama and House Speaker Boehner are set to give live addresses to the nation during our show! We'll cover as much as we can of both of them LIVE.

As usual, we're BradCasting LIVE again 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT) tonight, coast-to-coast and around the globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE and lively 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):

• OBAMA/BOEHNER, live coverage of each one giving their addresses to the nation on the GOP's hostage crisis "Debt Ceiling" crisis, as the Republican's put a gun to the nation's head and continue their fiscal terrorism, in lieu of actual governing, jobs and all the rest. What will the Dems give away in response to the terrorists? Perhaps we'll find out tonight.
• ROBERT SCHEER, the great veteran journalist, columnist and now Editor-in-Chief of Truthdig.com joins us with perspective on the entire fine mess, from his unique perspective.
• JOHN AMATO from Crooks and Liars joins us to make sense of the President and Speaker's dueling addresses on the "debt ceiling" crisis. Or at least to try to!
• PLUS: In whatever time we'll have left over: Rightwing extremist mass murder/terrorism in Oslo, the GOP games the polling place w/ their Photo ID restrictions in WI; and anything you'd like to tell me about via calls to 877-520-1150 and 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 GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Thanks for another great three days on the Malloy Show! Tonight's audio archives (commercial-free) are now posted below, along with the chat room archives as usual! Until we meet again in MalloyLand, thanks, Truthseekers! Enjoy!...

Last night, at Niagra Falls, where two grandmothers were the first to be married at one second after midnight, as New York welcomed marriage equality to the Empire State...

[Photo courtesy Lance Bass of 'N Sync.]

P.S. Yes, I'm still buried in work on the series of exclusives I've cryptically alluded to previously (here and here), even while prepping to guest host tomorrow night's Mike Malloy Show again. So your patience while I'm otherwise distracted with those important items continues to be much appreciated!

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below!]

Mike is in Seattle for the Progressive Voices conference this weekend, sponsored by local show affiliate am1090, so I'm back in the saddle guest hosting the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show again tonight (and Monday)!

Once again, we'll be BradCasting LIVE 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT) tonight, coast-to-coast and around the globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE and lively 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):

• DAVID DAYEN, from the news desk at Firedoglake, on the late breaking news out of DC on the debt ceiling meltdown, Beohner's walk-out from negotiations, Obama's angry evening presser, and other late news on the GOP's manufactured "crisis"...
• BOB FITRAKIS, attorney, political-science professor and award winning investigative journalist and editor of Ohio's FreePress.org, on the latest court filings in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville v. Ohio Sec. of State (2004 Ohio election fraud) lawsuit, the finally-unsealed 2008 pre-Election Day deposition [PDF] of the mysteriously-deceased GOP IT guru Mike Connell, the ongoing battle over the 2010 subpoena to depose Karl Rove in the case, and what it all now means to Ohio and the Presidential election as a whole in 2012.
• PLUS: Latest on the GOP's fake crisis over the debt ceiling; Obama's late presser tonight; More madness, and anything you'd like to tell me about via calls to 877-520-1150 and 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 GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Lots of interesting (and breaking) news, and occasional rants, in tonight's show, which is now available, commercial-free, in three swell archive "hours" for you below! Enjoy! And we'll see ya again right here, Monday! Same Brad Time! Same Brad Channel! For another thrilling episode of the Mike Malloy Show!

Prepping for tonight's Malloy Show, so very quickly, this from Wednesday night's Colbert Report. Can't tell you how nice it is, after so many years, that I'm no longer one of the very few yelling and screaming about this shit...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives of tonight's show below...]

Mike is off to Seattle for a Progressive Voices conference this weekend, sponsored by local show affiliate am1090, so I'll be filling in for a few days to guest host the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show starting tonight (through Monday)!

As usual, we'll be BradCasting LIVE 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT) tonight, coast-to-coast and around the globe from the studios of L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE and lively 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:

• HOWIE KLEIN of DownWithTyranny.com with a big scoop (so he tells me) on the debt ceiling showdown (or, as I call it, fake crisis.)
• ERIC BOEHLERT of MediaMatters.org on Murdochaplyse! The quickly growing Rupert Murdoch/News Corp. hacking scandal, and on James O'Keefe's latest, lamest video scam.
• PLUS: Much, much more, and anything you'd like to tell me about via calls to 877-520-1150 and 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 GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: If you missed the show tonight, or any portion, the audio archives are now posted below (along with the chat room archives). Enjoy!...

We were off the grid for much of last week, blissfully ignorant somewhere in the mountains of Arizona, as the first of Wisconsin's series of state Senate recall-related elections took place last Tuesday. Thanks to, quite literally, "fake Democrats" put up by the state Republican Party, the six elections held last Tuesday were forced to be Democratic primary elections, instead of Republican recall elections, as the state GOP hoped to game the system to buy more time before six of their state Senators will be forced to face the real recall elections.

Last week's, largely pointless elections cost the state nearly half a million bucks. Remember that fake "budget emergency" the GOP and Scott Walker claimed as their reason for the need to strip the right of citizens to collectively bargain with the state? Guess the state wasn't in such dire straits after all, since they could afford to blow money on elections meant only to buy Republicans time to stave off the unprecedented recall challenges.

The real recall elections to unseat six Republican state Senators are now scheduled for August, as all six of the real Democrats soundly defeated each of the Republicans' "fake Democrats" in last week's primaries. At least according to Wisconsin's unverified, computer-tabulated results. 5 of the 6 real Dems reportedly received over 60% of the vote against their fake opponents. One received 54%.

Yesterday, there were three more elections in the Badger State. One actual recall election against a Democratic state Senator, and two Republican primaries featuring real GOP candidates vying for the nomination to take on the other two Democratic state Senators facing recall elections scheduled for August.

The Dem facing the recall yesterday handily defeated his Republican challenger, but we'll defer to Daily Kos' David Nir for his smart summary of the computer-reported results...

If the state Dems are able to pick up just three of the Republican seats, out of the six in contention next month --- without losing either of the two remaining recall elections that the Dems still face --- they'll take the majority back from the Republicans to effectively neuter the hard Right Republican Gov. Scott Walker agenda until he too is likely to be up for his own recall election next year.

In Wisconsin, however, as in all of our states at this point, the wild cards are always the electronic voting systems and access to them. To that end, there are a few more recently-related items of note to make sure you have on your radar. At least two of them involve "our old friend" and transparent democracy's enemy, Kathy Nickolaus, the now-infamous Republican County Clerk of Waukesha County...

Good grief. So, this happened today...

No, Rupert Murdoch didn't really die. But The Sun, another paper owned by his News International, was hacked by the "hacktivists" of Anonymous and/or LulzSec. At least one of the hackers involved is said to have also been involved in the HBGary Federal hack earlier this year in which some 70,000 emails were stolen, posted on the Internet, and turned out to reveal they were working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to develop a plot which included targeting me and my family, among other progressives perceived to be enemies of the U.S. Chamber.

The hackers say they have also stolen thousands of emails from The Sun and News of The World and plan to release them tomorrow according to Andy Greenberg at Forbes...

No word yet on whether we'll learn tomorrow, when the emails are released, that Murdoch also had a $12 million plot in the works to try and undo me, as the Chamber did.

Later in the day News Corp.'s Times of London was also reportedly taken down by the hackers, and at this hour, the website of News International, the British arm of News Corp., is inaccessible.

But all of that is the "fun" part. Here comes the troubling part. While Murdoch didn't actually die today, one of the whistleblowers at the heart of Murdoch/News Corp.'s News of the World hacking scandal, apparently did...

I found being off the grid over much of the past week, just about as confusing as being on it. See above.

But we've made it back from our brief stint into the wilderness and now have much catching up to do (along with a few days of Mike Malloy Show guest hosting later this week and a few big stories I've been working on for a while) in the days ahead.

So please stay tuned...Back at full speed shortly...Please chat amongst yourselves until then...