Good news for Constitutional conservatives such as myself today in two out of three noteworthy court decisions in three separate courts, at least in regards to the rights of we, the people.

Let's start with the two good news items, both related to the Constitutional right to equal protection under the law, and then the not-so-good news item, the one out of Wisconsin, where a predictable partisan divide succeeded in removing rights from American citizens...

What is it about Mormon Republican Presidential candidates and their proclivity for committing voter fraud?

For that matter, what is it about high-profile Republicans in general and their rapidly growing record of voter fraud, as we have two new reports today of two more very high profile Republicans who appear to have committed voter fraud? One of them is GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the other U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri.

But they are just the two latest in a quickly growing list of Republican vote fraudsters.

In March, as you'll recall, Utah's former Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr. --- who is believed likely to jump into the GOP Presidential race soon --- was alleged to have committed voter fraud by casting his vote last year via his registration at the governor's mansion despite having resigned and moved out of the address almost two years prior to become President Obama's Ambassador to China.

Previously, of course, we've reported in great detail on GOP superstar Ann Coulter's repeated and now well-documented voter fraud. More recently (and more ironically), Charlie White, the newly-elected Republican Sec. of State of Indiana --- a state with, until recently, the most draconian, disenfranchising polling-place Photo ID restrictions in the nation --- was indicted on seven felony counts, three of them related to voter fraud, after he continued to vote at a residence where he no longer lived (where he also continued to illegally serve on the town council, despite no longer living there).

And now, according to a complaint filed by another GOP Presidential hopeful, it appears that current front-runner Mitt Romney has been playing similarly fast and loose with his own residency and is alleged to have voted, illegally, in last year's special election for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts despite no longer being a resident of the state...

As seen in CA recently, in support of NAACP's "Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate" campaign.

Just one of many important topics adversely affecting our nation every single day which will decidedly not be discussed in any way, shape or form during tonight's CNN-sponsored GOP Presidential debate in New Hampshire.

Who coulda guessed it? And, once again, a nation built on the premise of self-governance owes its continuing great thanks to WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning.

[Hat-tip @TomTomorrow.]

Our friend Mike Stark got through to Rush Limbaugh's radio show on Thursday and introduced a few actual facts over our public airwaves. Rush was clueless about how to handle it and had to resort to telling listeners that all of the independently verifiable facts Stark was presenting were completely made up fantasies.

Of course, they weren't. They are are easily verifiable and correct.

But this is the world we now live in, folks. Reality vs. Rush and the Right. As of now, Rush and the Right are winning. Those of us in the World of Reality are taking a serious hit in the bargain, thanks to corporate ownership of the public airwaves which allows a guy like Rush to use our own airwaves against we, the people who own them to pretend to millions of Americans each day that Facts are Lies, that Up is Down, that White is Black, that killing Medicare is saving Medicare, that Global Warming is a hoax, that "conservatives" believe in small government and the rule of law and the Constitution, that teachers and firefighters are the cause for our debt problems, and that Obama is a radical Leftist who hates America, is anti-business, and has raised your taxes.

Remember when Karl Rove said "We create our own reality," in 2004? That's the world we all now live in. One created from whole cloth and spewed to millions of gullible citizens each and every day over our own public airwaves. No actual facts required. No public interest obligations met in exchange for use of those airwaves. And so we all keeping heading down the long road to nowhere, or to ruin.

The Majority Report's Sam Seder takes us through Stark's call to Rush...and through the looking glass...

Had been saving this for a rainy day. But as professional scam-artist and serial philanderer Newt Gingrich's entire campaign staff resigned today en masse, the shelf life for this story may be as short as Newt's. Speculation has it he may not be around much longer than Monday's NH debate, so I guess I better run this right now!

Plus, I'm sick as a dog (summer cold), so should prolly stand down for a bit and get better quick cuz I gotta guest host the Mike Malloy Show again next week, and will probably need a voice to do it.

So, with that preamble...Man, do I miss Michael Moore's TV Nation. Here's a classic from 1995 and still fresh as the day it originally aired --- eh, Newt?

He had inappropriate sexual entanglements with a number of women and lied about it repeatedly to the American people. Yet nobody --- save for one Colorado law school prof --- seems to be calling for Justice Clarence Thomas' resignation for some reason.

That, even though Thomas, unlike Rep. Anthony Weiner, appears to have actually, and flagrantly, and repeatedly, broken the law.

As we reported in January, Thomas appears to have "knowingly and willfully" filed falsified Financial Disclosure Forms which withheld disclosure of nearly $700,000 his wife received from the rightwing Heritage Foundation for the better part of the last 20 years. Only once it was pointed out publicly this year did Thomas bother to file "self-initiated amendments" to the forms he had signed just above the legal warning in bold and all caps which reads: "NOTE: ANY INDIVIDUAL WHO KNOWINGLY AND WILLFULLY FALSIFIES OR FAILS TO FILE THIS REPORT MAY BE SUBJECT TO CIVIL AND CRIMINAL SANCTIONS (5 U.S.C. app. § 104)"

While there has been little indication that law enforcement is actually investigating the crimes of the U.S. Supreme Court Justice (which, as we pointed out in January, are punishable by up to $50,000 and/or 1 year in jail for each instance of falsification), last Friday when Thomas' Financial Disclosure Form for 2010 [PDF] was released, the matter appears to have gotten shadier still, leading at least one government watchdog organization to describe what Thomas and his wife Virginia "Ginni" Thomas may be been doing as "Judicial Insider Trading."

Connecting the dots, it would seem the couple made huge profits from Thomas' participation and insider knowledge of last year's Citizens United ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court, as we'll show you below.

While Barack Obama's DoJ seems to be looking the other way, there was one person in Congress trying to bring attention to this issue last week with his ConflictedClarence.com website: Rep. Anthony Weiner...

This may have been just about one of the funniest frickin' things I've ever seen on the Colbert Report...

It took two tries, but Carolyn Goodman, candidate for Mayor of Las Vegas and wife of current Mayor Oscar Goodman, was finally able to vote for herself today on Nevada's illegally-certified, 100% unverifiable Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen voting machines. At least she thinks she did. Whether her vote will actually be counted for her is something that nobody can ever know...

No, it ain't the fingernails, Carolyn. It's the machines.

As we revealed in our investigative exposé in the 2008 book Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, and summarized in our article on the Reid/Angle election for U.S. Senator just before Election Day last year, Nevada's Sequoia touch-screen voting machines were illegally certified in 2004 by then NV Secretary of State, now recently-appointed (to take the place of disgraced Sen. John Ensign) NV Republican U.S. Senator, Dean Heller.

The failure that Goodman experienced, and noticed, made her just the latest in a string of celebs and candidates who have had similar problems with 100% unverifiable voting machines --- as still used by some 20 to 30% of voters in the U.S. --- either flipping their votes, or not allowing them to vote at all.

Most famously, perhaps, was Oprah Winfrey, who, during early voting in the 2008 Presidential election, noticed that the computer (also a touch-screen made by Sequoia) had dropped her vote for President all together.

Earlier that same year, during February's "Super Tuesday" primary, then NJ Gov. John Corzine (D) was unable to vote for 45 minutes when Sequoia's AVC Advantage touch-screen systems failed to boot up at all when the polls opened.

During early voting in the 2008 general election, election integrity filmmaker Patricia Earnhardt, executive producer of the award-winning 2006 documentary Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, which deals, in no small part, with the problems and perils of 100% unverifiable e-voting, saw her own vote flipped on an ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine in Nashville (Davidson County), TN.

The BRAD BLOG has reported on countless such incidents over the past eight years with little or nothing being done, in most cases, to keep the same failures from occurring again in future elections. Indeed, we wrote an entire chapter about similar widespread failures during the 2008 election cycle alone for Project Censored's Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09.

One of "favorite" occurrences is what happened to poor Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate of Waldenburg, Arkansas in 2006...

By way of marking today's 10th anniversary of George W. Bush's job-killing, society-crushing tax cuts for the rich --- which we recently illustrated via one very clear chart, as the largest factor, by far, in exacerbating our current public debt --here, courtesy of Think Progress, is just a few of the things this country could have had for the same 10-year price tag as those tax cuts for rich people who didn't need them...

Well, that all might have been nice for all Americans.

So how are the current crop of GOP contenders for the 2012 Presidential nomination responding? Here is former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's economic plan, as outlined in a speech today, which promises to triple the size of the existing Bush tax cuts...

From Agence France-Presse...

Five American families are, today, having the worst days of their lives, thanks to their generosity in allowing their child to participate in a pointless war, built on knowing lies more than eight years ago, by men and women who have faced no consequences for those lies.

The deaths of the five soldiers in Iraq today mean that 4,459 U.S. troops have been killed to date in that particular war, while 1,610 have died in Afghanistan for reasons which remain similarly unknown on this day as well.

That's 6,069 U.S. troops killed in wars begun, but still not ended, by war criminals who have faced no consequences for their dishonest actions in illegally and dishonestly and recklessly waging wars with our blood and treasure in the name of this country. That total, of course, fails to include the number of U.S. contractors, foreign troops, and the untold number of citizens of both nations (and of the several other nations where we are waging wars as well) who have been killed in the bargain.

The carnage continues, with little hope for a real end in sight, and virtually no hope for accountability for those whose actions led directly to these tragic deaths.

On the other hand...of far more interest to both the media and nation alike...

Via RAW STORY...

In mid-May, TEPCO officials admitted that Unit 1 at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant had been "in a state of meltdown" with nuclear fuel rods exposed, and likely having melted through the bottom of their steel containment vessel, following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Several days later, the company admitted the same may also be true for Units 2 and 3.

In related news, as we noted in last Tuesday's Green News Report, following massive demonstrations last weekend in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced the country will decommission all of their nuclear plants by 2022 in favor of safe renewable energy initiatives.

"Step by step, we will abandon nuclear energy by the end of 2022," Merkel said. "This path is a big challenge for Germany, but it also means huge opportunities for future generations. We believe that our country can become a front runner for the creation of renewable energy, and as the first large industrial nation, we can create such a change toward highly efficient and renewable energies, with all its opportunities for export, developments and technology which create jobs."

In the U.S., no such plans for moving away from nuclear energy in the future, much less dismantling existing plants, have been announced, or even advocated by the Obama administration in light of Japan's nuclear disaster. The Fukushima accident is the worst since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and one which promises to plague the nation for months, and more likely years, into the future.

From The Hill:

Fairness and balance?! On the airwaves owned by the people?! We can't have that! Thanks for the watchdogging, Republicans!

[Hat-tip Sue Wilson via Twitter.]

On my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show today (heard on Wednesdays at 3:30pm PT in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego & around the world on KPFK.org) I spoke live with WI Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg. It was her first interview since conceding the highly-contentious and incredibly close WI Supreme Court election and "recount" yesterday to incumbent Justice David Prosser.

Given the state media's shamefully bad coverage of the disastrous "recount", the interview may well be the only one, as short as it was, in which she was able to address accountability for the "cascade of widespread irregularities", as she described them during her concession speech, which plagued the state's certified results.

"How do you know," I asked her at one point during our conversation, "that, given the wild, widespread irregularities --- these wide open ballot bags, tamper-evident seals that were broken, serial numbers that were missing, scratched out, changed --- how do you know that those ballots that were counted during the recount process were actually the ballots that were cast by the voters on Election Day?"

Her disturbing but unavoidable answer: "At this point, we don't know. All we have to go on is the hand count, and the extent to which they're consistent with the tapes in the [voting] machines."

You can listen to my follow up, and much more of what she had to say about the election, the "recount", her still-pending request for an independent investigation of controversial Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus, and the failure of the state's top election authority, the Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.), to assure that statutory security processes, meant to deter both malfeasance and malfunction, were actually followed...

Download MP3, or listen online below [appx 28 mins]...

For much more specific information on what we discussed during the interview, including photographs of "wide open" ballot bags, missing seals and serial numbers, other blatant chain of custody violations discovered during the course of the "recount" across the state, and particularly in Waukesha County, please see some of The BRAD BLOG's extensively detailed most-recently related coverage as linked below...