Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called in the tea baggers to the Capitol in D.C. today for an "emergency house call" (that's great video!) in hopes of killing health care reform legislation. She was joined by dozens of fellow wingnut lawmakers who spoke to the disinformed crowd, promising "not a single Republican vote" for the bill before things turned strange later on.

There, in the crowd as the lawmakers spoke, among the baggers, was the following sign which, as Richard Blair notes, "not one of them denounced"...

Here's the close-up view...

On October 17th, we reported that World's Worst Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent of Sarasota, FL, had discovered in pre-election tests that her new Diebold/Premier optical-scan voting systems failed to properly read paper ballots marked with blue ink.

Her "solution": Make sure that black pens were available at polling places, and otherwise have election officials duplicate blue-inked ballots by hand (and in secret, naturally, where the voter wouldn't be able to watch).

While an attempt could be made to encourage voters to use black ink at the polling place, there was no real way to ensure that absentee voters used black ink, other than try to encourage them to do so.

So, naturally, the inimitable Ms. Dent sent out thousands of sample ballots [PDF] encouraging votes to use "a blue or black pen"...

Dent, of course, is the same disastrous Supervisor of Elections who presided over the 2006 FL-13 Congressional race in which 18,000 electronic ballots in Democratic-leaning Sarasota disappeared from the county's ES&S touch-screen systems, in a race decided in favor of the Republican by just 369 votes. Later, she actively campaigned --- by placing leaflets in the polling place! --- to keep those touch-screen machines in use, despite that failure, and despite a measure on the ballot in the same election calling for a move to paper ballots.

Since the state now requires paper ballots, Dent chose to install the newest Diebold/Premier optical-scan systems, the ones that don't read blue ink properly, despite the fact that they had not been federally tested or certified for use at the time. Florida does not require federal certification tests for voting systems before using them.

Heckuva job --- as usual --- Kathy!

A big tactical move today by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in the Environment and Public Works Committee, which she chairs, in working around the Republican boycott this week of mark-up on the climate legislation bill. Very smart, and a big twist in that story as she's out-foxed the GOP stallers, obstructionists, and denialists! At least for now.

Check out Boxer's surprise move, and get caught up on where the roller coaster ride of climate legislation in the U.S. Senate stands for the moment, in today's Green News Report!

We're watching results as they're coming in tonight, while continuing to comb through various problem reports as they've been coming in throughout the day (the usual "hiccups" "glitches" "snags" and "snafus" reportage --- anything but the proper word for them all: "failure"!)

As we always find necessary to remind readers on such nights, the bulk of election failures tend to reveal themselves in the hours and days --- and sometimes even weeks --- after Election Day.

With that in mind, of the most potential note that we've seen so far today --- though mostly downplayed as minor "glitches" in most of the stories reporting them --- we've found reports of: Diebold touch-screen machine failure in OH's Montgomery and Greene Counties; new e-pollbooks failing in Suffolk County, NY; new Sequoia/Dominion optical-scan systems failing in St. Lawrence County, NY, and; Sequoia touch-screen failures in Essex, Somerset and Goucester Counties, NJ.

Fortunately, turnout has been light today, so the problems that have cropped up seem to have been handled by quickly replacing machines (a luxury available during slow, off-year elections when there are extra machines to go around) or in such a way that delays --- and the voter disenfranchisement that goes with them --- were minimal. At least as so far reported.

Whether any of the results tabulated in secret, with secret software, are actually accurate, well, that's anyone's guess as usual. In any case, we're monitoring, and will let ya know if there's anything you need to know about. Please feel free to let us know about anything you think we should know about in comments.

Other than that, we're just stunned that ACORN did such a terrible job, yet again, at "stealing the election" in New Jersey!

UPDATE 9:29pm PT: New Sequoia op-scan systems fail in Fulton County, NY and are impounded by court order. Emergency paper ballots are used. Fulton is part of the hotly contested NY-23 Congressional special election.

It's Election Day today, but a 90-year-old Republican will not be voting after the ID nightmare she faced when moving to Virginia. As it turns out, her birth certificate did not match her married name (ya think?), but even though she also brought a driver's license, proof of her new residence, a Medicaid card and a bank card, she still had problems getting the state-issued ID she'd need to vote today in VA.

After several trips to the DMV, --- luckily she's able to get there, several times apparently, unlike many other 90-year-olds --- Jean Earley was finally able to get that ID. But this story has twist ending. Go read it.

I'm sure John Fund and all the other GOP voter disenfranchisers are delighted with themselves. No doubt they haven't been this pleased since keeping those 80 and 90-year-old nuns from voting in Indiana last year.

What "right" to vote?

The Wall Street Journal's cowardly liar and "voter fraud" fraudster John Fund appears to be running out of fresh "voter fraud" lies to feed to Fox "News" viewers. According to Media Matters today, in advance of tomorrow's gubernatorial election in New Jersey, expected to be a very close race, Fund appeared on Fox's Glenn Beck show and related an anecdote of supposed fraud now going on in the Hispanic community in Camden.

"People are going door to door in parts of Camden with Hispanics that don't have very much knowledge of English, and they're saying, 'We have a new way for you to vote, la nueva forma de votar; just fill out these papers.'"

Trouble is, the incident that Fund claims is going on right now actually happened in Philadelphia 16 years ago, as even Fund himself admitted in his own WSJ column published just hours before his appearance on Fox today...

For various reasons, now seems a good moment to mention that The BRAD BLOG was honored this year with a prestigious Project Censored 2010 award for our coverage of the mysterious death of the GOP's IT guru Mike Connell. Connell, for those unfamiliar with the story (see background links at bottom of this article) was in the process of testifying about his rumored role in helping the GOP carry out fraud in Ohio's '04 Presidential Election when he was then reportedly threatened by Karl Rove. Weeks later he suddenly plunged to his death in a single-engine plane crash just before Christmas last year as he was preparing to land near Akron, on his way home from one of his frequent trips to D.C..

My colleagues Mark Crispin Miller and Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane were also honored by PC for their own coverage of the story.

Project Censored, based out of Sonoma State University, has been highlighting overlooked stories each year since 1976, and was recognized by Walter Cronkite as "one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured our newspaper and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism."

In addition to our "Excellence in Investigative Journalism" award from PC this year, as highlighted in their annual "Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010," I was also asked to write a chapter on problems faced by voters in Election 2008 for this year's book, Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09.

Co-Editors Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff have been kind enough to offer us a number of signed copies at a reduced rate so that we can offer them as premiums to readers of The BRAD BLOG to help continue our work here.

The 9,000 word chapter I wrote for the book is titled "Election 2008: Vanishing Votes, Disappearing Democracy and Media Misdirection" and includes sections named "And You Lose Your Vote! And You Lose Your Vote! And You Lose Your Vote!..."; "First Worst in the Nation"; "America Flips Out, Media Barely Notices, Parties Barely Care"; "Democrats Nowhere to be Found"; and "Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain."

If you'd like a copy of this great book (Makes a great holiday gift! I'll sign it as well, if you wish!), chocked full of important, overlooked stories from the last year or so, along with follow-ups to them --- and a lot of real information on the story of Election 2008 seen here for the first time in print --- please do one of the following:

• Donate $50 or more to The BRAD BLOG
• Alternately (and even preferably!) sign up for a monthly sustaining donation of $15 or more in the blue box in the right sidebar on this page, or
• Send a check for $50 or more via snail mail, (note when sending that it's for "Censored 2010"), to: Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594, Los Angeles, CA 90028

Your support is greatly appreciated, and tremendously needed, as we receive no foundational or corporate support for our work here! Your contributions are largely the only thing that keep us going! So thank you in advance for any help here!

Links to The BRAD BLOG's most recent coverage of the Mike Connell story follows below...

YouTube views of Rise of the Tea Bags, as of right now, since we posted it on Wednesday: 3,936 4,711 5,691 6,843 7,851 8,072 10,639 (Be the 4,000th 5,000th 6,000th 7,000th 8,000th 9,000th 11,000th!)

Followers of The BRAD BLOG on Twitter, as of right now: 497 539
(Be the 500th! Thanks to #500, @silver02suby. Be the 600th!)

Cost of national defense authorization bill for 2010 only, as signed by Obama on Wednesday without objection from tea baggers: $680 billion

Approximate cost of proposed U.S. House health insurance bill per year (though not reported this way by media): $90 billion

Cost of U.S. House health insurance bill over next ten years, as always reported by the media and vigorously objected to by tea baggers, despite CBO finding that it will actually reduce the deficit: Just under $900 billion

Approximate cost of defense authorization over next ten years (though never reported this way by media): $7 trillion

Approximate savings to tax-payers from U.S. House health insurance bill over next ten years: $100 billion

People killed by U.S. defense operations each year: n/a

Americans who die for lack of health insurance each year: 45,000

Cost of misplaced tea bagger/media priorities: priceless

Congrats to New York Times for their Wednesday editorial slamming the ES&S takeover of Diebold's election division (which, if allowed by federal regulators to go through, would give a single private company sole control of some 70% of the votes in this country's once-public elections).

While the Times has editorialized on the dangers of this horrific merger in the past, as I recall, and appropriately so, the reason they are due congrats this time around is because they've managed to write an entire editorial focused on the e-voting menace without once tossing in the deceptive phrase "paperless electronic voting machines" (as if "paperless" e-voting systems are any less of a threat to our democracy than the same wholly-unverifiable voting machines which offer an entirely useless so-called "paper trail").

I believe that's a first! So, waytago NYTimes! Before you know it, they may eventually even use the phrase: "paper ballot"!

Some things simply defy satire.

The following teaser is for what appears to be an actual, "serious" feature-length film called Tea Party: The Documentary Film. We were pointed to it yesterday by several folks after we released our own short documentary, Tea Party Express II: Rise of the Tea Bags, which we filmed on Sunday and posted here yesterday.

As you'll see below, even The Daily Show would be hard-pressed to satirize this self-satirizing teaser. And yes, this things seems to be for real and set for a DVD release on Thanksgiving. No, it's not a joke. It just looks and sounds a whole lot like one...

(On second thought...For the truly adventurous out there, maybe it can be satirized. It might be fun to take their voice-over track, and mash it up with our video somehow. But I should probably leave that to someone else, and otherwise get back to real work, right?! )

So we went out to Griffith Park out here in L.A. on Sunday to check out the kick-off day for the new "Tea Party Express II" national tour. Thought we might meet some interesting people and file a quick video report. Met a lot of interesting people, and so ended up making a short film of sorts. Enjoy. Spread the word. Go tell the story ("both sides")...

UPDATE 10/29/09: Boy, it's tough to compete with the Tea Baggers in the satire department, even when they're not actually trying to be satirical. As God is my witness, coming to you with a straight face this Thanksgiving --- Tea Party: The Documentary Film!...

UPDATE 11/9/09: As of today, we've had more than 11,000 views of Rise of the Tea Bags at YouTube. By Tea Bagger math, that's more than 3 million views! And yet, the media refuses to report it!!! Also, here's my interview on Air America Radio's Ring of Fire discussing the video...

I went to an event last night out here in Los Angeles where I got a lot of fun video --- way more than I can use. So please pardon the light posting today as I've been buried in the "editing room" culling through it all in hopes of putting something together that you may enjoy. Consider this an open thread --- or a guessing game as to what event that might have been --- until I'm able to come up for air...

More details on the ingenious musical outburst, which took place at the American Health Insurance Plan's (AHIP) annual state issues conference in D.C. on Friday, right here...

I'll be sitting in for Angie Corio on Live from the Left Coast on Green960 (KKGN-960AM) in San Francisco tonight (Friday) from 6p - 8p PT (9p - 11p ET).

Scheduled for tonight's Media-Reform-a-Palooza:

• FRANK SCHAEFFER, former rightwing fundamentalist leader, 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 on his "Letter to Rupert Murdoch" calling for an end to Fox "News'" inciting of violence, and his endorsement of VelvetRevolution's StopDomesticTerror.com campaign.
• SUE WILSON, filmmaker of Broadcast Blues on the the epic fail of the FCC to carry out their duty in overseeing the corporate abuse of our public airwaves and the Democrats failure (see my article "The Media Need a Fair and Balanced Doctrine" at Alternet to do anything about it.
• PLUS: Supporting the White House attempts to hold Fox "News" accountable and your calls on all of the above (866-960-5753)!

You can listen via the live Internet stream here or here if you're not in the Bay Area. Please tune in, stream in, call in and join the LIVE online chat room during the show at lftlc.com/LIVE!

POST-SHOW UPDATE: I'm delighted that our friends at KRXA 540am in Monterey, CA also decided to pick up and simulcast last night's show as well! Thanks to those who tuned in and called in!

Thanks to the good folks at LFTLC.com for removing commercials, these "hours" are appx. 40 mins each...

HOUR 1: White House v. Fox "News". And Frank Schaeffer on the looming danger of rightwing extremism...
Download MP3 or listen online below...

HOUR 2: Sue Wilson on reforming the media...
Download MP3 or listen online below...

Please see below for Jeremy Scahill at The Nation who, last week, covered the outrageous hypocrisy of federal legislation targeting ACORN (who committed no crimes), while the top 100 government contractors, who made "nearly $300 billion from federal contracts in 2007 alone" paid some "$26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse".

By way of contrast with the federally favored criminal corporations, Scahill notes, "Over the past fifteen years, ACORN has received just $53 million in federal funds, much of it for low-income housing." Despite that, "In mid-September all but seventy-five House Democrats and seven senators voted with their Republican colleagues to bar the group from receiving federal funds."

The corporate welfare queens, of course, face no punitive legislative by Congress and are allowed to carry out their waste, fraud, abuse and often extraordinarily criminal behavior while on the tax-payer dole and nobody --- Republican or Democrat --- bats an eye.

Following the Scahill quotage on these points below, you'll find a must-see video clip of Florida's tenacious Rep. Alan Grayson, handing it to his Republican colleagues in a committee hearing this week, for their attempt to pass an "unconstitutional bill of attainder" meant solely to punish the GOP's favorite stalking-horse, ACORN. (See Rachel Maddow's expert coverage on the unconstitutionality of such bills, as posted late last month, for more details.)

Grayson's flat-out, apologetically cold-hearted unwillingness to yield the floor to the disingenuous wingnut cabal, and his shaming of them for pushing such an outrageously unconstitutional bill, is something to behold. Would that he were the model for what all Democrats sounded and acted like on behalf of the people. [Hat-tip to BRAD BLOG reader David Lasagna for the heads-up on that video. Now go watch it below!]