Guess what I got for Xmas? Yup, got slammed by the flu on XMas weekend, just to make sure I had extra fun this year. Well, I've taken the hint, and have been standing down, way down, lying down, in fact, for several days, and may continue to do so, unless the world stops revolving without me.

Guest bloggers, as usual, will save the day...until I feel up to doing so myself again...Please pardon my absence until then...Much to catch up on, but it'll have to wait for now. You --- and I, both --- will thank me later.

At this year's Christmas, I'm happy to associate myself with my colleague, the good John Gideon of VotersUnite.org who offered these well-writ holiday thoughts at the top of last night's DVN:

As well, I share the following from a moving note sent to me by another colleague today, one who happens to be a great, longtime civil rights champion. I believe his thoughts, and thanks, are due to all of those who have helped to support our work here at The BRAD BLOG and have made us a regular stop on an increasingly busy super highway, over the past year and more...

Please take his kind words sent to me, as my sincere thoughts sent to you, in hopes we can all celebrate someday --- and perhaps even for a few hours this Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever holiday you enjoy --- what we all continue to strive for, in our long, strange journey together...

One last update before the two Jews running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota stop to celebrate Christmas.

It's almost all over but the court case, and even that, if it happens, doesn't seem to have much left to stand on. In summary then, here's where we now are in the extraordinarily close U.S. Senate hand-count in MN...

Yesterday, "Mediabloodhound" Brad Jacobson (an occasional guest contributor to The BRAD BLOG) covered the coverage, noting the curious lack thereof, in the corporate mainstream, of the death of Mike Connell, the longtime top Bush/Rove/McCain IT consultant.

Jacobson's piece concludes:

Shortly following the publication of Jacobson's piece, AP/CBS filed a rather detailed report, one which is actually quite thorough by MSM standards.

Nonetheless, it's still been fairly quiet in the bulk of the MSM, especially in the broadcast MSM, and especially given the high-ranks of Connell, who had been the chief IT consultant for Karl Rove, had received millions creating websites for the Bushes, McCain, the Swiftboaters, the state of OH and dozens of other GOP campaigns, as well as having created the network firewalls for top Congressional committees (for which his company reportedly received a sweetheart, no-bid contract) and the controversial alternate email server used by the White House and at the center of the US Attorney purge scandal.

Let's hope the AP/CBS report will now spur more MSM coverage...just in time to be lost in the XMas news hole, of course.

A few more odds and ends of note today on this matter, as we head into that news hole...

I'm not sure what, if any, light this video --- as shot by local eye and ear-witnesses in Akron, OH --- sheds on the plane crash and death of high-ranking GOP IT operative Mike Connell. But, as it may reveal something, to somebody, in the still-unexplained, and surprisingly-timed crash, I suppose it may useful to put it on the record here.

For example, despite scattered reports that bad weather may have contributed to the cause of the crash, the weather seems to have been clear, at least on the ground, at least by the time the witnesses arrived, as seen in the video. Reports of "mist" seem to be belied in the early part of the video, shot through the front window of the car which does not appear to have its windshield wipers on. [UPDATE: RAW STORY also reports weather data during the hour of the crash, noting visibility was clear, and temperatures just above freezing.] Also, several descriptions of what was heard by the "ear-witnesses" as the crash occurred, may be of value as well.

The video, and an audio interview with OH attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who had sought Connell's protection after reported threats from Karl Rove, follow below...

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

The lead attorney in the widening 2004 federal election fraud conspiracy case which began in Ohio --- but is rapidly growing to other states and other elections --- says that the stunning death of a key witness last Friday is a blow to the case, but not the end of it by a long shot.

"Michael Connell was a critically important witness. His loss hurts our case," Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the King-Lincoln Bronzeville v. OH Sec. of State lawsuit, told The BRAD BLOG in an email responding to questions about Connell's death. The Republican 'IT guru,' a top IT consultant to Karl Rove, George W. Bush, John McCain, and a bevy of congressional Republicans, had been in the nation's capital on still-unknown business before his single engine plane crashed Friday night on the way home, just three miles short of the runway in Akron, Ohio. The cause of the crash remains similarly unknown as of today.

"We will have to adjust," Arnebeck told us in response to queries about where the case may necessarily need to go from here. "The kind of organized criminal enterprise we are addressing requires the resources of the very best that the investigative press corps and law enforcement, at all levels, can muster."

As posted on the New York Times website in full on Saturday, the last line of a press release from VelvetRevolution.us, who has retained Arnebeck as counsel in the case, reads "Our prior request to have Mr. Connell protected went unheeded and now he is dead." [DISCLOSURE: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR.]

However, despite Connell's elite status as a top-rung Republican consultant for years --- he reportedly received some $800,000 from the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004 alone --- the NYTimes, the nation's paper of record, has yet to run anything else on the death of the man who, Arnebeck notes, he had intended to both further depose, as well as call to testify as a key trial witness in the federal conspiracy case. Coverage from the UK's Telegraph, however, is published here.

Connell had been compelled by the federal district judge in the case, on the Friday prior to last month's Presidential Election, to give a deposition to plaintiff attorneys on the Monday before the general election. The order for that deposition came after the OH attorneys had sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, seeking protection for Connell and his wife. While Connell had expressed a willingness to testify about what he knew concerning the '04 election, and the election website network he had created for Ohio's then-Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, he had become reticent after Rove had sent threats to Connell and his wife, according to tipsters...

With an apparent hat-tip to Saddam Hussein's post-Gulf War strategy, George W. Bush continues his scorched earth policy on the way out the door. Earlier this month his EPA announced a new last-minute rule allowing mining companies to dump their waste into mountain streams. Last Friday, he continued to take his dump on America, by issuing a permit to allow cruise ships to dump "untreated graywater" --- including oil, grease, metals, pesticides, viruses, fecal coliform bacteria from human sewage, medical and dental waste, detergents, and cleaners --- just one mile off shore of coastal U.S.A.

"A large cruise ship on a one-week voyage can generate one million gallons-which would fill 33 large swimming pools-of graywater," say Friends of the Earth in a press release issued last week (posted in full below) following the EPA announcement.

Hope you folks in Florida will remember to thank the Republicans in 2010...

Following the discovery of hundreds of ballots deleted by Diebold's paper ballot op-scan system in Humboldt County, CA, the county's election chief Carolyn Crnich has finally decided to dump Diebold all together. That's the good news.

The bad news, as longtime local election integrity advocate Dave Berman detailed this week, is that Crnich has decided to jump out of the frying pan, and into the fire with a different op-scan system, made by a different private vendor, using similarly secret software, with many of the same problems found in the crappy Diebold system she's finally tossing over the side.

A spokesman for Hart InterCivic, the private Austin, TX company which makes the paper ballot op-scan system Crnich is hoping to use, defended the county's planned move, though he had to make some erroneous claims to The BRAD BLOG in order to do so...

[UPDATED at end of article with today's (Friday's) latest numbers.]

As thousands of challenged ballots from both Sen. Norm Coleman (R) and challenger Al Franken (D) are being decided by the bi-partisan state canvassing board in the U.S. Senate race in MN, AP says it's currently a 2 vote race, out of 2.9 million ballots cast, in favor of Franken.

That said, as all of the challenged ballots are finally counted over the next several days (and weeks), the lead could go back and forth a bit each night. The Star-Tribune, which puts today's margin at 5 votes in favor of Coleman, currently projects that Franken will ultimately win by 89 votes...

As Jon Ponder noted here on Tuesday, a bi-partisan U.S. Senate panel has found [PDF] that George W. Bush was responsible for approving War Crimes (torture and abuse) at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Dick Cheney admitted in a recent interview to helping to approve War Crimes (torture and abuse) in interrogations, and the corporate media --- with the lone exception of MSNBC --- have been virtually as silent on what may be the most offensive crimes ever committed by an Executive Branch in the U.S. as they were during the lead-up to and follow-through on the War on Iraq, when those same officials sent our nation into war on the basis of demonstrable lies.

George Washington University's highly-respected constitutional law professor Jonathon Turley, noting the War Crimes now known and admitted to by Bush and Cheney, asked Keith Olbermann Tuesday night, "If someone commits a crime and everyone's around to see it and does nothing, is it still a crime?"

(Please watch the video at right, or read the text transcript at the end of this article.)

During the discussion, Turley mentioned --- no less than three different times --- that it'll be up to the citizens whether or not any action is actually taken to prosecute those who committed these crimes.

But is there any real basis --- in 2008 --- for his well-meaning argument? Not bloody likely...

It's been more than a full month since the November 13th arrest of Broward County, FL's election integrity advocate Ellen Brodsky and the state has still failed to file formal charges or supply her with discovery documents.

As The BRAD BLOG reported in detail following the arrest, Brodsky was taken into custody, seemingly at the behest of her opponent in the election, after attempting to oversee the public counting of ballots for the election in which she ran as a candidate for Supervisor of Elections.

The arrest for "disorderly conduct" (according to police records) was caught on tape and posted here last week. The tape shows fairly clearly that there was no such disorderly conduct by Brodsky, despite the order for the arrest having apparently been issued by the office of the current Broward Supervisor of Elections, Dr. Brenda Snipes.

Today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel picks up the story with an update noting that Brodsky, a month since her arrest, has been forced to seek a judge's order demanding that prosecutors explain why she was arrested in the first place.

The BRAD BLOG has also obtained a copy of a motion to compel discovery exhibits, which have similarly not been given to her, as filed by Brodksy's attorney earlier this month.

According to the Sun-Sentinel:

Journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi, the new hero in Iraq, much of the Muslim world, and even among many in this country, is facing less than friendly treatment from the Iraqi military and, according to some news reports, the U.S. forces overseeing his custody...

And yes, as we noted in our coverage on Sunday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino did, in fact, receive both a literal and symbolic black eye during the melee following the shoe toss. In what would be dismissed as ridiculous heavy-handed Hollywood symbolism, had it been featured in a movie, Perino actually received a black-eye when she was hit during the fracas, in the eye, with a microphone...

More photos here...

In other shoe-throwing news, you can now throw virtual shoes at Bush in a number of online games, or you can send him some actual shoes via a new online campaign promising to give Bush the boot. They all sound like good ideas to us!

Unlike the previous video, this one is real, as the line between satire and Bush's 'Presidency' grows increasingly impossible to discern in his waning days, and as his final visit to Iraq becomes as embarrassing as his first (when he delivered a fake turkey to the troops).

From NYTimes:

TV news coverage has noted that throwing shoes is one of the culture's greatest insults. So is calling someone a "dog." Unlike hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by Bush's attacks over the last 5 years, however, he was able to survive this one with his life, and even make a joke about it...

UPDATE: The video of both shoes dropping follows below. Also, MSNBC reports that WH Spokesliar Dana Perino may have ended up with a black eye. Both a literal, and an unbelievably symbolic one at the same time...

(Via Bob Geiger's Saturday Cartoons, hat-tip BRAD BLOG emailer "BS")