Here's an in-depth, in-person interview I did with Tom Klammer for his Tell Somebody show last week in Kansas City, MO, on KKFI. This is the first part of the interview, and he promises to run the rest next week. The conversation was on Election and Media issues in Missouri and across the country, including more on GOP anti-democracy, vote-suppressor Thor Hearne from the hometown of the headquarters for his law firm, Lathrop & Gage. A bit of drama is added, as if it's needed, as thunder is heard throughout the interview.

Brad Friedman interviewed on Tell Somebody with Tom Klammer, aired 8/24/07 (appx. 35 mins):

UPDATE: Part Two of my interview with Klammer was run on the following Friday. Here is that show, featuring the rest of our in-depth interview, focusing on the failures of touch-screen voting and duplicity by the voting machine companies.

Brad Friedman interviewed on Tell Somebody with Tom Klammer, Part Two aired 8/31/07 (appx. 39 mins):

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Plano, TX...

Staying, as we were for a few days, just about five minutes from Diebold Election Systems, Inc., headquarters in Allen, Texas, we thought it might be nice to drive by and see the old place for ourselves late last Saturday night...

Filed by Brad Friedman from Diebold Country (Plano, TX)...

There have been some first class examples of horrendous journalism in the wake of CA SoS Debra Bowen's historic attempts to begin righting the e-voting wrong late last Friday Night. (You can see a bunch of them for yourselves linked in John Gideon's 'Daily Voting News' yesterday.) In story after story, Election Officials --- most ubiquitously Steven Weir, Registrar of Contra Costa and President of the California Assoc. of Clerks and Elections Officials (CACEO), but many others as well --- and Voting Machine Spokesliars are directly quoted making one demonstrably false statement after another.

The majority of the journalists covering the beat don't seem to have a clue that they are being lied to, or how to counter it. A good start, however, would be to improve the ratio of Vendors/Elections Officials quoted to the number of Election Integrity advocates quoted. In many of the stories, there is barely a peep from the EI folks, who actually know what's going on (versus the Journalists who don't, and the Election Officials and Company Employees who are willing to lie to them). There is also a dearth of reporting on the opinions of actual voters and how they feel, since they are the ones who will be most notably affected by Bowen's long overdue changes to the Golden State's voting system.

Of all the stories we've reviewed since Friday, however, this Sunday piece from John Wildermuth in the San Francisco Chronicle easily takes the cake for the most atrocious reporting, perhaps ever.

In his incredibly unbalanced, anti-Bowen article --- featuring the biased, misworded, and unsupported headline "Touch vote machine ban hurts counties" --- Wildermuth offers an astounding bit of "reporting" on Bowen's new restrictions for Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting devices made by Diebold and Sequoia. In order to marginally meet federal requirements for a single disabled accessible voting device in each polling place (even though Bowen found that these systems do not meet such requirements), she's ordered no more than one such DRE device be used per polling place in counties who wish to deploy them for disabled voters.

Hold onto your hats, because Wildermuth, incredibly, mis-reported the point this way (emphasis added)...

Guest blogged from DC by Margie Burns

(NOTE: Margie will appear on today's Peter B. Collins Show as Guest Hosted by Brad Friedman, to discuss this article.)

Team Bush began describing candidate George W. Bush as a “compassionate conservative” in 1998, when Bush began his open run for president, as opposed to the behind-the-scenes operation that had begun with his first run for governor of Texas in 1994. By the time the 2000 presidential campaign was in full swing, probably every American with a television had heard the label. In fact, as the actual election approached, the Bush campaign often took to preferring “reformer with results” --- reacting to a margin of diminishing returns for “compassionate conservative.”

Where did they get the “compassionate conservative” label? Hardly anyone would remember or notice in 1998, but the New York Times had run it front-page on August 7, 1978, when Pope Paul VI died and the Times ran his photograph, captioned prominently as a “Compassionate Conservative,” above the fold. Originally the phrase was a genuine tribute to honor a man who by all accounts deserved it (see below). Its recycling by the Bush campaign was a tactic designed to help Bush seem ‘centrist.’

But a 1978 issue of the Times was not the first step in resurrecting "compassionate conservative" as a campaign slogan...

Guest blogged from DC by Margie Burns

Listening to Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) for fifteen minutes is worth a week of the para-discourse from elsewhere on national television. Feingold said on Meet the Press this morning that he will introduce a resolution to censure George W. Bush “in a few days.”

The censure resolutions will focus on two huge issues:

• Bush's process for getting us into the war in Iraq, including misleading statements and misuse of intelligence before the war; and
• “the outrageous attack on the rule of law,” including illicit electronic surveillance and other surveillance, and administration approval of torture. “This administration has assaulted the constitution,” Feingold said briskly.

Feingold said that he has talked with the Democratic leadership about the resolution, adding that it might provide an opportunity as well for Republicans uncomfortable with the administration but unwilling to use impeachment.

Questioned by Tim Russert about whether the resolution would pass, Feingold said basically we’ll see how it goes. He commented, “There’s a lot of support in the country for actually impeaching the president and the vice president.”...

Blogged by Brad from Houston...

Christopher Drew at New York Times follows up his article yesterday on the possible/pending death of the Holt Election Reform Bill (HR 811). In today's piece, however, he begins to report on the fact that there are alternatives to DRE touch-screen machines which offer the same interface for disabled voters, but without the dangers, as I opined about yesterday.

Of course, even that option --- an electronic assistive device that offers touch-screen voting and/or audio voting for disabled and blind voters --- is not good enough for Jim Dickson of the American Assoc. of People with Disabilities (AAPD), who is quoted by the Times as continuing to use his considerable access and ability to bully Congress members into sticking with DREs only. What the New York Times fails to report when mentioning Dickson is that he's received thousands of dollars from various voting machine companies who also prefer that every American be saddled with their shitty, unaccountable, inaccurate, easily-hackable DRE technology.

Christopher Drew and the NY Times have a responsibility to disclose that point when quoting Dickson as a source in their stories. They were the ones, after all, who reported on Dickson and the AAPD having "received $26,000 from voting machine companies" in 2004 alone.

Instead, Dickson is reported by the Times only as "a lobbyist for the American Association of People with Disabilities...whose group prefers the touch-screens."

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

"I think we in journalism have got to stop being so scared of being unobjective and to start focusing on our job which is to question, question, question," Chris Matthews told Jay Leno this week. Welcome aboard, Chris. Took ya long enough.

Leno begins his July 17, 2007 interview with Matthews by saying that the Hardball host has been "all fired up" this week. Well, that certainly describes Matthews in the video below. While he does take a couple backhanded, albeit deserving, shots at Tim Russert, he focuses his wrath primarily on the Bush administration, adding that "this crowd wasn't even exactly elected, you know."

While Matthews glosses over his own culpability when speaking of the failures of the press, he does deliver a powerful indictment on the Bushies and their vast propaganda campaign against the American people. Here's a particularly good rant:

In the last part of the interview Leno shifts the conversation to the 2008 presidential election and Matthews predicts a Hillary/Giuliani showdown. The video follows in full...

RAW STORY has the shameful report and video of Bush's press conference and latest failure of the mainstream corporate media...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Following on yesterday's Michael Moore smackdown of Wolf Blitzer, Sanjay Gupta, and CNN specifically and the MSM in general, Moore and Gupta had it out tonight on Larry King Live after Moore fact-checked Gupta's so-called "Reality Check" from the evening before.

The Moore/Gupta appearance is below, broken into three parts...

Part 1

Parts 2 and 3 of the Moore/Gupta appearance on Larry King Live follow below...

We just saw Michael Moore's Sicko tonight in St. Louis, and so were pleased to return to our current home base, to find RAW STORY's video coverage of Moore's long overdue smack down with Wolf Blitzer and CNN from earlier this afternoon.

Go watch it. If only for Moore's taking Blitzer and his network to task for helping us into the endless and idiotic Iraq quagmire. (If you can't watch the video, the tull text transcript is now posted here.)

"Just apologize to the American people and to the families of the troops for not doing your job four years ago," Moore excoriated Blitzer after a "Reality Check" report on Sicko by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, which the filmmaker declared "so biased it's unbelievable."

"We wouldn't be in this war if you had done your job. Come on. Just admit it. Just apologize to the American people," he continued in just one choice selection of his rant against the CNN and the mainstream media failures that sent us into --- and have kept us in --- this mess. (After checking out the video, you can send your thoughts to CNN here.)

Thank you, Michael. Again.

As to the movie, go watch that too. We'd have more to say about it, but we're still pondering it all. We had hoped to go with a couple of doctors (our cousins) so they could tell us what was "wrong" with the movie. But for some reason, they weren't interested in going. We hope you will be. It was exceedingly eye-opening even if --- despite all the kudos Moore has received for "his most mature film to date" --- we think he pulled a few punches. Perhaps we preferred him when he was less mature, but maybe that's just us.

But if that was any drawback to his film, and it really wasn't, he made up for it --- in spades --- today with dead on-target ass-whooping to the hapless Wolf Blitzer and friends.

UPDATE 7/10/07: As promised, during his fracas with Blitzer, Moore has now posted a fact-filled refutation of Gupta's so-called "Reality Check". We'll see if CNN and Blitzer, as promised, issues the appropriate apologies and corrections in light of it. Also, well worth reading in response to all of those MSM'ers who so diligently "fact check" when it comes to Moore's film (hey, they need to hold "power" accountable, right? Might as well try to do it once every three years when a Michael Moore film comes out!) see James Clay Fuller's "Commenting on the Commentaries" from Twin Cities Daily Planet. Finally, Moore appears for "Part 2" with Blitzer tonight at 7pm ET on CNN's The Situation Room, and perhaps more notably, with Gupta himself on CNN's Larry King Live tonight at 9pm ET. Someone feel like counting the number of commercials for Health Providers and Pharmaceutical Companies during those two hours alone on CNN, just for yucks?

LATER UPDATES: Video of Part 2 of the Moore/Blitzer interview, aired the next day, now posted here. Video of the Moore appearance with Gupta on Larry King Live now posted here.

Blogged by Brad from St. Louis...

Golly, there sure are a lot of Right Wingers out there using Bill Clinton's pardons as reason to say that it's okay that Bush has commuted four felony convictions of the lying covert CIA-operative outer Scooter Libby.

"Clinton did the same thing when he pardoned Marc Rich and so many others," proclaim the Neo-Apologists.

"Where were you when Clinton committed perjury?" they ask (failing to note that he was never actually convicted of a crime, and, in either case, was said to have lied about a sexual matter in a civil case, versus a matter of national security in a criminal case).

In either case, we wonder when one of our brave media anchors will ask the obvious follow-up to one of these clowns. Namely, "Does this mean you now support Bill Clinton's use of pardons? Do you now believe that it was okay for Clinton to lie during a deposition?"

Seems to us they can't have it both ways. If it was wrong for Clinton to lie during a civil suit investigation, and wrong for him to let convicted criminals off the hook with pardons, then it is wrong for Libby to lie (to a grand jury) during an criminal investigation and for Bush to let him off the hook for it.

The Scooter Libby Wingnut Talking Points, however, don't seem to go that many levels deep. Perhaps that's because the Neo-Apologists know that a well thought-out response to the Libby Debacle is not really necessary, seeing as how nobody on the teevee will likely ever bother to ask them such a seemingly obvious follow-up question to their lock-step, sound-bite-crafted response to Bush's commutation.

The 4th Estate fails again.

Blogged by Brad from St. Louis...

Supposed to be cooling my holiday heels a bit today, but couldn't let this one pass without comment. USA Today has an article this morning anointing psychologist Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, as the Democrats' new political rhetoric guru.

Nonetheless, in her article, headlined "Democrats get advice on how to talk about issues," reporter Jill Lewis can't seem to help but pass on the conventional wisdom (read: lies) of Republican rhetoric guru/liar Frank Luntz.

"Al Gore should have won" in 2000, Lewis unquestioningly quotes Luntz as telling her. "He lost because Americans didn't want him in their living rooms every night."

No. He "lost" because one vote on the Supreme Court determined that the man who won the national popular vote, as well as the electoral vote in Florida, should not have his votes counted as cast.

Had Lewis gone back and reviewed the findings of her own newspaper, who took part in a study of the ballots across the state of Florida, she likely would have discovered that.

While we realize that history is frequently re-written by the "winners," we see no reason why the corporate mainstream media need to participate in that charade. And yet, nearly 7 years later, and with facts now easily at hand, USA Today continues to do so.

We don't blame Luntz for lying. That's his job. Much as we don't blame Ann Coulter for being an unapologetic liar and hate-monger. We blame USA Today --- and other similarly irresponsible corporate mainstream outlets --- for giving him the platform to continue to pass on his lies without correction. Much as we blame ABC, NBC, MSNBC, et al. for giving Coulter a bully pulpit from which to spew her bullshit.

We need to begin to hold those who hold the keys to the kingdom responsible for allowing the charlatans inside the gates in the first place. Until we hold the media accountable and demand that they clean up their act, the Democratic focus-grouped advice of media message masters like Westen, and George Lakoff before him, won't mean a damn thing.

Blogged by Brad from "Thor" Country (St. Louis, Missouri)...

"Emptywheel" at Next Hurray has the details on the latest Republican front group to go missing on the Internets in the time-honored cowardly tradition of George W. Bush's cut and run vote-suppression capo Thor Hearne of the "non-partisan" propaganda outlet, "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR).

At least the latest GOP scam outfit to see their website set to "This site is temporarily unavailable," Italia Federici's "Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy," (CREA) had the decency to include the name of their party in the group's name. As well, unlike Thor and his buddies, the group --- whose major funder was the now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff --- waited until its President, Federici, had pled guilty to obstruction and tax charges before giving up their website's ghost.

Thor, on the other hand, got out as soon as the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal began to shine a spotlight on the "Democratic voter fraud" scam he had been perpetrating for years on a gullible nation and a pliant corporate mainstream media. If we ever find out who funded Thor's tax-exempt ACVR scam to the tune of more than $1 million, we'll not be surprised to see Abramoff's finger prints all over it. Pointing even more directly towards the White House, we've got reason to believe that James A. Baker and friends were also likely on the inside of the hoax set up by the man who was Karl Rove's top election "legal" eagle and, by no coincidence, Bush/Cheney '04 Inc.'s general counsel.

With groups like ACVR and CREA, the GOP helped raise the art of "astroturfing" to new, unforgivable heights of cynicism and criminal fraud. The CMSM let 'em do it for years, as most of us looked the other way in disbelief that the folks who ran this country --- by hook and mostly crook --- would ever be so blatantly disingenuous. They were. We fell for it. And it'll likely take years to undo the damage.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Filling in for Bill O'Reilly on tonight's Factor, Michelle Malkin ripped Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff for destroying the faith of the American people in our government's ability to enforce immigration laws. Later, she went after an immigrant advocate attorney who called for an end to the deportation of illegals, stating, "it is not a bumper sticker to say that we should enforce the laws that are on the books." Between the two, Malkin finds time to joke with "Democratic" Strategists, Kirsten Powers and Laura Schwartz, about Bush letting Scooter Libby "Off The Hook." Surprisingly, she appeared much less concerned with the law and order aspects of the Libby case.

UPDATE FROM BRAD 7/3/07: I believe it's worth underscoring Alan's point above. The two Fox 'News' analysts interviewed by Malkin, claiming that commuting Libby's sentence was "the right thing to do" are both identified as "Democratic" strategists. Incredible. Only on Fox...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Amy Goodman interviews former Marine spokesperson Josh Rushing on Democracy Now about his experiences serving at CENTCOM at the start of the Iraq war. In addition to sending over a Hollywood set designer to build a platform costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, Washington sent political operative Jim Wilkinson, who ran the media operation like a political campaign. According to Rushing, Wilkinson is also "credited with coming up with the line about Gore having invented the Internet," had his hand in the "Brooks Brothers Riot" during the 2000 Florida election recount, and was the guy handing George W. the bullhorn at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001.