In his first outing as one of the "new voices" to replace fired progressive columnist Robert Scheer at the LA Times, Jonah Goldberg forwards the wingnut CYA agenda by beginning to build a case that Bush may have lied the country into a war, but if he did so, it was okay since it was for "a just cause". He also regales his new readers by referring to those who disagree with him politically as "moonbats".

Finally, he goes on to gloat about it all over at Wingnut Central by making fun of those who protested Scheer's firing. Classy.

Great hire, LA Times!

...CONTACTS...
Jeff Johnson, new Op Ed page publisher
Jeff.johnson@latimes.org, voice: 213-237-5000 fax: 213-237-4401

Dennis FitzSimons, CEO Tribune Company
dfitzsimons@tribune.com, voice: 312-222-9100 fax: 312-222-1573

Letters to the Editor, Letters@LATimes.com

A page one story in today's Washington Post reports that a 51-page memo obtained by the paper, shows Dept. of Justice staffers had rejected a controversial new Photo ID requirement law for voters in Georgia, but that their recommendations were overruled and the measure was approved anyway by the Bush appointed Attorney General.

Georgia's new law was recently rejected as unconstitutional by two Federal Courts who equated it to a "Jim Crow-era poll tax" after its approval by the DoJ despite the recommendation against it by 4 out of 5 staffers in the DoJ's Voting Rights Act division.

The law would have required all voters to present a Photo ID at the poll, available for $20 to those who did not have one. The measure, which, like all such measures currently being pushed around the country by Republicans, is alleged to be disproportionately disenfranchising to minority (read: Democratic-leaning) voters.

Despite a complete dearth of evidence to demonstrate that Photo ID requirements are useful in combatting the non-existent epidemic of "Voter Fraud" in America, Republican legislators in Georgia and other states are attempting to ramrod such measures through their state legislatures. Even the creators of the Georgia law were unable to cite a single example of fraud in the state which would have been held off by the new legislation.

Indeed, the self-described "non-partisan" GOP front-group calling itself the American Center for Voting Rights has been fervently attempting to perpetrate the hoax of a "Voter Fraud" epidemic on voters for at least the past six months. They've made the cause their number one plan in attempting to further disenfranchise millions of minority, elderly, poor and urban-dwelling voters, all of whom are far more likely to vote Democratic and not own drivers licenses.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, parts of which are up for renewal by this Justice Department in 2007, requires states such as Georgia to have any such new laws that may effect voters to be "pre-cleared" by the DoJ.

According to WaPo...

UPDATE 12/2/05: Bush DoJ does it again! This time with a unanimous decision against Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting! Turns out that too was overruled by his DoJ cronies!

UPDATE 12/10/05: Now the DoJ has barred staffers from offering opinions at all! Democracy crumbles...

For more information on the "non-partisan" tax-exempt ACVR scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney '04 National General Counsel Mark F. "Thor" Hearne and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG's full Special Coverage of the "American Center for Voting Rights" at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.

(Roaring 20's anybody?)

The Corporate Mainstream Media may not give a damn about our democracy. Neither might the bulk of our politicians on both the Left and Right side of the aisle. But clearly the citizens do, and even one rightwing blogger who has recently seen at least some of the light...

The response to our article on the "staggeringly impossible" results of last week's election in Ohio on several Election Reform initiatives which would have struck deep into the heart of far-right Republican Ohio Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been notable to say the least.

We felt the report was notable enough that we decided to cross-post it both at BRAD BLOG and at HuffPo, where --- though it was never added to the front page as a "featured blog" --- it has already received an extraordinary 93 comments as of this posting.

To give you an idea of what that story documented, here are the numbers from just one of the four Election Reform initiatives which all ended up failing by numbers which defy reasonable explanation when compared to the historically accurate Columbus Dispatch poll, completed and published just days before the Election in the Buckeye state:

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

The results on that issue alone was so far askew that it was enough to give the usually dubious Mark Blumenthal of Mystery Pollster pause enough to comment, "These results had MP seriously wondering whether the pollsters or election officials had mistakenly transposed 'yes' and 'no' in their tables."

See the original post for a comparison of Polling vs Final Results for all of the initatives, but suffice to say while the one above was the most inexplicably out-of-whack, the others, with the exception of Issue 1 --- which was the only one supported by Ohio's Republican Governor and on which the Dispatch poll was virtually right on the money on "Yes" voters --- all of the initiative Final Results bring the entire election machinery in Ohio once again under deservedly fresh scrutiny.

(We'll remind you that Ohio's results in the '04 Presidential Election squeeker, where just 6 votes for Kerry instead of Bush at each precinct would have changed the entire result for the nation. And also that the results from that election remain completely suspect, largely uncounted, and never recounted according to state law even while several elections officials have either been indicted or remain under investigation for their role in gaming that fiasco...the one in the state which gave Bush enough electoral votes to claim the Presidency).

The original report we filed, discussed an article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Free Press in Columbus where they've been detailing an extraordinary amount of the election chicanery and "irregularities" under the iron-fisted rule of Blackwell, the Ohio elections arbiter and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair in a state which is currently a snakepit of Republican machinery and out-and-out corruption.

Amongst the comments at both BRAD BLOG and HuffPo where the blog item was posted, a few, as expected, have knee-jerked that it must have been the Columbus Dispatch polling that was wrong, rather than the Final Results reported by the State which added brand-spankin' new, and wholly unaccountable, unrecountable, untransparent, and undemocratic Electronic Voting Machines for the first time in this election to 44 of its 88 counties. Machines which use secret software on which voters are asked to trust --- but not verify --- that their votes will be recorded accurately...or at all.

In addition to those 44 counties (41 of them using the same machines by Diebold, Inc. that the Republican Sec. of State in California recently decertified for their 20% failure rate), several other counties already use Electronic Voting Machines, and nearly all of them use electronic tabulating machines of one brand or another to count those votes.

We spoke yesterday to Fitrakis about the Dispatch poll's "historic accuracy" (which he described as "legendary" in our phone call) and about the various wingnuts who predictably presume the polling, instead of the election results, were wrong...

RAW STORY scoops Woodward on Woodward scoop by revealing what Woodward wouldn't.

The just posted story at RAW reports that "attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials" identified National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley as having revealed Valerie Plame/Wilson as a "CIA analyst" to WaPo's Bob Woodward.

Hadley's leak to the reporter who gained fame via his investigative work with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal, would have occured prior to any other known leaks to journalists on the matter, and prior even to Joe Wilson's now-infamous NY Times Op/Ed which was critical of the Bush Administration's assertion that Saddam had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger.

They've already come under some harsh criticism (also here and here) from the left for their far-right leaning Editorial Board and unbalanced collection of blogs, but the group previously known as Pajamas Media has opened for business-proper today under the name "Open Source Media". Discredited former NY Times "journalist" Judith Miller was the keynote speaker at their launch. (Both BuzzMachine and Kos have some worthy thoughts on that).

OSM was founded by rightwingers Roger Simon and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. The latter blogger, at least, being quite fond of disparaging his political opponents by labeling them as "moonbats".

Nonetheless, and despite their currently massive lack of editorial "balance", several of their staffers have claimed in various recent conversations I've had with them that they hope to change that hard right tilt in the near future. The proof, however, will remain in the blog pudding.

During their testing phase, I participated in a "BlogJam" with three other bloggers for them. That's their term for an online debate forum. The no-brainer topic about which we debated a week or two ago was "Are left-right politics becoming too polarized?"

That debate is now available online here as one of their first offerings.

I had fun doing it, as you may be able to tell. You'll let me know how I did...

A group of 16 former intelligence officials sent a letter to George W. Bush earlier today expressing their outrage over "the breach of trust between this Administration and members of the intelligence community that has resulted from the Valerie Plame case."

The letter is described by former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson as having been signed by a "bipartisan" group "representing a variety of political views."

"We are agreed on one thing," said Johnson in an Email receved by The BRAD BLOG this evening, "we are Americans and believe this country is worth defending."

Johnson had been a classmate of Valerie Plame/Wilson's during training at the CIA.

The missive, sent late this afternoon from a variety of former and retired officials, calls on George W. Bush to keep his "promise to restore honor to the White House," and demands accountability for any staff members "implicated in the leak of Valerie Wilson's classified identity." It goes on to decry the "bond of trust" that was "shattered with the exposure" of Wilson's identity.

One White House official, so far, I. Scooter Libby, has been indicted on charges relating to an ongoing investigation into the matter by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

The former intelligence officials express that whether her exposure was "unwitting or intentional" the action's by Administration officials has destroyed both Wilson's career and her intelligence network "which was devoted to protecting this country from the threat of weapons of mass destruction."

They call on Bush to "immediately suspend the clearances of all White House personelle" who spoke to reporters about Wilson's CIA affiliation while taking the occassion to remind Bush about Dick Cheney's dismissal of the Air Force Chief of Staff who inadvertantly disclosed classified information to the press.

The letter, which was CC'd to several members of Congress, follows in its entirety...

This from a friend and emailer who attended today's protest over the recent dismisal of liberal columnist Robert Scheer at the LA Times. Scheer's apparent crime was being right on this administration and their trumped-up war from the get-go. That won't do as the LA Times works hard to both destroy itself and appease the Bill O'Reilly McCarthyites of the New American Right. You'll be delighted to know that while Scheer was removed, wingnut Jonah Goldberg has been added to the Opinion Page. Scheer's own website will continue to carry his columns, along with other papers around the country.

The LA Times can be reached at Letters@LATimes.com if you have any thoughts for them.

UPDATE: More details sent to me on how to contact the folks who need to be contacted:

Several additional photos from today's protest follow...

Death of a thousand cuts...That's what seems to be in store either for American democracy, or what will be required to finally take bring down the entire anti-democratic Electronic Voting cabal in this country, as aided and abetted in their crimes against American Democratic Values by the Corporate Mainstream Media.

We take heart that there is more and more coverage of these matters these days, even if there are more and more unfortunate reasons to have such coverage in the first place. VotersUnite.org's "Daily Voting News", now posted each day on BRAD BLOG, gives one some sense of how much is going on --- both good and bad --- in regards to Election-related issues in this country, and just how much of it does make it into the news somewhere, if only (and too often) on just the local level.

At least the public's and the media's awareness continues to grow --- slowly, but surely --- even as the incidents of democracy in disrepair increase exponentially along with that awareness (and along with the obscene outpouring of virtually unchecked HAVA money to States and Counties in the bargain).

Nonetheless, we always look for reasons to be optimistic, and our usual coterie of Election Reform Media All-Stars continues to both grow and produce stellar work. In addition to the recent Free Press exposé by Fitrakis and Wasserman on the inexplicable in Ohio's election last week, which we mentioned previously here (as well as at HuffPo), there are a few other notable heroic voices of late that you should know about.

Debra LoGuercio, the editor of the Winters Express and syndicated columnist for a number of smaller West Coast papers, continues to take both her democracy and her role of media watchdog seriously. Her latest column this week, "Where in the World is Democracy?" [link fixed] picks up on my previous calls (both at BRAD BLOG and later at HuffPo) for Mainstream Corporate Media coverage --- hell, even a single sentence would do! --- of the recent landmark report from the non-partisan Governmental Accountability Office (GAO). That report, which confirms so many of the problems with Electronic Voting that we've been reporting on here for more than a year, is apparently less important to the corporate media braintrust, according to LoGuercio, than figuring out where in the world Matt Lauer is.

We're happy as well to welcome one Kathy Gill into the still-all-too-exclusive club of journalists who give a damn about democracy. She's posted an article on that GAO report yesterday at About.com. Welcome to the small, but still-growing club, Kathy! Glad you're on board and please keep up the good --- and important --- work!

And as Election Day unravelled last week, our friend Robert Koehler of Tribune Media Services once again opines on the MIA MSM in regard to Election Fraud in America's once-great democracy in his latest piece, "A Crime Without a Name - 'Concern' about election fraud is useless without guts and anger". He speaks, amongst other things, about John Kerry's failure to stand up for what is right here, and the unwillingness of the mainstream media to investigate and report without that kick in the pants.

The always sharp Dave Astor of Editor & Publisher has added some visibility by picking up on Bob's column in a quick article about it yesterday. For this, we are pleased, since so many of Bob's Tribune Media clients have shown neither the guts nor the anger required to save our democracy, and have chosen instead to avoid running many of his important articles on Election Reform issues altogether. It'll be interesting as usual, to see how many of them don't pick up Koehler's latest, despite --- once again --- the elegant way in which he is able to express the nightmare of our crumbling democracy.

To poorly paraphrase a famous movie tagline; In the corporate-conglomerated media world of the 21st century no one can hear you scream. But some have heard, and will continue to yell even louder...And we'll keep at the rest of them until they realize what's at stake...no matter how many cuts it takes.

"Torture" is not really torture. It is now officially: "enhanced interrogation techniques".

That, according to National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley yesterday whose latest job, it seems, is to clarify that when Bush said last week "We do not torture," what he really meant to say was "We do torture, but we just refer to it as 'enhanced interrogation techniques' so we can trick ourselves into being able to sleep at night."

With so much going on, we haven't had much time to report here on the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you --- by hook and by crook --- a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Ohio Mainstream Corporate Media will have no choice but to look into it. And that's a good thing.

As usual, the Free Press' heroic Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are on the case. Their article on what happened on ballot issues 1 through 5 last week is A MUST READ for anybody who still gives the slightest damn about whatever democracy might be left in America.

We'll try to summarize here briefly. There were five initiatives on the ballot last week. Issue 1 was a controversial proposition for $2 billion in new state spending. The Christian Right was opposed (because some of the new funds might go to stem cell research), but otherwise, the Republican Governor Taft's Administration (he recently pleaded guilty to several counts of corruption) was pushing it hard alongside progressives in the state.

The Columbus Dispatch's pre-election polling, which Fritrakis and Wasserman describe as "uncannily accurate for decades", called the race correctly within 1% of the final result. The margin of error for the poll was +/- 2.5% with a 95% confidence interval. On Issue 1, the Dispatch poll was right on the money. They predicted 53% in favor, the final result was 54% in favor.

But then came Issues 2 through 5 put forward by ReformOhioNow.org --- a bi-partisan coalition pushing these four initiatives for Electoral Reform in the Buckeye State largely in response to their shameful '04 Election performance led by the extremely partisan Secretary of State (and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair) J. Kenneth Blackwell.

On those four issues, which Blackwell and the Christian Right were against, the final results were impossibly different --- and we mean impossibly! --- from both the Dispatch's final polling before the election and all reasoned common-sense. Take a look:

Now, you tell us...What could possibly explain such unheard of differences between the Dispatch's poll and the final results?

Now, we'll tell you...This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement and mandates of Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in 44 of its 88 counties...41 of them employing the same Diebold Touch-Screen Machines that California's Republican Sec. of State decertified in this state when 20% of them failed this summer in the largest test of its kind ever held.

Those would be the very same Electronic Voting Machines which a recent GAO Report (still unmentioned by a single wire-service or mainstream American newspaper) confirmed to be easily hackable.

Will the absurdly skewed results from last Tuesday's Ohio Election finally light a fire under the media --- either nationally or just in Ohio alone --- to look into what the hell is going on here?! We remain hopeful...if not optimistic.

The Free Press article is a must read, as mentioned, but we'll share their closing thoughts here on the possible reasons for the wildly unexplained discrepancy between the final polling and the final results which, as they posit, are due to either a completely inexplicable breakdown of the Dispatch's historically accurate polling methods wildly beyond the margin-of-error for all initiatives except Issue 1...or...somebody hacked that vote count:

Anybody in the Mainstream Media ready to give a damn yet?

Cross-Posted at Huffington Post.

UPDATE: Further information, updated news, etc. on this issue now available in this new post.

We've failed to report too terribly much on it to date, but there is a very important lawsuit quietly proceeding in New Mexico which is challenging the results of the 2004 Presidential Election there. The final result of that election was very close, and Election Reform advocates --- and indeed a great deal of evidence --- suggest that something was amiss there. Michael Collins wrote a good article about the suit a couple of weeks ago for New Zealand's SCOOP.

Yesterday, VoterAction.org sent out an email about some roadblocks that the plaintiffs are suddenly facing in the discovery phase of the trial. They were supposed to have been allowed to have experts inspect --- for the first time --- the Electronic Voting Machines that were used in the '04 Election, along with the actual results that they gave.

All of a sudden, Voter Action says, the county clerks have flat-out refused to permit the inspections by the plaintiffs' experts. That, after some interesting evidence has already been found by the experts during discovery, like tests where they were able to see votes for one candidate being registered for their opponent (as has been so widely reported as happening in so many elections of late!) and ballots being confirmed with NO choice for President at all, which wasn't supposed to have been possible on at least one of the machine types being looked at.

Voter Action didn't post the article from their email on their website, so we'll post it here in its entirety. Check it out...

From LA Times...

Josh Marshall has been doing some excellent reporting on this case as it's developed over the last year or so. This link should get you caught up.

Of note here, keep in mind that a) Tobin was working for the national Republican Party, he wasn't some loose-cannon, bad apple, lone agent, b) The phone-jamming scandal was in the '02 election, yet the RNC hired Tobin to head their '04 Northeastern Regional Campaign even after they knew he was in trouble for the '02 shenanigans and c) The RNC, as of August, had so far covered his $700k legal bills, that much before the trial had even begun.

Next time a wingnut tosses you the canard about some tires slashed in Milwaukee by a couple of kids, remind them of this guy, still on the RNC's payroll.

While I was up recently to speak at the "National Summit to Save Our Elections" in Portland, OR, I was asked to sit down for a few minutes with Clint Curtis to do a quick interview for "SourceCode" on Free Speech TV. Apparently their episode devoted to Election Fraud has been airing all week to folks who have satellite TV (which I don't).

I haven't yet had time to watch the entire episode, but here's the specific segment in which I interview Curtis. It's a quickie (about 4 minutes), so we don't get into too much detail for folks who already know the story, but hopefully the interview is worthwhile nonetheless.

The longer audio and text transcript of the interview I did with him onstage at the conference (as noted previously) is available here.

ALSO...I've just been informed --- at the very last minute, sorry --- that Curtis will be speaking at an E.R. event near Orlando today and tomorrow. Info follows...

What: "Achieving Election Reform: A Florida Statewide Conference"
Where: SeraLago Hotel & Suites, Kissimmee (just south of Orlando)
When: Saturday and Sunday, November 12-13, 2005
Time: 10 a.m. Saturday until 1 p.m. Sunday
Hosted by: Florida Fair Elections Coalition (FFEC)
Cost: Free (donations accepted)

Clint will be speaking at 4pm ET Saturday the 12th (that's today!) and will be available to meet with conference goers from 9a to Noon on Sunday the 13th. Go say hello if your read this in time and happen to be in the 'hood!

In today's Veterans' Day speech, Bush attempted to send the latest Talking Points out to his troops. Not the ones that fight, the ones that talk. Judging from Carol Platt Liebau's latest at HuffPo, the message was received from Dear Leader and is even now being delivered to whoever is left to buy it.

Here was "the message":

In other words, after years of questioning the patriotism of those who criticized his decision or the conduct of the war, he'll give up on that battle as long as we all stay away from the one point that is likely to bring the entire house of cards crumbling down, namely; How the war began. Or more aptly, how he began it.

It is, of course, the latest last-ditch effort (and there have been plenty of late) to save his Presidency. And of course, the way to do that...is to blame everybody else.

So who is actually the one rewriting history today? Bush (and Liebau and the other dead-enders) mislead yet again by claiming "More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

Setting aside that those Democrats didn't have "access to the same intelligence" that Bush did, Atrios helpfully points up Bush's condensed re-written history on that "vote to remove Saddam Hussein from power." We condense Atrios' work still further...

Got that? Good. Now let the next last-ditch Talking Point commence...bring it on.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall drops an elegantly concise case on Bush's latest "Rewritten History" gambit and his now-lost causes gone astray. It begins this way:

...And ends this way:

Go read the middle.