Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

On Election Day this November, voters in San Francisco will vote on a local initiative to rename one of the city's largest waste treatment plants in honor of George W. Bush. If the initiative passes --- and since the number of Republicans in the city is statistically zero, it very well might --- the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant will be forever known as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. It is as fitting a monument to the eight years of the Bush presidency as we can think of, with the possible exception of naming a garbage dump after him.

The San Francisco effort is the work-product of local activists who came up with the idea in the most grassroots of all settings: over beers. Subsequently, the group set up the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco, which handled promotion for the petition drive. On Thursday, the city's Department of Elections certified that the 7,168 signatures the commission submitted were valid and approved the initiative for the November ballot.

Although the organizers in San Francisco are clear that their effort is satire, this is a cause that grassroots organizers in other cities should consider seriously. This nationwide effort could be similar to, but hopefully more successful than, the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which was the brainchild of the anti-government lobbyist Grover Norquist, who is best known for his close associations with corrupt Bush cronies like (now-imprisoned) Jack Abramoff and (perhaps incarcerated one day) Karl Rove.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

A new Field Poll shows that 42 percent of California voters say they will vote for Proposition 8, the ballot initiative sponsored by the national anti-gay lobby that would amend the California Constitution to revoke the right of gay people to marry, while 51 percent say they plan to vote against it, according to a report in the Mercury News:

Mercury News also reports that "[women], older baby boomers and residents of coastal California --- particularly the Bay Area --- were among those most hostile to the proposed ban. Protestants, Latinos, residents of inland counties and people in their 40s and over age 65 were the most likely to favor it."

At least one professional advocate of bigotry toward gays was quick to downplay the poll results. "Historically, the Field Poll has understated the support for upholding the definition of marriage," Jennifer Kerns, a spokeswoman for ProtectMarriage.com, told the Mecurty News. "The reality is that the vast majority of Californians support the definition of marriage as between a man and woman."

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Polling before Labor Day in the presidential race is all but useless, still -- this is amazing:

That last number, Obama's 46 point lead among independents, is significant. This is just a guess but much of the antipathy among independents toward McCain, the self-described "maverick," likely can be traced to his position in favor of drilling off the coast.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Why should anyone be surprised at yesterday's decision by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors that Dean Logan is the best qualified to be the county's permanent Registrar of Voters? After all, failed election officials seem to be sought after by counties. Michael Vu failed miserably in Cuyahoga Co., Ohio, where he even had two employees convicted of felony election violations. San Diego Co. tripped over themselves as they rushed to hire Vu to be their assistant Registrar.

In 2004 Dean Logan was the King County (WA) Election Director. Logan was the center of a fire storm that erupted due to the close gubernatorial race. In their reporting of Logan's new promotion from acting Registrar to Registrar, the Los Angeles Daily News reports:

A year later and Dean was rescued by then LA Co Registrar Conny McCormack, who herself came to the county under the cloud of failings in her elections jobs in Texas. Conny hired Dean as her assistant. In August 2007 Conny announced her retirement and Dean was named acting Registrar later in the year.

Failures seem to follow Logan. He was in charge of the LA Co elections office when the "Double Bubble Trouble" incident took place last February on Super Tuesday, and thousands of legally cast ballots were left uncounted from the Democratic Primary. He was also in charge when our very own Brad Friedman attempted to vote on his polling place's supposedly disabled-accessible voting machine and the machine flipped four of his votes to candidates he hadn't voted for.

One has to wonder how many times someone can fail and still come up with the rewards, such as a $195,000 a year position counting votes in the most populous county in the country. Some people are truly Teflon coated. Amazing!...But not surprising.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.
Drilling off the coast of California, Florida and elsewhere would increase domestic oil production by 7 percent by 2030, according to the Energy Information Administration. But “because oil prices are determined on the international market…any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.” There is no short-term benefit to drilling, says the EIA, because it would take at least five years for oil production to begin. (Source: Center for American Progress.)

On the other hand, in a single step tomorrow --- closing the Enron Loophole --- Congress and George Bush could create an overnight drop in oil prices of between 25 and 50 percent. This is according to testimony before a Senate Committee two weeks ago by Michael Greenberger, the former director of Trading & Markets for the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC), the government board that oversees commodities markets.

"Yes," Greenberger testified, "overnight [closing the Enron Loophole] will bring down the price of crude oil to get at least a 25 percent drop in the cost of oil and a corresponding drop in the cost of gasoline. Some people estimate 50 percent."

Greenberger's testimony was brought to light by an investigation into the Enron Loophole by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's "Countdown" last week. (A transcript of Olbermann's report follows.)

The Enron Loophole is the nickname for a provision written into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) of 2000 that was drafted by lobbyists for Enron and inserted in the bill by then Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) that deregulated an aspect of the market Enron sought to exploit with its "Enron On-Line" trading program, the first Internet-based commodities transaction system. Phil Gramm is now a key economic adviser for the John McCain campaign.

While it was a technical success, Enron On-Line was based on a flawed business model that drained corporate revenues --- even while the company was manipulating the rates consumers paid for electricity in California. Enron On-Line eventually drove the company into bankruptcy, and the cooking of the books to hide its losses led to charges of conspiracy and fraud against Enron executives.

The Republicans' sudden rollout of the campaign to lift the ban on offshore drilling is really meant to shift the blame from Bush and the GOP to the Democrats and their opposition to offshore drilling. To their credit, they have done a masterful job --- and all it has cost them is the credibility of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who broke tradition in the state and came out in favor of lifting the ban. (It has also cost whatever meager credibility Crist's predecessor, Jeb Bush, had left. Bush opposed lifting the ban when he was in office but came out wholeheartedly in favor of it this weekend.)

*

Here's the transcript of the video of the report on the June 18 edition of "Countdown":

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

I live about 100 yards from West Hollywood City Hall so when the first marriage licenses were issued to gay people there on Tuesday, it was a big day for news helicopters overhead. I, of course, watched the festivities as reported by CNN's Thelma Gutierrez, via satellite feed to Atlanta, routed back to me 3,000 miles across the country by cable. What a whacky world.

Thelma was not alone. According to WeHo News, our local online-only newspaper, media outlets on the scene also included Tokyo Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Wall Street Journal, NY Times, and the Washington Post.

Here's how WeHo News described the first minutes of the gold-ring rush:

Del Martin, 87, and Phyllis Lyon, 83, got to tie the knot today, after 56 years together. That's what liberty and freedom look like. Congratulations to the lovely couple.

Also, this. Fiscal conservatives here in California, and elsewhere, may wish to re-think their stance on marriage equality and say "Thanks, gay people!"

Of course, some folks are hoping to turn back the clock by trying to change the Constitution next November out here. Here's my interview, from last week, with Richard Prenctice, CEO of the so-called California Family Council, a member of the "Protect Marriage Coalition." Why he's against liberty and freedom (and apparently sound fiscal policies) remains a mystery to me. Though I did my best to try and find out.

Another reminder may be needed: Just because California now allows same-sex marriage, it does not mean you must marry someone of the same sex. Also, if you are currently in a heterosexual marriage, you are more than welcome to stay married. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty certain about both of those points.

Last week I reported in great detail that four out of the twelve votes I'd cast on my ballot on L.A. County's e-voting system, during California's state primary on June 3rd, were flipped to candidates that I hadn't voted for. The ES&S InkaVote Plus system printed my ballot incorrectly.

I was voting on the audio ballot voting system meant primarily for blind and visually-impaired voters. Had I not been able to inspect my ballot visually after it had printed --- for example, had I been blind --- I would never have known that I was about to cast votes for candidates that I had not selected.

Because the "disabled-accessible" e-voting system at my own precinct was not working, again, for the second election in a row, I was told I'd have to cast a provisional ballot on the "disabled-accessible" e-voting system at the other "precinct," in the same polling place, in the same room, as my own "precinct."

The machine had been down all day, and nobody had come out to replace or repair it, even though the county had been called early in the day and told about the problem. Last election, on Super Tuesday, the machine was also broken, and none of the poll workers would touch it, due to exposed wires.

This time, despite asking to vote in a specific party's open primary, I was given a non-partisan audio ballot to compound the fiasco when I tried to vote provisionally on the other "precinct's" e-voting system that was up and running, even though not a single voter had used it in either this, or the previous election.

The voting went smoothly enough --- even if it took 20 minutes to move through the short audio ballot, shorter than usual because it was a state primary, and because I wasn't allowed to vote in partisan races for some reason --- at least until it misprinted my selections, which I had confirmed as correct while actually moving through the audio selections.

Luckily, after noticing that the e-voting system had printed my ballot incorrectly, I was allowed to VOID that ballot, and this time chose to vote on a regular, hand-marked paper ballot instead. My hand filled in the ballot far more accurately than the computer did.

That night, I alerted officials at the CA Sec. of State's office and L.A. County's acting Registrar of Voters, Dean Logan, about the problem, and the machines and ballots in question were isolated for testing. Whether someone who wasn't a loud, muckracking journalist, specializing in issues of election integrity, would have had that kind of quick service, I can't tell you.

Logan promised the machine would be tested, and the SoS office promised to follow the testing closely.

Earlier this week, Logan sent me an update via email, with photos, on what the investigation had so far found. The problem, Logan wrote, is being attributed to the "human error" of the poll workers who, he says, entered incorrect information into the e-voting system when setting up my ballot for me to vote.

Logan's complete email, detailing the findings of the cursory investigation to date, follows below, along with my email in response to it. As you'll see, the all-too de rigueur "human error" excuse does not sit well with me...

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

As a fairly well-known Election Integrity journalist who has personally covered, for years, the myriad election woes of thousands (if not millions) of voters around the country who have tried to bring seemingly endless stories of votes flipped on e-voting systems to the attention of officials, these stories always continue to be remarkable to me, even if not to many others in the rest of the mainstream media.

It's even more troubling when one realizes that so little ever seems to be done in light of so many of these horror stories, as those very same failed systems are still deployed across the nation, with little or no modification to correct the mountains of documented problems even now, as we head towards an election likely to be of historic proportions this November.

What follows is yet another one of those stories, where a voter had vote selections flipped by the electronic voting system, such that candidates were chosen other than the ones intended to be selected by the voter, though no fault of his own.

But this time, the voter is me.

Though I've covered so many of these stories, it was nonetheless remarkable to see it happen before ones very eyes, as occurred yesterday when I voted here in Los Angeles during our very low turnout California state Primary election.

The ES&S electronic voting system that I used to try to vote on yesterday, ended up flipping a total of 4 out of the 12 contests and initiatives for which I had attempted to vote.

Right before my very eyes, the computer-printed ballot produced by the voting system I was using, incorrectly filled in bubbles for four of the races I was voting in. Had I not been incredibly careful, after the ballot was printed out, to painstakingly compare what was printed to what I actually voted for, I'd have never known my votes were being given to candidates I did not vote for.

Had I been a blind voter --- as the system I was using is largely intended for use by the disabled --- I would have cast my ballot without having a clue that a full 40% of the votes I'd tried to cast for various California Superior Court judges were flipped to other candidates...

Yes, four different selections, on my very own ballot, were flipped before my very eyes when I went to vote in yesterday's California state Primary Election.

One might think that someone might have been smart enough to make damned sure, at the very least, that the equipment where that widely-known Election Integrity muckraking journalist jerk, Brad Friedman of The BRAD BLOG goes to vote, would have been thoroughly tested and working as it was supposed to. One might think that. But if so, one would be wrong.

Full story soon...

UPDATE: Full story now posted here...

We've long argued that same-sex marriage was, for all intents and purposes, a done deal. Marriage equality, under virtually any legitimate conservative reading of the U.S. and most state Constitutions, cannot be denied.

If the segment, at right, from tonight's O'Reilly Factor is any indication, it looks like even Bill O'Reilly is finally coming to grips with that fact, in light of the new poll showing for the first time that a majority of Californians are finally in favor.

Neither O'Reilly, nor his guest, "family law attorney" and "gay marriage opponent" Don Schweitzer, seem to be able to come up with a single legitimate reason to oppose it. The uncomfortable silences while they reach for something...anything...is really something to see. And if they've lost O'Reilly, well, the dead-enders may take a while longer to get the message, but it's over. The good guys will win this one...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

On Thursday, The BRAD BLOG interviewed Ron Shepston, who is running for Congress in California's 42nd District. The current holder of the seat is the ethically challenged Republican, Gary Miller (R-CA), who is regularly named as one of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress.

We first asked Shepston, an airplane engineer, about election integrity issues. Interestingly, despite running in the extremely "red" Orange County against the Republican Miller and expressing concern for election integrity issues in general, Shepston was not worried about the fairness of elections in his own district:

"I vote in my district and I do think we have fair elections there... I do worry about election integrity in general. I wonder what Republicans are afraid of when they don't want to have fair elections. I don't want to have to guess, I don't want to have to trust that my vote or that voters' votes count. I want verified ballots."

Unfortunately, as Orange County is one of two counties left in California where unverifiable DRE (usually touch-screen) voting machines have been allowed for use by all, Shepston seems somewhat out of step with the ability, or lack thereof, to verify even a single vote cast on such machines in his own district. Almost inexplicably, CA SoS Debra Bowen decertified use of almost all DRE systems in the state, other than one per polling place to meet federal accessibility voting standards, and DRE machines made by Hart InterCivic. Shepston's Orange County still uses those wholly unverifiable Hart voting machines.

Shepston, who says he considers himself part of the netroots movement, is a political newcomer who was encouraged to run for office by fellow bloggers at the Daily Kos website. Yet despite the fact that many of these bloggers are helping with Shepston's campaign, he directed some harsh words towards the Daily Kos:

"It's not the community that it used to be... And what's happened is that now that I've been there for so long I know the good writers and I go to just them. I don't branch out because it seems like every other diary that I get to it's just not worth it to me anymore. I don't learn anything... It's turned into a shouting match sometimes. It's not the same community that it was when I was there before."

Our complete interview (6:46), shot this week at a fund raising event here in Los Angeles with Ambassador Joe Wilson (more videos to come), follows below. You can find out more about Shepston at his Ron Shepston for United States Congress website...

California's Republican-dominated Supreme Court --- in a conservative finding --- has just found the state's ban on same-sex marriage to be in violation of the state Constitution.

And yes, that's a conservative finding, in that it respects both the state and U.S. Constitution and keeps Government out of our bedrooms and private lives.

For those phony "conservatives" who don't understand the difference, a special note: The ruling does not require you to go out and marry someone of the same sex. So you don't need to worry your little selves about it one bit. You get to stay married to your current partner as usual. If you wish.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

...Or did they?...

...Well, go figure.

That skill set should come in very handy down there in, of all places, San Diego, where the far-right Republican Board of Supes, and the far-right Republican Registrar of Voters office, have never met a hackable Diebold electronic voting system they didn't love.

I recall "Strider" (Krvaric) and the "Fairlight" boyz from my own C-64 and BBS "warez" swapping days in the late 80's. Those guys, and the other incredibly competitive pirate crews, could crack anything, anytime, usually within minutes after a new piece of software hit the market (and often, even before it did!).

But no doubt, the air-tight, mission-critical, impenetrable security in Diebold's voting systems would be beyond the reach of d00dz like Strider and friends. And, of course, there's far more to gain by a 17-year-old "Strider" cracking the codes of, say, International Karate Plus and Shoot 'em Up Construction Kit than there ever would be for him, as county GOP chair, to hack an election in San Diego, right? I mean, what would possibly be the upside to that?

Miriam Raftery's excellent two-part investigative exclusive for RAW STORY (and for me, at least, a trip down memory lane) is here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).