I'm guest hosting the The Mike Malloy Show again tonight (through Wednesday), LIVE from AM 1360 Rational Radio in Dallas, from 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Please tune in!

The call-in number this week only, for access to your public airwaves is: 800-277-1637, ext. 703.

Our LIVE chat room will once again be up and operating here during the show, so jump into the conversation there as well! (We''ll open it a few minutes before airtime, see down below.)

So far scheduled for tonight...

• ANDY WORTHINGTON, blogger/journalist, historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 759 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison and filmmaker (with Polly Nash) of the new documentary, Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.
• CHARLES JOHNSON, founder and publisher of the formerly rightwing Little Green Footballs blog, (now estranged) co-founder of the still rightwing Pajamas Media, on why he left the Right, what the hell is wrong with the wingnuts, and how/if we can ever get back to political sanity in this country.
• PLUS: My rants, Karl Rove's newest divorce, your calls at 800-277-1637, ext. 703, and whatever else comes up along the way...

Malloy's show is nationally syndicated on a number of air affiliates around the country, also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio streams here or here!

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show, hosted by the ever-patient "Agent 99". Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE & AUDIO ARCHIVES: Much cool to get the video stream working tonight for the first time for am1360! Sorry for the voice/picture delay in the first hour, but I think we finally got it fixed. Anyway, other than that, I believe it was another good show, and audio archives are now posted below! Chat room archives are posted below them for your replay pleasure...

Odds of being on an airplane attacked by a terrorist over the past decade, according to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com: 1 in 10,408,947.

Odds of being hit by lightning in any single year: appx. 1 in 500,000.

Odds the U.S. will wage a War on Lightning: 0 in a Gazillion.

Odds we'll talk about all of the above tonight when I guest host The Mike Malloy Show: appx. 1 in 3 (if that high).

UPDATE: And furthermore, why no 'War on Salmonella'?

I'll be guest hosting the The Mike Malloy Show tonight through Wednesday. This time around, I'll 'Bradcasting' LIVE from AM 1360 Rational Radio in Dallas, from 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Please tune in!

If you'd like to use your public airwaves tonight, the call-in number this week only will be: 800-277-1637, ext. 703.

Our handy-dandy live chat room will be up and operating here during the show, so jump into the conversation there as well! (We''ll open it a few minutes before airtime, see down below.)

So far scheduled for tonight...

• IGOR VOLSKY, of Center for American Progress, contributor to the book Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer, on where the hell we are now in the ongoing fight for health care reform.
• FRANK SCHAEFFER, former rightwing fundamentalist leader, BRAD BLOG guest contributor, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism) on America-hating Republicans, and his controversial case for Barack Obama.
• PLUS: My rants, your calls at 800-277-1637, ext. 703, and whatever we want to talk about at the end of this crazy year...

Malloy's show is nationally syndicated on a number of air affiliates around the country, also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio streams here or here!

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show, hosted by the ever-patient "Agent 99". Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE & AUDIO ARCHIVES: "Explosive" fun from Texas! Audio archives of last night's show are now posted below (sorry for the delay, due to tech prob) and the archive of last night's chat room is posted below that. Enjoy! And see ya again tonight!...

Straight-party ticket voters have long been getting screwed by touch-screen voting systems, whether they knew it or not, in election after election, as the systems have failed in various ways in states around the country for years.

But, for a modicum of good news on that front, finally, last week a panel of federal judges in Dallas County, TX, have responded to a lawsuit from the Texas Democratic Party --- who finally bothered to notice the problem --- by halting the use of such systems until corrective action of some sort can be taken. As the Dallas Morning News reported the county's E&S iVotronic touch-screen voting systems have now been decertified for the moment, leading the chair of the Texas Democratic Party to declare a "victory," even as he went on to demonstrate he still seems somewhat unaware of the overall problems of voting at all on such systems...

From Saturday's Houston Chronicle [emphasis added]...

To help discourage terrorism, let's give as much attention as possible to the Detroit plane bomber. Wall-to-wall coverage on Fox should teach those terrorists a thing or two. Let's put his face on the cover of TIME and Newsweek while we're at it. I'm sure it's the last thing he'd want.

UPDATE 6:12pm PT: Was trying to enjoy the rare luxury of few down hours to watch Sherlock Holmes with family here in Dallas (where I'll be guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show this week from Mike's local affiliate AM 1360 Rational Radio) when my iPhone alerts start buzzing. It's another TERRORIST ATTACK! SAME FLIGHT FROM AMSTERDAMN TO DETROIT! ANOTHER NIGERIAN! LOCKS HIMSELF IN BATHROOM!!! ... Of course, as you likely know by now, it was a Nigerian businessman whose "strange behavior" was walking back and forth to the bathroom.

Here is what I was forced to re-tweet from the movie theater...

Seriously, people. Can we get a grip? For more "explosive" news like the above (such as this re-tweet of Dave Roberts from Grist on the same topic, or this from Josh Marshall and this from Glenn Greenwald, both re-tweeted prior to the later afternoon Fox Fear Fest) which I may have neither the time nor inclination to bring you here on The BRAD BLOG, be sure to follow our Twitter feed. It's elementary, dear reader.

From AP today on the hostage stand-off that took place yesterday at a VA post office [emphasis added]:

Now I wonder where Taylor could have gotten those completely-misinformed ideas?

Of course, as non-disinformed folks know, there have been no moves --- zero, not even a peep --- by the Democratic-controlled Congress or White House about taking away anybody's "right to bear arms," and taxes have been lowered, not raised, since Obama took office, for 95% of working families. Though you'd be hard-pressed to know that if you did nothing more than watch Fox "News" or listen to talk radio on the public airwaves.

In one sadly ironic note, the AP article adds...

Earlier this month, a two-month independent investigation of ACORN, by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, found incidents of mismanagement, but no criminal wrongdoing by ACORN, the favorite whipping boy of Republican scammers such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Fox "News" and the GOP itself. That investigation (full report here [PDF]) also found that the "sting videos" used recently against ACORN were highly doctored and manipulated.

Of course, readers of The BRAD BLOG know the Republicans' entire, long, sad, anti-democratic (small "d" and large "d" both) campaign is based on little more than the fact that ACORN registers millions of legal low and middle income voters who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic (large "d") rather than Republican, and the GOP and their democracy-hating proxies will go to any lengths to keep those legal voters from exercising their legal franchise.

And today, once again, ACORN is cleared of wrongdoing vis a vis yet another independent investigation, this one by the Congressional Research Service [PDF], as noted in a press release from U.S. House Judiciary Chair John Conyers this afternoon (posted in full below).

Of most note to our readers, Conyers' statement points out what we've been pointing out - over and over and over again for years: "There were no instances of individuals who were allegedly registered to vote improperly by ACORN or its employees and who were reported 'attempting to vote at the polls.'" Who knew?! What a surprise! (At least to Fox "News" viewers, who probably won't hear about this report either.)

Also: "No instances were identified in which ACORN 'violated the terms of federal funding in the last five years.'"

And: "Recently enacted federal legislation to prohibit funding to ACORN raises significant constitutional concerns. The courts 'may have a sufficient basis' to conclude that the legislation 'violates the prohibition against bills of attainder.'" That finding is one that a federal judge also recently concurred with, when she issued an injunction earlier this month to keep the law from taking affect since ACORN had "been singled out by Congress for punishment that directly and immediately affects their ability to continue to obtain federal funding, in the absence of any judicial, or even administrative, process of adjudicating guilt."

Finally, according to today's report, Andrew "Drudge's Poodle" Breitbart's phony video-taped "sting operation" against ACORN may, itself, have violated the law in both California and Maryland, about which we might ironically recommend to prosecutors: "Capital punishment" for Andrew Breitbart!

The short press release from Conyers, announcing the new report's bullet points, follows below...

UPDATE: And coverage of the NYTimes burial of this report, now follows below it...

$636 billion for annual military spending was approved by the U.S. Senate over the weekend, with little more than a hiccup of debate from Republican "conservatives," not a peep from the Democrats, and even less coverage from the corporate mainstream media.

But $850 billion for 10 years of what is ostensibly meant to be health care reform for the health and welfare of American citizens --- all while reducing the budget deficit by $132 billion over that period, according to the CBO? "A budget buster!," shout the phony "conservatives" in the same Senate.

Anyway, there's your "American Values," in a two-part nutshell, from today's Republicans and the Democrats and corporate media who enable their madness as if it weren't so.

On Thursday we reported that Florida's AG office was investigating the recent acquisition of Diebold's voting machine unit by its larger/largest "competitor," ES&S, for possible violations of anti-trust statutes in the state. Today, the New York Post reports that the U.S. Dept. of Justice is also actively investigating the same thing --- along with 14 states in total --- and may "file a suit to unwind the deal" next month...

Though the Post story seems to be based on a single, unnamed "source," they also note that "A Diebold spokesman confirmed the Ohio ATM maker was cooperating with a Justice Department investigation."

And while there are other "Justice Department investigation[s]" that Diebold is also cooperating with --- as The BRAD BLOG noted early this year, when the company's Chief Financial Officer was forced to stop down: "[Diebold has been] been facing a class-action securities fraud lawsuit from shareholders since 2005; under SEC investigation since 2006; and under DoJ investigation since 2007; and admitted overstating '07 earnings in early 2008" --- Reuters coverage of the story offers more direct confirmation of the DoJ probe of this particular matter. "Diebold spokesman Michael Jacobsen said in an email that the company was cooperating with the Justice Department review of the sale," they report tonight.

BlackBoxVoting.org's Bev Harris deserves much credit here, both for helping to get the anti-trust ball moving when the merger was first announced in September, as we reported at the time, but also for providing the DoJ a great deal of information, statistics, financial and legal analysis demonstrating the monopolistic nature of the sale, and the harm it presents to our already in-tatters system of election in the U.S.. See BBV's additional coverage here.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says "comity" in the must-see clip below, but "comedy" might have been more appropriate in regard to Sen. Al Franken's (D-MN) shut down of Sen. Joe Lieberman (WhoKnows-CT), as Franken was presiding over the chamber, which left us laughing out loud, and applauding quietly to ourselves. (Via TPM with more background)...

And, if you missed it earlier this week, Franken's take-down of Sen. John Thune (R-SD) is an absolute must-see as well. Though we've had our own beefs with Franken's politics over the years, we must concede that it's frickin' awesome to finally see and hear someone --- anyone --- speak this way in the U.S. Senate. We'd be delighted to see 60 more just like him! Check it out if you haven't seen it already (and again, TPM has more background)...

Take a bow, Sen. Franken. Please keep up the great work!

From the Herald/Times [emphasis added]....

ES&S, of course, told the Herald/Times that their acquisition of Diebold "will result in better products and services for all customers and voters alike." And, if you believe that, we've got an unhackable voting machine to sell you....

[Hat-tip BRAD BLOG emailer JM]

Must read from Eugene Robinson at WaPo. "Palin's own 'Climate-gate'". Starts this way:

There's more, so please read the rest. So was Palin lying then about global warming? Or is she lying now?

And does it even matter to those who have become so professional at justifying and rationalizing such obvious and overt lies and statements of blatant absurdity that all relationship with Reality has become little more than a quaint memory of days long gone by? Before the madness and derangement had permanently set in...