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......

[Hat-tip to longtime BRAD BLOG toon sherpa Pokey Anderson]

Related... If you didn't hear my interview on last night's Mike Malloy Show with 70-year old Laird Monahan who, with his 67-year old brother are currently walking across the U.S. in order to highlight the Supreme Court's horrific Citizens United decision, unleashing unfettered, undisclosed (and often, even un-American) corporate money into U.S. elections, I'd highly recommend giving it a listen.

The Monahan Brothers, both Vietnam vets coincidentally, are American Heroes in my estimation, and their story should be told on not just every progressive media outlet in the nation, but more importantly, on the corporate mainstream media outlets who don't seem to want to offer much coverage to this story for some reason, as Laird and I discussed last night.

Click here to listen to listen to the interview with Laird. It's in the "HOUR 2" audio archive.

Will Ann Coulter finally be held accountable for having committed voter fraud? We may find out on October 14th when the matter will come up at a public hearing by Connecticut's State Elections Commission after an extraordinarily long two-year delay since the complaints about her allegedly illegal absentee votes in 2002 and 2004 were filed.

As The BRAD BLOG spent years documenting beyond a shadow of a doubt concerning her voter registration fraud and voter fraud in a different state, Florida, Ann Coulter committed third degree felony voter registration fraud, along with a first degree voter fraud misdemeanor, when she lied about her residency and then knowingly voted at the wrong polling place in Palm Beach County, FL, in 2005.

Years of lying to the media, as well as election and law enforcement officials, and a last-minute, inappropriate intervention by a former boyfriend in the FBI, helped run out the clock on those charges. Her offenses in the Sunshine State were eventually found to be beyond the statute of limitations by the Florida State Election Commission (FSEC). The stalling by other friendly Florida agencies took so long that the FSEC didn't receive the case until years after it had been originally reported to law enforcement by the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections. So she got off the hook and was never held accountable for easily documented crimes in Florida. [After years of reporting that part of the story in pieces as it developed, we told the entire sordid tale in one fell swoop in Hustler magazine. That April 2008 exposé can be read in full here.]

However, in Connecticut, where official complaints were filed in 2009 --- by a conservative activist --- that she also committed absentee voter fraud in the years prior to moving to Florida, when she allegedly voted illegally from her residence in New York, there is no such statute of limitations for voter fraud. [See UPDATE at bottom of story for someone who disagrees with that point.]

After a 20-month delay, Coulter's case is finally coming up for a vote at a public hearing before CT's State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) on October 14th at 9:00am, 20 Trinity St. in Hartford CT, according to an email from the commission's MaryAnn Stratton and confirmation from the commission's director of communication...

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...

Convicted federal criminal and Rightwing dirty-trickster James O'Keefe appears to have flagrantly run afoul of the rule of law yet again. This time, he appears to have violated and/or conspired to violate Maryland's Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act. It would not be the first instance of him having done so.

The apparent violation(s) of state felony laws, revealed today as part of what is being reported as O'Keefe's "botched" attempt to "punk CNN", comes on the heels of O'Keefe's previous apparent violations of the very same laws in MD, though law enforcement officials have yet to hold him accountable, to date, for those previous offenses.

Documents and other material produced by CNN today suggest that O'Keefe secretly, and illegally, taped phone calls he had with CNN's investigative journalist Abbie Boudreau, and conspired to secretly video tape her in a compromising situation, also in violation of MD law.

O'Keefe, who is currently on probation after pleading guilty to a federal misdemeanor following another botched scheme in Louisiana earlier this year, seems to have broken similar laws last year in a number of states, including Maryland, where he secretly video taped employees at the offices of the community organization ACORN in Baltimore. Despite requests to MD law enforcement by a non-profit watchdog organization for a criminal investigation into the previous apparent violations of the state's felony wiretap laws --- and despite recognition of the "possible" violation of those laws in a number of law enforcement investigations elsewhere --- no action has been taken to date by state officials...

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"...

As our friends the Tea Baggers have been temporarily instructed to give a damn about "the deficit", even while so many of them have been instructed to support deficit ballooning tax cuts for millionaires which will add trillions to the debt over the next decade, it seems it might be useful to run this chart for them, since clearly too few of them have yet to see it on Fox "News"...

Hope that helps clear things up a bit. Ya know, facts 'n' stuff. You're welcome.

Problems with New York's new electronic voting system are being reported across the state today, according to the New York Times. Today's primary elections mark the first statewide use of the new, paper-based optical-scan systems which have been been the cause of much controversy among election officials and Election Integrity advocates over the last several months and years in the Empire State.

New York is the last state in the union to replace their older election system --- much of the state, as well as all of New York City had previously used mechanical lever machines --- with new-fangled, failure-prone, easily-manipulated computerized systems following the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 which was enacted in the wake of the 2000 Presidential Election debacle.

In New York City, where Wall Street Journal reports the problems are "most severe" --- including reports from Mayor Bloomberg on "reports of broken and missing scanners, poor customer service and poll sites opening two to four hours late" --- the new systems are made by ES&S, the nation's largest voting machine company, and one with a storied history of election failures.

The systems used in other parts of the state are largely manufactured by the Canadian firm Dominion Voting, formerly as a partnership with Sequoia Voting Systems. Dominion eventually bought out cash-strapped Sequoia's portion of the NY state deal before buying out Sequoia entirely earlier this year. The purchase of Sequoia, then the nation's third-largest e-voting firm, on the heels of their purchase of Diebold/Premiere just weeks prior, has vaulted Dominion, virtually overnight, to one of the largest e-voting vendors in the U.S..

[Read The BRAD BLOG's recent exclusive on the Dominion purchase of Sequoia, and their attempts to cover up the continuing relationship that Sequoia has with a Venezuelan firm tied to President Hugo Chavez.]

Some state election officials and Election Integrity advocates alike had long-warned against the implementation of these new systems, going so far as to take the issue to court and to testify to the inability of certifying the accuracy of elections run on the new machines.

According to the Times this morning, some polling places "did not open for more than 90 minutes" in Brooklyn; elsewhere, every ballot scanned "was returning a the 'system error'" message; and across the state, there have been reports of "longer-than-usual delays and troubles with the scanners that are supposed to swallow and tabulate the new, SAT-style ballots"...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

This November, California voters will be afforded a rare opportunity to directly decide whether to legalize and tax the lawful cultivation, processing, distribution, sale, and consumption of marijuana by and to individuals over 21 years of age.

By approving Proposition 19, formally labeled the "Regulate, Control, Tax Cannabis Act of 2010" [PDF], voters will take an important first step towards ending the costly, hypocritical, and liberty-destroying "war on drugs" which, like its predecessor (Prohibition), has created a lucrative niche for criminal organizations --- hypocritical because the covert agencies of the U.S. government have long engaged in drug trafficking in support of Empire even as the so-called "War on Drugs" has provided a convenient excuse for supporting brutal dictatorial puppet regimes whose function it is to serve the interests of what John Perkins described in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man as the "corporatocracy"...

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...

From @PeterDaou during Obama's presser this morning:

...Or disallowing torture victims a day in court, for that matter.

From Charlie Savage at New York Times [emphasis added]:

Gosh. Can't understand why Obama's approval ratings keep falling.

In any case, the heart of this matter is the Government's "alleged" right (the President of the United States' actually) to use the so-called "state secrets privilege" to keep victims of alleged torture from ever even having a day in court --- even when one of those victims, as in this case, charges that his torture included "cutting his penis and other body parts with a scalpel and then pouring stinging liquid on the wounds."

Good thing none of this was done by Iran. We'd be outraged...

When it comes to elections, it seems there are no rules, laws, morals, or ethical boundaries which Republicans aren't willing to happily violate in order to be "victorious."

Our latest two examples:

• Over at Daily Kos today, a commenter has been outed as a "concern troll" hoping to deflate progressive support for KY's Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jack Conway, while serving on the payroll of Republican candidate Rand Paul.

• In Arizona, as the NYTimes reports today, the GOP has been proudly recruiting homeless people to run on the Green Party ticket for various offices, in hopes of splitting the Democratic vote.

So what wouldn't these guys do to ensure a "victory"? Stay classy, GOP. The founders would be very proud!