YouTube views of Rise of the Tea Bags, as of right now, since we posted it on Wednesday: 3,936 4,711 5,691 6,843 7,851 8,072 10,639 (Be the 4,000th 5,000th 6,000th 7,000th 8,000th 9,000th 11,000th!)

Followers of The BRAD BLOG on Twitter, as of right now: 497 539
(Be the 500th! Thanks to #500, @silver02suby. Be the 600th!)

Cost of national defense authorization bill for 2010 only, as signed by Obama on Wednesday without objection from tea baggers: $680 billion

Approximate cost of proposed U.S. House health insurance bill per year (though not reported this way by media): $90 billion

Cost of U.S. House health insurance bill over next ten years, as always reported by the media and vigorously objected to by tea baggers, despite CBO finding that it will actually reduce the deficit: Just under $900 billion

Approximate cost of defense authorization over next ten years (though never reported this way by media): $7 trillion

Approximate savings to tax-payers from U.S. House health insurance bill over next ten years: $100 billion

People killed by U.S. defense operations each year: n/a

Americans who die for lack of health insurance each year: 45,000

Cost of misplaced tea bagger/media priorities: priceless

Congrats to New York Times for their Wednesday editorial slamming the ES&S takeover of Diebold's election division (which, if allowed by federal regulators to go through, would give a single private company sole control of some 70% of the votes in this country's once-public elections).

While the Times has editorialized on the dangers of this horrific merger in the past, as I recall, and appropriately so, the reason they are due congrats this time around is because they've managed to write an entire editorial focused on the e-voting menace without once tossing in the deceptive phrase "paperless electronic voting machines" (as if "paperless" e-voting systems are any less of a threat to our democracy than the same wholly-unverifiable voting machines which offer an entirely useless so-called "paper trail").

I believe that's a first! So, waytago NYTimes! Before you know it, they may eventually even use the phrase: "paper ballot"!

Some things simply defy satire.

The following teaser is for what appears to be an actual, "serious" feature-length film called Tea Party: The Documentary Film. We were pointed to it yesterday by several folks after we released our own short documentary, Tea Party Express II: Rise of the Tea Bags, which we filmed on Sunday and posted here yesterday.

As you'll see below, even The Daily Show would be hard-pressed to satirize this self-satirizing teaser. And yes, this things seems to be for real and set for a DVD release on Thanksgiving. No, it's not a joke. It just looks and sounds a whole lot like one...

(On second thought...For the truly adventurous out there, maybe it can be satirized. It might be fun to take their voice-over track, and mash it up with our video somehow. But I should probably leave that to someone else, and otherwise get back to real work, right?! )

So we went out to Griffith Park out here in L.A. on Sunday to check out the kick-off day for the new "Tea Party Express II" national tour. Thought we might meet some interesting people and file a quick video report. Met a lot of interesting people, and so ended up making a short film of sorts. Enjoy. Spread the word. Go tell the story ("both sides")...

UPDATE 10/29/09: Boy, it's tough to compete with the Tea Baggers in the satire department, even when they're not actually trying to be satirical. As God is my witness, coming to you with a straight face this Thanksgiving --- Tea Party: The Documentary Film!...

UPDATE 11/9/09: As of today, we've had more than 11,000 views of Rise of the Tea Bags at YouTube. By Tea Bagger math, that's more than 3 million views! And yet, the media refuses to report it!!! Also, here's my interview on Air America Radio's Ring of Fire discussing the video...

I went to an event last night out here in Los Angeles where I got a lot of fun video --- way more than I can use. So please pardon the light posting today as I've been buried in the "editing room" culling through it all in hopes of putting something together that you may enjoy. Consider this an open thread --- or a guessing game as to what event that might have been --- until I'm able to come up for air...

More details on the ingenious musical outburst, which took place at the American Health Insurance Plan's (AHIP) annual state issues conference in D.C. on Friday, right here...

I'll be sitting in for Angie Corio on Live from the Left Coast on Green960 (KKGN-960AM) in San Francisco tonight (Friday) from 6p - 8p PT (9p - 11p ET).

Scheduled for tonight's Media-Reform-a-Palooza:

• FRANK SCHAEFFER, former rightwing fundamentalist leader, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back on his "Letter to Rupert Murdoch" calling for an end to Fox "News'" inciting of violence, and his endorsement of VelvetRevolution's StopDomesticTerror.com campaign.
• SUE WILSON, filmmaker of Broadcast Blues on the the epic fail of the FCC to carry out their duty in overseeing the corporate abuse of our public airwaves and the Democrats failure (see my article "The Media Need a Fair and Balanced Doctrine" at Alternet to do anything about it.
• PLUS: Supporting the White House attempts to hold Fox "News" accountable and your calls on all of the above (866-960-5753)!

You can listen via the live Internet stream here or here if you're not in the Bay Area. Please tune in, stream in, call in and join the LIVE online chat room during the show at lftlc.com/LIVE!

POST-SHOW UPDATE: I'm delighted that our friends at KRXA 540am in Monterey, CA also decided to pick up and simulcast last night's show as well! Thanks to those who tuned in and called in!

Thanks to the good folks at LFTLC.com for removing commercials, these "hours" are appx. 40 mins each...

HOUR 1: White House v. Fox "News". And Frank Schaeffer on the looming danger of rightwing extremism...
Download MP3 or listen online below...

HOUR 2: Sue Wilson on reforming the media...
Download MP3 or listen online below...

Please see below for Jeremy Scahill at The Nation who, last week, covered the outrageous hypocrisy of federal legislation targeting ACORN (who committed no crimes), while the top 100 government contractors, who made "nearly $300 billion from federal contracts in 2007 alone" paid some "$26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse".

By way of contrast with the federally favored criminal corporations, Scahill notes, "Over the past fifteen years, ACORN has received just $53 million in federal funds, much of it for low-income housing." Despite that, "In mid-September all but seventy-five House Democrats and seven senators voted with their Republican colleagues to bar the group from receiving federal funds."

The corporate welfare queens, of course, face no punitive legislative by Congress and are allowed to carry out their waste, fraud, abuse and often extraordinarily criminal behavior while on the tax-payer dole and nobody --- Republican or Democrat --- bats an eye.

Following the Scahill quotage on these points below, you'll find a must-see video clip of Florida's tenacious Rep. Alan Grayson, handing it to his Republican colleagues in a committee hearing this week, for their attempt to pass an "unconstitutional bill of attainder" meant solely to punish the GOP's favorite stalking-horse, ACORN. (See Rachel Maddow's expert coverage on the unconstitutionality of such bills, as posted late last month, for more details.)

Grayson's flat-out, apologetically cold-hearted unwillingness to yield the floor to the disingenuous wingnut cabal, and his shaming of them for pushing such an outrageously unconstitutional bill, is something to behold. Would that he were the model for what all Democrats sounded and acted like on behalf of the people. [Hat-tip to BRAD BLOG reader David Lasagna for the heads-up on that video. Now go watch it below!]

The military news outlet Military.com is covering the story of FBI linguist-turned-whistelblower Sibel Edmonds as their lead story today.

Reporter Bryant Jordan's 1,500 word feature includes a background summary of Edmonds' story, which The BRAD BLOG has been detailing for years, and a summary of the allegations she offered under oath last August in her sworn deposition following seven years of "forced silence" under a court-ordered gag due to the so-called "State Secrets Privilege" twice-invoked by George W. Bush's Department of Justice. A good round-up of the startling information Edmonds says she gleaned while listening to and translating wiretaps in the counterintelligence division at the FBI after 9/11 is offered throughout his coverage.

Jordan's piece is well reported and includes, for the first time to our knowledge, several forms of denials of Edmonds allegations by some of Bush's key State and Defense Department officials --- such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith --- who, she says, were participants in espionage plots against the United States in order to share military and even nuclear secrets with Turkish and Israeli government operatives.

Edmonds also offers a very spirited and seemingly common-sense response to those denials (one of which is rather ironic in retrospect) and to critics who maintain she has been offering these allegations due to some form of vendetta.

If you're not already familiar with Edmonds' story, we'll recommend Jordan's full article at Military.com, just as we have previously recommended the excellent cover-story interview by CIA vet Philip Giraldi at American Conservative magazine also published following her 8/8/09 deposition in which she was finally able to tell her story publicly and on the record for the first time. She did so as the Obama Dept. of Justice chose not to invoke the "State Secrets Privilege" when they had the opportunity this time.

If you are already familiar with her story, then read on, as we'll try to highlight the new information in which Jordan advances the story a few beats --- as every other U.S. mainstream corporate media outlet has simply failed to since Edmonds' remarkable allegations have finally become public...

Paging the E-Voting Geek Squad!

Following public records requests in Riverside County, CA, the Election Defense Alliance has received a public copy of code used to program a recent election on an e-voting system made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc.

The result is a first-of-its kind public examination of such code, as now underway on a wiki page called the "Sequoia Voting System Study Project" which was created by the group this week.

"For the first time ever, the internal guts of a modern voting system will be publicly examined in a collaborative, open fashion," the page explains before explaining that the code, prior to being released, was first given to Sequoia by Riverside County to strip out whatever they regarded as proprietary information.

"As near as we can tell," the wiki page notes, "instead of stripping out proprietary stuff of any sort, Sequoia simply committed vandalism: they stripped the Microsoft SQL header data off the top, expecting that this would ruin access to the data under any possible database utility, making the contents unreadable."

But according to project participant Jim March --- a long time citizen e-voting watchdog and inveterate software geek --- Sequoia didn't succeed...

This is, of course, the precise sort of thing which FBI linguist-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has been alleging concerning both Turkish and Israeli interests for some time. In her case, she has testified under oath to nearly-identical behavior by U.S. scientists, military personnel and academics at top-secret nuclear and military installations who are alleged to have done precisely what Stewart David Nozette has now been busted for, as reported today by AFP...

In addition to allegations against a network of moles said to be based at U.S. nuclear weapons facilities, Edmonds has also fingered current and former members of Congress, such as Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Dan Burton (R-IN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Stephen Solarz (D-NY) and Tom Lantos (D-CA, deceased), as well as high-ranking Pentagon and State Dept. officials such as Marc Grossman, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, as having participated, via bribery and blackmail schemes, in related espionage with Turkish and Israeli interests.

Despite several high profile front-page features on all of this in the UK Sunday Times last year (here, here and here), Edmonds' recent sworn deposition on these matters, a recent cover-story interview in American Conservative magazine, and an 18-year FBI executive officer corroborating key elements of her story and calling for a "Special Counsel" to investigate and prosecute, the U.S. corporate mainstream media have failed to report on the Edmonds story at all since she was finally allowed to speak about these matters in August following seven years of gag orders from the Bush Administration's invocation of the so-called "State Secrets Privilege."

[Hat-tip RAW STORY. More details at WakingUpNow.]

The November 3rd Election Day is nearing, so naturally the words "glitch," "hiccup," "snafu," and "snag" are back in the headlines, instead of the word "failure," which would be the appropriate one to use in such cases.

Today, it's our old friends in Sarasota, under the continuing and now-legendarily failed direction of Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent and her latest failed voting system, this one an optical-scan system made by Diebold, featured in the Charlotte Sun's "Scanning glitch in vote machine test":

The machine that didn't work --- no, it's not a "glitch," it didn't succeed in carrying out the purpose for which it was designed and purchased anymore than a car which didn't start, or whose brakes failed could be said to have a "glitch" --- was the old, failed Diebold Accuvote optical-scan system, similarly used in hundreds and hundreds of counties in dozens and dozens of other states.

The "solution" Dent ultimately settled on in response to the failure of the machines made by Diebold (now calling themselves Premier and recently purchased by their larger competitor ES&S) is as bad, and as offensive, as the original failure itself...

I'm thinking of changing the name of The BRAD BLOG to What Up? Anybody see any downsides to that?

UPDATE 10/17, 11:23pm PT: I actually presumed the irony above was self-evident. If many of the comments left are any indication, apparently it wasn't. So here's the previously-unlinked reference. Beyond that I must say I was surprised and rather moved, by the reaction in many of the comments, from around the world, even if they came as a result of having been inadvertently misled. So thanks very much for those and apologies for the goose chase. (Though I did enjoy it, nonetheless.) I think I'll call the blog Change the Game instead. Any objections?

A group of computer scientists and security experts from California's 2007 landmark "Top-to-Bottom Review" (TTBR) of electronic voting systems have sent a two-page letter [PDF] of condemnation to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), taking the federal body to task for their approval of misused security findings from the TTBR in recent certification testing for a new e-voting system made by Diebold/Premier.

The voting system, Premier's Assure 1.2 --- made by Premier Election Solutions, Inc. (formerly named Diebold Election System, Inc. and recently purchased by Election System and Software, Inc.) --- was granted federal certification by the EAC last August under new test protocols which "should not have received the EAC's approval," according to the letter penned by Aaron Burstein and Joseph Lorenzo Hall, and signed by twelve other investigators and participants in the TTBR project.

The letter was addressed to the EAC's Director of Testing and Certification Brian Hancock, a longtime official at the commission with a disturbing background of helping to hedge test results for other electronic voting systems...