Blogged by Brad Friedman from the road...

Journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! was arrested today, along with two producers of her radio/television show, while covering protests at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

Producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar "were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention," according to a press release issued this afternoon by the independent, progressive daily news program, broadcast on many Pacifica Radio outlets as well as satellite television.

"Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press," says the release, which adds that "Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul."

A short video of Goodman's arrest follows...

The press release also notes:

UPDATE: 11:51pm PT: Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar have now been released, according to a late update from Democracy Now!

UPATE 10/5/11: Minneapolis, St. Paul police departments and the Secret Service agree to $100,000 payment to settle federal lawsuits filed by journalists. More details now here...

Had planned to run this on what I thought would be a "slow" Labor Day weekend. Oh, well.

Goofin' with talk radio pals Jim Ward (of The Stephanie Miller Show) and Randi Rhodes (of The Randi Rhodes Show) last week at the DNC...

The youngest member of our host family in Boulder, CO, last week seemed to be on her way to making a clear choice. Feel free to add your own photo caption in comments...

-- Brad Friedman, from Denver, CO...

16,632 votes are unaccounted for in a Palm Beach County election recount following last Tuesday's state primary, according to Ellen H. Brodsky, non-partisan candidate for Supervisor of Elections in Broward County and a long-time Election Integrity advocate.

The machine recount was completed early Saturday morning in the Circuit Court race between Judge Richard Wennet and challenger William Abramson, Brodsky reports via email. The machine recount was completed at 4:30am, in the race in which Wennet and Abramson were separated by just 18 votes in the initial machine tally. Palm Beach County recently changed voting systems again, moving from faulty touch-screen voting systems to --- apparently --- faulty optical-scan paper-ballot systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc. [PDF].

The still-unexplained "disappearance" of votes in the machine recount "has severe repercussions," Brodsky wrote in an email alert this afternoon describing the re-scan of some 90,000 ballots.

"With 16,632 less votes on summary report," she writes, it "portends dire consequences for the November election and all elections."

The question remains as to how many votes were lost in other races on the same ballot which were not included in last night's re-tally. Florida state law disallows hand-counting of paper ballots which have already been counted by machine, other than in special circumstances. We'll see if this ends up being one of those circumstances. Theoretically, a hand-count would determine the correct totals for the race, where the machine-count has misreported totals. [UPDATE: Palm Beach Post reports the machine recount was close enough to allow for a hand-count of over votes and undervotes. See more in the update at end of this article.]

Sequoia's voting machines have seen notorious failures of late, including lost votes and other problems, around the country...

Financial Times:

News Hounds:

FOXNews.com reports: "Mindful of the pitfalls of hosting cocktail parties while Gulf Coast residents are being evacuated, John McCain’s campaign suggested Thursday that Republicans could postpone their upcoming national convention in St. Paul if Tropical Storm Gustav makes landfall over the weekend."

“McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said delaying the start time is a possibility.

"Senator McCain has always been sensitive to national crises — in the 2000 race, he postponed his announcement because of the situation in the Balkans, and we are monitoring the situation very closely,” Bounds said."

Ah, but he partied down with his pal the prez in 2005 as Katrina was drowning a thousand Americans and their pets in their homes.

"Silent Patriot" over at Crooks & Liars has the video, and a bit more detail to go with this. But here's the condensed version [emphasis in original]:

-- Brad Friedman from Denver, CO...

We had the chance to interview former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman inside the Pepsi Center on Wednesday, during the Democratic National Convention.

Our concise conversation ranges from the Congressional Democrats' failure to call for a full House vote on Contempt of Congress by Karl Rove, Siegelman's 2002 election which he believes was "stolen electronically," the corporate media's inability to investigate or report on it, and the concern about whether or not Democrats will be in a forgive and forget mode after this session of Congress if Obama is successful in his quest for the White House.

Here's our complete interview (appx. 6 mins)...

Some pull-quotes from the interview...

On Rove: "If we do not vote the contempt citation, Karl Rove is simply going to get in his getaway car and thumb his nose at the Constitution, Congress, and the American people. It creates almost two systems of justice: one for the powerful, those connected to the White House, and then another system for you and me and the rest of the people."

On Democrats: "Democrats are so magnanimous in victory, as they were after Watergate, they did nothing. After the Iran-Contra scandal, they did nothing. But what Democrats are going to want to do is get on with positive programs, to fix the damage that has been done by the Bush administration...But I view this as part of that positive change. Finding out who hijacked the Department of Justice and who used it as a political weapon."

On his 'stolen' 2002 election: "I went to bed the winner. The media had been sent home. The pollworkers had been sent home. The party chairmen had been given their copies of the election results. And then after midnight a light went on in the basement of the capitol, the basement of the courthouse, in the sheriff's office, and 5,200 votes that were mine were shifted to my opponent."

The complete text transcript of the interview follows in full below (thanks to Emily Levy of VelvetRevolution.us)...

Here's an object lesson in so much that's wrong with the corporate mainstream media.

U.S. Senator Jon Kyl, the Republican from Arizona, showed up at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night. He was mobbed by "reporters" from the corporate media (people with large video cameras and microphones who turn them on, point them towards famous people, and allow them to say whatever they want without ever challenging them in any way) out front of the Pepsi Center in Denver.

I happened to be there as well, with a much smaller video camera rolling, and the willingness to actually try to hold Kyl's feet to the fire.

First he had mentioned John McCain's "experience" in foreign policy that allowed him to deal with situations like the Russia/Georgia conflict in a way that Barack Obama couldn't. The "reporters" asked no follow-ups in response to Kyl's unsupported talking point, so I tried to ask him how McCain could deal with the two parties as an honest broker, given that he has senior campaign staffers who are paid lobbyists for Georgia. Kyle dodged the question and quickly moved onto something else. I tried to follow up, but he ignored me.

Then, when one of the "reporters" asked Kyl a hard-hitting question about whether he had "seen anything this week that made [him] cringe," he referred to Bill Clinton's convention speech, made within the past hour that night. Responding to the compliant, smiling media zombies he charged that Clinton had cited "statistics...that are not accurate." However, the Senator gave no evidence for those allegations, and the zombies didn't press him, so I decided to do so.

Here, then - with my polite pauses, allowing him to ramble on in answer to other inane questions from the zombies, edited out for time --- is what it looked like...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Denver...

[Updated at end of article...Including details on Hillary Clinton dramatically saving the day...]

Allow me to stress the unconfirmed nature of this report before I even tell you what I'm hearing. It's difficult to get information and/or confirm out here on such things, so take it with the grain of salt that it's currently intended to be served with.

That said, a reliable source on one of the state delegations tells me that today's nominating speeches have been moved up from 4:30pm to 3:45pm MT. (That much, we've now been able to confirm from a couple of different sources.) The reason for the move, so the speculation has it, is that there may be concerns of a floor fight on the way in regard to the roll-call nominations of Clinton and Obama.

I don't have much more than that, and Clinton's hopes for her supporters to move their support to Obama during last night's speech seemed pretty damned clear. So, for now, let's consider this report a rumor only for the moment (which I don't usually like reporting without confirm). But if the source is correct, it's certainly something noteworthy enough to watch out for, along with all of those caveats.

Todd Beeton at MyDD reports on Hillary's comments, within the last hour or so, at a meeting of her delegates. Some of her noteworthy comments to her delegates, as reported by Beeton, follow...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Denver...

Mike Sheehan, of both Scholars & Rogues and RAW STORY, cornered me on Monday for an interview on a number of important issues. Here's his Q&A with yours truly, mouthing off on a number of them...

Late night in the Pepsi Center, after almost all of the delegates had cleared out, and only a few folks in the press corps remained, Sen. Joe Biden came out to do a walk-through for tomorrow night's speech. We happened to be there to catch it, along with a phalanx of camera's and Andrea Mitchell who asked the only questions, including the insightfully probing "Senator, what did you think of Hillary's message?"

Surprisingly, Biden didn't say "it really sucked, Andrea. Worst speech I've seen in years." Here's the quick video...

...Later, at the CNN Grill, someone slapped me on the ass and said, "Good game, buddy!" When I turned around, it was an apparently inebriated Charles Barkley.

These conventions are weird.

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Denver...

I'm up in the press skyboxes at the Pepsi Center tonight where Hillary Clinton just finished her speech. The place was absolutely jammed, literally, to the rafters, as the "UNITY" "HILLARY" "OBAMA" signs flowed on schedule through the throngs.

How she did will be up to you to decide. Or rather, for ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBCFOX to tell you how to decide. May have more later tonight, though it's been a very long day here. So let's consider this an open thread for your thoughts on tonight's pageantry, until I'm able to check back in again...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Denver...

It was a long and hot day in Denver. The mercury topped out at 90 as we roamed the streets from one venue to the next. At least on the ground, as we got our bearings today, mostly far off the grid of the incessant and inane ramblings of cable news coverage, it was a fairly run of the mill afternoon and evening.

Given the world we live in, the lack of news is probably a good thing. So, at the risk of disappointing Fox "News", nothing blew up, huge riots did not break out, most everyone seemed to be in a good mood everywhere we went, and even the security detail, present but not overbearing, were polite and welcoming, even as parts of the city were blocked off in Baghdadian fashion.

Here then, are a few random and sometimes personal observations and notes as seen from on the ground and throughout the day...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Boulder, CO...

The following video report, as seen live on Fox "News" yesterday, demonstrates that the far-right "news" channel has no clue what the words "raucous", "out of control" or "freedom of speech" actually mean, as "reporter" Griff Jenkins is seen taunting DNC Convention demonstrators, only to receive chants of "Fuck Fox News", live on air, in the bargain...

The video also demonstrates (again) that, to Fox, "far left" is anybody who doesn't cow-tow to Fox's fringe kook extremist Republicanist agenda. That is, unless wanting to keep U.S. troops in Iraq forever, and launching yet a third war with Iran is the mainstream American view, and only "leftists" are against such things.

We'll be in Denver later today, and we'll try to look for Jenkins to find out if he wishes to explain his performance. If not, clearly it'll be because he "doesn't believe in freedom of speech".

UPDATE: The following longer clip (hat-tip BRAD BLOG commenter "Floridiot") shot by a citizen "off air", shows that this place could be a tinder-box with Fox, apparently, more than willing to light the match if needed. With temperatures set to reach 90 degrees later today in Denver, we'll hope things stay cool and Fox thinks better of their strategy of taunting peaceful demonstrators...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Boulder, CO...

Just as I went off the grid late last week, this news came in, so some of you may be ahead of me on this one. In either case, it's still worth noting that GOP/DoJ vote suppressor, Hans von Spakovsky was secretly hired by Bush's bad joke of a "Commission on Civil Rights" to oversee the '08 elections, as reported by TPMMuckraker's Kate Klonick late last week.

While the story is mindblowing, it's not all together surprising given the CCR's embarrassing track record under Bush. See the amazing flashback video of the CCR's Peter Kirsanow testifying to Congress in 2007, as posted below after Klonick's lede, and everything will likely make "sense"...