If American politics and political discourse is going to devolve into little more than a bad Disney cartoon --- and it has, as this election season demonstrates in spades --- why not just cut out the middle man and cut straight to the cartoon chase?

Our thanks to Stephen C. Webster at RAW STORY for drawing our attention to the latest escalation in the Glen Beck Toon Wars (so far, a one-sided war, in truth).

The first volley was the "duckin' brilliant" remix of Donald Duck cartoons by Jonathan McIntosh of Rebellious Pixels --- wherein our hero is driven daffy by the paranoid tea bagger rantings of the Fox "News" superstar.

In response, Fox' finest fantasist has seemingly become convinced the whole thing is a Big Government conspiracy out to get him. "Some of these remix videos, I believe, get federal funding," declared Beck on his radio show last week. "We're looking into the funding of this gentleman, and the incredible propaganda against me," he said. "We'll find out if it's been federally funded, ya know, as part of the stimulus package."

Well, apparently Mickey Mouse isn't taking Beck's latest goofy conspiracy theory lying down, as YouTube poster "ikat381" helped us to learn over the weekend...

Keep it comin', Glenn! We're lovin' these toons! So, we'd be outraged if we were you!

If you missed McIntosh's brilliant original, here it is again. It's as smart a take on (and reflection of) today's political environment as anything else we're likely to see, at least until the elections are far behind us. So sit back and enjoy it...

Just in. Yet another in the recent string of victories for (real) conservative values and the U.S. Constitution...

More details in the full AP story.

The order follows a successful lawsuit by the Log Cabin Republicans in which Judge Phillips found the military's policy --- which President Obama has chosen not to end with an executive order as he could have --- to be unconstitutional on First Amendment free speech grounds and a violation of the due process rights of gay and lesbian service members.

The decision also follows a string of other recent victories in federal courts for real conservative values, as confirmed by Republican-appointed judges, such as the U.S. District Court judge's finding this past August that California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage violates the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection clause.

As we noted recently, while it often takes far too long in this nation, the good news is that, eventually, Constitutional rights win and the haters lose. Today's ruling underscores that hopeful point --- in an otherwise dark period in this nation's history --- once again.

UPDATE 4:08pm PT: 21 Democratic U.S. Senators have sent a letter to the Obama Administration asking them to not appeal Judge Phillips' order. There are no GOP Senators signed on to the letter despite the fact that it was a GOP group who won the decision in court. While, to be fair, we also don't know if the Dem Senators asked the Republicans to sign or not, the fact that all of them voted against a repeal of DADT (if it were to be approved by the U.S. military) in the recent Defense Authorization bill suggests that it's likely none of the Republican Senators would have done so anyway. The letter from the Democratic Senators is now posted here....

UPDATE 10/15/10: Confusion reigns. Incredibly, the DoJ is asking the Judge to stay the order pending appeal after all. (Which part of "Unconstitutional" do you not understand, Mr. President?!) Of course, in truth, the decision is the DoJ's, not the President's directly. The Pentagon, earlier this week, has said for the moment they will not be enforcing DADT, though later in the week they told folks to not come out yet! Apparently. As mentioned, confusion reigns. Details on the appeal here. Memo from the Pentagon here.

A University of Michigan computer scientist and his team were not the only ones attempting to hack the Internet Vote scheme that Washington D.C. had planned to roll out for actual use with military and overseas voters in this November's mid-term election.

According to testimony given to a D.C. City Council committee last Friday by J. Alex Halderman, asst. professor of electrical engineering and computer science at University of Michigan, hackers from Iran and China were also attempting to access the very same network infrastructure, even as his own team of students had successfully done so, taking over the entirety of the Internet Voting system which had been opened for a first-of-its-kind live test.

[See our report last week on details of what had already been disclosed about Halderman's startling hack prior to last Friday's hearing.]

"While we were in control of these systems we observed other attack attempts originating from computers in Iran and China," Halderman testified. "These attackers were attempting to guess the same master password that we did. And since it was only four letters long, they would likely have soon succeeded."

In his stunning public testimony --- before a single member of the D.C. Board of Ethics and Elections (BoEE), and a nearly empty chamber --- Halderman explained how the team had, by the time they discovered their fellow intruders, already gained complete control of the system, it's encryption key and its passwords. The system was developed as part of an Internet Voting pilot program with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.

As The BRAD BLOG reported last week, Halderman's team was able to take over the system within 36 hours after it had gone live for testing. After having "found and exploited a vulnerability that gave [them] almost total control of the server software," his team was able to steal the encryption key needed to decode "secret" ballots; overwrite every single ballot cast on the test system; change the votes on those ballots to write-in candidates; discover who had already been voted for and the identities of the voters; install a script that would automatically change all votes cast in the future on the same system; install a backdoor to allow them to come back later; and then leave a "calling card" --- the University of Michigan fight song --- which was programmed to play in the voter's browser 15 seconds after each Internet ballot had been cast.

But the new disclosures offered before the committee on Friday, including the hack attempts by computers in China and Iran, may have been as explosive, if not more so, than the previous revelations. They certainly illustrate and underscore a grave national security threat present in electronic voting systems such as the one D.C. had planned to use, as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories computer scientist and cyber-security expert Dr. David Jefferson told me during an interview last Friday night on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show which I was guest hosting last week.

The hack of the system forced the D.C. election administrators to shut down their plans for the pilot program which was to have gone live in days, as encouraged and partially funded by the federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which allocated millions of dollars for such Internet Voting pilot programs.

The revelations of the intrusion attempts from China and Iran, however, would not be the only new, previously unreported bombshells Halderman offered during his Friday testimony...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives...]

We're back tonight to close out the week, filling in as guest-host on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show, and it will be a helluva show (see details below!)

We'll be BradCasting LIVE, as usual, from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Please you'll join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! The LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG during the show, so come on by 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.)

So far scheduled for tonight's show...

• LIZZ WINSTEAD, Comedy Central's The Daily Show co-creator and former Air America host joins us to dish dirt on the upcoming 10/30/10 Stewart/Colbert D.C. Rallies, backstage at 'The Daily,' our insane election season, and maybe even "what happened in Vegas"...
• DR. DAVID JEFFERSON, Livermore National Laboratories computer scientist and cyber security expert and VerifiedVoting.org's Internet Voting expert with NEW UNREPORTED BOMBSHELLS on the already breath-taking D.C. Internet Vote Hack that we learned about earlier this week. Seriously. NEW BOMBSHELLS. Ds, Rs and everyone else should tune in for this. For rils.
• JOHN WELLINGTON ENNIS on his new documentary, Pay 2 Play: Democracy's High Stakes covering the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United ruling and it's effect on "democracy."
• PLUS: News on Ann Coulter's voter fraud, how you think I should vote in November, and whatever else we all feel like covering from today's news with your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates around the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show. Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: The audio archives are all now posted below (and the chat room archives are posted below that, if your interested.) If you listen to nothing else, listen to the first hour, cuz it should rock the world of every American. Big time. (But the other hours were pretty good too, for completely different reasons). Enjoy!...

[Hat-tip to longtime BRAD BLOG toon sherpa Pokey Anderson]

Related... If you didn't hear my interview on last night's Mike Malloy Show with 70-year old Laird Monahan who, with his 67-year old brother are currently walking across the U.S. in order to highlight the Supreme Court's horrific Citizens United decision, unleashing unfettered, undisclosed (and often, even un-American) corporate money into U.S. elections, I'd highly recommend giving it a listen.

The Monahan Brothers, both Vietnam vets coincidentally, are American Heroes in my estimation, and their story should be told on not just every progressive media outlet in the nation, but more importantly, on the corporate mainstream media outlets who don't seem to want to offer much coverage to this story for some reason, as Laird and I discussed last night.

Click here to listen to listen to the interview with Laird. It's in the "HOUR 2" audio archive.

[Now UPDATED with audio archives...]

I'll be guest hosting the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show tonight (and again tomorrow), and again we'll be BradCasting LIVE from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Please join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in!

The LIVE chat room, as ever, will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG during the show, so come on by 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.)

So far scheduled for tonight's show...

• VAN JONES, Former White House adviser on green jobs initiatives, award-winning environmentalist and human rights advocate and now American Progress Senior Fellow, on where those WH initiatives and Congressional climate and clean energy legislation now stand (or don't) in D.C.
• LAIRD MONAHAN, who walked across the U.S. with his brother and fellow Vietnam vet Robin to spotlight concerns about the Supreme Court's horrific Citizens United ruling allowing unregulated (and undisclosed) corporate campaign dollars in U.S. elections.
• ALLEN ST. PIERRE, Executive Director of NORML, on California's Prop 19 which, if passed in November, would regulate and largely legalize the sale and possession of marijuana in the state.
• PLUS: The D.C. Internet Vote hack, Ann Coulter's voter fraud, James O'Keefe's latest con and whatever else we all feel like covering from today's news with your calls at 877-520-1150 and tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates around the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show. Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Lots of good stuff on the show tonight, I think. You'll let me know, as usual. The audio archives are all now posted below (and the chat room archives are posted below that, if your interested.) Enjoy! I know I did!...

Will Ann Coulter finally be held accountable for having committed voter fraud? We may find out on October 14th when the matter will come up at a public hearing by Connecticut's State Elections Commission after an extraordinarily long two-year delay since the complaints about her allegedly illegal absentee votes in 2002 and 2004 were filed.

As The BRAD BLOG spent years documenting beyond a shadow of a doubt concerning her voter registration fraud and voter fraud in a different state, Florida, Ann Coulter committed third degree felony voter registration fraud, along with a first degree voter fraud misdemeanor, when she lied about her residency and then knowingly voted at the wrong polling place in Palm Beach County, FL, in 2005.

Years of lying to the media, as well as election and law enforcement officials, and a last-minute, inappropriate intervention by a former boyfriend in the FBI, helped run out the clock on those charges. Her offenses in the Sunshine State were eventually found to be beyond the statute of limitations by the Florida State Election Commission (FSEC). The stalling by other friendly Florida agencies took so long that the FSEC didn't receive the case until years after it had been originally reported to law enforcement by the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections. So she got off the hook and was never held accountable for easily documented crimes in Florida. [After years of reporting that part of the story in pieces as it developed, we told the entire sordid tale in one fell swoop in Hustler magazine. That April 2008 exposé can be read in full here.]

However, in Connecticut, where official complaints were filed in 2009 --- by a conservative activist --- that she also committed absentee voter fraud in the years prior to moving to Florida, when she allegedly voted illegally from her residence in New York, there is no such statute of limitations for voter fraud. [See UPDATE at bottom of story for someone who disagrees with that point.]

After a 20-month delay, Coulter's case is finally coming up for a vote at a public hearing before CT's State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) on October 14th at 9:00am, 20 Trinity St. in Hartford CT, according to an email from the commission's MaryAnn Stratton and confirmation from the commission's director of communication...

As we posited in our coverage yesterday of D.C.'s Internet Voting scheme which was hacked with the University of Michigan fight song just days after experts had warned against the entire scheme, J. Alex Halderman, asst. professor of electronic engineering and computer science at the university, was, indeed, at the heart of the hack.

He details tonight that he and a small team of students were happy to participate in the test that D.C. election officials had announced, with just three days notice, inviting hackers to try and penetrate the system they planned to use this November, as developed with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.

Halderman writes in his explanation of how they did it:

And if you think that's chilling, Halderman goes on to note that all cast ballots on the system were modified and overwritten with write-in votes, all passwords taken --- including the encryption key, which e-voting supporters constantly suggest will keep such systems safe --- before they went on to install a back door to let them view any votes cast later, after their attack, along with the names of voters and whom they voted for...

It took nearly a week of The BRAD BLOG bitching, moaning, emailing, complaining, and tweeting to the Washington Post, its ombudsman, and, of course, the author of the story, Alexandra Petri, who had blatantly misreported, twice in the same article at Dana Milbank's "Rough Sketch" blog, the long-ago debunked myth that Rightwing con-man and dirty trickster James O'Keefe had "dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN" in his scam video tapes that shamefully took down the four-decade old anti-poverty, pro-democracy organization based on his hateful hoax.

As we detailed in our original report on Petri's inaccuracy last week, O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp and never even represented himself as a pimp in the offices of ACORN. The truth about all of that had been publicly available to know for almost a year before Petri misreported on it in the pages of the Washington Post last week.

Given that the Washington Post published another related story over a year ago with a number of similarly misleading inaccuracies in it, which they have yet to correct even after all this time, perhaps we should be happy it took less than a week this time around for the right thing to be done at the paper.

Petri has finally, nearly a week later, corrected her article, as she notes in the following email sent to us this morning...

Last week we told you about D.C.'s intention of running an insane live experiment on live voters in a live election with an untested, wholly unverifiable, easily-manipulated Internet Voting scheme this November, and about just some of the computer security and election experts who have been desperately trying to warn them against it.

And now we find out that the very short planned pre-election test phase, in which hackers were invited to try to manipulate the system, has been abruptly aborted in the wake of a, um, disturbing (if not wholly unpredictable) development.

The failed system in D.C. was developed with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, an outfit that is working with election officials around the country to push Internet Voting everywhere, along with other computerized voting schemes. Simply because a system is "open source" does not mean it's secure, particularly when it relies on concealed vote counting, as all of their e-vote schemes do.

Below, along with our quick list of other recent known e-voting hack events, computer scientist Jeremy Epstein in "The Risks Digest," which describes itself as a "Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems," offers the quick timeline of recent developments in the District of Columbia's plan "against advice from many computer scientists, pursuing a trial of a prototype system for the November election."

The result, as seen below, in this latest assault on citizen-overseeable democracy is, of course, a stunning surprise to absolutely nobody other than perhaps the D.C. election officials interested in this horrific scheme and the profiteers who must have tricked them into believing that it was a secure and/or good idea [emphasis added]...

Who could have foreseen it? (Oh, right, we did, months ago, when we described this year's appalling SCOTUS decision in Citzens United as "a case that would live in infamy.")

The following comes from Washington Post today (which, btw, doesn't bother to correct blatant errors in its reporting on other matters, but that's a different issue):

Duckin' brilliant...

[From Rebellious Pixels, by way of Boing Boing and Will Shetterly with hat-tip to Ana Marie Cox.]

Not to say "we told ya so," but we did tell ya so, the day after Obama's election in 2008...

Anyway, now he's gone. Perhaps this will be the change we can believe in. Though we are not holding our breath.

CNN's Sr. National Editor Dave Schechter had this to say about The BRAD BLOG on their "Election Center" page yesterday, in regard to our coverage of election integrity [emphasis added]...

And also, "needless to say", no matter what the voting machine manufacturers have to say --- and no matter whether their systems are secure (they're not) or accurate --- there remains no way for us, we, the people, to actually know that, particularly on 100% unverifiable DRE (Direct Recording Electronic, usually touch-screen) voting systems, since it remains impossible for anybody, including the companies, to produce a single piece of evidence to prove that even one vote, ever cast on any of them during an election, for any candidate or initiative on the ballot, has ever been recorded as per the voter's intent.

Our thanks to CNN's Schechter for the kind notice, and we hope our squeaky wheels bring some much-needed grease to our ridiculously perilous and undemocratic system of concealed vote counting in this nation.

I'll also take this opportunity to ask for some grease from you folks. We haven't posted a plea for contributions in many, many months --- yet, boy howdy, do we need it! Please help us refresh the completely empty coffers --- since I really hate to ask at all, frankly, particularly since I've got so much else to do in this election season --- with an online donation via credit card or PayPal!

Alternately, snail mail donations are also much appreciated, as sent to: Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594, Los Angeles, CA 90028.

Finally, most appreciated of all, are monthly subscriptions of any amount you like. Please see the light-blue box halfway down our right sidebar on any page, where you can specify any amount you can afford, to sign-up in about 60 seconds to become a monthly sustaining supporter!

Thanks in advance guys! And now back to your regularly scheduled wheel squeaking...

CORRECTION: I had originally misspelled Dave Schechter's name in the above article. A fine thanks for his kind words, eh? Anyway, now corrected with my apologies for the error.

Alexandra Petri writing on Dana Milbank's "Rough Sketch" blog at Washington Post:

For chrissakes, you're the WASHINGTON POST! Get the story straight please!

O'Keefe NEVER "dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN." Never. Not once. Ever. It was a hoax. Period. Just like his criminal operation at Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in New Orleans (for which he is still on probation), and the CNN sexual assault/wiretap scheme.

How many times are you guys gonna fall for it and keep misreporting the same damaging, inaccurate story?

That he NEVER "dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN" has now been documented, in no uncertain terms, over and over again for nearly a year. Not just by The BRAD BLOG repeatedly, but by his own accomplice Hannah Giles (twice, including once on video tape!), and by one official investigation after another, going back nearly a year.

For example, here's former MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger's report [PDF] from December of 2009:

For the record, when you issue your swift correction (which I hope you'll do immediately and transparently and loudly), before you make yet another mistake, as the NYTimes did when issuing theirs, O'Keefe also did not "represent himself as a pimp" to ACORN workers either. He represented himself as the boyfriend of the girl/prostitute (played by Hannah Giles) trying to save her FROM an abusive pimp who was trying to kill her.

Jesus. It's not the first time WaPo has misreported on this matter. But we figured they'd have figured out the scam by now. Apparently not.

Please issue a correction immediately. Thank you. And good lord. (This is how James O'Keefe, Andrew Breitbart, and the rest of their crew get away with lying again and again and again. Incredible.)

P.S. If you want to report on the story --- in your own MD backyard, Washington Post --- why don't you cover the fact that O'Keefe has now violated Maryland's Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act again and again (and now, likely, the terms of his federal criminal probation), as we laid out yesterday, and the fact that MD law enforcement officials seem to be doing absolutely nothing about it?!

UPDATE 10/1/10, 12:50pm PT: It has been nearly 48 hours since the Petri/Milbank story was posted containing the egregious mistakes noted above, and yet there has still be no correction. Over the past 24 hours we've notified both @Milbank & @Petridishes via Twitter multiple times; have notified WaPo's "Corrections" address (Corrections@WashPost.com); and have notified their Ombudsman Andy Alexander who has responded with Alexandra Petri's email address so we could contact her that way directly, which we have. And yet, still no correction for the blatantly innaccurate reporting.

During those same 24 hours, Milbank has posted one item, and Petri has posted two --- one as recently as two hours ago, another a few hours earlier than that today --- so we know they are both around to make the corrections. They have apparently chosen to not correct their inaccurate reporting.

Next time you are told how the "professionals in the MSM fact-check their work, but bloggers don't," please feel free to keep this incident handy.

(Thanks to Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for picking up this story today!)

UPDATE 10/1/10, 3:46pm PT: Incredible. Petri has just posted yet a third item on Milbank's blog without bothering to correct the O'Keefe "pimp" story. I've left a comment on every one of her blog items since, pointing back to this article and asking her what gives and if she ever intends to correct her blatant inaccuracies. Hope you'll consider doing same until she accurately and transparently corrects the story. Milbank's blog is here.

UPDATE 10/3/10, 11:36am PT: It has now been four days since Dana Milbank allowed Alexandra Petri's complete inaccuracies about Rightwing con-man James O'Keefe and ACORN to be posted on his WaPo blog without correction. The paper's corrections editor, their ombudsman and both Milbank and Petri have been notified many times. They continue to appear not to give a damn that they are blatantly misinforming their readers and the nation.

UPDATE 10/5/10: SUCCESS! After nearly a week of prodding, Petri has finally issued a correction! Though even older WaPo misreports, by other journalists, on this same matter, are still unaddressed. Full details now posted here...