I was on The Young Turks' panel show The Point this week. "Sexy Liberal" comedian (and one of your best bets on Twitter), John Fugelsang, was guest-hosting for Cenk Uygur and the show was largely election and voting related. So, as you can imagine, occasionally, I had an opinion or two.

Topics ranged from Rocky Anderson to Ron Paul to why elections are held on Tuesday and if they still should be, among other things. The other panelists (both Right-leaning) included PJTV's Alexis Garcia and comedian Avi Liberman. Enjoy!...

UPDATE 3/2/12, 9:40am PT: "The Amazing Atheist's" legion of fans (yes, he's some sort of YouTube star, as noted during the show) are furious with me, apparently, for my remarks directed towards TAA's comments in his video clip as seen during the show above. They have taken to YouTube comments to express their derision, including many on my lack of understanding of our system of democracy, etc, etc. BTW, to be fair, since I didn't get to specifically answer the Electoral College question during the panel discussion, and otherwise wasn't able to fully expound on my third-party thoughts there (and neither was TAA able to respond directly at all to any of our thoughts, due to the way the format works on The Point), I've let TAA, as well as the The Young Turks folks know that I'm more than happy to go one-on-one with TAA and his legion of followers live, anytime, if they are ever interested and feel like hosting such an affair.

On the day that news of Sen. Ted Kennedy's death hit after decades of service to his nation, Andrew Breitbart took to Twitter to call him a "duplicitous bastard," "a prick," and, "a special pile of human excrement."

Breitbart died here in Los Angeles last night, reportedly of "natural causes," sometime after midnight. He leaves behind a wife and four children. He was 43.

His legacy will speak for itself. It need not be embellished. Though, undoubtedly, it will be. Just not by us. We don't do that here.

We've covered his work honestly, accurately and fairly over the years in more articles than we care to remember and certainly more than we cared to write. It was a courtesy he did not reciprocate. Each time we wrote about him or even spoke of him, it was reluctantly, as it is today. Our interest in Breitbart was never in him, no matter his, or his followers, misguided beliefs to the contrary. Our interest was only in the failures of the mainstream corporate media that he, ironically enough, helped to highlight, and in our hopes of standing up for those he'd harmed.

While pretending to point out "liberal media" bias, what Breitbart ultimately served to do was highlight the corporate media's cowardice, laziness and penchant for trusting in scoundrels. Oddly, that may have been exactly what he wanted to do --- just not in the way he had hoped...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below! Enjoy 'em!]

Mike has the night off! So we're back tonight guest-hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show! And it's primary night in MI and AZ and we'll have not one, but two Presidential candidates as guests tonight!

We'll be BradCasting, as usual, LIVE from 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG, as usual, while we are on the air. Please stop by and join the fun while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Scheduled tonight (so far):

• MI & AZ PRIMARY RESULTS, or what they are reported to be, anyway. Also, just some of the reasons why you should be concerned that those reported results may not be what they are reported to be!
• GOV. BUDDY ROEMER, who is on GOP Presidential ballot both MI & AZ tonight, but who has recently left the party for a Reform Party candidacy and a run for the Americans Elect nomination.
• FRED KARGER, who is on the GOP Presidential ballot in MI and, unlike Roemer, still a member of the party for some reason. He's also the first openly gay Presidential candidate and the guy who alerted the world to Mitt Romney's apparent voter fraud in MA!
• PLUS! Depending on how MI and AZ is looking, some additional, last minute guests; lost op-scan votes in NY; Indiana's GOP Sec. of State getting off scot-free for voter fraud; "Webster's Follies" in Maine; no dead voters in SC; criminal probe closing in on Scott Walker in WI; and more you need to know about! Along with your phone calls over your public airwaves at 877-520-1150 and your tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and also on SiriusXM Ch. 127. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate KPTR 1450 in Palm Springs or at WhiteRose Society or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Maybe someone had a bit too much caffeine today. Well, in any case, it led to a pretty high energy show! And lots of circus music! You can check it all out now for yourself, sans commercials, in the high-octane archives now posted below. Enjoy!...

Tomorrow (Tuesday), there's yet another "make-or-break" set of Primaries for the GOP establishment's preferred front-runner Mitt Romney in both Arizona and his home-state of Michigan. While pre-election polls suggest Romney's the run-away favorite in AZ, he reportedly has only a marginal lead in MI. Should he lose that state tomorrow, his party, and their nomination process, could well descend into complete chaos (even more so than it already is.)

But here's the good news for Election Integrity fans keeping an eye on the race track for tomorrow's horse race: Both Arizona and Michigan allow all voters to vote on paper ballots at the polling place if they wish. So there's actually something to count that reflects the voters' intent.

The bad news: Rather than count those ballots, the states will run them through oft-failed, easily-manipulated optical-scan computer systems and report whatever it is that the computers announce as "the results."

While many Americans mistakenly place faith in these systems, a report in today's New York Daily News illustrates --- yet again --- how foolhardy that is. And this one is a doozy (yes, yet another one)...

My full story on this is at Salon today. But, here's the skinny.

It looks like Indiana's now-former Republican Sec. of State, Charlie White, who was found guilty of three voter fraud felonies and three other felonies early this month, has now been sentenced.

And it also looks like the old adage --- It's Okay If You're a Republican (IOKIYAR) --- continues to ring true in the Hoosier State. Despite being the top election official in the very first state in the union to institute disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restrictions, Charlie White has gotten off with a slap on the wrist, essentially, for three intentional voter fraud felonies, and the three others he was found guilty of as well.

His sentencing hearing was held last week. He pretended to be contrite before the judge (unlike when he appeared days earlier on Fox "News"), so it turns out he'll serve just one year in home detention for all of his crimes. The sentencing, naturally, has left him "elated."

The fates of other, less Republican, less high-ranking folks however, such as those who were prosecuted with the full force of the federal government during the George W. Bush Administration's unprecedented, if failed attempt to ferret out "voter fraud" crimes, were not quite as lucky. Unfortunately, they were used as fodder to help Republicans push for those polling place Photo ID laws (which would have failed to deter either them or White from committing voter fraud) by Bush's wholly politicized Dept. of Justice.

For folks like Wisconsin's Kimberly Prude and Florida's Usman Ali, to name just two examples of those who were caught in that buzz-saw, and who each committed far less egregious --- far far far less egregious --- crimes than those intentionally committed by White, the legal system was not nearly as kind.

Prude, who tried to rescind her own absentee vote before the 2004 election, immediately after learning from her probation officer that she was not allowed to vote --- despite never having served time in jail and being on felony probation for having passed a bad check four years earlier --- was forced to serve more than a year in prison. Ali, who never even voted at all, had it even worse. He was deported to Pakistan where he hadn't live in more than 10 years, destroying his life in this country for not just himself, but for his American wife and daughter as well.

I tell the whole story --- of White's virtually scot-free sentencing, as compared to Prude's and Ali's --- in my story today at Salon. Please give it a read.

As you might expect, the moral, once again, is: IOKIYAR.

I actually didn't mean this to be a commercial. I was simply going to share Mike Malloy's brief "Podcast Trivia" question from last Friday night's show since I found it so hilarious and a classic example of why a free world needs Mike Malloy.

In grabbing it from the archives to post the segment here, I also heard his earlier plea for folks to consider subscribing to the Mike Malloy Show podcasts to help the show continue to stay on the air. So I've tacked that to the front of the clip I'd planned to run here below.

I hope you will consider subscribing, if only as a way to help support Progressive Radio over our public airwaves, since those airwaves have been, by and large, "bought" up by mega-corporations who have removed all true market competition from them (here's just one recent, appalling example), and we have a government either too cowardly or too corrupt to protect them for its citizenry.

So it's up to folks like you and me to do whatever we can. Thanks in advance for your help!

And now, here's the clip that had me LOL'ing on the way home from dinner last Friday night, along with the quick plea from Malloy added to the top. Don't worry. The whole thing is barely four minutes long...

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a regular guest host for the Mike Malloy Show, and will be filling in once again this Tuesday night (9p-Mid ET), on the night of the Michigan and Arizona primaries. If the gods are with us, I'll have not one, but two different Presidential candidates as my guests that night! So I hope you'll tune in! As ever, we'll have streaming audio links (and a live chat room) during showtime right here at The BRAD BLOG, if you're not lucky enough to live in a town where you can hear Mike Malloy, for free, over our public airwaves (or haven't chosen to pay money to hear him on SiriusXM's channel 127.)

[Hat-tip @BrookeJarvis on the Twitters.]

Well, golly, who coulda seen this coming? And I suspect it's just the beginning...

There were other similar stories Tuesday, during the first full roll-out of the Wisconsin GOP's new anti-voter law, passed disingenuously under the guise of curbing "voter fraud". And Tuesday's was just a tiny election. For example, this from Isthmus' The Daily Page...

While the GOP and its operatives have been on a tear over the last year (and many more), falsely claiming an epidemic of Democratic "voter fraud" meriting the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of legal (and mostly Democratic) voters through polling place Photo ID restriction laws in order stop it, the recent spate of actual voter fraud by high profile Republicans --- both alleged-with-much-evidence and actually-proven-in-a-court-of-law --- continues apace.

The latest high-profile Republican to join the ranks of apparent voter fraud felons is Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana. Like Republican Sec. of State Charlie White, who was found guilty of three counts of felony voter fraud (and three other felonies) earlier this month, Lugar hails from Indiana, the very first state in the nation, ironically enough, to implement voter suppressing polling place Photo ID laws in 2008.

And, like White, those draconian laws did absolutely nothing to stop Lugar from apparently committing voter fraud under the law, since the only type of voter fraud potentially deterred by polling place Photo ID laws are the incredibly rare cases of in-person polling place impersonation. Where voter fraud occurs to any measurable extent, it is in cases like Lugar's, White's, and all of the GOP superstars we'll remind you of again below.

The allegations against Lugar, who has been registered to vote at a house he has not lived in since 1977, were detailed quickly Tuesday night on the Rachel Maddow Show. A complaint against Lugar has been filed by a group of Indiana "Tea Partiers" challenging his eligibility for office, as publicized last week by Lugar's primary opponent in the 2012 election, Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock.

Maddow's report, embedded below, was the prelude to her interview with independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders is one of four non-Republican U.S. Senators who have now requested a study by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the problem of "voter fraud" in this nation, particularly in the 14 states where Republican legislatures have recently passed polling place Photo ID restrictions under the pretense of stopping it. If that study finds what all of the other legitimate ones have found to date, we'll learn yet again how extraordinarily rare in-person voter fraud is and, at the same time, how many thousands and/or millions of Americans stand to be disenfranchised by the very laws that Republicans pretend are meant to deter it.

Here's her report...

And, by way of service to those who may yet to have noticed, here again is an update of our quick summary of the recent (and quickly growing!) spate of serious fraud allegations and convictions of a number of very high-profile Republicans other than Lugar. The list, please note, also includes several of this year's GOP candidates currently vying for the party's nomination for President of the United States...

Last week was a bad week to be Republican con-man Andrew Breitbart. But, really, what week isn't?

First there was his embarrassing, angry, drunken, video-taped "stop raping people" bender outside of CPAC, followed by his sober, but completely debunked, attempts to justify it all on the morning after.

And now comes this...

See Courthouse News Service for the rest of the details.

You'll recall the Rightwing race-baiting hoaxster Breitbart published a deceptively edited video of Sherrod from a 2010 speech at an NAACP event, which, he claimed, included a "racist tale" that provided proof that "this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions."

After the full context of the video became known, and that she was actually relating a story from which she had learned a lesson decades earlier, Breitbart continued lying about it, claiming he had only charged racism among the NAACP, not Sherrod. He claimed the short video clip offered evidence that they, not she, was racist, despite the quotes from his article, and the headline which is still: "Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism-2010".

He continues to tell the same lie about it all to this day, even as he faces Sherrod's lawsuit, and did so again as recently as last week during an interview with Cenk Uyger on The Young Turks on Current TV.

Breitbart's Sherrod deception (see Media Matters' complete timeline here) resulted in her firing by the White House which, as they similarly did in the ACORN case, failed to review the full context of the deceptively presented material before tossing her under the bus and forcing her to resign. The White House eventually apologized and asked her to come back. She declined and then filed her defamation suit against Breitbart. They never made good, however, on having signed the federal bill that eventually destroyed ACORN, the four-decade old community organization which legally registered millions of low- and middle-income voters to vote, legally helped them receive loans to purchase houses, and fought back, for years, against the very predatory lending practices by the vulture capitalists who eventually tanked the global economy.

Breitbart's then employee, the now convicted federal criminal James O'Keefe is still battling a lawsuit by an ACORN worker who was inappropriately terminated after Breitbart published O'Keefe's "severely edited" videos of him and other ACORN workers (none of whom, as 5 or so different independent investigations have all determined, committed any crimes.) As we reported last September, Breitbart may very well be pulled into that lawsuit as a defendant as well, as the case continues to move forward.

Yes, it's a bad year --- actually, lifetime --- to be Andrew Breitbart.

It was "standing room only" in the combined supercaucus in Washington County, Maine today, according to the Bangor Daily News. The paper reports "Ron Paul scores big wins in Hancock and Washington counties," the two counties which had yet to hold all of their caucuses before Maine's hapless, attempted vote suppressor and state GOP Chair Charlie Webster prematurely announced Mitt Romney the "winner" of the state caucuses by just 194 votes one week ago tonight.

But, according to both the paper's tallies and the state party's, Paul's pickups today were not enough to top Romney, as one more town has yet to caucus (Castine is currently scheduled for March 3), and as revised results, posted by the state GOP late last night, continue to be scrutinized...

[Late tonight, after promising not to do so, and then changing their minds under pressure, the Maine GOP has finally released updated results. Those new results are linked and examined in the UPDATE now added to the bottom of this article.]

"The fight for Maine is far from over," says Cincinnati's Fox19 reporter Ben Swann, as he reported new numbers for Maine's 2012 GOP Caucuses last night.

The State's GOP Chairman Charlie Webster had announced last Saturday night that Mitt Romney had won Maine's caucuses by just 194 votes over Ron Paul. But, as we've been reporting, several counties had yet to even cast their votes at that time and, as we detailed in a follow-up report last night, the results of caucuses in dozens of towns across the state had simply been zeroed out in the state GOP's officially published results [PDF].

A firestorm of criticism directed towards the hapless Webster --- who had unsuccessfully fought last year to keep legal student voters in the state from being able to cast their legal vote at all, under the fraudulent guise that they were committing "voter fraud" --- has resulted in his backtracking on just about everything, including his own previous attempt to keep results from caucuses yet to be held from being included in the final results at all.

Swann says that he was able to ascertain results from several of the caucuses that had been reported by the GOP on Saturday as showing no votes at all having been cast. That, despite caucuses having been held in many of those towns last week, several of them a full week before Webster's apparent attempt to disenfranchise voters and steal the election for Romney last Saturday night.

Romney's lead, before the remaining 2 of 16 Maine counties vote tomorrow has now shrunk from 194 votes to just 157, according to new results obtained by Swann...

[Now UPDATED TWICE with new details at bottom of article.]

It figures. The one time we're on the road and unable to keep up with things on a minute-by-minute basis, a major election would be stolen outright. And there's not a disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restriction in the world that could have done a thing to stop the thieves.

Despite the reputation The BRAD BLOG has gained in some quarters over the years, I don't believe we have ever outright declared an election as "stolen." That has now changed as the Republican Party of Maine has blatantly stolen the 2012 GOP Caucuses in their state for Mitt Romney, as we detailed yesterday.

That fact is just the latest data point in a remarkable and rapidly expanding spate of GOP election fraud by very high profile Republicans across the nation, as we also detailed in yesterday's report.

The question now: Can it be "stolen back"?

Happily, even though we're on the road, the issue is being covered very well this time around by Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. Her coverage last night honed in on a few additional points in this remarkable story, underscoring the blatant theft and breathtaking hypocrisy in the entire embarrassing, if enlightening, affair.

Among the points she expanded on last night (several of which we'd flagged in our coverage yesterday): the call by a Maine county Republican committee for the immediate removal of the shameless and breathtakingly dishonest state GOP Chair Charlie Webster and how the state party leadership not only seems to have lied to voters about results from postponed caucuses to be held this Saturday in Washington County, but how new evidence from Waldo County suggests the party may have simply just made up "results" out of whole cloth --- and then tried to keep those fake numbers a secret from the public in order to award the race to Mitt Romney by 194 votes over Ron Paul.

All of that, remember, before an entire county --- Washington County, one of just 16 in the entire state --- has even managed to hold their caucuses and vote at all in the statewide contest.

This is remarkable stuff and perhaps made more remarkable by the fact that this isn't currently at the top of every news outlet in the nation...

The state GOP itself has stolen the state for Mitt Romney in Maine's 2012 Caucuses. Period.

Might Romney be the actual winner once all votes are actually cast and counted? Perhaps. But the fact is, the Maine Republican Party has purposely blocked that from happening and the apparent loser in all of this --- beside the voters of Maine --- is Congressman Ron Paul who, according to the official results reported by the state GOP last Saturday night, "lost" to Romney by just 194 votes.

Adding to the outrage, the election fraud was perpetrated by the Chairman of the state's Republican Party, Charlie Webster.

Readers of The BRAD BLOG may well remember Webster as the man who spent months attempting to wholesale disenfranchise thousands of legal student voters in the state of Maine, on the entirely fraudulent basis that they were committing "voter fraud" because they were out-of-state students who, living in Maine and going to school there most of the year, should be, nonetheless, barred from voting there.

Federal law clearly states otherwise, allowing such students to vote in Maine. And even the Sec. of State there, Republican Charles E. Summers, Jr., who investigated Webster's "evidence" for his case, found it to be entirely baseless. (Though that didn't keep Summers himself from sending threatening letters to many of those perfectly legal student voters, in apparent hopes of intimidating them into not casting their votes in The Pine Tree State.)

While Webster was pretending that massive voter fraud was occurring in Maine, he has now, himself committed a massive case of election fraud by announcing the winner of last week's Maine Caucuses as Mitt Romney despite his full knowledge that voters in at least three different counties have been entirely disenfranchised, with their votes not included in his "final" results. Many of those voters haven't even been allowed to cast their votes yet at all.

Last Saturday Night, the scheduled end of the week long state caucuses, Webster announced before live television cameras with much fanfare: "I'm now gonna announce the winner of the Maine GOP poll. And that winner is Mitt Romney."

But Webster was lying, and committing a massive act of knowing election fraud in the process as he made his announcement. His deceptive act was simply the latest in a grotesque and growing series of election fraud acts carried out this year by high-level GOP personalities and officials, including confirmed and alleged fraud by several of the party's Presidential contenders...

On Tuesday, we dismantled the latest absurd attempt by pretend journalist and real federal criminal James O'Keefe to demonstrate the rampant "voter fraud" that he and his Republican Party claim to be so pervasive in these United States so as to require polling place Photo ID restrictions guaranteed to prevent little, if any, voter fraud at all, while serving to deter hundreds of thousands of legal (disproportionately Democratic-leaning) voters from being able to even cast their legal vote on Election Day.

We noted that O'Keefe's silly new video purporting to show his proudly unnamed and unseen co-conspirators being told that no ID is necessary to register to vote via third party application is extraordinarily misleading at best, as it fails to note that all newly registered voters who failed to register in person are already required --- by federal law --- to show ID before voting at the polls for the first time. We did concede, however, that those O'Keefe's band of merry pranksters might fraudulently register could, potentially, go on to commit voter fraud via absentee ballot (if they wished to risk the high penalties of a felony). However, as we pointed out, the polling place Photo ID restrictions O'Keefe and his GOP friends are arguing for with his latest series of "Voter Fraud Investigation" silly propaganda videos, would do nothing to prevent absentee voter fraud.

It appears, however, in fact we may have given O'Keefe far too much credit in even conceding that much, as a followup article on our report elsewhere has since revealed.

Yesterday, Mediaite's Tommy Christopher cited our short-order dismantling of O'Keefe's latest ruse and that I had explained in the piece that I'm "currently on the road and don’t have enough time for [O'Keefe's] idiocy as is."

So Christopher did us the favor of picking up the ball at the point, humorously noting "so I generously made time for this idiocy, and found out that even O’Keefe’s absentee scenario is false"....