This one is just incredible. Fox "News'" Rightwing owner/idealogue Rupert Murdoch's NY Post may have hit an all-time nadir for corporate mainstream media "reporting" in this remarkable historical period. Greg Sargent has the scoop...
  w/ Brad & Desi
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  w/ Brad & Desi
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BARCODED BALLOTS AND BALLOT MARKING DEVICES
BMDs pose a new threat to democracy in all 50 states...
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VIDEO: 'Rise of the Tea Bags'
Brad interviews American patriots...
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'Democracy's Gold Standard'
Hand-marked, hand-counted ballots...
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GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal 2012...
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The Secret Koch Brothers Tapes...
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MORE BRAD BLOG 'SPECIAL COVERAGE' PAGES... |
This one is just incredible. Fox "News'" Rightwing owner/idealogue Rupert Murdoch's NY Post may have hit an all-time nadir for corporate mainstream media "reporting" in this remarkable historical period. Greg Sargent has the scoop...
Signs indicate things are getting worse, and quickly, for one of Congress' most corrupt members, Rep. Tom Feeney, a once-powerful Florida Republican whose extensive career of documented lies, political favors, and routine partisan smear-mongering The BRAD BLOG has covered in great detail over the last two and a half years.
Yesterday, Feeney was fingered as "Representative #3" in recent court filings related to the guilty plea of Republican Congressional Aide Mark Zachares, who admitted receiving some $40,000 in cash and gifts from Jack Abramoff. A day earlier, it was revealed that the FBI had recently interviewed Feeney and requested documents related to his 2003 golf junket to St. Andrews, Scotland with Zachares and the disgraced GOP lobbyist.
Today, court documents reveal that the cost of the 2003 trip was closer to $20,000 per person instead of the $5,643 Feeney claimed when he "paid back" that amount in January of this year, after the House Ethics Committee found him to be in violation of House Rules prohibiting lobbyist-paid travel.
Further news reports indicate much more trouble may be ahead for the beleaguered Congressman, as Abramoff is said to be chattering away to federal investigators --- "so much he doesn't have time to eat," according to one news report --- in hopes of reducing a prison sentence he's currently facing in relation to conspiracy fraud charges to which he's already plead guilty in Florida.
But if that weren't indication enough that Feeney may be in big trouble, it's also now being reported this morning that his former Chief of Staff, Jason Roe --- who, along with his wife, Patricia, has also been the target of corruption allegations --- abruptly resigned from his new position as Deputy Campaign Manager for Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Amusingly, the reason he cited for the resignation was "familial obligations."
Those "familial obligations" might include the fact that Patricia reportedly received some $50,000 from the Feeney campaign for fundraising duties, before becoming Chief of Staff for Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) --- whose wife's office was raided last week by Federal investigators leading to his resignation this week from all Congressional Committees.
Further, in what TMP's Josh Marshall aptly described last night as "a classic scandal harmonic convergence," the case against Renzi, which included federal wiretaps prior to last year's November election, also has direct implications in the the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal.
And all of the "familial" wives are involved as well.
Following all of this? You may need to take notes. We'll try to make it easy for you...
Orlando Sentinel has some fresh details and Politico has some observations on the papers filed yesterday by the FBI concerning the guilty plea by Mark Zachares in the Abramoff affair, as we discussed yesterday in our item covering the FBI interview of the corrupt Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL).
In addition to what looks like trouble in the case for at least two other GOP Congressmen, it looks like Feeney is being fingered as "Representative #3" in yesterday's filing...
That can't be seen as good news for Feeney who, we'll remind readers, is a very close friend of the Bush family, having run (unsuccessfully) as Jeb's Lieutenant Governor during his first run in Florida in '98, serving as point man in the FL House during the 2000 Election Debacle (when he promised to give the state's Electors to GWB no matter what the Supreme Court ended up deciding), and much, much more.
We'll also remind readers that the imprisoned Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) was once designated as "Representative #1" before being indicted in the Abramoff affair himself....
"When it Rains, it Pours" Week continues here at The BRAD BLOG...
Widely syndicated columnist Liz Smith, in the New York Post today and elsewhere (her column runs in at least 70 papers), picks up on Joe Conason's NY Observer piece from last week which pointed to our coverage of the Ann Coulter Voter Fraud issue.
In the bargain, a Fox & Friends producer has called me today to see if I might be available to appear on their show to discuss it tomorrow or the following morning (which would be about 3am or 5am my time, so if I do it, watch for the sleepless bags under my eyes...anything for Election Integrity). The producer explained that Coulter might appear after me via phone. I suggested she appear either before, or preferably at the same time, so she's not allowed to, um, say things that aren't true, as occurred last time she was asked about all of this on FNC.
As FNC tends to be, um, Ann Coulter friendly, we'll have to see if she has veto power enough to ensure I never actually get to appear to discuss it. But we'll see.
Anyway, here's Liz today:
Palm Beach County election officials say she also voted in the wrong precinct the following year, disregarding a poll worker who explained her error. (You can see this registration form online at bradblog.com.) Conason says those acts are crimes punishable by prison terms of up to five years and that Coulter is an attorney who knew what she was doing. Ann, with typical restraint, has called Palm Beach officials "syphilitic and mentally defective" but has stonewalled the ongoing investigation into the matter.
No charges have yet been filed.
Of course, you can read more about it, including perusing documents such as her fraudulent voter registration form and the report from the poll worker demonstrating she knowingly voted at the wrong precinct last year, via our "Ann Coulter Voter Fraud" Special Coverage page.
Good luck, Ann. Though it's taken over a year for the rest of the national media to catch on, you may finally be busted. At least in the media.
UPDATE: 3:19pm PT Heard back from Fox, who reports they "just spoke to Ann and she is unavailable tomorrow AM," so they probably won't be covering it tomorrow. Have a feeling Ann will be unavailable every AM to talk about this one. Hope they'll cover the story anyway, as I'm happy to stay up all night to help them.
Holy cow. When it rains it pours. Someone get us an umbrella. Quick.
Two related stories collide to suggest some possibly very bad news for our friend, the notoriously corrupt Tom Feeney (R-FL).
First this just in today from the St. Petersberg Times...:
Feeney's office said the congressman is cooperating voluntarily.
WASHINGTON - The FBI has asked U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney for information about his dealings with Jack Abramoff as part of its ongoing investigation into the lobbyist convicted of defrauding clients.
FBI agent Kevin Luebke refused to say whether Feeney, a Republican from the Orlando area, is under federal investigation.
Federal agents also have asked the St. Petersburg Times for an email sent to the newspaper by Feeney's office describing a golfing trip the congressman took with Abramoff to Scotland in 2003.
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"Rep. Feeney considers this an embarrassing episode in his 17-year career as an elected official and an expensive lesson for him as a public servant," according to [a statement released by Feeney's office].
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The FBI contacted the Times last week to ask for the February 2006 email that Feeney's then chief of staff Jason Roe wrote to the newspaper in response to a series of questions about interactions between Feeney and Abramoff. The Times has referred the FBI's request to its attorney.
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Feeney, 48, who spent a decade in the Florida Legislature where he was speaker of the House, has paid $23,000 in legal fees this year - more than any other expense - according to his latest campaign finance reports.
"Rep. Feeney anticipates voluntarily cooperating with the Justice Department in any further investigation of this trip and looks forward to promptly resolving this matter," according to Feeney's statement.
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"Any assertion that this office knew Abramoff paid for the Scotland trip is a g--d----- lie," Roe wrote in the email being sought by the FBI. The email was quoted in a newspaper article last year.
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"Tom has never written a letter for Abramoff. Abramoff has never been in our office. Abramoff has never asked anything of us," Roe wrote in the email. "There is no accusation of a quid pro quo. No quid pro quo exists."
More details in the full story on what we've been reporting for years --- in what seemed like a vaccuum until now --- on Feeney's golf junkets with Abramoff to St. Andrews, Scotland. (See this May 2006 story for example: "Feeney/St. Andrews/Abramoff and Ney/HAVA/Abramoff Connections Still Flying Beneath the Radar")
There were three Congressmen who went on those trips. The first two, Tom DeLay (R-TX) and Bob Ney (R-OH), have both been forced out of Congress in the bargain and are respectively under indictment or in jail. Only Feeney, so far, has escaped both notice and legal accountability.
That may be about to change, however, with today's news that Mark Zachares, an aide to Rep. Don Young (R-AK), will plead guilty tomorrow to accepting some $30,000 worth of goods from Abramoff, with a promise of a job down the line in an interesting scheme that could also reveal something about what Feeney might have been discussing in some fashion with Abramoff.
The two men worked out a "two-year plan" in which Abramoff would build a homeland security lobbying practice that Zachares ultimately would join.
Feeney has insisted that there was never a deal for anything between him and Abramoff, unlike with DeLay and Ney. However, the notion of long term plans, such as the deal Abramoff was working on with Zachares, has never been discussed in relation to Feeney.
And as luck would have it, Zachares was on that trip with Feeney and Abramoff in 2003 and is cooperating with the feds --- all of which could spell out very bad news indeed for Feeney.
We've been covering the corrupt Congressman in great detail for years in relation to allegations by Florida computer programmer Clint Curtis that Feeney asked him to create a vote-rigging software prototype when they worked together at a software firm in 2000, while Feeney was serving as a registered lobbyist for the company even while he was Speaker of the Florida House. We originally broke that story in December 2004. A summary version is here.
Let's hope Curtis saved those "Clint Curtis for Congress" signs. He may need them again sooner than he might have thought.
As you can imagine, we'll be watching this one closely. And likely with no small amount of elan...
UPDATE 4/24/07: Feeney fingered as "Representative #3" in FBI filings. Details...
Given all of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC)'s extraordinary failures of late, there's little time for the moment to review them all. See our EAC category page for the tip of the iceberg.
That said then, two notable articles are published today which go to town (and rightly so) on the EAC, detailing just some of their most recent failures --- namely, their withholding and/or rewriting of two important reports for clearly partisan reasons, but at whose direction? --- and the newly awakened Congressional response to those failures. As well, a few names are named that are names we've heard named before as being at the center of the politicization of the DoJ's Civil Rights voting unit, but popping up again over at the EAC. Whodathunkit?...
"You have to firewall politics out of the Department of Justice. Because once it gets in, people question every decision you make," the former U.S. Attorney from Arkansas, Bud Cummins, told the Los Angeles Times in March. "Now I keep asking myself: 'What about the Blunt deal?'"
What about the Blunt deal, indeed.
{Ed Note: See the 5/8/97 update at the end of this story concerning Cummins denial that he ever made that comment to the LATimes}
Last Thursday we began piecing together a few previously unconnected dots in the firing of Cummins. The dots connected appear to lay out a fairly straight arrow into the the highest levels of the White House. At least if you're familiar with some of the players, whom they know, and what they do for a living.
Since we've been reporting on the high-level (just about as high as they get) GOP operative, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, for some years now at The BRAD BLOG, the connection was made quite easily once we tripped upon a key fact: Hearne's Missouri law firm, Lathrop & Gage LC, was at the center of a criminal investigation by Cummins's office. That investigation had come to public light just before Cummins's sudden --- and still unexplained --- dismissal. He was replaced by Karl Rove aide Timothy Griffin.
While the Republican Punditocracy has been running around desperately repeating the old Scooter Libby-era chestnut "No Underlying Crime!" over the days since Gonzales's woeful testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, we've been looking more into the Cummins/Hearne/Rove/White House nexus, which seems to fairly scream out "Underlying Crime!" on just its face.
And others in the blogosphere, it seems, appear to be quite ready to burst as well with news on this element of the U.S. Attorney firings....
Chris Bagley of the North County Times files a terrific profile today of Riverside County, CA, Election Integrity advocate Tom Courbat. The piece covers the awareness of the issue that Courbat has been able to raise in the county (and, we would add, subsequently in the nation), the procedures that have changed there due to his persistent activism, and the recent Harri Hursti appearance in the wake of Jeff Stone's "Riverside Hack Challenge," etc. (FWIW, we are also mentioned in a few grafs, in regard to the Hursti business and a bit more.)
All of the above has been carried out by Courbat --- as we say, heroically --- even while he continues to battle cancer tied to the use of Agent Orange during his Vietnam-era military service in South Korea.
Tom is one of many such quiet, and usually unrecognized, heroes around the country, to whom our nation owes a debt of gratitude which can never be adequately repaid. We're proud to recommend Bagley's article today, and hope it serves as inspiration for many others.
The announcement of the sudden passing of the Congresswoman from California's 37th district today comes as both a surprise and a tragic loss. She was the first African-American woman to chair the important U.S. House Administration Committee, having taken the chair for the first time this past January in the 110th Congress. It had previously been held by Vern Ehlers (R-MI) who had taken over from Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) after he stepped down in the wake of his Abramoff-related corruption charges.
We covered the announcement of her cancer diagnosis and subsequent request for a temporary leave of absence last week from her post as chair of the committee which is currently overseeing the scheduled mark-up of Rep. Rush Holt's Election Reform bill (HR811). Our coverage last week described who might take over the committee in her absence.
Both The Hill and AP have additional details on Millender-McDonald's passing.
There is new information on the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 2006 election that shows that voting results on more than 1 in 4 voting systems failed to match up with the results on the central tabulator. The election was held under the administration of Michael Vu, the county's now-resigned Election Director who has, incredibly enough, been immediately hired up by the People's Republic of San Diego County and their former Registrar Mikel Haas (along with Vu, one of America's worst, so he was promoted by the county, naturally!) as the new Assistant Registrar of Voters...
In the 37 sample precincts where results didn’t match, there may have been corrupted memory cards, missing or torn reports, faulty printers or other problems, according to the independent audit commissioned by the Cuyahoga County elections board.
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The audit committee found a match among 95 precincts out of 132 precincts in which three races were checked for discrepancies between vote-memory cards and paper records of ballots cast on electronic machines.
Amazing enough, but it gets much, much worse....
...And this one, unlike John McCain's version, is actually amusing. Even if both of them are creepy as hell...
Kudos to the creator of the video, Adam Kontras, for his prescience and sense of dark satire back in April of 2006 when it was originally released. Even as we curse him for having given McCain, the former "straight shooter"-turned-wingnut-loon, any bad ideas.
Kontras tells us he received "lots of death threats from angry Iranians not understanding it," when he first posted it, and that he still does. As we receive far too many love letters here at The BRAD BLOG, hopefully this will to serve to send a few of the irony-impaired Iranians our way for a while instead. Always happy to serve.
(Hat-tip to Justice Through Music, who's also had this on their radar for some time!)
Guest Blogged by Daniel Borchers of Citizens for Principled Conservatism
Controversialist Ann Coulter, legendary for her hate speech and elimination rhetoric (see just a few of her most notorious greatest "hits" in the chart below), is a featured speaker at tonight's New Jersey Right to Life (NJRTL) Banquet. That’s right, an advocate for death is a spokesman for life.
Presidential candidate Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), among others, will be sharing the dais with Coulter.
Despite Coulter controversies just last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC, and at the Reclaiming America for Christ (RAC) Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, NJRTL still prominently features conservatism’s most prominent polemicist.
Ann Coulter at CPAC 2006:
“I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'“
(Responding to a question from a Catholic University student about her biggest moral or ethical dilemma) “There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought 'Ann, that's not going to help your career.'“
“If we find out someone [referring to a terrorist] is going to attack the Supreme Court next week, can't we tell Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalito?”
Ann Coulter at the Reclaiming America for Christ Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 3/3/07.
“I spoke at CPAC yesterday, and I [took questions] about Obama and Hillary and Gore and global warming, and I said I was going to also have a few remarks about the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but apparently you have to go to rehab if you use the word ‘faggot.’”
“Those few abortionists were shot, or, depending on your point of view, had a procedure with a rifle performed on them. I'm not justifying it, but I do understand how it happened....The number of deaths attributed to Roe v. Wade - about 40 million aborted babies and seven abortion clinic workers; 40 million to seven is also a pretty good measure of how the political debate is going.”
I contacted both Sen. Brownback and Rep. Smith. Neither deigned to address, or even respond, to my concerns over their tacit endorsement of Ann Coulter’s views, despite my having written them to explain that…
The Young Turks' Cenk Uyger, with our buddy RJ Eskow from Huff Po co-hosting yesterday morning, invoked The BRAD BLOG, calling on us to get to the bottom of Sanjaya's removal from American Idol. We're on it.