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"These attacks are contrary to the passionate - but respectful - political debate the public deserves."
-- House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), in a letter sent just two days ago to Howard Dean. That would be two days prior to Sensenbrenner's Judiciary meltdown this morning.

(Hat tip to Liz from Rapid Response Network for the find.)

As originally reported here yesterday, Democrats on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee invoked a rarely used rule to extend Committee hearings on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

Apparently, they inappropriately called witnesses to testify today from whom the Republicans did not wish to hear. And thus, in what can only be seen as an unprecedented tyrannical abuse of Majority power in the U.S. House of Representatives, Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), suddenly and without warning, gavelled the hearings to a close! Unilaterally, without debate, and in the middle of ongoing testimony!

The extraordinary video clip of Sensenbrenner's appalling display, was captured by C-SPAN. Take a look at the meltdown...

BuzzFlash describes the remarkable incident in some detail as follows...

UPDATE: We must go on the air on Tony Trupiano's show in a just a few minutes, so this must be quick for now. (Link to that interview, with a lot more information on my conversation with a Democratic staffer who was in the room, is now below.)

To clarify some confusion on this matter, what had been referred to as "Democratic Hearings" today in some places, actually were not Democratic-only hearings (unlike the hearings that took place in January on Ohio Election Irregularities, and the recent Media Bias forum held by Conyers and other Dems).

Today's hearings were called under the archane provision of House Rule 11, which, we are told, allows the Minority to call for an additional day of hearings and to choose their own witnesses if they are unsatisfied with the hearings as held by the Majority.

The U.S. House Judiciary Democrats have been unable to do that previously on issues like Election 2004 and Media Bias because the Majority hadn't called a hearing at all on those matters, and thus, they were forced to call their own hearings.

We are told by a Democratic Staffer who The BRAD BLOG has just spoken to, and who was present at today's debacle, that the Majority has been quite disturbed by those previous hearings for some time, and, in fact, during the airing of Conyers' Media Bias forum (it ran as taped on C-SPAN at 8:30pm ET a few Saturdays ago), an email was sent to a Judiciary Committee staffer which said, in effect, "I'm watching your forum right now, hope you enjoyed it, it will be your last."

We'll have more detail after we're off the air, but the staffer just explained to us that the Minority was displeased with the witnesses called previously in the Commission hearings on renewal of the Patriot Act, and attempted to work with the Majority to call additional witnesses.

According to the staffer, they were told, "'You're gonna get your hearing, but it's gonna be 8:30am on Friday morning'...Never in the history of the Judiciary Committee have we been able to find a time when a hearing has been scheduled like that. The Congress was not in session today. We've never been able to find an instance when a hearing was called when Congress wasn't in session."

"The irony, when we're debating the Patriot Act," we were told, "of cutting off the debate and acting so anti-democratic when that's going on, is unbelievable!

"In the committee with sole jurisdiction over civil rights and civil liberties, for the chairman to say, I don't want to hear about guys who are getting their testicles shocked, it's breathtaking arrogance, it's testimony to abuse of power and how this place is now run. They've become everything they said they deplored when they took over the house in 1994."

Conversations with the House Democratic leadership on currently ongoing. The BRAD BLOG has learned that they are "very very concerned" about this matter, and that "the issue will be elevated."

"Ms. Pelosi is very concerned about this," said the staffer.

The signature drive for John Conyers Downing Street Minutes letter to George W. Bush is at just over 411,000 signatures gathered in somewhat fewer than 24 hours as of 3:02am PT.

Be number 500,000.

And thank you for caring.

We meant to blog about this earlier, but were waylaid by the power outage today and other matters... In any case, a DU'er announced last night that a meeting of the Hocking Democratic Central Committee was to take place tonight to discuss the recent firing by the Board of Elections of Ohio Recount Whistleblower, Sherole Eaton.

(Eaton was a guest on last weekend's BRAD SHOW to discuss the matter. In case you missed it the interview is archived here [MP3]).

Eaton filed an affidavit during the December recount concerning some chicanery she witnessed by a Voting Machine Company employee from Triad. The employee, Mark Barbarian, she testified, removed a hard drive from the central tabulating machine in Hocking County prior to the recount and instructed her county and others in Ohio, on how to create a "cheat sheet" to ensure that the recount would match the original Election results.

As her thanks for whistleblowing, she was fired this month by the Hocking County Board of Elections.

The legend goes --- as spread frequently and thickly by Ohio Secretary of State and Co-Chair for the Committee to Re-Elect Bush/Cheney, J. Kenneth Blackwell --- that nothing could possibly have been amiss in Ohio's Election, since all of the BoE's are bi-partisan and comprised of two Democrats and two Republicans.

Trouble is, many of those Democrats, we've since come to learn, may indeed be "Democrats" in name only. They serve at the approval and pleasure of Blackwell and the behavior of the Hocking County Democrats on the BoE give every indication that they are anything but Democrats.

As Eaton explained to us on the show last Saturday night, these Boards of Elections are "cooked".

This evening, the Democratic Central Committee met to call those two Hocking County "Democrats", Susie Hughes and Gerald Robinette, on the carpet in a public hearing concerning the Eaton firing.

Once again, DU'er "NoBushSpokenHere" filled us in on the details including a surprise appearance by Eaton herself who was, as of this past Monday, under the knife having brain surgery for an aneurysm.

The good news is she made it through the surgery successfully. The bad news is that the surgery was unsuccessful.

Indefatigable as she is, incredibly, she made it to the meeting tonight to stand her ground and face her accusers. We'll let "NoBushSpokenHere" take it from here:

Shaping up to be a great show so far! Check out our currently scheduled guests...

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As fallout from the Downing Street Minutes continues to rock Capitol Hill, more unwanted attention to Administration policies on the war and human rights abuses looks to be on the way.

MoveOn.org joined the call for signatures earlier this morning for John Conyers letter to George W. Bush asking for clarification about several matters in the official British minutes now known as the Downing Street Minutes. That recently released information documents an official UK meeting describing the Bush Administration policy to topple Saddam Hussein through military means and to "fix" intelligence around the policy as early as eight months prior to the war. The BRAD BLOG has learned that MoveOn.org has received well over 240,000 350,000 new signatures to that letter in just the few hours since joining the campaign, and is receiving several thousand new signatures each minute.

But Conyers and Company are not resting. The BRAD BLOG has learned that the ranking House Judiciary Member has just announced additional hearings will be held tomorrow morning concerning the allegations of Human Rights abuses at U.S. Terror Prisons, including Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. The hearings will feature testimony from a representative of Amnesty International, the first such congressional testimony since the group released their recent report on alleged Human Rights abuses at the U.S. run prison camps.

The following Press Release was issued just moments ago concerning hearings to be held tomorrow on Capitol Hill...

UPDATE: Tomorrow's hearing, clearly, is different from the one later announced by Conyers concerning the Downing Street Minutes. That one, scheduled for next Thursday, will feature testimony from Constitutional Attorney John Bonifaz (featured on last weekends BRAD SHOW) as well as CIA Analyst Ray McGovern (scheduled for this Saturday's BRAD SHOW! Do we got your news agenda right here or what?!

UPDATE 6/10/05: Holy Meltdown, Batman! Watch Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) go nuts at this morning's Patriot Act hearings! Full BRAD BLOG team coverage right here...

NOTE: That's also a rare picture of the ingenious and mysterious Freeway Blogger himself, otherwise known as "Scarlet P." --- and more good news, he is currently scheduled to be a guest of ours on this weekend's BRAD SHOW!

Robert Koehler of Tribune Media Services, one of just a handful of MSM'ers willing to continue the fight for democracy in America, gets it right all over again in tomorrow's column when he refers to November 2nd, as a "shiv to the gut of democracy."

Koehler had previously made quite a bit of noise with his now-classic initial column on the matter --- the first that we know of in the Mainstream Media, to charge that Election 2004 was "stolen" --- and his subsequent columns here, here and here. That last one was spiked by the higher ups at TMS, as we reported some weeks ago, and was never syndicated to TMS member newspapers. (Our radio interview with Koehler on The BRAD SHOW is archived as an MP3 here.)

In his latest column, Koehler recounts the story of a man from Franklin County, Ohio, who had voted at the same precint for 50 years, only to show up last November to find that he was no longer on the voter rolls. "I guess my vote don't matter anymore," he was quoted as saying at a hearing before the Franklin County Board of Elections.

Koehler also vows to continue his still-too-lonely fight to correct the greatest domestic threat to democracy this country has seen in...well, perhaps ever.

Here's an advance look at a couple of key grafs from tomorrow's piece, penned after returning from the recent Election Reform Conference in Cleveland, most of which will be picked up by very few newspapers most likely, as none of them contain the words "Michael Jackson":

As Jonathon Alter posits in his must-read NEWSWEEK column this week (really, go read it!) about what would have happened had Watergate occured in today's Media/Political climate, the current strategy for the apologists on the Right --- and a very successful one so far, we might add --- is to make enough noise with unsupported claims that eventually "the American people figure both sides [are] just spinning, and a tie always goes to the incumbent."

If you have any doubt about that strategy, just ask yourself who eventually won the PR battle last year between Bush and Kerry concerning their respective military service during Vietnam.

Echoing that sentiment, Koehler recounts his personal investigation of one such attempt by an emailer from the Right to neutralize the issue of Election Fraud with bogus claims to a level playing field:

We'll leave the results of his investigation for him to tell when his column publishes shortly. The entire column will soon be available here.

Thanks for your continued work on behalf of this country, Bob. Glad to see that you've vowed to remain on the job! We'll be right there with you keeping up a fight that is more than worth continuing, no matter how many charlatans are on the beat trying cynically to suppress it.

As Rush spent a full two hours on this morning's show trying to tear Howard Dean apart, while not once mentioning the new WaPo-ABC poll just out today outlining the real trouble that Bush and his Congressional Supporters are now in, we figure he must be pretty worried about what's happening.

We also figure the poll will go less reported than it ought to, so we'll try to help. It's the least we can do.

In addition to the headline figure that shows, for the first time since Bush's War on Iraq began, more than half of Americans now understand that the war has not made America any safer, it's a few of the nothing-but-bad-news-for-Bush internals that caught our eye.

Even without the proper investigation and reportage by the MSM on the unprecedented corruption of this administration, the American people seem to be getting the picture. Take a look...

While the debate amongst the Left rages on (even here at BRAD BLOG on occasion) about which way Democrats should move --- to fight for their core values or move towards the Right --- the poll numbers are noteworthy, particularly in the current atmosphere where so little honest coverage is given to this Administration's failures by the Mainstream Corporate Media.

Those "Independents", as the poll demonstrates, are getting the picture. Without the Democratic party attempting to remake itself as Republican Lite.

And while the phony Red State/Blue State battle continues (phony, because most of the country lives smack dab in the Purple area, even while being largely underinformed and/or grossly misinformed, and the premise, put forward by Neo-Cons and Bush Supporters, but fallen for by too many on the Left, is simply meant as an attempt to shame the majority of Americans who live in the middle into choosing sides) the truth continues to make its way into the American conciousness.

Truth has a way of doing that. Sometimes, it just takes a while.

That said, perhaps now is a good time to remind Democrats once again that none of those numbers much matter. Not as long as the Republicans own the ballot box machinery. Pay attention. Or continue your "losing" streak.

UPDATE: On that point, it's also worth pointing out, as Stephanie Miller did on her excellent radio show this morning, that the "approval rating" numbers in this poll, just a few months after the November Election, are eerily similar to those "discredited" Exit Poll numbers you may have heard about. We just thought we'd mention that.

We were pulling for Eric Brewer, our man in D.C. (well, BTCNews.com's man in D.C., but as he's a blogger and was a featured guest on last weekend's BRAD SHOW, we consider him one of our own), to win the $1000 offered to anyone who would publicly ask Bush about the Downing Street Minutes/Memo. It's only been over a month or so since it was revealed, according to the minutes, that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Brewer was there today, but Steve Holland of Reuters beat him to the punch. We'll let Eric give you the first-hand skinny...

UPDATE: We like Brewer's account. But for those who prefer the tale of the tape, it's right here (courtesy of our friend, David Edwards): RealPlayer or Windows Media

ANOTHER UPDATE: Constitutional Attorney John Bonifaz, on behalf of AfterDowningStreet.org, renews the call for a Congressional investigation into the matter:

It should also be noted that Mr. Bonifaz was a guest on last Saturday's BRAD SHOW as well, during which time he informed us that he was also a supporter of the Impeachment of Bill Clinton. Just so's ya know.

Something stinks to high heaven about these people and their new report. And not simply because they're based in Houston, TX, (though it certainly doesn't help their case) but the fact that they are directly funded by Voting Machine companies such as Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia immediately destroys any credibility they might have otherwise had when it comes to making decisions about our Electoral System in desperate need of reform.

ElectionCenter.org claims to be a non-profit, non-partisan, professional organization of Elections Workers. Today, they have released a new report [large PDF] with recommendations on how to improve America's Electoral System.

The AP covered the new report in a story yesterday which shines a fairly positive light on it yet manages to include a couple of paragraphs which jump out as huge red flags. Here's a couple of them from the AP story [emphasis added]...

So here we have yet another "nonprofit, nonpartisan" organization dedicated to Election issues, who have a clear conflict of interest due to their financial alliance with the Voting Machine Companies instead of the American Citizens whose interests they claim to represent.

Unlike the now-discredited "American Center for Voting Rights", a phony front group founded by GOP operatives as a smokescreen for real Election Reform issues, Election Center has been around for a number of years. But their claims that their mission is to "improve service to voters, the public, the taxpayers and to government" is completely belied by the companies they keep...or that keep them...

Here's a screenshot of the agenda from their upcoming August "National Conference" in Beverly Hills/Hollywood. It will likely tell you all you need to know about this group:

A few Googles of the various election officials associated with this organization and their new report should answer any other questions you may have. These people (folks like Palm Beach's Theresa LePore and Los Angeles' Conny McCormack to name just a few) are certainly not in the business of fighting for the voters' best interests.

Suffice to say, if Election Center expects any recognition for their recommendations for Electoral Reform from the Election Reform community, perhaps they should have thought of that before selling that option off to Diebold and friends.

We congratulate the Republicans in Washington State for fighting so hard to ensure the accuracy of the election for Governor there. We're glad to see a political party willing to fight for the validity of every vote.

If they had an actual case, however, as the Democrats do in numerous other states where they've failed to fight the way Republicans do for every vote, John Kerry would likely be the President by now.

Nonetheless, here's the key information on the GOP's resounding defeat as reported by today's Seattle Times...

So. No fraud found in Washington State. For the Governor's race anyway. We suppose the only thing that Wingnut Tinfoil Hat Wearers will now be able to use in order to counter the calls for a similar investigation of the Presidential Election in states where the votes were never actually counted (like J. Kenneth Blackwell's Ohio for example) will be those slashed tires in Wisconsin.

Beyond that, we're certain those GOP'ers who were outraged by what they thought they saw in WA will be calling for the same strict standards to be applied to the rest of the country any moment now. Right?

Okay...Byron Calame has now officially replaced Daniel Okrent as the Public Editor (or Ombudsman) at New York Times. And not a moment too soon.

Calame's first column two weeks ago criticized the paper's tardiness in covering the issue of the Downing Street Minutes, and his latest column, published yesterday, sets a few of his goals in the new job.

Among those goals, Calame claims, will be more responsiveness to reader Email when they feel that stories are being given less than the coverage they deserve by "the paper of record".

The Okrent chapter now closed (and we had found his eagnerness and interest in responding to reader concerns to be less than up to snuff), we'd like to give Mr. Calame a fresh opportunity to get the job done right.

To that end, our hopes are that "6 or 7" of you might drop Mr. Calame some email concerning the dreadful coverage that the NY Times has given to issues of Election 2004 and Election Reform. Nothing else matters much as long as those issues are not resolved. And the clock is ticking towards '06. And the matter, thanks to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), is just getting worse every day around the country.

The case that we have a completely corrupt, hackable, non-transparent, non-auditable, un-democratic, un-American, privatized, GOP-owned Electoral System in this country, and the unaudited and likely wholly incorrect results that it produced last November has been well documented for at least seven months in hundreds of articles on The BRAD BLOG pages, but covered in perhaps 3 or 4 articles (at most!) by the NY Times.

And, of course, names like Vote-Rigging Software Whistleblower, Clint Curtis and the myriad of well-documented investigative articles on the matter which we have published over those months, have never been mentioned even once in their pages.

Neither have they mentioned the phony GOP front group calling themselves "The American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR) or the affront to real Election Reform in the body of the illegitimate "Baker/Carter National Election Reform Commission" headed by --- of all offensive ironies --- longtime Bush Family crony and the architect of the Bush/Cheney 2000 strategy to ensure that Americans' votes would never be counted, James A. Baker III. (That body, by the way, is meeting again on June 30th in Houston on Baker's home turf...shouldn't the fact that he's heading such a commission along with Voting Machine Company officials actually sitting on the same commission, with advisors from the ACVR be an issue worth reporting on by The New York Times?)

As to the still-unexplained disparities between the Final Results of the Election and the now-infamous Mitofsky/Edison Exit Polls that day (the same polls, by the same company that were good enough to make the prima facie case for Electoral Fraud in Ukraine by no one less than George W. Bush himself, but completely ignored in America for reasons still unkown), the NY Times continues to be desperately delinquent in their job of investigating and reporting on the issue to the American People. Should Mr. Calame be unaware of the controversy, feel free to point him here [PDF] and here [PDF].

If he's still unaware of the ever-growing confidence crisis surrounding elections in this country, feel free to point him to editorials by Robert Koehler here or Jim Lampley here.

And then there is the matter of millions of American tax-payer dollars flowing right now to Voting Machine Companies under HAVA for new voting hardware and software which is unauditable, lacking any real standards and allowed to remain wholly proprietary and unverified by all independent bodies.

As Mr. Calame is freshly on board at "the paper of record", and as we frequently point out, "it's only democracy at stake", we feel it's time for a fresh round of polite email to the Times demanding once again that they fulfill their vital fourth estate duties as watchdogs on behalf of this country. It is time to demand again that they finally investigate the enormous and still-growing body of evidence out there that indicates Election 2004 was gamed at best, stolen at worst. Furthermore, they must offer informed, honest, investigative reporting about the most important issue that our democracy --- theoretically the world's most important --- faces today: clean, fair, open, transparent, verifiable and trustworthy elections which can only be achieved through real Election Reform requiring nothing less than a voter-verified paper ballot created for every vote cast.

If we don't get that right and we continue to have Elections in this country which the citizenry continue to have zero confidence in, then nothing...and we mean nothing...else matters.

Send Mr. Calame your email and spread the link to this article high and low --- use the "Email it to someone" link below as much as you wish --- so that others might do the same!

It's your democracy and we believe it's well worth fighting for! We won't give up on it yet, if you don't! Make some noise! It matters!

...CONTACT...
Byron Calame, NYTimes Public Editor: Public@NYTimes.com