I guess Desi Doyen, co-host and managing editor of The BRAD BLOG's Green News Report, was such a smash in her TYT guest hosting debut on Thursday with regular host Ana Kasparian, they just had to have her back again on Friday to guest host again, this time with The Young Turks' 'Top Turk', Cenk Uygur.

Of course, it's just my opinion, and I suspect I'm biased, but, frankly, she killed.

See the evidence and judge for yourself in a few clips posted by The Turks below, on the Rightwing blaming Obama for CO's wildfires (seriously), the banning of "sea level rise" by VA and NC legislatures and...wait for it...talking urinal cakes. Yes. Talking urinal cakes...

In completely related news...Yesterday, the NYTimes' statistical wunderkind Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight tweeted: "Our model currently projects ... an exact tie in Florida. #SignsOfMayanApocalypse".

Little wonder then that Florida's Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Sec. of State Ken Detzner are more than happy to blatantly mislead the public, the media and the federal court system, as The BRAD BLOG detailed exclusively last week, about their attempted purge of suspected "non-citizens" from the voting rolls.

And it's similarly no surprise that, as University of Florida political scientist and founder of ElectionSmith, Dr. Daniel A. Smith detailed on Friday, the "Failed Florida Secretary of State's Voter Purge" has, to date, earned a 98.4% failure rate in its initial list of 2,625 voters identified as "potential non-citizens."

That, of course, is if you take the Sec. of State's word for it that the 41 registered voters they claim to have confirmed as "non-citizens" actually are. (How many of them even knew they were registered or actually ever voted is another question.) To date, the state has provided no actual evidence to verify those 41 non-citizens voters they say they've identified. And given both Scott and Detzner's documented track record of blatant dishonesty, we see no reason to give either of them the benefit of the doubt.

Breaking from today's Irish Times...

To help put those costs in perspective, 55 million Euro --- the cost of the systems to the state of Ireland to date --- is about $69.5 million.

In this country, the U.S. wasted almost $4 billion (with a "b"), via the Help American Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, on the very same type of worthless, unreliable, easily hacked machines that the Irish are smart enough to get rid of entirely...

Clearly, those "Turks" are just trying to steal her away from us!

Once again, the delightful Desi Doyen, co-host and managing editor of The BRAD BLOG's Green News Report was sitting in to guest host on The Young Turks yesterday along with longtime TYTer, Ana Kasparian.

They were both joined in the first hour, devoted to yesterday's stunning Supreme Court health care ruling, by Current TV's Jacki Schechner (an expert in health care legislation issues). The second hour, it was just Desi and Ana.

(By the way, Des will once again be sitting in today, Friday, co-hosting along with TYT top dog Cenk Uygur during the 4p-5p ET / 1p-2p PT hour. I'll try to remember to post the LIVE FEED here at The BRAD BLOG, but either way you can watch the full hour live at TheYoungTurks.com.)

A bunch of highlights from yesterday's two hours, on a bunch of topics covered --- from the health care ruling, to the RW push to close the last abortion clinic in Mississippi, to eating bugs to save the world, to new news on the Miami 'zombie' who tried to eat a guy's face --- all follow below. Enjoy!...

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL-19) joined me live on today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio to discuss two things:

1) Our exclusive from earlier this week on FL Gov. Rick Scott's voter purge/DHS database deception (an issue which Deutch has been raising hell about for several weeks) and 2) His OCCUPIED Amendment to get corporate money the hell out of our electoral system, particularly in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Montana's 100-year old anti-corruption law on Monday.

I was delighted to hear the Congressman was nearly as furious about both as I was. He also confirmed that nobody has been able to verify the "100 or so" alleged "non-citizens" that Scott says have been found on the rolls (out of 182,000 identified in the initial purge list and out of 11.2 million voters), and also that there are still three FL counties --- Lee, Collier and Bay --- where the Supervisors of Elections may still be carrying out the faulty and disenfranchising systematic purge.

My rant explaining Scott's scam kicks off the show, before Deutch then joins us. Then, Desi Doyen joins us with the latest Green News Report and we take a couple of quick amusing calls.

Oh, and though I mentioned it at the top of the show, I forgot to reiterate it again at the end of the show, so I'll do so now: FL Gov. Rick Scott, FL Secretary of State Ken Detzner and/or their spokesmen were invited to appear on the show to offer their response to our Monday exposé. They declined to even respond to the invitation.

Download MP3 or listen online below...

I was on Thom Hartmann's Big Picture yesterday to discuss The BRAD BLOG's special exclusive report on Monday in which counselor Canning and I detailed how Gov. Rick Scott (R) and the state of Florida is attempting to deceive the media, the public, and apparently even the federal court system about this year's attempted voter purge in the Sunshine State. The Dept. of Justice has filed suit alleging that the systematic removal of voters within 90 days before Florida's federal primary is a violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

As documented in our investigative report, claims being made by Scott, his Sec. of State Ken Detzner and their surrogates in a recent media blitz, charging that the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security was purposely restricting them from access to a federal immigration database in order to keep the state from using it, appear to be baseless. FL had hoped to use the SAVE database to help purge some 182,000 "potential non-citizen" voters they claim are on the rolls.

But FL's claims (which is used to underscore a dark conspiracy the actions of the federal government are all being done to enhance President Obama's re-election prospects), are belied by documented email concessions from the FL Dept. of State's Asst. General Counsel Maria Matthews who acknowledged, as long ago as October of 2011, that the state simply didn't have the unique numeric identifiers required by DHS to check those "suspected non-citizens" against their immigration and citizenship database.

Here's my conversation with Hartmann last night about our story...

For more on all of the above, see our original investigative report, including email documentation from public records requests, etc., revealing Florida's attempted deception. We have now also added a Timeline page for the entire story right here.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I will be discussing all of the above and more with Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL-19) on my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show today (Wednesday) at 6p ET/3p PT. You can listen live at http://KPFK.org/listen-live.html.

Props to CNN's Soledad O'Brien for her dogged attempt to get an actual answer from Romney's Senior Advisor (and former Commerce Secretary) Carlos Gutierrez as to whether the presumptive GOP nominee supports Arizona's controversial "papers please" law, in light of yesterday's SCOTUS ruling striking down most of the law, but allowing the most controversial part of it to stand (for now.)

If the rest of the media insisted on actual answers from politicians and their surrogates before moving on (talking to you David Gregory), we might actually move the ball forward occasionally.

For the record, Romney has previously called AZ's SB1070, the law that was largely struck down yesterday, a "model" for the nation. But I guess we all get to pretend he didn't for a while, as he tries to Etch-a-Sketch his way out of the extremist positions he staked out in hopes of winning the GOP primaries.

[Hat-tip TPM]

-Special Report by Brad Friedman and Ernest A. Canning, The BRAD BLOG

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), his recently appointed Secretary of State Ken Detzner (R), and their surrogates are attempting to deceive the media, the public, and possibly even the federal court system about their state's effort to use a federal immigration database as part of a state program that could result in the purge up to 182,000 registered voters who, the state says, are "potential non-citizens".

A review of public documents and internal emails obtained by The BRAD BLOG on the heels of a federal lawsuit filed against the state last week by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) --- charging that Florida's attempted purge of voter rolls violates federal law --- reveals that claims being repeatedly made by the Florida officials about both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and DoJ are disingenuous at best.

Admissions made to DHS officials on at least two occasions, by a high-ranking attorney at the FL Dept. of State (FDOS), undermine the public assertions of both Scott and Detzner, who each claim that the federal government is purposely withholding access to a federal immigration database so that it cannot be used for scrubbing illegal voters off the state rolls.

The false allegation that the DHS has "refused" to provide access to the database, so as to prevent the state from lawfully removing illegally registered non-citizen voters, was also repeated in Florida's own federal complaint, which it recently filed against DHS.

In offering this deceptive claim, Scott and Detzner are knowingly inflaming an unsubstantiated conspiratorial scheme that the Obama Administration is working to keep illegal voters on the rolls in order to enhance the President's 2012 election prospects.

The first-hand evidence reviewed by The BRAD BLOG, obtained via public records requests under Florida's Sunshine Act, reveals that both Scott and Detzner are advancing the "refused access" canard --- echoed by both the Rightwing and non-Rightwing media --- in order to confuse the public and obscure the reality that the state's controversial purge could potentially disenfranchise thousands of perfectly legal citizen voters...

So much for states' rights from the so-called "conservative" U.S. Supreme Court --- as if 2000's Bush v. Gore didn't already tell you that they, like other "small government Conservatives", were largely full of shit when making that pretend claim...only when convenient to their policy goals, of course...

You can read more about the courageous decision earlier this year by the Montana Supreme Court --- the decision struck down today by SCOTUS --- in Ernie Canning's coverage from January. In that case, even the dissenting MT Justice found the U.S. Supreme Court's "entire concept" of corporate personhood to be "offensive."

"Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people --- human beings --- to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creations of government. ... Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons," wrote the dissenting Justice James C. Nelson who, clearly, disagreed with Citizens United, but dissented in the MT case because he believed --- as SCOTUS affirmed today --- that they, not states, can decide how campaign finance will or won't work for every state in the entire nation.

The 5-4 Citizens United majority has essentially told Montana --- and every other state in the union --- that they may not run their own elections as they wish. Even though Justice Anthony Kennedy had written for the majority in that case that "independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption," the high court today decided not to review the record of corruption --- essentially, mining companies buying up the entire state legislature in MT back at the turn of the 20th century --- which gave rise to the now-dead Montana law.

In Justice Stephen Breyer's dissenting opinion of today's summary reversal (made without even hearing oral arguments), he writes: "[E]ven if I were to accept Citizens United, this Court’s legal conclusion should not bar the Montana Supreme Court’s finding, made on the record before it, that independent expenditures by corporations did in fact lead to corruption or the appearance of corruption in Montana."

"Given the history and political landscape in Montana, that court concluded that the State had a compelling interest in limiting independent expenditures by corporations," Breyer wrote in the dissent (joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan). "Thus, Montana’s experience, like considerable experience elsewhere since the Court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubt on the Court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so."

The court's one paragraph summary reversal and Breyer's full dissent can both be read here [PDF].

Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org sends out the following notice this morning...

The full takedown notice is here. The "highly problematic" Accenture voter registration software --- used by TN, WI, PA, CO, KS and others --- is still posted here, as of now if you'd like to download it, poke around into some of the source code, and/or mirror it on your site.

Other than "crap-on-a-stick high-school sophomoric completely insecure [and] malfunctioning", Harris previously described the software this way: "This voter registration and voter history system has been widely criticized --- in Colorado, where it reportedly assigned voters who are Republicans as Democrats, and vice versa, and in Tennessee where it has been proven to lose voter histories."

On the heels of her smashing debut a few weeks ago guest hosting on the The Young Turks, our own Desi Doyen, co-host and Managing Editor of The BRAD BLOG's Green News Report is back with The Turks, this time on their hit panel discussion show The Point.

Most of the topics on this episode are a bit less political, and a bit more cultural, than usual (perhaps because the scheduled Republican guest failed to show?), and include everything from jobs and the economy (with a cameo by Jerry Springer) to lying on online dating profiles and the perils of Reality TV. All in all, at least as enlightening as anything you'll get by watching David Gregory on a Sunday...

The AP report is not as encouraging as it initially appears...

But don't get too excited. You fans of Big Government --- the Biggest Government of All --- will likely be back in business and killing your fellow U.S. citizens again soon...

So, remember way back in the not-so-cold month of January when, on the night of the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses the GOP announced Mitt Romney as the "winner"? And then, a couple of days later when, thanks to publicly counted hand-marked paper ballots used by the GOP for their own caucuses across the entire state, a Ron Paul supporter was able to come forward to point out that the GOP had reported inaccurate Caucus Night tallies on their website? And then, several weeks later when the GOP was forced to admit their previously reported tallies were indeed wrong, and the citizens who actually witnessed the counting on Caucus Night with their own eyes were right and that, in fact, Santorum, not Romney had actually received the most votes?

Well, funny thing. Over the weekend, at the Iowa GOP State Convention, neither Santorum nor Romney was the winner. The winner of the state of Iowa --- at least the man who will have, by far, the most delegates representing him at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August --- is Ron Paul. Thanks to Paul supporters turning out in droves at district, county and then the state convention, Paul will have 21 of the state's 25 delegates at the RNC in August. And Iowa is not the only state where that has been happening.

Last week while I was guest hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show, I interviewed Presidential historian, author and Ron Paul Campaign Senior Advisor Doug Wead about the fascinating strategy, and extraordinary, even violent push-back (see here and here for just two examples caught on video) from the GOP establishment against the Ronulans turning out in democratic support of their candidate at these conventions. And almost all of it seems to be quietly happening well below the MSM radar at GOP state convention after GOP state convention.

If you missed the interview last week, I ran the bulk of it again yesterday (slightly shortened) on my KPFK/Pacifica show here in Los Angeles. Afterwards a ton of callers phoned in --- from all sorts of political viewpoints --- in response.

Wead was coy in responding to my questions about what Paul's game is precisely, and he wouldn't answer directly when I pressed him (twice) as to whether Paul was still seeking the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination or something else entirely, but the conversation was often quite revealing --- particularly (and here I'm not quite sure Wead is reading Paul's supporters accurately), when he finally suggested that "the son also rises".

Give it a listen. I'd certainly welcome responses from all of you, Paul supporters or otherwise!

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

Perhaps we should call it the David Gregory Technique, since the dreadful Meet the Press host seems to use it, and little more, week in and week out during his usually useless interviews with public officials.

Here's how the David Gregory Technique works: Ask a public official for "your response to that charge?" Get that response. And then move on to the next question. No follow-up. No challenge. It's that simple. Just get their "response" on record --- like an in-person performance of the public official's already-published press release responding, either accurately or not, to the same issue.

Afterword, news consumers are no more informed or enlightened than before going in, other than to become familiar with the political talking points in play, whether they are based in fact or reality or not. Who knows?

Such was the treatment that Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) enjoyed last week from Michele Martin on the apparently ironically named TELL ME MORE program on National Public Radio concerning his spate of allegedly unlawful, attempted voter suppression programs in the Sunshine State. NBC's David Gregory couldn't have done it better himself...

Oh, noes! Someone prepare the fainting couch!

Some blogsite calling itself "Respect in Politics", which claims to be "nonpartisan" and "nonprofit", is simply light-headed with concern over what some disrespectful substitute radio talk show host said on the radio recently!

The site announces at the top of each page that "the lack of respect and civility" is "too frequent in politics and the media" and "needs to be addressed". Well, we agree with the general premise, of course, but only in the case where respect and civility have been earned, not merely granted.

For some unspecified reason, their courageously pseudonymous blogger "Mike888" seems to believe that both the late con-man and apparent-criminal Andrew Breitbart and the Republican Congress Members in the U.S. House of Representatives who continue to confound the idea of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, are somehow owed some sort of either respect or civility when they are discussed over our public airwaves.

So who is that disrespectful --- actually "crude", as they describe it --- substitute radio host who was so offensive in "criticizing the right"? Oh, my...it looks like that would be yours truly, naturally...