In the summer of 2007 they ran one of the most extraordinary and explosive exposés on the topic we've ever seen. It included absolutely mind-blowing details on ES&S iVotronic touch-screens voting machines (the same ones currently failing in North Carolina and in Texas and being used in about 15 other states this year) and featuring an astonishing segment with seven on-camera employee/whistleblowers from Sequoia Voting Systems charging they were ordered by higher-ups to rig the chads to fail, only in Florida, on the paper ballots their company made for the 2000 election. You can (and should!) watch that remarkable report --- picked up by absolutely nobody in the MSM, incredibly enough --- right here.

This Tuesday, it looks like HDNet's Dan Rather Reports is set to roll another story on hackable e-voting systems. Here's the :30 second teaser for their latest...

The premiere showing will be Tuesday, Oct. 26th @ 8pm and is described this way on HDNet's Dan Rather Report's website:

With all the endless hours (upon hours, upon hours) the network and cable news mainstreamers like Chris Matthews have found to devote to the horse-race and politicking of these elections, you'd think they might be able to find more than just 19 seconds to cover the issue that can be, and so often has been, the deciding factor in so many recent elections. If you'd think that, you'd be wrong. 19 seconds is all Rather got on this weekend's Chris Matthews Show to discuss the topic. [Hat-tip Heather at Crooks & Liars]...

UPDATE 10/27/10: The HDNet folks have responded to pleas to make the episode available for all (even those of us who don't have it on their cable system!). The entire episode is now available here through next Wednesday only! Get it while it's full, free and hot!

Otherwise, it's also available here via iTunes for $1.99 according to Mr. Rather who was nice enough to let me know on the Twitters.

For folks with shorter attention spans, or those who need a little more encouragement, Rather blogs about the episode here, and here's a 2.5 minute video clip featuring the great Frank Heindel, patriot Election Integrity advocate of South Carolina, who is (as he notes in comments below), the one alluded to when the description above says "one American's fight against voting machines in his state."

Guest Blogged by Sue Wilson

In the October issue of O magazine, Democratic consultant and commentator Donna Brazile did the unthinkable: she used the "F" word --- in Oprah Winfrey's publication, no less! Eyebrows are being raised across the political spectrum.

Okay, not that "F" word, a different one which is, apparently, far more controversial these days: Brazile says that if she "were in charge" her first priority would be to bring back the Fairness Doctrine." She says that that would require "holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance in an honest, equitable, and balanced fashion."

To the uninitiated, bringing Fairness to the public airwaves --- broadcast radio and TV --- is a no-brainer. But to Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and an army of 550,000 amassed to keep the nation's radio airwaves under "conservative" control, Brazile's declaration of priorities could be a call to arms. Is it possible that the Democratic establishment is finally ready for a fight to take control of their message? While no longer with the DNC, Brazile is still closely aligned with the Democratic power establishment after all.

Okay, time for a bit of history.

Our elders will remember a time when radio was America's number one source of news and information. And they remember being horrified at how Tokyo Rose and our enemies used the radio airwaves to promote hate and propaganda against the U.S.

So they watched as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and radio station owners worked together to prevent propaganda from ever being broadcast over the public airwaves in these United States of America. This coalition of government and business put the "Fairness Doctrine" in place to ensure a healthy, reasoned discourse so critical to our democracy.

The thing is --- and a point important for those who believe much more information is now available on cable and the Internet --- radio is still America's number one source of news and information. More people listen to radio than watch television, read newspapers, or go online. Nearly fifty million people in the U.S. listen to talk radio.

But Fairness? Equal Time? Reasoned discourse? Those went out the window in 1987 with - drumroll, please - President Ronald Reagan...

Think Progress has a great report today on the billionaire industry titans, U.S. Supreme Court Justices (including Scalia and Thomas), infamous front-group astroturfers and Rightwing media scammers who meet in secret twice a year --- as they did last year in Aspen and will again this January in Palm Springs --- to plot how they will spend their billions to keep "liberty" and "freedom" available to all (of them) and to plot the 2010 and 2012 elections for Republicans.

The story includes the actual invitation letter [PDF] to the upcoming Palm Springs event, from Vast Rightwing Conspiracy funder, billionaire Charles G. Koch of Koch Industries Inc., along with the agenda and participants of last year's Aspen meeting attached to it.

The letter begins creepily enough: "If not us, who? If not now, when?", but my favorite part is this part from the reprint of the agenda of last year's meeting...

The Connecticut State Election Commission announced this morning in Hartford that "it cannot make a full and fair determination of the allegations" against Ann Coulter who was alleged to have committed voter fraud twice in the state by voting illegally from her residence in New York City while being registered at her parents home in the Nutmeg State.

After a nearly inexplicable 20-month investigation, the Commission found "insufficient evidence in the present matter to substantiate the Complainant's claims."

However, The BRAD BLOG can report that, based on the Commission's five-page "Findings and Conclusions", it appears the Connecticut board either overlooked or ignored key evidence, including specific documentation of Coulter's illegal voting history in the state of Florida (they were only off by more than a year!), as well as her own incriminating admissions on the Fox "News" Channel about living in New York City......

It took nearly a week of The BRAD BLOG bitching, moaning, emailing, complaining, and tweeting to the Washington Post, its ombudsman, and, of course, the author of the story, Alexandra Petri, who had blatantly misreported, twice in the same article at Dana Milbank's "Rough Sketch" blog, the long-ago debunked myth that Rightwing con-man and dirty trickster James O'Keefe had "dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN" in his scam video tapes that shamefully took down the four-decade old anti-poverty, pro-democracy organization based on his hateful hoax.

As we detailed in our original report on Petri's inaccuracy last week, O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp and never even represented himself as a pimp in the offices of ACORN. The truth about all of that had been publicly available to know for almost a year before Petri misreported on it in the pages of the Washington Post last week.

Given that the Washington Post published another related story over a year ago with a number of similarly misleading inaccuracies in it, which they have yet to correct even after all this time, perhaps we should be happy it took less than a week this time around for the right thing to be done at the paper.

Petri has finally, nearly a week later, corrected her article, as she notes in the following email sent to us this morning...

Alexandra Petri writing on Dana Milbank's "Rough Sketch" blog at Washington Post:

For chrissakes, you're the WASHINGTON POST! Get the story straight please!

O'Keefe NEVER "dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN." Never. Not once. Ever. It was a hoax. Period. Just like his criminal operation at Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in New Orleans (for which he is still on probation), and the CNN sexual assault/wiretap scheme.

How many times are you guys gonna fall for it and keep misreporting the same damaging, inaccurate story?

That he NEVER "dressed up as a pimp to interview members of ACORN" has now been documented, in no uncertain terms, over and over again for nearly a year. Not just by The BRAD BLOG repeatedly, but by his own accomplice Hannah Giles (twice, including once on video tape!), and by one official investigation after another, going back nearly a year.

For example, here's former MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger's report [PDF] from December of 2009:

For the record, when you issue your swift correction (which I hope you'll do immediately and transparently and loudly), before you make yet another mistake, as the NYTimes did when issuing theirs, O'Keefe also did not "represent himself as a pimp" to ACORN workers either. He represented himself as the boyfriend of the girl/prostitute (played by Hannah Giles) trying to save her FROM an abusive pimp who was trying to kill her.

Jesus. It's not the first time WaPo has misreported on this matter. But we figured they'd have figured out the scam by now. Apparently not.

Please issue a correction immediately. Thank you. And good lord. (This is how James O'Keefe, Andrew Breitbart, and the rest of their crew get away with lying again and again and again. Incredible.)

P.S. If you want to report on the story --- in your own MD backyard, Washington Post --- why don't you cover the fact that O'Keefe has now violated Maryland's Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act again and again (and now, likely, the terms of his federal criminal probation), as we laid out yesterday, and the fact that MD law enforcement officials seem to be doing absolutely nothing about it?!

UPDATE 10/1/10, 12:50pm PT: It has been nearly 48 hours since the Petri/Milbank story was posted containing the egregious mistakes noted above, and yet there has still be no correction. Over the past 24 hours we've notified both @Milbank & @Petridishes via Twitter multiple times; have notified WaPo's "Corrections" address (Corrections@WashPost.com); and have notified their Ombudsman Andy Alexander who has responded with Alexandra Petri's email address so we could contact her that way directly, which we have. And yet, still no correction for the blatantly innaccurate reporting.

During those same 24 hours, Milbank has posted one item, and Petri has posted two --- one as recently as two hours ago, another a few hours earlier than that today --- so we know they are both around to make the corrections. They have apparently chosen to not correct their inaccurate reporting.

Next time you are told how the "professionals in the MSM fact-check their work, but bloggers don't," please feel free to keep this incident handy.

(Thanks to Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for picking up this story today!)

UPDATE 10/1/10, 3:46pm PT: Incredible. Petri has just posted yet a third item on Milbank's blog without bothering to correct the O'Keefe "pimp" story. I've left a comment on every one of her blog items since, pointing back to this article and asking her what gives and if she ever intends to correct her blatant inaccuracies. Hope you'll consider doing same until she accurately and transparently corrects the story. Milbank's blog is here.

UPDATE 10/3/10, 11:36am PT: It has now been four days since Dana Milbank allowed Alexandra Petri's complete inaccuracies about Rightwing con-man James O'Keefe and ACORN to be posted on his WaPo blog without correction. The paper's corrections editor, their ombudsman and both Milbank and Petri have been notified many times. They continue to appear not to give a damn that they are blatantly misinforming their readers and the nation.

UPDATE 10/5/10: SUCCESS! After nearly a week of prodding, Petri has finally issued a correction! Though even older WaPo misreports, by other journalists, on this same matter, are still unaddressed. Full details now posted here...

While we covered yesterday's all-time hottest day in recorded history here in Los Angeles (and that it happened in late September!) during today's Green News Report, I was later informed that, in fact, when the temperature got to 113, the thermometer actually broke!...

Did it actually get hotter than 113 here thereafter? Sure felt like it while working outside yesterday where it was, literally, a 100 degrees in the shade.

If you didn't catch today's Green News Report, it's worth a quick listen if only because the Fox "News" flashbacks to last January and February are worth their weight in Global Warming Denialist gold.

[Hat-tips to @GottaLaff and @RoseMarieHolt on the Twitters, where you can also follow @TheBradBlog here.]

The political positions of those describing themselves as sympathetic to the "Tea Party" represent a vast minority view, far outside of the mainstream positions represented by 2008 voters, according to a new poll commissioned by Project Vote.

The study finds self-described "Tea Partiers," and their political concerns, are far outweighed by the views of everyone else, despite the absurdly out-of-proportion coverage granted to them by the corporate mainstream media.

Analysis of the findings from around the net also underscores what we've long argued here at The BRAD BLOG: the Tea Baggers don't actually give a damn about "the deficit" or even the Constitution. If they did, they wouldn't have waited until after Republicans lost the elections in 2008 to start marching and decrying the deficit explosion (and supposed concerns about Constitutional rights) brought about under the previous Administration. They would have been out marching along with the real Tea Partiers, those who supported Ron Paul as long ago as 2007, and his concerns about unbridled deficit spending and the trampling of Constitutional rights during the eight years of the Bush Administration.

Here are some of the key findings from the new poll. In them, we learn what every MSMer should have endeavored to figure out and take into account long ago, before granting so much free exposure to the radical extremist fringe represented by these people...

If you're anywhere near the L.A. area, I'd be delighted if you came by to say hello this Sunday at the 9th Annual West Hollywood Book Fair.

I'll be on a panel discussing "The Death & Life of American Journalism," along with fellow journalists Jason Leopold, Marc Cooper, Bill Carter, and Kathleen Sharp. I'm told I'll be able to sign DVDs of Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story afterward.

It should be an interesting and lively discussion, as moderated by Jason, and as described this way on the WHBF's website:

Our panel is 2:00pm - 3:00pm at the fair's "Current Events & Hot Topics Pavilion" in West Hollywood Park, 647 N. San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles, CA. The event is FREE, there's lots of other stuff going on there as well, and you can get more info here...

Hope you can make it by!

Last night on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, correspondent Aasif Mandvi offered some of the best journalism we've seen on television in quite a while.

It wasn't particularly funny, union supporters are going to hate it, Walmart is going to love it, but credit where it's due.

This is the sort of journalism that Rightwing con-men like Andrew Breitbart, James O'Keefe, and their acolytes pretend to be producing. It's journalism they could and even should be producing. But as they are political/partisan con-men/hitmen/hacks, they've chosen to throw away all of their credibility to the point where they are outclassed even by a comedian like Mandvi. Then again, the same can be said for many of the so-called journalists in our corporate MSM who rarely manage to offer anything as serious, substantive --- or scathing --- as Mandvi's report from last night...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."-Mark Twain

One of the basic axioms of law is that fraud vitiates consent. One of the foundational principles of democratic governance is that legitimacy rests on the informed consent of the governed. Come November, those principles will be tested in California.

Billionaire Meg Whitman, a former EBay CEO who surpassed the $100 million mark in campaign spending nearly a month prior to the traditional Labor Day kickoff of the Fall campaign, who, by Sept. 16, had donated a record-smashing $119 million of her own funds to her campaign, who refused to meet with former California Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and Republican State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poisner in a pre-primary debate, has knowingly sought to fill the gaping knowledge deficit created by the corporate media's gross neglect of its fourth estate responsibilities with disinformation about Brown, her Democratic opponent.

When confronted by an analysis which exposed a powerful but deliberately deceptive ad (video below) which shows former President Bill Clinton accusing Brown of lying about his tax record based on a CNN report which is now known to be erroneous, Whitman's spokesperson, Darrell Ng dismissed the idea of pulling the deceptive ad as "ridiculous"...

Following up on our posting of NewLeftMedia's interviews earlier this week with disinformed Tea Baggers at Glenn Beck's recent D.C. rally for...something or other...Sam Seder jumps in with his own collection of disinformed numbskullery at the same event...

The responses from the disinformed interviewees in both Seder's and NewLeftMedia's videos are remarkably similar to those featured in our own set of interviews in "Rise of the Tea Bags" as filmed nearly a year ago at the Tea Party Express II kick-off event out here in Los Angeles.

When we released "Rise of the Tea Bags," many of the defensively dismissive comments from Tea Baggers accused us of having "cherry picked" who we decided to highlight in the video. No, we didn't, we repeatedly responded at the time. In fact, while the responses seen from many of those we did choose to show made them appear at times as blithering idiots, we had actually gone out of our way to be as fair to all of them as possible in the edits, and even determined to not show a number of folks because some of their responses were just so laughably idiotic it would have appeared as if they were either plants or had somehow been set up by some dishonest scam to appear as fools.

Anybody who appeared ignorant, in our video at least, had only themselves to thank if they came off looking foolish. We didn't gin up anything and took a great deal of time and care in editing to ensure that was the case.

The thing is, getting these kinds of interviews on tape, at this point, during these types of Rightwing gatherings, is as easy as throwing a stick. This is an illustration of the triumph of mass disinformation...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"Without a well-informed public, humanity itself and all species on the planet are threatened."-Dr. James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.

That 'Tea Party' backing Koch Industries, an oily conglomeration which is ranked as one of the nation's worst polluters, has joined with two other Texas-based oil industry polluters, Tesoro Corp. and Valero Energy Corp., aka the "Toxic Twins," comes as no surprise. After all, Koch has already been aptly described by Greenpeace as "the kingpins of climate science denial."

It also comes as no surprise that California's Prop 23 measure on this November's ballot, which would require the state "to abandon implementation of [Assembly Bill 32's] comprehensive greenhouse-gas-reduction program that includes increased renewable energy and cleaner fuel requirements, and mandatory emission reporting and fee requirements for major polluters such as power plants and oil refineries," was submitted [PDF] to the CA Secretary of State's office bearing an Orwellian label, the "California Jobs initiative" --- an initiative that has the backing of "Tea Party" darling and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, whose idea of "jobs creation" entails the transfer of domestic jobs overseas.

This corporate deception mirrors Pacific Gas & Electric's effort to use the ballot box as a vehicle for acquiring monopoly power. PG&E deceptively described its failed Prop 16 initiative, on last June's ballot, as the "Taxpayers Right to Vote Act."

There's a good chance that, just as they defeated Prop 16, CA voters will see through the "jobs creation" scam of Prop 23. But, if current polls are indicative, a large segment of an under-informed electorate who, in their disgust with President Obama's betrayal of "change we can believe in," are being taken in by billionaire-funded "poison populism" --- moving to the Right when the health of our economy and of humanity itself cries out for a sharp turn to the Left...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times appears to be the type of reporter comedian Stephen Colbert had in mind during his blistering act at the 2006 White House Correspondence dinner:

"Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"

As revealed by her front-page Los Angeles Times article, "Swinging at the left, hit or miss," Abcarian, apparently armed with nothing more than the baseline, mainstream media accounts of the Shirley Sherrod scandal, paid a visit to the West Los Angeles office of the man whom Brad Friedman aptly described as a "pathological liar" and "race baiter;" jotted down Andrew Breitbart's latest spin about himself and the Shirley Sherrod fiasco, and then dutifully spit out a fawning account which accepted at face value Breitbart's latest claim that he simply failed to "wait for full video" of the Sherrod speech, and which described Breitbart as a "new-media phenom;" a "transformed...liberal" who became "a star of the 'tea party' movement" after experiencing an epiphany during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarency Thomas, whom Breitbart describes as "an American hero" who was unfairly targeted by "a cavalcade of Caucasians asking...about his very private video rentals!"

In Abcarian and the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Breitbart, the consummate con-artist, had found yet another vehicle for rewriting history...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

After months of electoral politics conducted exclusively by way of dueling, 30 second propaganda slots (aka paid-for political ads), incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and her Republican challenger, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina conducted what excluded Green Party candidate Duane Roberts derided as "a sham debate between two multi-millionaires backed by big business interests."

While there is some merit in Roberts' complaint, the debate proved of vital importance, especially since it exposed the extreme views of the lesser known Fiorina on a variety of issues ranging from her opposition to environmental protection, opposition to marital equality for same sex couples, and her outright call to reverse Roe v. Wade. But the most telling aspect was that the debate exposed Fiorina to be an unapologetic proponent of outsourcing and corporate globalization, which, since the passage of NAFTA, has proved to be the bane of the American middle-class.

That made this a debate of manifest importance to the people of California. Yet the corporate media, whose financial interest is served by failing to provide meaningful news coverage, thereby forcing candidates into the paid-for propaganda slots, proved true to form. Live coverage was limited to Cox Communications' Oakland, CA, affiliate, KTVU...