In what can only be described as a cynical and partisan last minute stunt by the Republican-controlled House of Representative, GOP leaders have announced a sudden vote this evening on the "Murtha Resolution" which had called for the immediate phasing out of troops in Iraq and a deployment of a "quick-reaction U.S. force" of Marines in the region should trouble arise.

The GOP-modified version of Murtha's resolution, which had given numerous reasons for his call for a pull-out has starkly changed both the language and meaning of the original resolution in hopes that Republicans can force Democrats onto the record voting in favor of, or against, "immediate termination" of forces in Iraq.

The BRAD BLOG has obtained PDF versions of both the original Murtha Resolution [PDF] as well as the 3-line GOP-Amended version [PDF] version being put forward by House Leadership for the last minute vote this evening.

Congressman Murtha (D-PA) is a long time Iraq war hawk, strong advocate of the military and a combat veteran of both the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. In an emotional statement yesterday, he had called for the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq.

After the preamble in Murtha's original resolution, which gives numerous reasons to support his call for troop withdrawal, the following statement is made:

The GOP revision, however, includes no preamble, and states that all troops will be removed immediately. This is it, in its entirety:

The AP has more on the all-out political melee now occuring on the House floor...

MORE... Debate/Vote scheduled for 7pm ET ... C-Span's live coverage here. (thanks for link to DaveF of Bare Knuckle Politics!)

As the State of California appears to now be bending over backwards in an attempt to give their elections to Diebold as reported earlier today, a lawsuit has been quietly filed in North Carolina by the http://www.eff.org\">Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to ensure that Diebold must play be the same rules as other vendors and that they abide by state law which they have been attempting to skirt through court filings.

Today EFF announced that they were going to court to prevent Diebold Elections Systems, Inc. from evading the North Carolina law which requires Voting Machine Companies to place their source code into escrow with the state. Diebold, one of America's largest Voting Machine Companies, apparently doesn't want to and has recently received a court-waiver to allow them to avoid doing so.

From EFF's press release issued today...

(Hat-tips to both John Gideon and David Edwards for alerting us to this story.)

Election reform advocates had hoped Diebold touch-screen voting machines would be permanently decertified in the country's largest "voting market" (as Diebold likes to refer to it) after a massive test of their AccuVote DRE machines earlier this year revealed a 20% failure rate. But a more recent test, secretly held at Diebold Election System's McKinney Texas headquarters, apparently in violation of California state law, has resulted in what appears to be a last minute about-face from California's Republican Sec. of State, Bruce McPhereson. The latest news has now thrown everything into doubt in the state concerning the future of electronic voting here.

Miriam Raftery of RAW STORY has the full skinny. Something smells very rotten in the state of California.

The original co-sponsors of legislation in the House of Representatives to require "paper records" on Electronic Voting Machines and many other security measures and improvements to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, have sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to other members citing the landmark report recently released by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the myriad security problems found after a year-long investigation into those machines.

In a letter from last Wednesday obtained by The BRAD BLOG, Congressmen Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Tom Davis (R-VA) asked colleagues to join them in support of H.R. 550, known as the "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act".

In their letter, the congressmen point out several of the key findings in the GAO report leading off with a quote from it that reads ". . . computer programs could access these cast vote files and alter them without the system recording this action in its audit logs.” [emphasis in original]

The legislation, which currently has more than 150 bi-partisan co-sponsors, has been languishing for some time as House Leadership has kept it from coming up for debate on the House floor or committee mark-up. H.R. 550 is currently "pending" in the House Administrative Committee, according to Holt's Communications Director, Patrick G. Eddington, but it has received "no debate, mark-up or hearing" as of yet. He added, "no Committee has specifically addressed H.R. 550."

H.R. 550 was introduced in April of this year. It was a reintroduction of a predecessor bill, H.R. 2239, which was first introduced in 2003, but was similarly never debated or voted on in any House committee.

The House Administrative Committee is chaired by Ohio Republican Bob Ney who held hearings last March on "Ohio Election Irregularities" in which he called only one witness from any "Voting Rights" group. That group, the self-proclaimed "non-partisan" American Center for Voting Rights, had been formed only days before the hearing, and as reporting by BRAD BLOG has revealed, was formed by two high-level Bush/Cheney/RNC operatives. Ney is also reported to be currently under investigation by the DoJ for his involvement in the ongoing Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Amongst several other points cited in the letter from the GAO reports's findings: Ballot definitions on Electronic Voting Machines may be altered so that "the votes shown on the touch screen for one candidate would actually be recorded and counted for a different candidate."; Programming errror in a Pennsylvania county resulted in an undervote percentage of 80% in some precincts; An "unknown number of disenfranchised voters" as documented by California voting officials; Election monitors in a Florida county discovering a "flaw" in an Electronic Voting Machine ballot that allowed "ballots to be added to the canvas totals multiple times without being detected."; An Electronic Voting system in Ohio added nearly 4,000 votes for Bush in just one precinct during the '04 Presidential Election.

Though the GAO report was non-partisan, requested by the Chairmen and ranking members of three different U.S. House Committees, and was released last month after a year-long investigation along with a rare bi-partisan joint press release which lauded it, not a single wire service or mainstream American newspaper to date, that we know of, has devoted a single paragraph reporting on its release or the information contained within.

The complete text of Holt and Davis' letter to colleagues follows [emphasis in original] ...

Guest blogged by Chris Floyd

Below is an expanded version of my column in today's edition of The Moscow Times.

Four years ago, George W. Bush quietly assumed dictatorial powers with a secret executive order granting himself the right to imprison anyone on earth indefinitely, without charges or trial or indictment or evidence, simply by declaring them an "enemy combatant," on his say-so alone. This week, the assemblage of bootlickers and bagmen that now befoul the U.S. Senate voted to codify the core of this global autocracy under the pretense of curtailing it.

With great self-fluffing fanfare, the Senate passed two measures ostensibly designed to stem the flood of torture and tyranny issuing from the White House. But the twinned amendments to a military spending bill have the curious effect of cancelling each other out: the anti-torture measure leaves Bush's tyranny intact, while the anti-tyranny measure will allow torture to continue unabated. This switcheroo, we are told by one of the scam's sponsors, "will reestablish moral high ground for the United States," the Washington Post reports.

But what can we actually see from this lofty moral promontory? We see that all foreign captives in Bush's worldwide gulag have now been stripped of the ancient human right of habeas corpus. They will not be allowed to challenge "any aspect of their detention" in court --- until they have already been tried and convicted by a "military tribunal" constituted under rules concocted arbitrarily by Bush and his minions. Only then, after years of incarceration without rights or legal protection, will they be given access to a single federal appeals court which can review their conviction --- subject to the usual "national security" restrictions on challenging evidence gathered by secret means from secret sources in secret places. Remarkably, the Supreme Court is expressly prohibited from any jurisdiction whatsoever over any aspect of gulag captivity, the Washington Post reports. And of course, Bush can simply skip the tribunal and keep anyone he pleases chained in legal limbo until they rot. Neither of the ballyhooed amendments affects this raw despotism.

In his first outing as one of the "new voices" to replace fired progressive columnist Robert Scheer at the LA Times, Jonah Goldberg forwards the wingnut CYA agenda by beginning to build a case that Bush may have lied the country into a war, but if he did so, it was okay since it was for "a just cause". He also regales his new readers by referring to those who disagree with him politically as "moonbats".

Finally, he goes on to gloat about it all over at Wingnut Central by making fun of those who protested Scheer's firing. Classy.

Great hire, LA Times!

...CONTACTS...
Jeff Johnson, new Op Ed page publisher
Jeff.johnson@latimes.org, voice: 213-237-5000 fax: 213-237-4401

Dennis FitzSimons, CEO Tribune Company
dfitzsimons@tribune.com, voice: 312-222-9100 fax: 312-222-1573

Letters to the Editor, Letters@LATimes.com

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The new Secretary of State in Colorado has told 10 counties to be prepared to conduct hand recounts of all of their paper ballots. An audit of the results from those counties ES&S optical-scan machines has caused some question as to whether the results are correct. Also, on the front of this morning's Washington Post is an article that reports that not everyone in the Department of Justice was in agreement that Georgia's voter ID law is constitutional. Political appointees overruled career employees....

(Roaring 20's anybody?)

Guest blogged by David Edwards

Representative John Murtha (D-PA), a Vietnam veteran, is known for support of the Pentagon and the Iraq war. Today, he called for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Murtha is the top Democrat on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He explained that the American people are ahead of congress on this issue. Murtha choked back tears as he explained the failures of the Iraq war that lead him to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops.

AP reports on Murtha's speech:

Video in Windows Media format...
Video in QuickTime format...
Audio in MP3 format...

UPDATE: Stakeholder has the full text transcript of Murtha's speech, along with the text of his resolution. Right here...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

If it feels like 1984, that's because it is. We're 21 years late but we're there all the same. The Ministry of Information is busy changing our past. Fiction has become the news. And Truth has become an enemy of the state.

Whether you measure by severity or frequency, it's clear that the falsification of our national history has recently reached an all-time high. Bush's declaration that we don't torture was a clear sign that the truth is definitely behind us now, and his assertion that his opponents are rewriting history raises the level of absurdity to a level one would prefer to call unimaginable.

The propaganda that has been catapulted lately --- like all good propaganda --- contains almost enough truth to make it somewhat slightly plausible. For example, the CIA has from time to time acted as a rogue agency, Congress did vote to grant Bush the power to do something to Iraq; and Bush may have believed some of what he was saying about Iraq before he started the war. So the lies are not totally false, and we can't dismiss them entirely. We have to pick them apart very carefully, in order to show that, even though said claims do contain an occasional nugget of half-truth, the claims themselves are overwhelming false.

It's hard work!

And in the meantime, like all good propagandists, the White House Spin Machine has a vast assortment of Spinnerettes at its disposal. [And make no mistake, the Spinnerettes are definitely disposable!] The Spinnerettes keep repeating the lies, over and over and over, generating an ocean of falsehood that comes at us in wave after wave after wave, until most of us must struggle to discern what is true and what is false.

Of course the wise men among us have no such trouble. So it's always a good idea to read Robert Parry, and his newest column, in my opinion, is one of his best.

Here's a sample [with emphasis added]:

Kaboom! Game, set and match!

What's that? You want another game?

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

While Ohio SoS Ken Blackwell characterizes last weeks election as a success the dirty truth is just now coming out. In Lucas County, for instance, the election board's call logs for the Nov. 8 election, reviewed yesterday by The Toledo Blade, show that paid poll volunteers made more than 180 requests for help. Many of the calls involved broken machines. Does that sound like a success Mr. Blackwell? In Detroit, the city elections director suspects there are problems with their Nov. 2 vote count and she wants to do a 5% hand recount. The state is keeping her from doing that....

RAW STORY scoops Woodward on Woodward scoop by revealing what Woodward wouldn't.

The just posted story at RAW reports that "attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials" identified National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley as having revealed Valerie Plame/Wilson as a "CIA analyst" to WaPo's Bob Woodward.

Hadley's leak to the reporter who gained fame via his investigative work with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal, would have occured prior to any other known leaks to journalists on the matter, and prior even to Joe Wilson's now-infamous NY Times Op/Ed which was critical of the Bush Administration's assertion that Saddam had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger.

They've already come under some harsh criticism (also here and here) from the left for their far-right leaning Editorial Board and unbalanced collection of blogs, but the group previously known as Pajamas Media has opened for business-proper today under the name "Open Source Media". Discredited former NY Times "journalist" Judith Miller was the keynote speaker at their launch. (Both BuzzMachine and Kos have some worthy thoughts on that).

OSM was founded by rightwingers Roger Simon and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. The latter blogger, at least, being quite fond of disparaging his political opponents by labeling them as "moonbats".

Nonetheless, and despite their currently massive lack of editorial "balance", several of their staffers have claimed in various recent conversations I've had with them that they hope to change that hard right tilt in the near future. The proof, however, will remain in the blog pudding.

During their testing phase, I participated in a "BlogJam" with three other bloggers for them. That's their term for an online debate forum. The no-brainer topic about which we debated a week or two ago was "Are left-right politics becoming too polarized?"

That debate is now available online here as one of their first offerings.

I had fun doing it, as you may be able to tell. You'll let me know how I did...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"We fondly remember Mayberry; but it was a fictional town. We have to move on."

So said Catherine Carpenter, the Administrative Assistant and self-described "Queen of Town Hall" and "Jill of All Trades" in the once sleepy little southern town of Bluffton, South Carolina.

Last night was the last time that the citizens of Bluffton would vote using paper ballots after going to the only polling place they ever needed: Town Hall. It has been a long-standing tradition that at the end of the day, when the polls closed, the citizens of the town would gather in the hall and watch as the votes are counted.

Each vote is marked with a slash mark on a chalk board and audience members call out "tally " each time a group of five votes is recorded.

But now, according to Carpenter, the town has grown too large to do that anymore. Since 2000 this once little town has grown from 1278 citizens to over 4800. They are very quickly being swallowed up into the retirement community craze that has swept north from Florida. And that means Tuesday's gathering of citizens to watch the tally of the votes and to call out "tally" will move on too...