The Senate Democrats voted almost unanimously against giving President Obama "Fast Track" authority for trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) today.

Journalist David Dayen of Salon joined me on today's BradCast to discuss what today's procedural vote portends; what both TPP and "Fast Track" actually are (and aren't); whether Dems will continue to block the controversial trade agreement in the Senate; and whether Republicans will be able to do the same in the U.S. House.

Also today: The first lawsuit of the 2016 election season is filed in (where else?) Ohio; Defending Jeb Bush on Iraq (yes, you read that right!); Another 2-year old shoots his mom (thank, NRA!); Crazy former Rep. Allen West says he's a victim of "Sharia Law"...at the Walmart!; And Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report...

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Today we covered two stories I've been trying to get to for a while on The BradCast, and they're both related.

The first is the story of the state lottery insider who hacked the system to "win" a $14 million jackpot --- begging the question: if a state run lottery with a multi-million dollar security system can't protect against insider manipulation, how can a local election official do it, particularly with Internet Voting systems that partisans and profiteers continue to push for?

The second also relates to the first. Computer science and security expert Jeremy Epstein of Virginia Verified Voting joins me to discuss the immediate decertification of 1/5 of Virginia's voting systems after a state analysis found what many of us had been warning about for years: the AVS WINVote system is so simple to hack that, Epstein says, if it hadn't already been hacked in the decade its been in use there, "it was only because no one tried."

A must-listen version of The BradCast, if I say so myself. Or you can wait until Halloween if you're looking for something really scary.

We also covered some encouraging economic news out today, and who to "blame" for it; Missouri Republicans overriding the Democratic Governor's veto to cut off public assistance to children and families; and what the NRA wants you to get mom for Mother's Day...

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While we post The BradCast here everyday, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
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I've been having sort of a running conversation/debate with author, comedian, friend and KPFK/Pacifica Radio colleague Jimmy Dore ever since the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. He heard my take on the shootings, as discussed on KPFK at the time, and picked it up (a less generous person might say, misinterpreted it) on his own show.

We then had it out on his show and, finally, with the weekend shootings in Garland, TX at a rightwing group's event offering $10,000 for the most offensive cartoon featuring the prophet Mohammed, it seemed like a good time to pick up that conversation to see if either his or my views have changed.

So, Jimmy was my guest on today's BradCast and I think you'll enjoy the discussion!

Also, Bernie Sanders' refreshing words on a Sunday network news show; Carly and Carson both jumped into the 2016 GOP nomination clown car; one encouraging moment in Nepal amongst unspeakable tragedy following their recent devastating earthquake; the FEC continues to be dysfunctional, with one of their chairs now out-and-out noting that campaign finance regulations are unlikely to be enforced during the 2016 Presidential elections, despite record "dark money" set to be spent on them.

All of that and more on today's show! Please enjoy and spread the word!

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While we'll be posting The BradCast here everyday, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!

Would the nation even be discussing what happened in Baltimore were it not for the violence that broke out at the protests over the killing in police custody of Freddie Gray?

Also, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is jumping in to the 2016 race for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Our listeners call in with thoughts on all of the above and more in a very lively show! All of that and Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report on today's BradCast!

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While we'll be posting The BradCast here everyday, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!

On today's BradCast: What's really going on in Baltimore? We discuss the riots and the reason and turn to Fox "News", of all places, for a bit of sanity! (No, really. Thank you, Shep Smith!)

Then, Doug Hughes, the U.S. postal worker who landed his gyrocopter on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol to bring attention to the need for campaign finance reform in the wake of Citizens United, joins me for a conversation that focuses --- for a change --- on why he actually did it. See his website TheDemocracyClub.org for more.

It's an "orgy of spending," Hughes told me, and he's hoping to see a "nonpartisan, ground swell voter rebellion" against it. He also talked about his cool gyrocopter, what his bosses at the USPS have done since his brush with infamy, and the failure on behalf of our national security apparatus to stop him. The letter he was attempting to deliver to 535 members of the U.S. Congress is now posted here.

Plus: Marriage equality is winning the day even on Fox 'News', but can it win once and for all in the U.S. Supreme Court?...

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Recently, North Carolina opinion columnist and NC Insider editor Patrick Gannon misinformed readers of the Asheville Citizen-Times by telling them that the anti-voting law passed by Republicans after they took over the statehouse in 2013 --- a law which we (and others) have described as "the nation's worst voter suppression law since the Jim Crow era" --- isn't actually so bad.

"In many ways," apologist Gannon writes, the bill simply "put North Carolina more on par with other states."

He argues, as if it's a good thing, that while NC "once had among the least restrictive --- or more voter-friendly --- sets of election laws...That is no longer true." So, less "voter-friendly" is just fine by him, it seems.

Gannon offers justification for each of the key restrictions that now hamstring NC's once rather progressive and, yes, voter-friendly election laws, by arguing that the GOP's changes do little more than put the state back in line with voting laws in other states "including Texas and South Carolina." Again, as if that's a good thing.

But a Citizen-Times letter writer, in response, offers a key clarification to one of the most egregious bits of misinformation offered by Gannon --- one frequently parroted by Rightwing vote suppressors --- that the Photo ID restrictions passed as part of NC's new law are just like provisions for Voter IDs in "34 states that have passed voter identification requirements."

That, as letter writer Mike Burns accurately (if more politely) explains, is complete bullshit...

A deal announced today by Ohio's Secretary of State may help avoid some of the legal nightmares that plagued the Buckeye State's 2014 elections. While the legal settlement [PDF] restores some of the early voting access Republicans have been attempted, for years, to impose, it also leaves other rollbacks to voting reforms passed after the state's 2004 Presidential nightmare in place.

MSNBC's Zach Roth explains the agreement between Ohio's Republican Sec. of State and the ACLU, which had sued on behalf of the Ohio NAACP and League of Women Voters last year to block new GOP cuts to polling place access:

Both sides hailed the new agreement --- hopefully ending a years-long, roller-coaster legal battle --- as a victory for voters, though Roth added on Twitter that the deal, overall, seemed to be more of a victory for the GOP than for voting rights advocates. Elections expert Daniel Smith is a bit more optimistic about it today, noting that it's "a much bigger deal to have extended hours" and Sunday "Souls to the Polls" voting restored, even as the ACLU, for its part, concedes the settlement is "far from perfect"...

Virginia has decided to learn what much of the country already knows. The 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems they have long been using in their public elections are also 100% hackable.

After ignoring the warnings and using them anyway for more than a decade --- and three Presidential elections --- a recent incident on Election Day in 2014 led the Commonwealth to finally do what they should have and could have done long ago: test the machines to find out how vulnerable they actually are.

Well, they finally did so and --- boy howdy! --- did they discover what the rest of us have been warning about for years.

There is a reason, after all, that Virginia was the last state in the union to continue using the WINVote system made by the ironically named Advanced Voting Solutions (AVS). And there is a reason why, after finally bothering to test them, Virginia has now immediately decertified one-fifth of the voting systems used across the state, even though it will leave some jurisdictions scrambling for new ways to hold their primary elections scheduled for early June.

We've been noting problems with the WINVote system almost as long as The BRAD BLOG has been in existence. One example is our short report from 2007, when we discussed problems with the AVS systems before the company eventually went out of business entirely and after the WINVote system had been decertified by Pennsylvania when the company refused to pay the federal testing lab examining a newer version of the system for federal certification. Before those tests were discontinued at the time, we reported, the lab had "found 1,946 source code anomalies, 25 serious documentation problems, and an unauthorized change of motherboards."

As we wrote in 2007, "Elections officials want to ignore those problems." The elections officials in Virginia were precisely among those we were talking about.

But, no more. Once VA officials finally decided to do their own long-overdue security analysis of the systems, "Security deficiencies were identified in multiple areas, including physical controls, network access, operating system controls, data protection, and the voting tally process," according to the 6-page report [PDF] released by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA) this week.

"The combination of critical vulnerabilities in these areas, along with the ability to remotely modify votes discretely, is considered to present a significant risk. This heightened level of risk has led VITA security staff to conclude that [a] malicious third party could be able to alter votes on these devices," they wrote, adding tersely: "These machines should not remain in service."

The details of the Commonwealth's findings (now that they've looked for them) are so mind-blowingly startling that some Virginia localities who are losing their voting systems are now perfectly happy with the idea that they may have to --- gasp! --- hand count paper ballots in their upcoming elections...

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

BRAD BLOG reader "Plumb Bob" left this comment recently, following our short piece on concerns about the results of last week's Mayoral race in Chicago:

"Plumb Bob" is, of course, absolutely right.

But there's far more to this story that should be used as a huge takeaway for those partisans and profiteers who continue to push not just for electronic voting, but for Internet Voting, even as a recent Internet Voting scheme in Australia's New South Wales was found to be vulnerable to manipulation and has resulted, as predicted, in an election with some 66,000 votes that many feel may have been tampered with...

A provision added to Ohio's new transportation bill by Republican lawmakers would have made it more difficult --- and expensive --- for out-of-state students to vote in the Buckeye State. The scheme would have required anybody who registers to vote there to obtain an Ohio driver's license and register their car in the state (at a cost of at least $75) within 30 days, or risk losing their right to drive.

That provision, voting rights advocates warned, was likely to deter out-of-state students at Ohio colleges and universities from registering to vote there, despite a long-held U.S. Supreme Court determination that students may register to vote where they attend school.

The good news on this issue is that while Ohio's Republican Gov. John Kasich signed the transportation bill last week, he used a line-item veto to remove the offending provision. But more than a bit of potential confusion --- and the ability to deter student voters from exercising their right --- still looms...

We covered a lot of ground on this week's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio.

From today's breaking news on Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ); to today's breaking news on mandatory water restrictions in CA; to a shockingly good act of MSM journalism helping to force Gov. Mike Pence (R-IN) to do the right thing; to our latest exclusive on U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller's "wife-beating" case; to callers' opinions (lots of 'em!) on the one condition I'd agree to in exchange for mandatory voting (a very popular condition, it seems!)

PLUS, one caller surprises me with a song that seems to be about me (it actually has my name in it!) and Desi Doyen joins us for a very amusing Green News Report!...

Told ya we covered a lot of ground. Please enjoy it! I know I did!

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Was Netanyahu/Likud's win last week in Israel the best possible outcome for Palestinians? While it seems counter-intuitive at first blush, some who follow Israeli/Palestinian politics very closely say it was.

My guest on this week's Pacifica Radio BradCast, Estee Chandler of JewishVoiceForPeace.org and the producer/co-host of KPFK's Middle East in Focus program believes that is the case and tells me why. She offers a different (and very welcome) perspective than the Right/Left (and now, sadly, Republican/Democratic) narrative we've heard so much of from most of the media since last week's election.

Also, BRAD BLOG's legal analyst Ernie Canning joins me to discuss the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to hear the WI Photo ID voting case and what that means for voting across the country in 2016, as well as the error the CA Supreme Court seems to have made when they removed Prop 49 (the "Overturn Citizens United" initiative) from the 2014 ballot last year.

Plus, Ted Cruz' astoundingly ingenious if extraordinary cynical remark the day after he declared his intention to seek the 2016 GOP nomination for President; OH tries a new voter suppression tactic; another predictable Internet Voting failure in Australia; Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report and MUCH MORE!...

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I wrote a bit about this after last year's elections, though from a different direction. But, given the recent remarks by President Obama (and more than a fair bit of questionable reporting about those remarks), its worth adding a few more thoughts here.

Over the years, I've seen folks misinterpret The BRAD BLOG's coverage of voting and elections and voter suppression by presuming that by covering these things, it's the same thing as telling everyone to vote.

In fact, I strongly believe in the right to not vote. While I think it's a counter-productive response to pretty much everything --- including the misguided and lazy notions that "elections don't really matter" or "both parties are the same" --- I would fight for your right to not vote under our existing system as vigorously as I'd fight for your right to vote (if you want to) and to have that vote counted, counted accurately and in a way that everyone can know that everyone's votes have been counted accurately.

With that in mind, it was interesting to see the reactions to President Obama's statement last week in Cleveland which some, including CNN and, naturally, the ever-outraged Fox "News", took it upon themselves to interpret as a call for "mandatory voting" in the U.S...

A few weeks ago, our legal analyst Ernie Canning warned how the U.S. Supreme Court's pending decision on whether or not to hear the ACLU's challenge to the Wisconsin GOP Photo ID voting law might be the last chance before the 2016 Presidential elections to determine the Constitutionality of such laws.

On Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to grant cert in the WI challenge in the Frank v. Walker case. The decision is not a ruling on the merits of the case or the Constitutionality of the law. It simply means that, for now, there were not four votes on the Court to hear the ACLU's challenge at this time.

It also means that, barring further court action or a quick decision on a similar law out of another state, polling place Photo ID restrictions on voters will be allowed in the Badger State in 2016. That, despite the fact that the federal trial court found, when striking down the law as unconstitutional and a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last year, that the new Republican-enacted law may serve to bar some 300,000 disproportionately Democratic-leaning and already lawfully registered voters from casting a ballot in the state's Presidential election.

There is also more than a bit of irony in this matter, in that, after U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman soundly rejected the law in 2014 --- finding that "evidence adduced at trial demonstrates" WI's Act 23 "disproportionately impacts Black and Latino voters" and that the law would "prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes" --- the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals deadlocked (disingenously) 5 to 5 on whether to stay the original ruling. That deadlock meant the stay would be granted and the WI law would be allowed, barring further court challenges, despite the fact that 6 federal judges had voted to strike down the law, while just 5 had voted in its favor. To make matters worse, Act 23 had also been struck down previously in state court as a violation of the state constitution as well. Nonetheless, in this matter, a minority of judges successfully ruled against the majority.

All of that, despite a blistering dissent filed in last year's 7th Circuit Court WI decision by against the law (and all such laws) from revered conservative 7th Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner. Posner's original ruling in favor of a Photo ID restriction law in Crawford v. Marion County, Indiana, was the basis of the first such case to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, upholding Indiana's Photo ID law in 2008. So his unambiguous reversal on the issue, now that we know much more about such laws, was noteworthy and, opponents of the law had hoped, convincing to the Supremes who have, for many years, favorably cited the legal scholar's opinions.

Though the 7th Circuit's decision to temporarily stay the original ruling striking down the law was later vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court last year --- on the basis that the stay was made too close to the election --- the discriminatory law is now back in place in the state. The refusal by the Court to grant cert this weeks means that it will likely remain in place as the next Presidential election begins.

Some watching these matters closely, however, believe that Monday's decision by SCOTUS to not hear the Wisconsin case may ultimately be a good thing, perhaps "a blessing in disguise"...

Another new Internet Voting system, another major vulnerability to massive election fraud discovered along with it. This time in Australia, as reported by ABC:

Well. If the people who run it said it was fixed, why worry? (Just because they also said it was secure in the first place? Silly you.)

"Just because they've patched this particular bug that they've been specifically notified of does not mean that they've fixed the fundamental questions around the security and verifiability of the system," said University of Melbourne's Vanessa Teague, who discovered the security vulnerability. "If anything the existence of this one particular bug serves to bolster the argument that these kinds of bugs are probably inevitable in these kinds of systems"...