Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, blogs today on Electronic Voting. Here's just one of the money quotes...

Democratic Secretary of State candidate, Debra Bowen has released a new video ad on her campaign website showing how easy it would be for hackers to break into a garage where pre-programmed, election-ready Diebold touch-screen systems are now being "stored securely" by poll workers around the state.

Such a break-in could allow them to easily manipulate a single Diebold touch-screen machine to implant a virus on it would could then pass itself from machine to machine, resulting in an entirely flipped election. Nobody would ever know.

We have long since been critical of CA Sec. of State Bruce McPherson's re-certification of Diebold voting systems after his own technical advisory board at UC Berkley had advised him the machines could be tampered with in dozens of ways.

His further lack of enforcement of security requirements for the use of the systems --- he has sat by and allowed them to be sent home for weeks ahead of the election with poll workers on so-called "sleepovers" --- is both an outrage and a violation of his own state requirements and federal law.

Yesterday, we detailed (with photographs) how San Diego County Registrar Mikel Haas has been handing thousands of such hackable voting machines to poll workers in his county since October 16th of this year. Those irresponsible "sleepovers" now allow those poll workers --- or anyone who may wish to access the machines in their garage --- a full 3 weeks prior to the election to find the 60 seconds needed to flip every race in San Diego County.

Bowen's Diebold "sleepover" break-in ad can be viewed at her campaign website. It's also posted in full below...

More than 10,000 pre-programmed election-ready Diebold touch-screen voting machines, to be used for the first time across the entirety of San Diego County this November 7th, are now in the cars, garages, homes, and hands of poll workers and lord knows who else across one of Southern California's largest voting regions.

As reported in several first-hand accounts from San Diego poll workers just after recent training sessions (see end of article for one of those first-hand accounts), the voting machines were sent home on so-called overnight "sleepovers" with temporary poll workers beginning on October 16th, allowing for a full three weeks prior to the election for poll workers to find the 60 seconds they might need to hack a single machine. One tampered machine could affect the results on every single voting machine, in every race in the county.

San Diego Registrar Mikel Haas --- easily one of the country's worst and most irresponsible election administrators --- is unconcerned. He's also instructing poll workers not to give out paper ballots despite a recent order from the California Secretary of State.

The ability to easily insert malicious viral code onto Diebold's touch-screen systems has been proven, and video-taped by Princeton University and others. A single person could hack an entire election, flipping votes undetectably, and no trace would be left behind after the election.

But it's not just tampering that should be of concern to the voters of San Diego. It's the fact that these particular systems are amongst the most unreliable in the country. They simply do not work.

Diebold touch-screen voting systems are innacurate. Their screens freeze. Their printers jam and fail to create reliable "paper trails" and frequently they simply fail to start up at all. All of which occurred during Primary Elections in states across the country earlier this year, resulting in thousands of legally registered voters being disenfranchised, or turned away without being able to cast a ballot.

Incredibly, Haas has ordered these systems to be used for the first time in this November's general election, without even a test run during the June 6th Primary & Special Election, when a blended system of both Diebold optical-scan (paper-based) and touch-screens was used.

The few touch-screen systems in place during the June election (one per polling location) went almost completely unused. And yet Haas has ordered them for use across the entire county this November, despite notorious failures by these same unreliable systems in states like Georgia and Maryland and --- perhaps most notably --- Cuyahoga County, OH, where the systems in first-time use failed monumentally during the Buckeye State's Primary Election.

USA TODAY wrote Friday about the aftermath of Cuyahoga's Primary Elections and the extraordinary measures now being taken to turn the county's temporary poll workers into rocket scientists able to trouble-shoot the many expected problems with the systems. After some 300+ recommendations were made by an independent audit of that particular train wreck, elections officials are scrambling and bracing for the worst.

Haas, however, has taken no such measures and, indeed, his poll worker training has reportedly consisted of instructing folks to sing the praises of electronic machines and avoid handing out paper ballots to voters despite the recently unearthed memo from the California Secretary of State's office instructing all Registrar's that all California voters may vote on paper if they wish.

An account of one such training class by Ken Simpkins, the Carlsbad attorney who filed an election contest to challenge the results of the Francine Busby/Brian Bilbray Special Election sleepover fiasco last June, reports that workers are being told not to give paper ballots to voters even if machines are unavailable when voters show up to vote.

"If the machines were not ready at the opening of the polls and voters were there," Simpkins writes about instructions given at a training class he attended, "voters should be asked to wait until the machines are ready." His full description of that and other stunning moments from Haas's training is at the end of this item.

In an accidental fit of reporting, the far-right San Diego Union Tribune yesterday asked Haas about the ongoing "sleepovers" in an article on concerns about the county's upcoming beta test election. As usual, his obnoxious answer was just another "fuck you" to the voters of San Diego:

Never mind that we've previously reported first-hand accounts from poll workers who took voting machines home with them during the June 6th election, where they admitted that family members, and any number of neighbors, may well have had easy access to the machines in the "secure storage space" known as their garage or their car. But Haas knows "where they live." So rest easy, San Diegans!

Also, never mind that such sleepovers are in violation of state and federal law. But, hey, it's San Diego! Mikel Haas territory! He makes the rules and can do whatever he wants!

I only have a second as I've got to hit the road to get up to Santa Barbara to speak at tonight's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner (along w/ Wes Clark), so I'll try to be quick about it...

The U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) is a complete and utter failure. The current commissioner, Paul DeGregorio, has done nothing to instill confidence in elections or provide a lick of oversight in the deployment and use of these voting systems across the nation in the Midterm Election. In his latest interviews and editorials, he is reprehensibly doing nothing but echoing Voting Machine Company propaganda and Election Officials who choose to be apologists for them.

See DeGregorio's latest editorial here from the Tallahassee Democrat, in which he posts completely unfounded and unsupported "opinion" in contradiction of virtually all scientific evidence.

Contrast DeGregorio's nonsense with the comments of his predecessor, the honest, Bush-appointed, non-crony, Rev. DeForest Soaries, from this unaired network interview, in which he flatly states there are no standards for electronic voting systems in place and that 'elections in America are ripe for stealing.'

The EAC, under the "leadership" of DeGregorio, has become hopelessly compromised as he's allowed even the disinformation experts, such as "Thor" Hearne from the phony GOP front-group "American Center for Voting Rights," to set the agenda for the commission. Note that DeGregorio and Hearne are old St. Louis GOP colleagues. What a scam.

Below are a few choice pieces of information unsubstantiated horse excrement, from DeGregorio's editorial yesterday.

On this one point only, I can actually agree with DeGregorio: "Americans should be confident that their vote will be counted, whether they touch a screen or fill in an oval."

Yes, they should be confident, but they have absolutely no basis for that at this time, thanks to folks like you, Paul. Your words do not give such confidence. Transparency gives confidence. We've had quite enough "faith-based elections" in this country. Anyway, read on for some of DeGregorio's most shamelessly misleading garbage... (You can contact the EAC here.)

In a cover story interview in the Crawford, Texas Lone Star Iconoclast, Clint Curtis has a few no holds barred thoughts on his race in Florida's 24th Congressional district, on his opponent, the corrupt Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff), and on his plans to fight back at the retaliation Feeney has levelled against him for blowing the whistle on Feeney's vote-rigging attempts and other alleged malfeasance...

If you don't know who the fearless Curtis is, what cave have you been living in? We originally reported on his remarkable story in December of 2004 and have been doing so ever since. The rest, as they say, may well be history in the making.

Last month we reported on the Defense Department's newly announced scheme to allow military and overseas ballots to be cast via the Internet. It was pointed out, among other concerns, that in many cases troop and overseas citizen votes would be subject to conversion from unsecured email voting into faxed documents by a private company who, in turn, would then forward the vote to the appropriate county jurisdiction.

The San Jose Mercury News quoted experts at the time who charged the system was "ripe for fraud" as military voters would apparently not be warned that their ballots might be seen by others and transferred into faxes, etc. by "a private contractor whose top executives have made political contributions to Republican Party organizations."

Underscoring those initial reports today, a group of independent computer scientists and E-Voting experts including David Jefferson of Livermore National Laboratories, Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins, David Wagner of UC Berkeley, and Barbara Simons, a former researcher for IBM, have released an alarming short paper warning of "significant risks" found in the newly announced plan from the DoD's "Federal Voting Assistance Program" (FVAP).

The group had been members of a scientific peer review panel for a previous DoD Military and Overseas Internet voting scheme in 2004. At the time, they found the plan featured "a large number of security risks and vulnerabilities, including denial of service attacks, insider attacks, viral attacks on voters' PCs." That experimental program was subsequently cancelled after the findings.

But now, in September of this year --- just over one month ago --- the DoD announced and implemented their new scheme for military and overseas citizen voting via the Internet, to be used this November 7th without any public testing or peer review whatsoever.

According to today's report, the new DoD voting scheme --- known as the "Interim Voting Assistance System" (IVAS) --- has been put in place without any "publicly available external security examination" and has "never been used in a public election before (not even in a primary)."

The scientists say that security concerns about the new, untested system include loss of privacy and identify theft for the military and overseas voters and, even more troubling, they found the system to be vulnerable to hackers and tampering by governments both foreign and domestic.

The six page report is now available here [PDF].

From the report's troubling introduction:

In an email received by The BRAD BLOG this morning, Simons summarizes the report's three main findings, characterized as "serious concerns about the security issues posed by this new system."

Her succint, yet alarming, email is posted in full below....

The endorsement from Esquire magazine is short and sweet, and is now added to the list --- along with the Daytona Beach News-Journal's endorsement of publications supporting Clint Curtis over the corrupt Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) in Florida's 24th U.S. House Congressional District:

So much for Feeney's discredited attempts to sell the idea that Curtis is "not fit for Congress." Looks like the nation's newspapers and magazines seem to think it's Feeney who's not fit for the post.

And the voters, in yesterday's Zogby poll showing Curtis and Feeney in a "virtual toss-up," would seem to agree. Notable numbers, if only because Curtis has had almost zero money to use in his campaign while Feeney has had more than $1 million.

(Donate to Curtis here if you'd like to help --- unlike Feeney, Curtis is currently getting no money from either the national party or huge corporate PACs.)

In the meantime, the Curtis campaign has just released two new one-minute radio spots. They're both linked below. In the first one, he challenges Feeney to a public polygraph test for the both of them. (Clint has already passed one himself in re: his allegations about Feeney.)

-- Curtis for Congress, Audio Ad: "Take the Test, Tom!"

-- Curtis for Congress, Audio Ad: "Vote for Clint Curtis!"

Let us know what you think, and remember that donations made above will help to get these things on the air all over the 24th district in Florida to counter Feeney's disgraceful smear campaign against Curtis.

One last thought, posted below the fold is a comment sent to the Clint Curtis Blog from someone who claims to be a professional pollster who says about that Zogby poll showing the dead heat that the "That poll is even better news than advertised. That's not a dead heat --- you may well be winning!"

He goes on to add, "I'm a professional pollster and let me give you a polling insider's tip about how to interpret a poll like this one." Those "insider tips" are beneath the fold...

Blogged from the road by Brad Friedman

Another stunning security breach has been exposed in our nation's electoral system, The BRAD BLOG has learned, as the online voter registration database --- containing the personal information of some 1.5 million voters in Chicago --- has been found to be vulnerable to both downloading and hacking.

The flawed electronic database which allowed the retrieval and modification of personal voter information --- including social security numbers and birthdates of Chicago voters --- was discovered recently by members of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project (IBIP), a non-partisan group of Election Integrity advocates.

IBIP members say they were not only able to get full editing access to the online database, they also found they could modify the records for registered voters, setting them to inactive and otherwise changing addresses and other key information fields.

The ability to gain access and hack the system, said by IBIP to be covered on the front page of tomorrow's Chicago Sun-Times, was documented by the group on video-tape. (UPDATE 10/24/06: As promised, the Sun-Times story is now here...)

An exclusive version of that video-taped hack has been made available to The BRAD BLOG.

-- Streaming Flash version...

Cook County elections officials are said to be scrambling to plug the hole in what has become an ever-increasingly unsecured system of voting in America in light of new regulations, encouraging the use of electronic voting systems, and state-wide registration databases, as set forth by Congress's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after the 2000 Election Debacle.

In a news release sent to The BRAD BLOG earlier today (complete release posted at the end of this article), Bob Wilson, the Cook County chair of IBIP, says that the vulnerability would allow a malicous hacker to change voter registration status for thousands of Chicago voters.

"For example, you could change the status of all the voters in a precinct to inactive after the registration deadline so that when one of those voters checked their online status they might believe they were ineligible and wouldn't attempt to vote," Wilson says.

"Or, you could change their polling place information," he added, "so they would show up at the wrong precinct on election day . . . the possibilities are nearly endless and could cause election day havoc."

The problem was discovered by IBIP weeks ago, and the group immediately notified the appropriate authorities. "We had hoped that the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners would take quick action to plug this hole, but apparently that's not the case," IBIP member Peter Zelchenko is quoted as saying.

He estimates it would have taken little more than five minutes to fix the problem originally, but late last week IBIP and Zelchenko became aware that the security breach was significantly more severe than first thought. The Board was immediately notified again and finally began taking action over the weekend to install a new web interface for the system.

Zelchenko, an information technology expert who originally discovered the flaw, says the latest alarming discovery underscores the vulnerability of our new electronic system of voting in America. As reported by the news release:

Since the vulnerability reportedly affects only the online version of the voter registration database, as opposed to the master copy, it is hoped that the damage may be controlled and that any tampering might now be minimized. Such tampering --- either the collection of personal information for political, or more nefarious purposes, or legally registered voters having their online records deleted or otherwise set as inactive --- may have already occurred before the problem was discovered.

Whether the problem has been corrected by now or not, the remarkable security breach may have already given some voters incorrect or misleading information concerning the status of their registration or the correct location of their polling place when checking the online system for information.

We'll try to update this story when new information is available from the Sun-Times as we continue to be on the road and are unable to keep up and/or follow-up as much as usual.

The complete news release from the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project follows in full...

UPDATE, Posted by John Gideon 4:45pm PT: ABC News has now picked-up this story...

UPDATE by Brad, 8:09pm PT: Though we gave this story to ABC, having spoken to them earlier today, they didn't see fit to credit us. And yet, we always give them proper attribution for their stories. Sigh...Still always the bridesmaid I guess.

UPDATE 9:34pm PT: Chicago Tribune reports (and attempts to slightly downplay, as expected from the conservative Trib) "Voter information open to hackers". Associated Press reports "Group says data vulnerable, election officials investigating".

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Diebold's "system is utterly unsecured," said cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore in the online print version of ABC World News' report on Sunday Night.

Spoonamore continued, "The entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and secure our nation's voting."

With the election only 16 days away, ABC World News worries "about another Florida style ballot fiasco" in tonight's e-voting segment. One major concern, it seems, is that e-voting machine maker Diebold's source code is turning up in random mail boxes, as The BRAD BLOG reported last Thursday. Yet, despite this latest revelation coming on the heels of a Princeton study evidencing the ease in which Diebold machines could be hacked, Diebold maintains everything is peachy.

-- ABC's Video report here...
-- ABC's printed report (with additional details) here...

UPDATE FROM BRAD 9:22pm PT:

We're delighted to see that ABC News has finally decided that there is a story here worth reporting. Wish they had come on board long ago. In any case, the print version of their story, written by Jake Tapper, Rebecca Abrahams and Eduardo Sunol, has several notable details above and beyond the video report. In addition to the comments from Spoonamore above, there's this...

(Blogged on the road by Brad from the Bioneers Conf. in Marin, CA)

It was one thing when Daytona Beach News Journal endorsed computer programmer turned vote-rigging whistleblower turned congressional candidate Clint Curtis over his Democratic primary opponent (whom Curtis thumped in that race).

It's quite another thing --- a coup, in fact --- that now the News Journal has endorsed Curtis over the powerful sitting U.S. Congressman and former Florida Speaker of the House, the corrupt Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff), in their race for the U.S. House seat in Florida's 24th district.

Feeney, of course, is Jeb Bush's former gubernatorial running mate, the man who promised to deliver Florida's electoral vote to George W. during the 2000 fiasco no matter what the Supremes had to say, the only so-far unindicted Congressman to have gone with Jack Abramoff on a paid golf trip to St. Andrews, Scotland, and the man whom Curtis accused --- via affidavit, video-taped Congressional testimony, and lie-detector test --- of commissioning a vote-rigging software prototype in 2000.

Shamefully, Feeney has done little more than mount a disgraceful smear campaign against Curtis, attempting to paint him as "crazy" and not fit for office. The campaign seems only to have highlighted Feeney's own lack of seriousness as a legislator; one fit more for prison than the U.S. House of Representatives.

The News Journal's complete endorsement of Clint Curtis seems to bear that out, to Feeney's eternal disgrace. Here's a few snippets...

...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

With the US election looming, Kenneth Anderson revisits the recent Mexican presidential election for the November/December issue of The Humanist (go directly to PDF).

An enormous number of superb documentary films that cover the topic of our American electoral meltdown are being released. Last week, I quickly ran a preview item on HBO's Hacking Democracy --- premiering Nov. 2nd on HBO --- which gives a first-hand account of the detective story as it has unravelled over the last three years concerning the many lies of the Diebold corporation. I've now seen the final cut and will have more details on that extraordinary film soon.

In the meantime, I was thrilled recently to get a look at David Earnhardt's breathtaking Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System documentary, which tells the story of America's crumbling democracy and a few of the citizen patriots across the country who are attempting to save it.

Along with a focus on some of those folks, the film's emphasis is on the impossibilities which seem to have occurred in the tainted 2004 Presidential Election and the likes of which we may look forward to in the weeks and years ahead.

Earnhardt's film draws a great deal from a series of speeches and interviews filmed in April of 2005 during a National Election Reform Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

I participated as a speaker at several events during that conference, as did computer programmer, whistleblower, and former lifelong Republican Clint Curtis who had, at the time, yet to even dream of running against a very close friend of the Bush clan, the corrupt U.S. House Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff) --- the very man Curtis has alleged asked him to create a vote-rigging software prototype when they both worked for the same Oviedo, Florida, software firm in 2000.

Curtis left the Republican party after being soured on them vis-a-vis his direct experiences with Feeney.

Earnhardt was kind enough to share with The BRAD BLOG the section of the film which introduces the basics of Curtis' vote-rigging claims about Feeney. It's a beautifully done segment --- and not just because it includes interviews with me as well, but it doesn't hurt! --- which should go a long way towards allowing folks to decide whether Curtis is "crazy" as Feeney's reprehensible smear campaign and website against him is hoping to trick voters into believing now that they've become Congressional opponents.

Here's the clip (about 8 mins) from Earnhardt's film which I found to be finally as uplifting and hopeful as it was maddening and heartbreaking. The entire film can be purchased on DVD at the website www.EternalVigilance.us where additional clips from the film are also available.

NOTE: There is yet another documentary, still in the works, wholly devoted to the Clint Curtis/Tom Feeney/Yang Enterprises, Inc., vote-rigging scandal and The BRAD BLOG's so-far two-year long investigation and reporting of it. That films goes into considerably more detail on the entire breadth of the allegations (including the Chinese spying, the mysterious death of the Florida Inspector General who was investigating Curtis' claims, etc.). We hope to have details and, perhaps a short preview from that film soon as well.

Please pass the permalink to this article far and wide to help counter the hundreds of thousands of corporate PAC and RNC dollars that Feeney is using in his shameless attempt to discredit Curtis.

While you're at it, if you'd like to help unseat Feeney, one of the most corrupt members of Congress, please donate to Curtis' citizen-funded campaign. We've spoken to him recently, and he continues to be upbeat about his chances, but while the national Dems have still failed to help his campaign (as with so many others across the country), it's up to the people to help someone who will fight for electoral integrity get into the U.S. Congress!

(Hat-tip Hotpotatomash for help with the video!)

The publicity email sent to us this morning from filmmaker David Earnhardt follows in full...

Following up on our Wednesday coverage of the four- month-old report on "Voter Fraud," which the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) refused to release when they discovered the report points to just how little such fraud actually occurs. The facts don't lie, despite the loathesome high-level GOP/Team Bush operatives who call themselves the "non-partisan" American Center for Voting Rights' (ACVR), and their ongoing disingenuous and well-funded efforts to establish that voter fraud is rampant, perpetrated almost exclusively by Democrats, and must be cured by disenfranchising and unconstitutional Photo ID requirement laws at the polls (although not for absentee or military balloting, of course).

We've now had a chance to review the unreleased report [PDF] in full. It's just twelve pages. But it slams the notion that there is any massive problem in America with "Voter Fraud", despite ACVR's continuing campaign to suggest the problem is an epidemic --- versus all of the many other forms of disenfranchisement that really do occur and really do threaten our democracy.

"There is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud," the report explains, "or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, 'dead' voters, noncitizens voting and felon voters."

The report singles out ACVR as the only named proponent of the discredited notion that voter fraud is plaguing the country --- ACVR is ignominously named as dissenting three times in the report! --- so it is little wonder they didn't want this report to see the light of day.

ACVR's main perpetrator and Democracy-Hater-in-Chief, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne II, was actually a part of the "working group" assembled for this report. Notably, Hearne failed yet again to mention that he was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. in his bio at the end of the report.

Similarly, Hearne withheld that information in his testimony on behalf of ACVR during now-disgraced Rep. Bob Ney's U.S. House Adminstration Committee hearing in March of 2005. ACVR was the only "Voting Rights" group invited to discuss the travesties of Election 2004. He testified only that he was a "longtime advocate of voter rights" and must have just forgotten to mention his Bush/Cheney connections...or that the ACVR had been formed just three business days prior to the hearing!

The EAC's buried report points to problems not with voter fraud, but instead with minority voter intimidation, improper purging of registration rolls, dirty tricks, and all sorts of things that the loathesome ACVR con-men have spent enormous amounts of money trying to smoke-screen, via propaganda reports hoping to fool America into believing that double-voting, dead people voting, and non-citizens voting is the real threat to democracy.

It's not. But anti-American monsters like Thor Hearne definitely are.

The biggest problem, the EAC's unpublished report finds, is absentee ballot fraud; a problem that is decidedly not addressed in any way by the despicable Photo ID laws that Hearne and friends have been promoting in statehouses around the country. He and his evil compatriots were even able to convene a phony "blue-ribbon" panel last year on Election Reform, chaired by Bush Family crony James A. Baker, in order to endorse the call for a national Photo ID requirement at the polls. (Who better to lead an Election Reform panel than the man who went to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to keep voters from having their votes counted in Florida in 2000?!)

Apparently snake-oil salesman Hearne was unable to fool the rest of the folks working on the EAC report into believing he wasn't utterly full of shit (as previously reported in exacting detail by The BRAD BLOG.)

Consider this embarrassing ACVR moment from the EAC's buried report...

Kudos, btw, to Candorville cartoonist Darrin Bell, who has had his sharp eye on this issue for a while. His strip is widely syndicated (it's in our copy of LA Times for one), so his coverage of "Liebold" should be receiving quite a few eyeballs today.

He contacted us this morning to alert us to today's toon, along with the promise that "there will be more to this storyline as the election approaches."

He asks that we also point folks to the main Candorville website. We're happy to oblige!

Poor, poor, corrupt, ethically-challenged, morally bankrupt Tom Feeney (R-Abramoff). Can't even run a smear campaign without getting into trouble, screwing it up and seeing it backfire.

As we reported several weeks ago, the feckless Florida Republican launched a "Crazy Clint Curtis" smear website and blogsite, to attack his whistleblower-turned-congressional opponent with doctored photos and doctored facts.

The Tom Feeney for Congress Campaign's shameful tactics continue to fizzle, apparently, as they have been forced to remove their smear blogsite, which had been set up on blogger.com to attack Curtis. The removal of the site, and the link to it from the main smear-site, comes not a moment too soon: we had planned to run an item on Feeney's latest demonstrable lie, which we had noticed was recently posted on the smear blog. The blog, which had been at CrazyClintCurtisBlog.blogspot.com is now redirected to an innocuous search page, with no trace left behind.

In a blog item Feeney posted on the site --- before he "disappeared" it --- he charged that an article published in Hustler about the mysterious 2003 death of Raymond Lemme "was based on the delusions of Clint Curtis's murder conspiracy theory," or some such nonsense.

As it was "we," Brad Friedman, who actually wrote the article in question [PDF], we can tell you that it was based on nothing of the sort. It was based on the mysterious and still unexplained circumstances surrounding Lemme's death, which the Valdosta, GA police had initially ruled a suicide, but then later reopened the investigation after The BRAD BLOG reported on an affidavit filed by Curtis. Curtis alleged that his former employer YEI had harbored Chinese illegal aliens spying for China (later confirmed), overbilled on state contracts (later confirmed), and that Feeney, who also worked for the firm as lobbyist and attorney --- while simultaneously serving as Speaker of the Florida House --- had requested Curtis to create a software vote-rigging prototype (not yet confirmed, but similarly not disproven.)

Lemme was an investigator from the Florida Inspector General's office, looking into the charges Curtis originally filed with the state of Florida in early 2001. In his sworn affidavit, Curtis says that Lemme told him in June of 2003 that his final report was almost complete, and that he'd found the corruption "went all the way to the top." Two weeks later, Lemme was found dead in Valdosta, Georgia.

Our story on Lemme's death detailed the many contradictions between the official police report and the unearthed photographs of the death scene --- photographs which the police report originally stated were taken at the scene but unavailable, due to a "failure in the camera's flash memory cards."

And now, Feeney has scrubbed the smear blogsite altogether, in what appears to be the latest misstep in the Congressman's bizarre and shameful campaign.

Previous follies in Feeney's smear campaign include (but are not limited to):

All of this from a man who issued a news release in the early morning hours after Curtis's landslide victory in the Florida primary. Quoth Feeney: "Serious times demand serious leaders and Curtis is not even in the same solar system as the rest of us."

Really? Which solar system are you in, Mr. Feeney? We're still waiting for your "serious" leadership, or at least a serious campaign on both the issues and allegations.

For his part, Curtis recently issued a press release calling on Feeney to explain what he knew of Florida colleague Mark Foley's sexual predator issues and when he knew about them. As a GOP Deputy Whip in the U.S. House, Feeney is a part of the Leadership who had been reportedly made aware of Foley's predilections long before the information was publicly revealed.

So far, Feeney has refused to comment on the record, to our knowledge, concerning the Foley matter.

He has also refused to take a polygraph test concerning Curtis's allegations and has denied, but not answered to, them. Curtis, who gave an account of the remarkable story in video-taped sworn testimony to a Congressional panel in late 2004, successfully passed such a polygraph on his own in early 2005.