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

In the wake of 60 Minutes' bogus Benghazi report, starring an eye-witness who, as it turns out, appears to have completely lied about being there during the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound which resulted in the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel, rightwing reporter Lara Logan and her producer will be taking a "leave of absence" of unspecified length.

Via Michael Calderone at HuffPo...

See Calderone for the text of the memo from Fager, which includes the summary of the internal report by Fager's underling Al Ortiz, Executive Director of Standards and Practices at CBS News. Fager is both CBS News Chairman and the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes. Apparently, he has not required himself to take a leave of absence, even though, as Executive Producer, he is ultimately responsible for what goes on the air.

In the memo, Fager describes what happened as "a regrettable mistake"...

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I'd hate for this rather high-larious conversation to get lost. Aside from being hysterical funny, to me, anyway, it's also quite illustrative of how wingnuttery works these days.

Purposely disinformed boobs are given false information by Rightwing corporate charlatans to create an army of pawns and stooges all to ready to spread the disinformation. Those pawns and stooges occasionally show up in blog comments or at your Thanksgiving table, offer the misinformation they've been propagandized to believe, get called out on it with actual, independently verifiable facts, and, instead of responding with actual facts in kind, declare the entire thing "bullshit!" before running off with their disinformed tail between their heavily propagandized legs.

That was the precise model of my recent conversation with disinformed wingnut stooge "Greg" in BRAD BLOG comments last week, in response to a very short blog item which did little more than illustrate how Matt Drudge covers undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as if they were an invading Zombie Army coming to destroy America and Americans. (See the illustration I snipped from the Drudge Report last week above right.)

Here's how the embarrassing --- but, I fear, all too recognizable --- conversation went with "Greg". Pop up some popcorn, and enjoy. His final response, especially, makes it all worth while...

Let's keep this a secret from the U.S. corporate media, but, as Sy Mukherjee and Andrew Breiner note at ThinkProgress...

They go on to explain that analyst opinion remains mixed, at the moment, as to the extent of the Affordable Care Act's influence on the "remarkable slowdown in health spending" since the bill's passage in 2010, but that "savings from the ACA's hospital payment reforms" and "more efficient and collaborative care models" as "encouraged by Obamacare" are among the factors...

Let's end this week far better than it began

On Tuesday, Virginia state Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) was stabbed multiple times in his own home, by his son Gus who, having reportedly had a mental evaluation the day before, was not kept overnight, due to lack of bed space in western Virginia.

Gus shot himself to death that morning, after stabbing his father who was airlifted to the hospital in critical condition as of Tuesday night.

Today, Sen. Deeds was released from the hospital in "good" condition, and returned to Twitter to send this message his many supporters...

I am alive so must live. Some wounds won't heal. Your prayers and your friendship are important to me

— Creigh Deeds (@CreighDeeds) November 22, 2013

UPDATE 11/25/2013: Deeds was interviewed by the The Recorder today and blames the beauracracy of the local community services board for releasing his son from an emergency custody order for lack of a bed space just 13 hours before the tragedy occurred. Some local hospitals have said, since the incident, that they did have room, but were not contacted...

Oh, what fun. This, of course, is just one of the reasons why it's important that you help support and fund the work we do here at The BRAD BLOG. We're up against the unaccountable hoodlums and thugs like the far rightwing U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying organization in the world. So we must be doing something right.

And there is no tactic too dirty for the slimeballs at the Chamber, as we're reminded again in a new report by Gary Ruskin released Wednesday by the Institute of Public Accuracy titled "Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations" [PDF].

As Ruskin notes on page 22 of the new report...

Long time readers will recall the sleazy, likely criminal, $12 million 2011 scheme plotted by the mafia-like thugs at the U.S. Chamber targeting me, my family (who have nothing to do with my work), and other progressive organizations and activists who dared oppose their corporatist, anti-American agenda in even the slightest way. Their plot involved using tools developed by private government contractors (with taxpayer dollars) for the so-called "War on Terror", and turning them against private U.S. citizens for their corporate espionage benefit...

Think I just figured out why Republicans are scared to death!!! of "illegal aliens". Republicans read the Drudge Report. And where ever Drudge says "aliens", they see "ZOMBIES!" instead.

See this section from Drudge's homepage last night for instance...

Scary, eh? Lock your doors! They're coming for you next!

Sometimes it's a good idea to get a full explanation before these things become fodder in a contentious partisan legal election contest. So that's what we've tried to do. Happily, the General Registrar of Bedford County, VA was more than willing to help.

Last week, and the week before, The BRAD BLOG devoted quite a bit of coverage to the incredibly close Attorney General's race in Virginia. As of last week, the Democratic candidate Mark Herring was certified by the state's local voting jurisdictions (counties and cities), as the "winner" over Republican Mark Obenshain by just 164 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast.

The contest is, for now, in the hands of the State Board of Elections which will issue its own official official certification of results on November 25th, after which the candidate declared the "loser" is almost certain to ask for a "recount" and potentially file an election contest thereafter, depending on the outcome. (See the last section of this article for an explanation as to why we put quotes around the word "recount", especially in Virginia.)

During the week-long roller coaster canvass by jurisdictions across Virginia following the November 5th election, there were a number of minor adjustments to local tallies as county and city election officials checked and double-checked results printed by touch-screen and paper ballot optical-scan tabulation computers from Election Night and then adjudicated provisional ballots for tally and inclusion in the final results. While most of the adjustments made during the week following the election were relatively small, each was of great significance in a race this tight.

But there were three rather large changes to the results during the post-election canvass process --- two were in the Democratic strongholds of Fairfax County and the city of Richmond, and one was in heavily Republican Bedford County. All of the large tabulation adjustments were said to have been caused by various combinations of computer tabulator and human error.

Two of them, the ones which resulted in about 1,300 votes beginning picked up by the Democrat over his Republican rival in both Fairfax and Richmond, were covered and explained in the media in some detail. (See our coverage here of the discovery of the thousands of "missing" Fairfax votes and the eventual explanation the next day. The Richmond additions are described here.) The adjustments made during the canvass by heavily-Republican Bedford County, however, which resulted in a net pick-up of about 500 votes for Obenshain, received considerably less public explanation.

Given that all of these matters may be revisited once again in a "recount" --- and the inevitable legal challenges to go with it --- we thought it might be good to get the explanation for Obenshain's big vote pickup in Bedford County on the written record. Bedford's General Registrar Barbara Gunter was kind enough to reply to our queries last week on that point, offering her explanation for the known details of the computer and/or human errors that led to more than 700 votes in the AG's race being initially misreported on Election Night in Bedford County...

This story is horrific. It struck me even more so this morning, given that I had just been in contact with Virginia state Senator Creigh Deeds (D) last week on several occasions and had asked him to appear as my guest on the KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast.

Deeds is currently said to be in critical condition after being stabbed multiple times today in his own home, "in the head and torso," according to officials. His son Gus was found dead in the same home, the victim of "an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, adding the detail that the son "had been released Monday following a mental health evaluation performed under an emergency custody order." Joe St. George of CBS6 reports that Gus had withdrawn last month from William & Mary College.

"The son was evaluated Monday at Bath County hospital," Dennis Cropper, executive director of the Rockbridge County Community Services Board told the Times-Dispatch, "but was released because no psychiatric bed could be located across a wide area of western Virginia."

The best news that can be reported from all of this for now is that officials said at a noon ET news conference today that VA's 2009 Democratic Gubernatorial candidate was able to communicate with state police about the incident before he was airlifted to a medical facility.

I had been in touch with Deeds over the last week or two in the course of our in-depth coverage of the incredibly close VA Attorney General post-election tabulation...

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

Over the weekend, new Fox "News" lamestream media warrior Howard Kurtz was appropriately critical of the pathetic "apology" CBS' 60 Minutes offered for their bogus Benghazi report which was based entirely on a lying "witness" to the September 2012 attack. (The guy was never there, the story was completely made up.)

Fox doesn't seem to allow their videos to be embedded, but you can watch Kurtz' :97 second piece on "Why 60 Minutes apology isn't enough" right here.

While Kurtz is correct that CBS' "apology" was not nearly enough, and that the serious error requires a much more thorough investigation into and explanation for how Rightwing correspondent Lara Logan was so easily fooled by her source, and why nobody at 60 Minutes kept the false story from being aired in the first place, Kurtz completely fails to even mention one very important point. Fox "News" itself used the very same source for the basis of its own false narrative in its own series of misleading stories last year. Moreover, Fox, unlike CBS, has failed to even retract those similarly bogus reports, much less apology or investigate any of them...

From Brentin Mock of "Facing South", a publication of the non-profit Institute for Southern Studies...

Among those on the ballot earlier this month was Mount Gilead's Mayor Patty Almond, who is said to have had the support of the town's African-American community. In 2011, as Mock reports, Almond "lost" the mayoral race by just two votes, until it was discovered that "four black voters were denied ballots when their town residencies were challenged." A new election was eventually ordered by the State Board of Elections. Almond won the new election in 2012, but, thanks to the legal fight, did not take office until December of last year. So Almond served less than a year before her recent re-election contest, held on the same day that the Montgomery County Sheriff's office and four local police departments decided to "swarm" the tiny NC town...

The last graf from an AP article describing the plunge in spending by "outside" Rightwing groups, so far this year, on 2014 campaigns...

Just a reminder, as we've recently completed this phase anyway, of our in-depth Virginia Attorney General election tally coverage (with more to come, undoubtedly) and as the very real effects of climate change we've been warning about for five years via our Green News Report become more and more apparent: We are funded here by reader support. We rely on you to help us keep doing all that we do. So, as we head towards our 10th(!) anniversary in January, with some difficult decisions ahead for us as we try to figure out how to keep going, please consider making that decision a bit easier for us by donating today.

Better still, sign up to become a monthly sustaining supporter! It's easy, quick, and you'll be doing more to help than you can imagine. Yes, we really need your support if we are to continue into a second decade...

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Clear Channel's Premiere Networks has reversed course. After previously announcing they would end their relationship with her at the end of 2013, the nation's largest radio syndicator has decided to keep progressive radio talker Randi Rhodes on air into next year after all.

According to an email announcement with the subject line "Randi Rhodes Show Continues!", as sent to radio station affiliates that carry Rhodes this morning, Premiere has apologized for their previous announcement earlier this week. That announcement, first reported on Wednesday by Politico, indicated that they would not be renewing Rhodes' contract as of year's end.

"In a happy turn of events, we are pleased to announce that Premiere Networks will continue to produce and distribute The Randi Rhodes Show," reads the new email sent Friday morning by Premiere's Peter Tripi, Senior Vice President of Affiliate Relations.

"In an industry of constant change, it's a pleasure to provide good news about a talk talent we think so highly of," the email continues, before concluding with an apology. "We apologize for any inconvenience the previous announcement caused, but look forward to a very successful 2014 with The Randi Rhodes Show."

Phone calls to Tripi and another Premiere executive, seeking an explanation for the quick turnabout, were not immediately returned. The BRAD BLOG was first tipped off to Premiere's decision to keep Rhodes on the air late Thursday, by a station owner who had received a call from Premiere's Director of Affiliate Marketing, Kurt Kretzschmar...

On this week KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast I was joined by Heather Parton --- much better known as the great blogger "Digby" of Hullabaloo --- to discuss the complete collapse of CBS 60 Minutes' bogus Benghazi exclusive and their pathetic "correction". Moreover, we take a look at what Digby has uncovered about the apparent Rightwing, Fox "News"-like predilections of correspondent Lara Logan and how that (and a few other disturbing Fox "News" connections) resulted in Benghazi hoax disaster at the once-great CBS News.

Next, I bring everyone up to date on the insane roller coaster that has been the last week of the insanely close Virginia Attorney General's race and the surreal pitfalls to come in the likely "recount" and potential election contest thereafter.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report on the Super Typhoon Haiyan disaster in the Philippines, its connection to climate change and the new all-time low for global warming deniers in its wake...

Download MP3 or listen online below (appx 58 mins)...