10,000 Argentinians would like to welcome you to Argentina, Mr. Bush...

The Hill has today's story. The BRAD BLOG reported on Ney up to his eyeballs in the Abramoff investigation recently, and last May when it was reported that he was under investigation by the DoJ.

But we found the following phrase, in today's report, had a somewhat familiar ring to it...

...Hmmm... Now where have we heard that same phrase recently? These guys are getting a lot of use out of those words lately!

On today's Democracy Now, Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), claimed that he was personally told by John Kerry last Friday that Kerry felt 2004 Presidential Election had been stolen.

RAW STORY reports on a denial by Team Kerry of Crispin's report...

Indeed, Miller carried the RAW STORY report on his blog today with the headline "Contemptible".

Miller had previously blogged about his meeting with Kerry last Friday:

That Kerry was unaware of the GAO report [PDF] is no great surprise. We first broke the news of the non-partisan GAO report and it's accompanying bi-partisan joint news release originally here at BRAD BLOG a full two weeks ago. Since then, we've opined about a complete failure to even mention the report at all, by any of the Mainstream Corporate Media (all wire services, all mainstream newspapers, all cable news channels failed to even mention it) both here at BRAD BLOG and late last night at HuffPo (where the item is currently a featured blog and has more comments than any other featured blog item listed on the front page!)

Miller gives more details, in his blog item, on his conversation with Kerry:

Now, however, Senator "Never Surrender" completely denies the conversation ever took place. You may remember that he also claimed he would ensure that "every vote was counted" last year. You decide.

Last June, 42% of Americans in a Zogby poll felt that Bush should be impeached if he lied about the War on Iraq while 50% opposed.

Earlier this month, in a new poll by Ipsos, a majority of 50% were in favor of impeachment, while just 44% were opposed.

And today, the latest poll from Zogby asking the same question, says 53% support impeachment of Bush while just 42% oppose.

In the meantime, even while the Mainstream Media were relentlessly discussing impeachment every day, wall-to-wall, about Bill Clinton back in September and August of 1998 (while hardly mentioning it today in relation to Bush) "only 36% supported hearings to consider impeachment, and only 26% supported actual impeachment and removal" according to a study of 16 major polls which asked the question back then (versus the 3 major polls now, 2 of them which had to be funded by American citizens donating to AfterDowningStreet.org.)

ImpeachPAC.org, a new organization from the AfterDowningStreet.org folks (of which The BRAD BLOG is an affiliate) have begun raising money for Congressional candidates who support impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. They have much more on all of the above.

UPDATE: Two commenters have taken us to task for what they consider to be a misleading headline on this item, noting that the 53% who "support Bush Impeachment," as the headline states were answering whether or not they would do so "if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq."

Though we did make that point clear in the first sentence of the article, the commenters (one of them an habitual troll here at BRAD BLOG, but we do not discriminate) still had a problem with the headline.

When we posted this article, what we didn't delve into (mostly due to lack of time) was what the sponsors of the poll --- who similarly headlined their article announcing the results as "53% of Americans Support Impeachment," by the way --- also discussed how many Americans feel already that "Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq."

From their article:

Thus, 53% of Americans support impeachment "if Bush did not tell the truth" and anywhere from 52% to 57% believe he did not tell the truth.

Do the math. We stand by the original headline. (And still hope Bush gets a blowjob so impeachment proceedings may begin.)

From testimony by Republican fundraiser Michael Scanlon at Wednesday's Republican-run Senate hearings:

Do you people get it yet? You're the "wackos" according to your own people.

You've been played.

Incidentally, from the same poll (and especially for all those wingnut radio hosts who have told me that they don't talk TreasonGate because "Americans don't care about the issue"), here's the numbers of those who found the following scandals to be of either "Great Importance" or "Some Importance" and, parenthetically, the dates on which the polls were taken:

Watergate (5/73): 78%
Iran-Contra (2/87): 81%
Whitewater (3/94): 49%
Clinton-Lewinsky (1/98): 62%
CIA Leak (now): 86%

From Rolling Stone:

See the full story for several swell quotes from our friends John Byrne of RAW STORY and Arianna of HuffPo.

From Newsweek...

Once again, blogger/White House correspondent, Eric Brewer, holds feet to fire. Read the below, from his questions at today's WH Press Gaggle, and ask yourself if it sounds like McClellan is dodging anything. Anything at all...

Brewer has much more, including background on the forged Iraq/Niger documents hoax (which is quickly where this thing may well be going) and his questioning about it today as well to National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley.

Keep up the good work, Eric!

While it may not be "breaking news" that Rush Limbaugh is a liar, it's important that somebody hold him accountable for it. Today it's our turn, we guess.

Rush spent virtually the entire first hour of his show today ranting and raving and spitting and spewing that Democrats have "lost touch with all reality."

His claim, it seems, is based on the Democrats' invoking of Rule 21, which shut down the Senate to a closed door session in which the Dems, in a rare moment of having discovered a spine, called upon Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KA) to complete his promised investigation into the Bush Administration use and/or misuse of pre-war intelligence. That would be the investigation that Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, decided (for some reason) to put off until after last year's Presidential Election, but has --- in the full year since --- all but succeeded in forgetting about.

Of course, Rush knows full well that it's not the Dems, in this case, who have "lost touch with all reality," but he's counting on his listeners to be so uninformed as to believe anything he says. He has good reason to count on that, since a) he's been misinforming them by creating his own fantastical version of "reality" for years and b) the Corporate Mainstream Media has completely abrogated their responsibility to report on these matters to the American People with anything that even resembles thoroughness or accuracy for the past five years.

So it's very easy, as we wrote about recently at HuffPo for Rush and his ilk to get away with spinning their "Dems-Out-Of-Touch-With-Reality" scam on the American People. And, for that, we can thank the Media for their delinquency, and the Democrats for their years-long failure to stand up to thugs and liars like Rush and Bush and make sure the truth (the real one, not the phony Rush/Bush version) is understood.

Case in point: On Monday morning, at the top of his first show since the indictment against Scooter Libby came down last Friday afternoon, Rush was able to come on the air and out and out lie to his audience about Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment and press conference. Rush quoted Fitzgerald as having said at the press conference: "Despite all of our investigation, we did not find any evidence of the outing of a covert agent."

Since we don't need to lie or mislead, here is the precise audio clip [mp3] of Rush lying to America, and here's the text of what he said precisely...

Click the graphic to see the video.

As a side note, an emailer sent the following text of a sign seen at the massive recent D.C. protests:

What do you know? When Democrats step up and fight for what is right, they actually accomplish something! Who knew?

Little time to go into detail today, so I'll simply link to the NY Times report here, quote a quick passage, and let you know that I'll have more to say on all of these things before too long. As always.

UPDATE: Great breaking video on all of the above at Crooks & Liars.

It's been nearly a week and a half since the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its 107-page report [PDF] confirming what many of us have been reporting for what seems like forever: That electronic voting machines are not secure, are hackable, and employ secret software that is frequently neither certified nor adequately inspected.

The GAO report, which The BRAD BLOG broke on October 20th, confirms that "[C]oncerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."

Furthermore, it was released in tandem with a joint bi-partisan news release which lauded the report. The extremely rare joint news release was issued by six high-level U.S. Congressmen (three R's and three D's), all Committee chairmen and ranking minority members, including the Chair and ranking member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

And yet, not a single wire service (AP, Reuters, UPI, AFP, et al) nor the NY Times nor the Washington Post has even run a single paragraph on the landmark GAO report or even the news release to our knowledge. Not one. Even though many of those same outlets reported on numerous occassions that the claims now confirmed as very real by the GAO were little more than "conspiracy theories" forwarded by "leftwing blogs" such as this one.

A few tech-related websites ran articles on the GAO report (ComputerWorld here, the UK's PC Advisor here, FCW here) as did The BRAD BLOG, of course, and several other sites that still give a damn about democracy in America (Free Press article here, Truthout article here to name a few). But that's largely it.

Congrats to Richard M. Cohen III and the University of N. Carolina's The Daily Tar Heel and Ian Hoffman of Inside Bay Area for virtually the only print newspaper coverage in all of America (at least that we were able to find).

CNN reported on the GAO report...on November, 24 2004 in an article headlined "GAO to investigate election complaints". That was, of course, back when the investigation was first announced. Now that the investigation is actually completed, apparently CNN has no interest in reporting the results discovered.

We'll have to assume that the lack of security and validity of millions of American votes, including votes both cast and lost in the last Presidential Election, are of little interest to the Mainstream Corporate Media. And that raises the question: Just what are they interested in and why? And what possible excuse could all of those mainstream media outlets have for not running even the tiniest notice of such an important report following a year long investigation which directly concerns the very future of American democracy?

At an emailer's suggestion, we've contacted the good folks at the excellent Editor & Publisher about this to see if they might be interested in looking into the matter and perhaps getting a few of the wire service folks and mainstream newspapers to go on record with an explanation as to why a landmark non-partisan government report, accompanied by an extremely rare joint press release concerning the most basic element of democracy --- the vote --- is not newsworthy in their minds.

We'd encourage you to do the same. Editor & Publisher welcomes your polite and encourging email at Letters@EditorAndPublisher.com.

Our man in the White House, Eric Brewer (the only real blogger inside the press room) of BTC News stood tough in today's gaggle in the wake of Scottie's dodges and alongside the bulk of his paid brethren who largely took the Alito nomination bait so cleverly fed to them by the crooks who'd rather do anything than explain why they seem to have lied this country into an endless and pointless war.

Brewer's question:

See Eric's coverage to find out what --- and if --- Scottie answered...