Move over, Utah! True conservative Constitutional equality for all comes sweeping down the plains...

"Equality is not just for the coasts anymore, and today’s news from Oklahoma shows that time has come for fairness and dignity to reach every American in all 50 states," said Chad Griffin, the President of the Human Rights Campaign, in a statement issued this afternoon following the federal judge's ruling.

Borrowing a long-time favorite phrase of politicians who wish to take responsibility without actually taking responsibility --- one used infamously and repeatedly by Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal --- NJ Gov. Chris Christie (R) admitted that "mistakes were clearly made" in his State of the State addressed delivered Tuesday in Trenton.

The beleaguered Governor, however, did not identify who exactly made those "mistakes" in his ongoing "BridgeGate" scandal...

The rest of Christie's address, according to the text released by his office just prior to the speech, did not address the still expanding, still unexplained, political retribution scandal carried out by a number of the Governor's top aides and appointees last year when several access lanes to the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee were shut down for five days in early September. The order for "traffic problems in Fort Lee" that led to the closures, was issued by Christie's Deputy Chief of Staff in mid-August.

Subpoenas to a number of those staffers and appointees, as well as state, federal and even criminal investigations, are still in process at this time. Christie's personal role in both the lane closures and the documented attempts by his Administration to hide the actions from the public, is also still unclear.

Last week, we highlighted the alternate "BridgeGate" scandal theory offered by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. She reported, with circumstantial but seemingly plausible evidence, that the four-day closure of several Fort Lee, NJ access lanes to the George Washington Bridge last September might have had to do with something other than political payback for a lack of endorsement for Christie's re-election bid by the Democratic Mayor of Fort Lee.

Maddow posited that the timing of the now-infamous "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email of August 13, 7:34am, as sent by Christie Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Ann Kelly, may have been a direct response to something other than Fort Lee Mayor Mike Sokolich's refusal to endorse Christie. Instead, Maddow said, the still-unexplained closures might have been meant as retaliation to the state Senate's Democratic Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, who has been a particular thorn in the Republican Governor's side for many years. (By way of just one example, see her attempt to pass a bill to limit travel of the NJ Governor following our exclusive release of audio tapes revealing Christie's super-secret appearance at a secret Koch Brothers gathering in Colorado in 2011.)

In support of the theory, Maddow highlighted a late afternoon press conference given by a very angry Christie on August 12th, the night before Kelly's early morning email, concerning a NJ Supreme Court nominee being stalled by Senate Democrats led by Weinberg, who happens to represent part of Fort Lee.

For what it's worth, the Democratic NJ Senate President Assembly leader, as well as several others, have found reason to doubt Maddow's theory.

But, on Sunday, in another smart example of good investigative broadcast journalism on MSNBC's UP with Steve Kornacki, the host, a former New Jersey political reporter and, incidentally, former employee of David Wildstein (the Christie appointee at the NY/NJ Port Authority who ordered the actual shutdown at the agency, according to subpoenaed email and text messages) offered yet another plausible alternate explanation for the shutdown.

This one also sounds like yet another plot straight out of HBO's The Soprano's, as it relates to, in Kornacki's words, "something of enormous economic and political significance"...

Meanwhile, back in Virginia...here we go again...

Yes. As reported by the State Board of Elections website tonight, that's a 9-vote margin in the state Senate special election held on Tuesday to replace Democratic state Sen. Ralph Northam who is vacating his seat after being elected last November as VA's next Lt. Governor.

To put that another way, control of the entire VA state Senate now rests on 9 unverifiable touch-screen votes out of more than 20,000 cast.

The VA state Senate is currently evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, twenty seats each. The tie-breaking vote in the state Senate goes to the Lt. Governor. Until Northam is sworn in to his new job on Saturday, when he takes over from the current Republican Lt. Governor, the GOP controls both chambers of the state legislature. A Democratic Lt. Governor will, theoretically, for the first time since 1998, mean that control of the upper chamber goes back to Democrats. But that is only if both Northam's Senate seat and the one being vacated by Attorney General-elect Mark Herring both go to Democrats in the special elections...

[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

Some very good investigative broadcast journalism from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Thursday night.

On Thursday morning, New Jersey Governor and, until now, Republican Presidential favorite, Chris Christie gave a two-hour press conference (full transcript here) in which he expressed being "stunned" and "blindsided" Wednesday morning by the blockbuster revelations published that day by Shawn Boburg of the Bergen Record.

The paper's report included email and text messages [PDF] between Christie's Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly and a number of other top appointees conspiring to shut down lanes of the George Washington Bridge leading out of Fort Lee, NJ on the first day of school last September. The messages reveal the staffers appearing to enjoying the pain the shut down was causing the town, joking about the inconvenience to the local children of voters of Christie's gubernatorial opponent in last November's election, and otherwise agreeing not to respond to queries from town officials about the closures.

During the presser, Christie announced he had fired Kelly before it began. He said he had done so because she had previously assured him she knew nothing about the traffic closure that went on for four days in Fort Lee, turning the town into a parking lot and delaying emergency first-responders, among other problems it caused. "I've terminated her employment because she lied to me," he explained on Thursday.

What struck me as odd about his answer to questions about his staff's response to the firing was that he said he hadn't spoken with Kelly since the revelations came out in the paper on Wednesday morning, before she was then fired on Thursday.

"I'm wondering what your staff said to you about why they lied to you. Why would they do that? What was their explanation?," the reporter asked.

"I have --- I have not had any conversation with Bridget Kelly since the email came out," he answered. "And so she was not given the opportunity to explain to me why she lied because it was so obvious that she had. And I'm, quite frankly, not interested in the explanation at the moment."

Not interested in the explanation?...

And...we were back live this week on the KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast for our first show of the new year.

And it wasn't a moment too soon for today's breaking Chris Christie BridgeGate blockbuster and our coverage of the Fox 'News'-ification of CBS News following yet another failure on Sunday by 60 Minutes.

Also, the latest breaking news on marriage equality in Utah, my personal Obamacare "nightmare", Desi Doyen with a chilling Green News Report and loads of great callers!

It's good to be back. Hope you'll agree...

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx 58 mins]...

Prepping for today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio, and may touch on this story a bit more then, or later as it continues to explode.

Either way, it's one that, despite being largely ignored by the D.C. media originally, seemed to have legs when it quietly emerged a couple of months back.

Today's blockbuster by Shawn Boburg in The Record, including tons of documents (emails and texts between the conspirators), almost ensures those legs. The question is now, as it has been from the jump, how NJ Gov. Chris Christie, a 2016 Presidential Republican fave, handles it. Oh, and if criminal charges --- even federal criminal charges, since this ultimately affected interstate commerce --- will emerge.

To date --- seemingly forgetting the old "it's not the crime, it's the coverup" mantra --- Christie's handled it very poorly. He's spent weeks denying any foreknowledge of the several-days closure of several lanes of the George Washington Bridge (the world's busiest) last September as part of an apparent (now pretty much confirmed) political payback scheme against Democratic Fort Lee, NJ Mayor Mike Sokolich. His response, to date, has largely been to belittle questions and reporters and officials who've asked about it. He may have one more chance to save himself if he acts quickly now and fires a whole bunch of people, and comes clean on everything he knows. But if he knows more than he's letting on so far (as is likely the case), he may be watching 2016 --- where he coulda been a contender --- go down the drain.

Here's the lede of Boburg's story. And no, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" --- "Got it", are not lines from The Sopranos. They are actually lines from this actual, now-documented, scandal...

It must be nice to be the king and get to decide who does and doesn't get to vote for (or against) you and your friends, just like the King Governor of Iowa...

The President of CBS News is David Rhodes. He was hired in February 2011. He was formerly the Vice President of News at Fox "News".

Again, the current President of CBS News was formerly the VP of News at Fox "News".

According to his bio posted at CBS: "Rhodes began his career as a Production Assistant at the newly-launched Fox News Channel in 1996, where he later became Vice President of News. At the network he managed coverage of three presidential elections, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, hurricanes including Katrina, and was the channel's Assignment Manager on the news desk the morning of September 11, 2001."

That means, as The Nation's Greg Mitchell pointed out at the height of the recent CBS News/60 Minutes Benghazi report controversy (before CBS was finally forced to retract the entire fake story), that Rhodes "was the guy who worked hand-in-glove on the biased, often propagandistic, Fox 'coverage' of the run-up to the Iraq war, the 2000/2004/2008 elections, the Plame affair, the worst years in Iraq, and all other things Bush and Cheney, and so on."

Again, the guy who cut his teeth in the news business, beginning as a Production Assistant and working his way up to become VP at Fox "News", is now the President of CBS News.

That bears both highlighting and repeating as many have been asking, once again, over the past 24 hours, "What's the Matter with 60 Minutes?" after yet another report last night that is being described as a "hit job" by some and, more charitably, as "puzzling" by others --- including by some who were interviewed both on-air and off for the once-great news magazine's bizarre segment titled "The Cleantech Crash"...

That's pretty much how it starts every winter now. The sentiment in the toon above is of a piece with Fox News tool Stuart Varney who offered this bit of genius to Fox' easily duped viewers last week...

The laughably absurd notion that a boat getting stuck in the ice in Antarctica is somehow a sign of "global cooling", as Varney actually argues, out loud, on television, is part of the now-annual "it's cold in winter, so there is no global warming!" nonsense that I suspect we'll be seeing much more of this week, thanks to the fact that it's cold in a large swath of the U.S. suddenly. More on that extreme cold in parts of the U.S., and why it's here --- and not in the Arctic, where it belongs --- in a moment.

But to help the scientifically-challenged (and, apparently, too many of my trollish Twitter followers) understand how ice in the Antarctic --- where there is ice --- is, in and of itself, a sign of nothing, Varney's televised idiocy notwithstanding, here's how one climate activist explained it in a Letter to the Editor at the Concord Monitor, in response to another LTE written by some dupe named Tom Sellew, who used the Monitor to forward the same, fact-free nonsense as Varney...

Still on the road (back full time as of next week), but thought this video from yesterday's The Lead with Jake Tapper on CNN was well worth popping here quickly, if you've yet to see it.

It's a fantastic and very lively debate about Edward Snowden and, perhaps most-interestingly, Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, between journalist Glenn Greenwald and Washington Post op-ed columnist Ruth Marcus. Greenwald describes Marcus here --- much to her apparent consternation --- as an Obama Administration "loyalist" for, among other things, what he sees as a double-standard for her calls for the prosecution of whistleblower Snowden, versus the seeming free pass she's willing to give to Administration officials such as Clapper who has admitted to misleading Congress with false testimony (aka Lying to Them). That would be a felony crime...if anybody bothered to prosecute it.

Greenwald is tenacious (as usual) in forcing Marcus to answer his question about whether Clapper should be prosecuted. For her part, she does a decent job of acquitting herself, sort of, even as the entire conversation --- and the two staked-out positions here --- really do help to illustrate, as Greenwald describes it, how "the D.C. media" and "people in Washington continuously make excuses for those in power when they break the law."

"That's what people in Washington do," he charges. "They would never call on someone like James Clapper, who got caught lying to Congress, which is a felony, to be prosecuted. They only pick on people who embarrass the government and the administration to which they are loyal, like Edward Snowden. It's not about the rule of law."

"People in Washington who are well-connected to the government like she is, do not believe that the law applies to them. They only believe that the law should be used to punish people and imprison people who don't have power in Washington or who expose the wrongdoing of American political officials," Greenwald argues. I'll let you watch to see how Marcus responds.

This one is very much worth watching in full. If you prefer, the complete text transcript is posted here...

We're still on the road, enjoying a rare bit of family time, but doing some housekeeping in the background.

As we told listeners of Green News Report before our holiday break, the GNR would be moving to a different server/feed after the first of the year. That feed is now up and good to go! Please adjust accordingly...

• ITUNES: If you were an iTunes subscriber to GNR (and why wouldn't you be?!), please re-subscribe now (its free) at our new iTunes subscription feed address.

• RSS: If you followed the GNR via a straight RSS feed, the new RSS feed address is now here.

If you listen via TuneIn or via Stitcher or one of our fine radio outlets, you needn't adjust a thing.

Also, one favor. Since we're moving addresses at iTunes, we've got to start our iTunes ratings/reviews from scratch there. If you've got a quick second to give us a good rating and/or leave a few nice words in an iTunes review, we'd very much appreciate it. That will help more folks learn about and hopefully hear the Green News Report via iTunes!

Finally, GNR listeners will likely very much appreciate our "Very Special BradCast Holiday Special" if you've yet to give it a listen. You'll hear both Desi and myself (in a number of different roles), and will most certainly appreciate some of the more subversive (and very GNR-related) messages in the last two segments of the special ("Buzz Edsel v. the Sun Stealers" and "Buzz Edsel and the Santa Surprise") in particular

Thanks! Happy holidays! And we'll be back with new GNRs and more next week!

Download it and curl on up to the radio hearth for some good old-fashioned, old-time radio fun (with a very BradCast twist!)

Breaking with tradition here, since we will be offering a rare pre-recorded BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio this week and next week (both Christmas Day and New Year's Day are on Wednesdays, when my show usually airs live), and since you may want to listen to it before going completely off grid over the holidays, I thought I'd release our Very Special BradCast Holiday Special here prior to its first KPFK airing at 3p PT/6p ET on Christmas Day this week.

For this very special special, we went back to some of our very oldest BradCasts, as originally aired in the 1930s and 1940s, and chose three different episodes of The BradCast Radio Theatre Players in performance of "Henry Ford's Science Fiction Theatre OF THE AIR!" In many cases, they are as timely today as when they first ran.

Some of you who are old enough, may remember when The BradCast was originally sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. For those who aren't, these episodes will hopefully be a delightful surprise, as they feature both Henry Ford himself, as well as myself, Desi Doyen and our old friend Paul Byrne who wrote all of the "Mighty Adventures of Buzz Edsel" episodes which you'll hear in this Very Special BradCast Holiday Special!

As the graphic above notes, the show includes Action! Adventure! And fun for the whole family! (Except Communists!) So curl on up to the old-time radio hearth and enjoy!...And a happy holidays to all...

• COMPLETE SPECIAL:

MP3 Download or listen online below (57 mins)...

• Or, if you prefer to listen to just one segment at a time:

PART 1: Intro & "Buzz Edsel versus the Giant Jupiterians!"
MP3 Download or listen online below (appx. 24 mins)...

PART 2: "Buzz Edsel versus the Sun-Stealers!"
MP3 Download or listen online below (appx. 16 mins)...

PART 3: "Buzz Edsel and the Santa Surprise!"
MP3 Download or listen online below (appx. 16 mins)...

Since we are no longer sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, thanks in no small part to radio like that featured above, please feel free to help us out, since it's only readers like you that allow us to even have a chance to keep doing all that we do here at The BRAD BLOG...

MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly $20 : $20.00 USD - monthly $50 : $50.00 USD - monthly $100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" also very welcome!)

[This article now cross-published by The Progressive...]

Well, that was easy. On Sunday, December 22, the day before the deadline for January 2014 insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA or "Obamacare"), I signed up without problem.

I used the California exchange website, it took me less than an hour, I'll be able to keep the same provider I had previously (and therefore, the same doctors), and I'll be saving almost exactly $300/month or $3,600/year.

Sounds good to me. I had no "glitches" along the way, at least to date, and the process was quite clear and simple.

Since I'm in fairly good health, and haven't used much of the plan that I've had for years, I opted for a marginally higher deductible in this new plan than I had previously, and the copays for most things will cost me about $15 more a piece. However, I could have had an almost identical plan, from the same provider (and many others) with the same deductible that I currently have, and still would have saved about $150/month. For that matter, every plan offered to me that I was able to compare side-by-side on the exchange site (there were many to chose from), would have been less expensive for me than my current individual plan which I've had for about 15 years.

My apologies for a rather boring Obamacare story. No drama. No outrage. It just seems to have worked as planned --- and will save me a lot of money. (Even if I have to cover my entire deductible next year, I'll still be saving money over what I had been paying to the same healthcare provider.)

While I still find no reason for private insurance companies to profit off of our illnesses --- and hope for a far more moral system of healthcare in this country in the near future (as we've discussed in countless articles at The BRAD BLOG over the years) --- Obamacare, in this case, seems to have worked just as it seems it was designed to.

So, for those who helped make at least that much happen, thank you. I'm better off than I was before Obamacare. So that, at least, is a bit of progress in the right direction.