Americans finally stand up against the phony, democracy-hating town hall disrupting bullies. VelvetRevolution.us (of whom The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder) was there to document it last night...

Will this event receive as much coverage in the corporate media as those where the wingnuts weren't outnumbered and shouted down?

And...as we've asked before...how long will this keep escalating before someone ends up dead? (And I'm not referring to those thousands of Americans already dead because a bureaucrat from the corporate healthcare industry was allowed to come between them and a doctor to help deny them healthcare.)

Several weeks ago, VelvetRevolution.us, in coalition with a number of other accountability groups, filed bar disbarment complaints against 12 different Bush Administration attorneys in four states and the District of Columbia in regard to their approval of banned torture techniques used during detainee interrogations.

In a press conference today we (Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG is co-founder of VR) added two more to that list, both top CIA attorneys who continue to serve at the agency under the Obama Administration.

As RAW STORY's Larisa Alexandrovna reports today:

Please see Alexandrovna's coverage today for details of revelations discussed at the presser this morning (eg. the "crucifixion" of a detainee who "died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs" and details on, and links to, the new complaints against Rizzo and Fredman, both of whom still serve in the CIA today, incredibly enough).

More information on the campaign, including all of the complaints filed, is available at VR's DisbarTortureLawyers.com campaign. A quick video of Zeese's announcement, summarizing the complaints after today's press conference follows below...

Speaking of VR's DisbarTortureLawyers.com campaign, unleashed earlier this week, with quite a bit of fanfare in the corporate media (see our coverage here), VR's previous, and still on-going campaign, launched several weeks earlier, RestoreJusticeAtJustice.com (as originally discussed on The BRAD BLOG here) made the latest cover of Bush's one-time "hometown" newspaper, Crawford's Lonestar Iconoclast.

Yours truly is liberally quoted throughout Nathan Diebenow's fine coverage which is posted in full right here...

[Full Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG is co-founder of VelvetRevolution.us]

Today, VelvetRevolution.us announced our new campaign calling for the disbarment of 12 of the Bush-era torture lawyers in four states and the District of Columbia. The campaign, whose VR homepage is at DisbarTortureLawyers.com (where you can sign on yourself, read the complaints, etc.), calls for action to be taken by the state bar associations to revoke the law licenses of attorneys John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Mukasey, Michael Chertoff, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury, Douglas Feith, David Addington, William Hayens, and Timothy Flanigan in NY, CA, TX, PA and D.C., following their exceedingly irresponsible and inappropriately liberal interpretation of U.S. law.

[Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG is co-founder of VelvetRevolution.us]

My colleague Kevin Zeese, an attorney himself, as well as executive director of VotersForPeace.us and a board member at VR, signed the complaints delivered to the appropriate boards for all 12 Bush attorneys. He announced the launch of the initiative at a press conference in D.C. this morning. His published statement, released today with the press conference, is posted in full here.

So far, the coverage in the corporate mainstream media today has been surprisingly decent and fairly widespread. We've seen reports from NY Times, CNN, LA Times, WaPo, Bloomberg, AP and others.

AP's coverage has been interesting, and instructive, to watch. When they first reported on the initiative early today, the lede on their story was [emphasis mine]:

Their updated version, which included a few more details, but the same headline, "Complaint seeks disbarment of Bush lawyers," had this as its lede [emphasis mine]:

Not sure what makes calling for a strict, conservative interpretation of the Rule of Law, versus the wildly liberal interpretations of the Bush Administration (and that's putting it mildly), a "liberal" cause, but that's what I guess we must come to accept from the news organization --- sorry, let me update that --- rightwing house organ that AP has become.

UPDATE: As I've been asked by a number of media folks for a comment on today's initiative, as co-founder of VR, I've been happy to offer them this statement:

"The wildly liberal interpretations of the rule of law by the Bush administration attorneys, in order to justify their torture schemes, should be offensive to the core, to anyone who believes in a strict, conservative interpretation of decades of established U.S. law on the matter, including treaties signed, on behalf of the U.S., by such conservatives as Ronald Reagan."

UPDATE 5/19/09, 8:44pm PT: AP's short video coverage of Kevin Zeese at the presser yesterday is here. But a more complete version of his statement follows below. Also, a big congrats to our Kevin for being honored with the prestigious BuzzFlash "Wings of Justice" award today for his tremendous effort on this campaign!

What follows below is a letter I sent to AG Eric Holder last week, on behalf of VelvetRevolution.us (of which The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder), calling for his immediate investigation of all political prosecutions at the DoJ during the Bush era, including those of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and Mississippi attorney/Democratic fundraiser Paul Minor. On the heels of the DoJ's dismissal of charges against Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, the DoJ needs to similarly vacate charges against anyone who was specifically targeted, for political reasons, by the Bush Admin's perversion of justice at the DoJ.

There are now well over 700 organizations and individuals, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ray McGovern and Scott Horton currently signed on to the letter, and you are invited to do so yourself via the campaign's main page at RestoreJusticeAtJustice.com. More details are over there. We hope you'll both sign on, and help spread the word.

Here is the letter to Holder, sent last week just before Minor's wife passed away, and prior to the release of the Bush regime's appalling torture memos which we will, no doubt, be dealing with in a future campaign...

A county clerk in Colorado has finally done the right thing for the voters by removing a touch-screen voting machine from service, and quarantining it, after it was discovered to be flipping votes from one candidate to another. The failed machine in this case was a Diebold Accu-Vote, a frequent flipper.

As reported by the Colorado Independent (Hat-tip VoterAction.org)...

Long is to be lauded for being the first election official in the country so far during the general election (that we're aware of) to have taken the correct action in such a vote-flipping case. And now that Hodge's eyes are "opened" we hope that both she and her Republican opponent, Hadfield will stand up for their voters by signing the StandingForVoters.org "no concessions" pledge immediately!

Late last night VelvetRevolution.us (a non-partisan, non-profit election watchdog co-founded by The BRAD BLOG) issued a press release calling on election officials to not recalibrate systems mid-election, but rather remove and impound them, and offer voters paper ballots as needed instead. The complete press release is posted at the end of this article.

Colorado has a troubling history with electronic voting, even as the Secretary of State found all of the state's machines to be faulty and easily hackable in late 2007, but has capitulated to pressure from election officials to allow them to be used by voters again this year anyway...

Guest Blogged by Emily Levy of VelvetRevolution.us...

Velvet Revolution - co-founded by Brad Friedman - today launched its newest campaign at StandingForVoters.org, calling on candidates across the country to pledge to challenge elections when necessary.

"This election, let's make democracy the winner!" the Standing For Voters site proclaims. Readers of The BRAD BLOG know that's quite a stretch, that we're a long way from having a true democracy in this country. Yet challenges by candidates --- before, during and after the elections --- could be an important step in the right direction. In many situations, only candidates have standing to challenge elections.

StandingForVoters.org is primarily directed towards candidates themselves and serves to educate them about election integrity issues, types of election challenges, and recent history of candidates who challenged elections. Voters are encouraged to participate by finding candidates who will pledge; tips about how to do this are provided on the site, including:

The first two candidates to sign the site's more robust pledge, "The Super Pledge," are no strangers to election integrity issues. Ellen Brodsky, candidate for Supervisor of Elections in notorious Broward County, Florida is a long-time election integrity advocate, founding Broward Election Reform Coalition. Brodsky was thrilled to pledge, saying, "You can count on me to speak about fair, accurate and transparent elections in every breath I take."...

Exclusive cell phone photos follow below of a chance meeting between Karl Rove and a progressive Anti-War, Anti-Bush activist at a D.C. Safeway supermarket on Memorial Day. The activist, Brett Kimberlin, is a director at Justice Through Music, which is a co-founder, along with The BRAD BLOG of the Election and Media Reform organization, VelvetRevolution.us. Kimberlin was recently featured in an article by the Lonestar Iconoclast, George W. Bush's "hometown paper" in Crawford, Texas, after the release of his anti-war "Happy Springtime (Bush is Over)" song and video...which we highly recommend, by the way.

Rove took the time to pose for a picture with Kimberlin and his daughter, after which he sent us both the photos and the following, rather amusing description of the encounter...

The photos of Kimberlin and Rove, and his swell butter-transporting Jaguar, follow below...

We'll be the media on Election Night, reporting the meltdowns with the same kind of attention everyone else will devote to the "horse race" (which we'll cover as well). From 3pm PT to 1am or as events warrant. To be carried on multiple air affiliates and Internet streams. All invited to carry broadcast for free! More details to come as I can keep up. Please spread the word and ask your local station to carry the historic broadcast! Details for now right here...

UPDATE: Some of our air affiliates on board so far (we welcome all who are interested to carry all or any part of the broadcast, see link above for details) include: KRXA in Monterey, KSAC in Sacramento, KGOE in Eureka, KUDO in Anchorage with more hopefully coming soon!

FURTHER UPDATE: Brad and Peter preview the broadcast on last Friday's Peter B. Collins Show! Listen here... [5 minutes, MP3].

And speaking of Velvet Revolution's Election Protection Strike Force, we've just upped the bounty for E-Vote fraudsters to $500k. Pass that around too. Along with the 888-VOTE-TIP hotline to support it.

Debra LoGuercio, editor of the Winters Express in California, takes a look at our DIEB-THROAT stories in her latest column for McNaughton Newspapers. She closes with this graf:

We're glad LoGuercio has noticed, and that more and more such folks are beginning to take notice of what we've been yelling and screaming about since at least November 3, 2004 here at The BRAD BLOG

We also join her call for refutation of the points made by DIEB-THROAT in our stories covering just some of the information that the still-anonymous source has shared with us. Those stories, if you haven't caught them yet, are respectively here, here and here. You can reach LoGuercio at this email address, and you can reach us at this one should you have any information or evidence that in any way questions the validity of our reporting or the information we've presented so far from DIEB-THROAT.

So far, that hasn't been done. As well, we are told that more coverage of our reporting from other media outlets (larger ones) is likely on the way.

Today, Diebold Inc's stock price stayed largely flat (gaining about .61%), closing at $36.15.

Last February, when we launched our "Divestiture for Democracy" campaign at VelvetRevolution.us shares of Diebold, Inc. (DBD) stock were more than $53/share. The value of the company's stock has fallen more than 30% since we began our campaign, plunging some 20% in the last week alone since our first DIEB-THROAT story.

The DV4D Campaign put America's Voting Machine Companies on notice. We let them know we expected them to do the right thing for this country and introduce transparency, security and accountability into the electronic election systems which they were foisting on a misinformed electorate.

We hope that the other major American Voting Machine companies are taking note of what is happening right now at Diebold, and before they get too excited about trouble at their competition, we hope they all understand our promise (The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR) to do anything and everything legally and within our power to hold the anti-American owners and management of all of those companies accountable for putting our democracy at grave risk through their careless and unpatriotic business practices.

Democracy is not for sale. At least it shouldn't be. And we intend to continue to do something about it. Wherever and whenever possible.

We didn't set out to write a fundraising article for VelvetRevolution, but now that we've written it, we realize, this is as good a time as any to ask for your support of VR, so that we can keep up such work to help take our great country back from the cretins and bad guys that have --- and continue to --- hijack it from the good citizens of this country.

You can make a donation to VR right here... Thank you in advance! We need it!

P.S. Today, VR placed a new ad in Washington DC's City Paper to coincide with this weekend's massive rallies there. More on the latest ad in our campaign here, but here's a preview for you...

P.P.S. Katrina Wilcox, our Information Manager extraordinaire from VR, will be Guest Blogging here all weekend from D.C. where she's covering the rally for us! Please come back soon for thoughts, pictures and even video if we're lucky from on the ground in D.C. all weekend!

We're moved beyond words, frankly.

Activist Doris "Granny D" Haddock, best known for her cross-country walk for Campaign Finance Reform speaks out today with extraordinary eloquence about "Our Velvet Revolution".

(A RealPlayer slideshow of some of her heroic efforts over the last several years is available here.)

She will be participating in several of the upcoming Counter-Inaugural events in DC, and her 95th birthday will be four days later. Her statement, published by Democracy Week today, are meant as her 95th birthday remarks.

Having seen and done as much as she has in her lifetime, only a fool would disregard her wisdom.

And so, on velvet revolutions and the freedoms and pursuit of happiness, we'll quote just a few of her words from her beautiful piece:

Wow...

Dennis Burke of Democracy Week, who joined Granny D on her walk, follows up her article on the Democracy Week blog with a piece on our Velvet Revolution featuring a short interview with yours truly.

Despite our frequently self-promotional flair here on The BRAD BLOG!!! we assure you it is but a satirical literary device. Of sorts. And in fact even we find ourselves a bit too modest to quote somebody quoting us...At least this evening.

So a link to Burke's fine coverage on how VR came about and a bit on what we hope to accomplish will have to suffice.

We thank both Democracy Week and the inimitable Granny D for both the coverage and the inspirational words of wisdom.

The Velvet Revolution continues...