Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a former Harvard Law Professor, argued that Senators not only have the right, but a constitutional duty to change the Senate filibuster rules. She argued, in no small part to her fellow Democrats, that the rules were being abused by Republicans as part of a "naked attempt to nullify the results of the last Presidential election [in order] to force us to govern as if President Obama hadn't won the 2012 election."

Her remarks (see video and text transcript below) were made in the wake of the third occasion in which Senate Republicans blocked the nomination of an extraordinarily well-qualified female nominee to the important federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal.

"Republicans now hold the dubious distinction of having filibustered all three women that President Obama nominated to the DC Circuit," she said. "Between them, they have argued an amazing 45 cases before the Supreme Court and have participated in many more. All three have the support of a majority of Senators. So why have they been filibustered?"

"Well, the reason is simple," she explained, answering her own question. "They are caught in a fight over the future of our courts. A fight over whether the courts will be a neutral forum that decides every dispute fairly, or whether the courts will be stacked in favor of the wealthy and the powerful."

Yes. The minority party in the U.S. Senate is blocking these nominations, not because of the qualifications of these very well-qualified women, but because they are continuing a thirty-year Republican effort to "rig the courts", as Warren explains, by packing the U.S. federal bench, particularly the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals...

September 29, 2003, is a day that will live in radio infamy.

It was a day when two delinquents got away with a crime against conscience --- aided and abetted by a culture of government dysfunction and radio-industry corruption.

It was a day when two words sent a city back three decades.

It was also a day when, for a brief moment, I found myself forced to choose between being a realist and being a Republican. I chose poorly...

With these 300 fraudulent votes created by one Republican candidate alone, that's 300 more fraudulent votes than have ever been created by ACORN or anybody who has ever worked for them.

But, of course, you're unlikely to hear that, or even this story itself, from the tenacious Fox "News" "voter fraud special investigative unit" or the GOP clowns who help them disinform American voters.

From Nick Wing at Huffington Post...

According to the article, "Villamaino, a former East Longmeadow Board of Selectmen chairman who resigned last year amid the scandal, ultimately lost his Republican primary, and the GOP candidate subsequently lost to the Democrat in the race."

Three very quick points of note here...

5:50pm PT: Boston Police tweet: "CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody." Watertown residents stream into streets to cheer police as cars roll back out of town...

5:47pm PT: Local media: Second "suspect alive, in custody, and they're asking for a medic. It's over." Applause heard breaking out around scene. || Boston Police tweet: "Suspect in custody. Officers sweeping the area."

4:31pm PT: "Barrage of gunfire" heard in Watertown. "Body found on a boat," reports NBC's Pete Williams. Area locked down, officials respond, reports of suspect surrounded...unclear whether person is still alive...

12:51pm PT: Noteworthy developments since I last checked in here. The suspects are brothers from Chechnya and have been in the U.S. for two years or more. The one who was killed is 26-year old Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The one still on the lam is 19-year old Dzhokhar. Here's another good timeline of the overnight events through 8:40am ET today as the city remains shut down during the on-going manhunt...

3:15am PT: All MBTA transit trains and buses have been shut down, as the man hunt continues. Since I suspect this is all going to be over, one way or another, by the time I wake up, and since it's the second near-all-nighter I've had here in a row, I'm going to try and hasten things by going to sleep. Though I'll likely still be following along and retweeting on The Twitters.

1:55am PT: It's been a wild night, where we've been trying to keep up with and/or make sense of developments via Twitter.

So far, one MIT officer has been shot dead. Another local law enforcement official is in critical condition after a gunfight with the alleged Boston Marathon bombing suspects. One of those suspects, the one seen in the black hat in photos released by the FBI earlier today, is now dead, according to officials.

The other suspect, in the white hat, is being pursued in the Watertown area at this time, where residents have been asked to stay inside, lock their doors, and do not open it unless it is for the police who are going yard-by-yard searching for the second suspect. He is believed to be armed and very dangerous.

Here, via CBS Boston, is what happened up until now, over the past 5 hours or so, according to a description offered by the Middlesex District Attorney...

[UPDATED MANY TIMES AT BOTTOM OF ARTICLE, NOW INCLUDING FINAL WRAP (FOR NOW) ON THE DAY AFTER.]

From AP, via National Memo...

More photos at ThinkProgress...

The blasts reportedly occurred near the Marathon headquarters in a nearby hotel. The headquarters has been locked down. Additionally, NBC News is reporting:

MANY UPDATES THROUGHOUT THE DAY, AND A WRAP UP ON THE DAY AFTER, ALL NOW FOLLOW BELOW...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Obama nominates REI CEO for DOI; Historic Nor'easter to hit Nor'east, historic low water levels in Great Lakes; Ben & Jerry's junks GMOs; Saving Indonesia's rainforest; PLUS: Find the nation's biggest polluters - in your backyard... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): "These big pools of oil will be burned if we choose to cook ourselves"; Air pollution linked to higher infant mortality; Flame retardants linked to ADHD: study; OH: Frackers illegally dump toxic fracking fluid into storm drain; Big Oil profiting from record high gas prices; BP objects to $34b spill bill from states; Faulty bolts halt offshore drilling; USDA reports climate change to slam farms, forests ... PLUS: AZ's anti-Agenda 21 bill wants to eat your brains ... and much, MUCH more! ...

"I didn't leave the Republican Party, it left me." – Former FL Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, 9/6/2012

"Anyone from New York or New Jersey who contributes one penny to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee should have their head examined." - Rep. Peter King (R-NY), 1/2/2013.

In the wake of the Jan. 1, 2013 decision by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to postpone a vote on Hurricane Sandy relief until after the 113th Congress was sworn in, NY Rep. Peter King's sense of betrayal, which he described as "a knife in the back" in a remarkable floor speech, is understandable, but his proposed remedy is woefully deficient.

The only way that Republicans in an entire region of the country --- the Northeast --- can achieve meaningful representation in the 113th Congress may be by way of a massive party switch. The increasingly rare breed of "moderate House Republicans" may soon only be left with the choice of emulating the late Sen. Arlen Specter's 2009 party switch, by either becoming Democrats or by becoming independents who will caucus with the Democrats.

Of course, that didn't work out terribly well for Specter either...

While both Brad Friedman and Sue Wilson have written in detail here at The BRAD BLOG about the recent closure of progressive talk radio stations in cities such as Portland and Seattle, along with the FCC's failure to enforce the public interest obligations of the conglomerates that own those stations, there's an interesting development on the other side of the dial, at least in Boston, where the demise of right-wing talk radio --- in a region where the format once dominated --- hints at a downward spiral for a key element of the conservative entertainment complex.

The latest sign of right-wing radio's malaise may be seen in the apparent demise of Boston's WTKK-FM.

The Greater Media Inc.-owned smooth-jazz-turned-right-wing-talk station is reportedly preparing to undergo yet another format change in early-January, returning to music.

As a conservative who listened to WTKK for years, I'm amused by this development, especially in light of the continued industry-wide fallout over Rush Limbaugh's verbal assault on Sandra Fluke earlier in the year.

Friedman and Wilson have shown conclusively that good progressive radio is not being allowed to succeed --- that the national corporate interests of these large media conglomerates (just as predicted by some media observers decades ago, following the passage of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996) are being placed ahead of the local public interest obligations which broadcast licensees are required to meet in exchange for their use of our public airwaves.

With the challenges now being faced by good progressive talkers facing obstacles stacked against their success, is there anything wrong with enjoying the spectacle of seeing bad right-wing radio fail, as appears to be the case in Boston at year's end?...

45 Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House are calling on Congressional leadership in both chambers to cut $100 billion from a "bloated nuclear weapons budget" as part of the ongoing so-called "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, issued a press release citing the letter sent to House Speaker John Boehner (R), Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) and Senators Harry Reid (D) and Mitch McConell (R) charging that "Our oversized nuclear weapons arsenal fails to reflect historic reality" and that "Our spending on radioactive relics of the past requires a reality check" after the successful conclusion of the Cold War.

The 45 House Dems list unnecessary current expenditures for "refurbishing a nuclear bomb that no one wants…a Uranium processing facility we do not need…a nuclear bomber when the ones we have will last for decades."

The letter, (posted in full below) implores leadership:

While the letter from the largely progressive Congressional members appears to be a rational step in the right direction, it raises additional questions. Among them: (1) Given that two nations, the U.S. and Russia, possess 95% of the world’s nuclear arsenals, and given that each nation’s individual arsenal is capable of destroying all life on the planet many times over, does it make sense to simply trim only $100 billion from an estimated $640 billion in nuclear weapons expenditures scheduled over the next ten years? (2) Why not couple the immediate request to trim $100 billion from the nuclear weapons budget with a call for a joint resolution of Congress calling upon the President to initiate negotiations under the auspices of the U.N. for a multilateral Treaty that would entail the eventual dismantling of all nuclear arsenals?...

Although covering stories of long lines and chaos at polls and malfunctions and breakdowns of electronic e-voting systems and tabulators, has been rather routine at The BRAD BLOG over the past decade, this one is a bit unusual.

According to Kathleen Conti, Town Clerk of Reheboth, MA --- a town of some 12,000 located about 50 miles south of Boston --- a spider's web "blocked a sensor" on an electronic op-scan tabulator (the town uses ES&S' Optech III-P Eagle) preventing the machine from reading paper ballots on Election Day.

The eight-legged election integrity advocate, who forced the town's election staff to hand count some 867 paper ballots, is reportedly still at large.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Debating the future - contrasting the candidates on energy; Obama fast-tracks solar on public lands; Car battery maker goes bankrupt; PLUS: It's official: September 2012 was the hottest month ever. Ever, people! ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Corn Belt Shifts North With Climate as Kansas Crop Dies; TEPCO admits Fukushima was avoidable; New Study Ties Hurricane Strength To Global Warming; Keystone XL pipeline opponents turn to civil disobedience; Iraq to invest up to $1.6 bln in solar and wind ... PLUS: World's biggest geoengineering experiment 'violates' UN rules ... and much, MUCH more! ...

Where, in Pennsylvania, the state GOP admitted that they are not aware of so much as a single instance in which an ordinary citizen has been charged with, let alone convicted of in-person voter impersonation --- the only form of voter fraud that can be prevented by disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restriction laws --- there have been a growing number of claims that political elites have used a false residence to vote, often to insure their own elections in a district where they do not reside.

On October 2, a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge ordered that "Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon [D] and his wife will face trial on 23 felony counts of perjury and voter fraud" when the couple allegedly used a false address to both vote and qualify for elective office within LA's 7th district, according to Los Angeles Times. The Alarcons claim they were simply using a second home outside the district while their other home was being renovated.

The issue of false residency voter fraud is neither novel nor limited to Democrats like Alarcon. Indeed, as Brad Friedman has tirelessly documented, the issue of false residency voter fraud amongst high-profile Republicans --- including the GOP's 2012 nominee for President of the United States --- has approached epidemic proportions.

Class, as well as party, may explain the disparity between the ability of the elites to commit false residency voter fraud with near impunity as compared to the harsh impact of Photo ID laws that address a phantom menace as applied to the most vulnerable segments of our society.

Here are just a few recent cases of false residency voter fraud by some faces you will be very familiar with. Only one of them, to date, has faced any sort of actual accountability for their election crimes...

In a debate, it is not always enough for one candidate to accuse the other of making up numbers from whole cloth --- especially when the opposing candidate presents analysis from highly partisan lobbying groups as "independent" sources on par with the Congressional Budget Office or Office of Management and Budget.

Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D) missed the opportunity to highlight the non-independence of the "independent" sources Sen. Scott Brown (R) cited during their first televised debate last week (see video below). He claimed that her policies would raise $3.4 trillion in taxes "on the backs of citizens" and "cut 700,000 jobs nationwide". The numbers were proffered by Brown in response to Warren's criticism of the Republican Senator's votes against three critical jobs bills that she asserted would have been paid for by "a fractional tax on people making more than one million dollars a year."

Warren accused Brown of making up his numbers from whole cloth and drove home her central point --- that Brown is willing to hold middle class taxpayers hostage in order to prevent a restoration of the Clinton level of taxes on the top two percent of Americans.

But she missed the opportunity to call out Brown for his laughably misleading use of statistics from highly partisan lobbying organizations --- specifically the National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce --- as coming from "independent groups"...

At the U.S. Senatorial debate on Thursday night between Sen. Scott Brown (R) and Elizabeth Warren (D), he...

...said that she...

...claimed to be of Cherokee heritage, but "as you can see, she’s not," Brown said, as he gestured towards her. "She checked the box claiming she is Native American, and clearly she is not," he reiterated again.

But I look like this...

Longtime readers of The BRAD BLOG know, by now, that disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restrictions have nothing to do with stopping voter fraud, and everything to do with stopping legal, Democratic-leaning voters from casting their legal vote.

They also know that while Republicans have long pretended there is massive Democratic voter fraud occurring, what they don't want you to know is how many Republicans --- very high-level Republicans, in fact --- are actually committing real fraud (both election fraud and voter fraud), as we summarized once again last week after four GOP U.S. House staffers of Rep. Thad McCotter (R-MI) were charged with 36 criminal felony and misdemeanor election fraud-related charges for allegedly turning in fake signatures and petitions in a failed scheme to get McCotter on the ballot this year.

And what do we learn just days later? Another Republican appears to be involved in another massive election scheme --- this time, to fraudulently defeat a fellow Republican. And, as is almost always the case, no polling place Photo ID restrictions in the world would have deterred the allegedly fraudulent absentee ballot scheme (which is said to have included illegally changing Democratic registrations into Republican ones, among other appalling crimes)...