On Monday, President Barack Obama, both in a surprisingly clear written statement and video-taped announcement (posted at end of this article), called upon the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to adopt "bright-line" rules that would ensure an "open and free" Internet via the concept of "net neutrality" --- a concept that would, in the President's words, ensure there "are no gatekeepers deciding which sites you get to access. There are no toll roads on the information superhighway." Anything less, the President proclaimed, "would threaten to end the Internet as we know it."

Though oversight similar to that called for by the President resulted in a record number of public comments (99% in favor) to the FCC, predictably, the President's announcement drew harsh reactions not only from the handful of corporations which could profit from those Internet highway tolls, but from their Republican allies. Following Obama's comments, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-FL), for example, quickly denounced "net neutrality", if somewhat cryptically, as "Obamacare for the Internet."

Republican opposition would amount to little more than public grousing, however, if, in accordance with the President's recommendations, the five Obama-appointed FCC Commissioners (only three can be of the same party) carefully craft new regulations that "reclassify Internet service under Title II of...the Telecommunications Act," a reclassification that would undo the damage wrought by the Republican George W. Bush-appointed FCC Commissioners in 2002.

The question for now is: Will they?...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: "The science has spoken": final UN climate change report - the bad news, the good news, and room for hope; PLUS: Flashback: 25th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's historic climate change speech --- back to when conservatives accepted science ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Your next electric car may not even need a battery; Who’s really been running W.Va. all these years? [cough-COAL-cough]; California’s strawberry industry is hooked on dangerous pesticides; Rich countries subsidize oil, gas, coal by $88bn a year; Worker deaths hit all-time high in Alberta; Amazon.com doubles down on coal; Water treatment plant run by solar power; BP foiled again ... PLUS: Will China help Obama save the planet? ... and much, MUCH more! ...

I am incredibly saddened to learn, on Veterans' Day of all days, of the death of Tomas Young, a 34-year old Iraq War veteran turned unapologetic peace activist, paralyzed from the chest down, whose heart-breaking story I played a small role in helping to bring to the national stage back during the extraordinary summer of 2005...

Well, that was interesting.

On this week's "day after" KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast I was joined by old friend Matthew Segal, co-founder of OurTime.org, to discuss whether the failure of young voters to turn out was really to blame for the results of Tuesday's red tide mid-term elections, or whether it was something else entirely. (Yes, we're looking at you, Democrats.)

Segal, by the way, became activated to help young voters while trying to vote as a student at Ohio's Kenyon College in 2004. He was one of 1,300 students who waited 10 hours or so on line, some until 4am on Wednesday morning, to try and cast a vote in the Presidential Election on one of two available voting machines at the polling place that year.

Speaking of voting machines, and voter suppression, and voter disenfranchisement, and election fraud, and unverified results, we also take a broad, early look at all of the other issues and failures --- beyond the horse race --- that may have played a part in Tuesday's surprising outcome, even as we're still trying to make sense of data and curious reports that are still coming in.

We hear from a bunch of callers on all of the above, and Desi Doyen joins us as well to discuss some of the implications of the GOP U.S. Senate takeover on the environment and climate change...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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The Politicus USA headline typified MSM coverage of what Brad Friedman often refers to as the "horse race" --- "Democrats Surge As Michelle Nunn Leads Georgia Senate Race In Third Straight Poll."

For The BRAD BLOG, and for a good many election integrity advocates and computer scientists, that narrow focus ignores "the track conditions," which, in Georgia entails the continued use of touchscreen voting systems courtesy of a 2009 determination by the Georgia Supreme Court that "unverifiable elections are just fine."

Where horse race coverage focuses exclusively on the here and now, this site feels it helpful to look back a dozen years to what took place in Georgia shortly after Democratic Secretary of State Cathy Cox signed a May 2002 contract with what was then known as Diebold Election Systems Inc....

No doubt this is precisely the sort of thing that Chris Christie, New Jersey's governor, chair of the Republican Governors Association and 2016 Republican Presidential hopeful, was talking about last week when discussing the need for Republicans to be in charge of the "voting mechanisms" in 2016.

New Mexico, certain to be a key swing state once again in the 2016 Presidential election, currently has both a Republican Governor, the popular Susana Martinez, and a Republican Secretary of State, Dianna Duran. Both are up for re-election this year. Duran is in a neck-and-neck race against her Democratic opponent Maggie Toulouse Oliver.

Duran is one of those GOP "voter fraud" fraudsters who likes to pretend there is a massive epidemic of voter fraud that needs correcting via polling place Photo ID restrictions, even though such measures prevent far more legal (largely Democratic-leaning) votes from being cast than fraudulent ones --- and even though she's been able to find next to none since taking office four years ago.

At the same time, Duran appears to be slow-walking thousands of perfectly legal new voter registrations from being processed by the state Motor Vehicle Department (MVD), despite a 2010 court order issued after a settlement with the federal government requiring New Mexico to comply with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the so-called "Motor Voter" law.

On Monday, the Santa Fe New Mexican offered this distressing report from Brian Sweeney, a state voter, or, at least, someone who has been trying to be one for months without success...

I haven't been following this case at all, but I happened to be up very late last night when the cable news nets switched LIVE, around 2am out here, to carry the sentencing pronouncement for South Africa's Oscar Pistorius on the charge of "culpable homicide" (akin to manslaughter in the U.S.), for which he's been convicted in the 2013 killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

The presiding judge for South Africa's High Court was Thokozile Masipa, an appointee of Nelson Mandela. She read her complete sentencing ruling aloud from the bench in the courtroom.

I was struck by one section that included several ideas that I don't recall hearing lately, if ever, in any sentencing for a criminal case of this sort in the U.S...

It's been a very busy few weeks here of late, just trying to keep up with all of the roller coaster court rulings (here's the latest, and its not good), thanks to GOP voter suppression laws around the country. (Your donations to our efforts in that regard help a great deal --- thank you and please!)

So, with a very few minutes pause in the voter suppression action on Friday morning, we were finally able to catch you all up with the latest in the Judge Mark Fuller wife-beating case on Friday.

Naturally, no sooner did we do so, when a few more noteworthy events happened in the case...

[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

Recently, the attorney for U.S. District Court Judge Mark Fuller (Middle District of Alabama) described the incident where the federal judge was arrested and charged for beating his second wife bloody in an Atlanta hotel room in early August as overblown.

This week, his attorney went further in describing allegations that Fuller similarly beat his first wife as little more than "nonsense" and "gossip".

Also this week, Fuller's most famous "victim", former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D), has finally spoken out about the entire sordid business.

Fuller's Alabama attorney Barry Ragsdale says that it was only after the release of a video showing an NFL superstar knocking out his then-fiancée in a hotel elevator in Atlantic City that people began to care in the least about a federal judge who, according to the police, repeatedly struck and kicked his second wife Kelli and dragged her around the hotel room by her hair.

"It got caught up in the Ray Rice and NFL scandals, and it's gotten lumped into a category of domestic violence that I don't think it belongs in," Ragsdale said in his attempt to marginalize the incident on behalf of his client, according to the Montgomery Advertiser. "There was not a beating, kicking or slapping in this instance," he says.

Really? Is that the case? Well, aside from the wife, the police and the evidence at the scene suggesting otherwise, let's review the audio from Kelli Fuller's 911 call again to help determine if Ragsdale's claim is credible.

Since the audio, as we originally posted it here last month, was buried inside of a longer video segment from Chris Hayes' MSNBC show, we've taken the liberty to pull out just the audio from the call itself, as played on MSNBC, to put it into its own standalone video for easy reference. Here ya go...

Really, Mr. Ragsdale? No "beating, kicking or slapping in this instance"? The 911 audio evidence strongly suggests otherwise, as did the lacerations and bruises reportedly found on Kelli Fuller's face and legs, the hair found on the floor in the room, and the blood discovered in the bathroom when police responded at the Ritz-Carlton.

We wonder if Fuller, a 2002 George W. Bush lifetime appointee to the federal bench (unless he resigns or is impeached by Congress) with a record for failing to recuse himself when presiding over trials of political opponents, would be impressed with the audio evidence from the 911 call and the testimony of police if it was presented in his court room.

In any event, Ragsdale went on to describe the reaction from the public and the calls for the federal Judge's resignation and/or impeachment from the entire Alabama Congressional delegation (including both of the state's U.S. Senators and all five Congressmen and women), the state's Governor, senior federal judges, and all sorts of newspapers from Alabama (here, here and here) to Washington D.C. as merely "overblown"...

Attorneys for U.S. Congressman Mark Veasey (D-TX) and other plaintiffs have filed an Emergency Application[PDF] with the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to restore a lower court ruling that struck down the law last week as intentionally discriminatory and an unconstitutional poll tax. That initial U.S. District Court ruling was subsequently stayed by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week.

Veasey's application was followed by the filing of another Emergency Application [PDF] by the United States Department of Justice (DoJ). Both were filed with Justice Antonin Scalia who oversees the 5th Circuit. Scalia has instructed the DoJ to respond by 5p ET on Thursday.

Both applications to SCOTUS were filed in the case of Veasey v. Perry in which a U.S. District Court, after a full trial on the merits, imposed a permanent injunction, preventing the State of Texas from implementing the nation's strictest photo ID law, Senate Bill 14 (SB 14).

The District Court determined that, if implemented, SB 14 could disenfranchise more than 600,000 registered Texas voters who are disproportionately black and Hispanic. The District Court not only ruled that SB 14 violated the U.S. Constitution, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and amounted to an unconstitutional poll tax, but expressly found that it was passed as the result of deliberate and willful racial discrimination.

The emergency petitions ask that the Supreme Court lift the U.S. 5th Circuit's 11th hour stay of the injunction so as to prevent electoral chaos and confusion in the rapidly approaching November election. In the first petition, the Veasey plaintiffs argue that what the 5th Circuit did in this case --- stay a permanent injunction that was issued on the basis of a District Court finding of intentional discrimination after a full trial on the merits --- was "virtually unheard of" in the annals of American jurisprudence.

Plaintiffs contend that the 5th Circuit misapplied a leading Supreme Court case, Purcell v. Gonzalez [PDF] (2006) pertaining to the issuance of injunctions on the eve of a pending election. That case does not, as the 5th Circuit ruled, mandate a per se rule that always precludes changing a law immediately prior to an election. The DoJ contends that no such per se "rule exists, and the court of appeals clearly and demonstrably erred in failing to apply the established stay factors."

Instead, plaintiffs forcefully argue, "The Purcell principle", mandates that an appellate court give deference to the factual findings of the District Court. The 5th Circuit, they add, erred by ignoring the requirement of Purcell that Texas prove it would likely succeed on an appeal. The 5th Circuit also erred, they say, because it failed to balance the state's allegations about possible confusion that might ensue from implementing pre-SB 14 law against the "actual" confusion, chaos and mass disenfranchisement that the District Court, based upon uncontested evidence, concluded would occur if SB 14 is enforced in the November 4th election (early voting begins in TX on October 20th).

"Imagine that a state passed a law, six months before an election, stating that 'Negroes cannot vote,'" the plaintiffs write. "It would be ludicrous for an appellate court to turn around and stay that injunction because of some per se rule that election laws can never change immediately prior to elections"...

California Congressman Duncan D. Hunter (R) is in the middle of an amusing kerfuffle after claiming that he was told by unnamed U.S. Border Patrol agents that "ISIS is coming across the southern border," and will soon be "bombing American cities [after] coming across from Mexico." Most disturbing, he also said that while several of the Islamic terrorists had already been nabbed by federal agents, more have most likely slipped through and are amongst us even now!

"I know that at least 10 ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the Mexican border in Texas," the Congressman told a dubious Greta Van Susteren on Fox "News" earlier this week. Though those 10, luckily, were taken into custody, Hunter added, "you know there's going to be dozens more that did not get caught by the Border Patrol."

The Dept. of Homeland Security, however, has denied the claim, calling it "categorically false, and not supported by any credible intelligence or the facts on the ground." The Mexican Embassy has similarly disputed it. Politifact investigated the matter, before describing it as "incorrect and ridiculous" and rating it a "Pants on Fire" lie. And now other Republicans are being forced to grapple with how and whether to back up their colleague or not.

Nonetheless, Hunter Jr. is sticking by his alarming claim.

But this is hardly the first time a California Congressman named Duncan Hunter went on record, on television, during the heat of a campaign to simply make shit up about scary aliens sneaking across the border to come into our country and undermine our very way of life.

As The BRAD BLOG highlighted in 2007, Hunter Jr.'s father, now-retired Rep. Duncan Hunter Sr. --- who held the same Congressional seat his son holds now --- offered a similarly outrageous and apparently bald-faced lie while pretending to run for President that year.

Then, as now, Republicans were in the middle of attempting to enact disenfranchising Photo ID voting restrictions in the lead up to the election, akin to the very same ones blocked by the Supreme Court in WI and struck down as discriminatory and an "unconstitutional poll tax" by a federal judge in TX last night.

During a PBS-sponsored Republican Presidential debate that year, in response to a panelist's question, Hunter the Elder offered a blatant whopper about non-citizens "being round up [and] herded into the polls" to vote, claiming, with no apparent evidence to back him up whatsoever, that "we've seen that in California" in past elections.

Like Boy Hunter's recent claim on Fox "News", Father Hunter's response to debate moderator, Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Cynthia Tucker, appears to have been simply made up out of (nearly) whole cloth...

In a late 6 to 3 ruling, just weeks before Election Day, and coming just minutes after the release of very good news in regard to a similar law in Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court has now blocked Wisconsin's Photo ID voting law for this November's election.

A 1-page order [PDF] vacates a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals stay of the U.S. District Court’s permanent injunction that had, until blocked by the Appeals court, prevented Wisconsin from enforcing its Republican-enacted photo ID law.

SCOTUS has now restored the right of some 300,000 duly registered Badger State voters to take part in the November 4, 2014 election. Many of those lawfully registered voters would have lost that right, simply because they lacked a narrow form of a state-approved photo ID.

According to the District Court Judge Lynn Adelman's April ruling after the trial, it was "absolutely clear," based on evidence and expert testimony, that Wisconsin's law would have "prevent[ed] more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes."

Thursday's SCOTUS order is likely to come as a disappointment to WI's Republican Gov. Scott Walker who has regarded the Photo ID law as a top priority in advance of his "toss up" re-election contest against Democratic challenger Mary Burke. Though 300,000 registered voters --- 10% of the electorate in WI --- might have been disenfranchised by the law, but for tonight's ruling by the Supremes, Walker was named the winner of his initial 2010 election by just under 125,000 votes...

If you didn't make it through our detailed rant on how factually wrong, from top to bottom, rightwing Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeal was in his "horrendous" ruling on Wisconsin's GOP Photo ID voting law (now pending an emergency ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court), the ACLU focused in a press release on the same thing we did --- but in a much shorter version.

Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said in a statement issued after the ruling: "Permitting this law to go into effect so close to the election is fueling voter confusion and election chaos in Wisconsin, particularly for the many voters who have already cast their ballots. Voters deserve a fair shake, and this last-minute disruption changes the rules of the game in an election that is already underway, and risks locking out thousands of voters."

Then, the ACLU offered this pithy bullet point --- which summarizes our long article (taking apart each of these false claims one by one) --- to underscore the "factual inaccuracies in the appeals panel's ruling":

Yup. More than 300,000 registered voters in the state --- nearly 10% of the registered electorate --- as determined during the full trial on the merits of the case in the U.S. District Court. That trial resulted in the law being struck down as both unconstitutional and in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Until that ruling was overturned by a 5 to 5 decision by the 7th Circuit, later justified by the Federalist Society's Judge Easterbrook's "horrendous" ruling earlier this week.

And, remember, Republican Governor Scott Walker, who is in a "toss up" re-election contest against Democratic challenger Mary Burke this year, was named the winner of his original 2010 election by just 124,638 votes. That margin is less than half of the number of legally registered voters in the state who are now unlikely to be able to cast a vote at all in this year's election, unless SCOTUS tosses out the ridiculous, falsehood-riddled ruling of the 7th Circuit.

Given the SCOTUS decisions this week in NC and last week in OH, that possibility seems to be growing dimmer by the hour.

Nice to have friends in high places who are willing to just make shit up though, eh Governor?

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KPFK/Pacifica Radio is on fund drive of late, but with all the breaking election news this week, I couldn't stand to not do a fresh BradCast for my syndicated network affiliates who deserve better than a "Best Of" on a week like this one, as Election Day draws near.

So, since it appears this year's election is likely to be decided in the courts, before we even get to Election Day, here's our non-KPFK "Special Election Coverage Edition" for the affiliates and for you, as produced here at The BRAD BLOG World News Headquarters, rather than at the radio station as it is usually done.

No guests, no callers, just me, lots of information and rants, and an occasionally thought or question from my producer Desi Doyen. Given all of that, and the news this week and last (particularly from SCOTUS), the result may be somewhere between a radio broadcast and a primal scream. But many of my shows seem to amount to that these days.

We covered, among other things, the new GAO report confirming Photo ID voting restrictions depress turnout of African-American and younger voters; SCOTUS overturning appellate courts to allow GOP voter suppression laws in NC and in OH, with a decision on WI's voter suppression law not far behind (thanks to the federal judge who lied about it); Federal court striking down VA's gerrymandered Congressional map (for now); the GOP Attorney General candidate in AR caught committing voter fraud and, a lot of unusually good (and very welcome!) news in our latest Green News Report!

Buckle up, and enjoy! (And please consider donating below to our efforts! Your help is very much needed right now!)

Download MP3 or listen online below...

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A new 206-page report from by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office [PDF] finds that Republican-enacted polling place Photo ID restriction laws in states such as Kansas and Tennessee resulted in lowered voter turnout among African-Americans as well as younger and recently-registered voters.

The study will likely serve as yet more important evidence to rebut the disingenuous, cherry-picked claims by Republicans over the years that Photo ID voting restrictions do not affect minority participation.

As The Hill reports today...

The report, according to Leahy's full statement, "also found scant evidence of voter fraud that the new laws that ostensibly are designed to discourage."

I'm on a number of deadlines today, so haven't gotten to peruse the actual report yet, but let me note a quick point or two, based on The Hill's reporting on the GAO study, which was requested by Democratic Senators Leahy (VT), Durbin (IL), Schumer (NY), Nelson (FL) and independent Sanders (VT), all of whom are co-sponsoring legislation to fix the part of the Voting Rights Act that the U.S. Supreme Court gutted last year in its notorious 5-4 decision...