Via Knockville News Sentinel and RAW STORY:

In related news yesterday...The DoJ's Office of the Inspector General issued a 140-page report [PDF] finding that officials at the Bush Justice Department, including Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson, broke the law for years by screening job applicants for non-political career civil servant/civil rights jobs based on professed fealty to George W. Bush, sexual orientation, their political views on same-sex marriage and abortion, and Internet searches to determine if they might be "liberal Democrats," as opposed to "good Americans."

Violations of the Rule of Law by Bush's Justice Department include a less-qualified candidate being hired for a counter-terrorism job on the belief that the more-qualified candidate's wife was a Democrat, a career prosecutor kept from promotions on the belief that she was a lesbian, and the firing of the U.S. Attorney with whom she was falsely rumored to be having an affair.

The stain of those illegally hired and fired by the Bush DoJ's Rightwing Affirmative Action Program will continue to spread its toxins throughout the Justice Department and American legal system for years to come.

UPDATE: Jon Ponder has more on Goodling's anti-gay efforts on behalf of Team Bush.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Prospects are so bad for Republicans in the Senate that Sen. Mitch McConnell, their embattled leader, has given them free reign to vote against the party and, certainly, their unpopular president, if it will help them save their seats in November.

In stark contrast, Republicans in the House are apparently determined to follow Bush in lockstep over the cliff (to mix multiple metaphors), or at least that's the impression they gave at the impeachment hearing last Friday --- which was officially titled "Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitation" --- when GOP Judiciary Committee members put on a show of the sort of blind loyalty to George Bush that put their party in its dire predicament in the first place.

One by one, these pols --- all of them the sort of Republicans who give white guys a bad name --- took turns lashing out at the proceedings and trying to spin Bush's crimes as insignificant and morally relative to other president's misdeeds. At worst, it was a disgusting display of complicit politicians trying to save their own skins by fending off any pursuit of justice for Bush. At best, they came off a bit comically, like vampires in movies clawing and snarling at sunlight just seconds before they meet their doom.

Speaking of horror, a prime example of growling and back-biting --- not to mention outright lying on the record --- was the performance of Rep. Steve King of Iowa (who is not related to the novelist Stephen King).

Desperation is again setting in for Bill Kristol. The headline of the neo-con's column today --- he's now shamefully employed by the New York Times --- cuts directly to the chase and speaks volumes, while neatly summarizing years of the Republicans' only actual campaign agenda. All, in three words.

The headline: "Be Afraid. Please."

There it is, in a very polite nutshell. Look for more of that --- much, though likely less polite --- between here and November. It's about all they have.

The rest of his column is largely irrelevant (as he should have become, long ago) and is yet another sad waste of precious NYTimes ink. But the admission inherent in the headline is about as telling as you'll ever find.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

As the campaign manager for the presidential bid of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Kent Snyder received a lot of credit for raising $35 million from grassroots supporters, a phenomenal accomplishment for an insurgent campaign.

But, like 48 million other Americans, Snyder had no health insurance, and when he died from pneumonia on June 26 after a two-month hospital stay, he left medical bills totaling over $400,000.

It is emblematic of our age that Snyder's boss, Rep. Paul, is a physician.

The story comes from the Washington Blade:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The McCain campaign's Alabama chairman, Attorney General Troy King, the virulent homophobe who is the subject of rumors that his wife discovered him having sex with another man, was a client of Strategum USA, the consulting firm of Ralph Gonzalez, a closeted gay GOP political operative who was killed last summer in a double murder-suicide in his home in Orlando.

Gonzalez was also the one-time campaign manager/consultant for Florida's hard-right, scandal-plagued 24th Congressional District U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney whose close ties to disgraced GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and involvement in an alleged electronic vote-rigging conspiracy have been reported extensively for years by The BRAD BLOG.

Last Friday, the McCain campaign quickly scrubbed all references to King from its website without offering a public reason.

The August 27, 2007 Birmingham News report of the murder-suicide which took Gonzalez' life, discussed the consultant's work for King in Alabama...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Operatives for the John McCain campaign expressed their displeasure at a protester who carried a sign that equated McCain with George Bush by behaving just like operatives for George Bush and having her forcibly removed and threatened with arrest.

The incident occurred outside a McCain townhall meeting in Denver on Monday when Carol Kreck was ticketed for trespassing and escorted off the sidewalk at the behest of the McCain campaign.

Her offense? She was carrying a sign that said, "McCain = Bush."

It is revelatory that McCain operatives see the sentiment expressed in Kreck's sign as an insult. If her sign had read, "McCain = Reagan," they probably would have given her a front-row seat...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The White House propaganda office invited a few of George Bush's remaining supporters in the media --- second- or third-tier rightwing columnists like Jonah Goldberg and Kathleen Parker --- up to the Oval Office last week for an audience with his nibs.

During the mostly off the record meeting, Bush apparently doled out campaign-style spin that he purported to be the real stories behind issues in the news --- deep background info that would set his critics back on their heels and boost his pathetic poll numbers, if it weren't, you know, top secret. Classified. Hush-hush.

No, if the public wants to know what Bush has really been up to since Inauguration Day 2001, they'll just have to wait to read his book --- or at least that's what he told the group, according to Jonah Goldberg, who reported it in his Los Angeles Times column:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Charlie Black, John McCain's senior adviser, made news earlier this week when Fortune Magazine editor David Whitford reported that Black told him "with startling candor" when asked how a terrorist attack inside the United States would affect the campaign, "Certainly it would be a big advantage to [McCain]."

Keith Olbermann has been reporting on this story all week on his MSNBC news hour, in part to make that point that if a Democrat had made a similar gaffe, the Beltway punditocracy would have been in high dudgeon, demanding the adviser's head on a pike and lambasting the candidate for associating himself with such scum.

Longtime political junkies know that Charlie Black was among a handful of angry young rightwingers who remade the Republican Party after the debacle of Richard Nixon's resignation. Along with Roger Stone, Terry Dolan, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and George Bush Jr., he is one of the inventors of today's GOP attack machine, a style of media-driven slash and burn politics that can be traced to the establishment by Black, Stone and Dolan in 1975 of a political action committee that raised millions from conservatives using deceptive direct-mail advertising and spent the money on TV ads that slimed Democrats.

Black, one of the most successful lobbyists and political strategists of the Reagan and Bush eras, has backed his share of losers over the years, too. But even when he has bet on the wrong horse, he has always landed on his feet --- which may explain why John McCain needs Charlie Black this year much more than Black needs McCain.

Here are 10 things to know about Charlie Black:

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.
John Yoo and David Addington, the architects of Bush's illegal torture policies, testified before the House Judiciary Committee today. The hearing included this frothy exchange between Yoo and the committee chairman, John Conyers (D-Mich.):

Yoo was serving in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, when he wrote the infamous memo and contributed to the PATRIOT ACT. He is now a professor of law at UC Berkeley.

Addington is the chief of staff to Dick Cheney.

Blogged by Brad from somewhere near Portland...

Here's a chuckler. From Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic...

And if you believe the GOP has any intention of scaling back any such thing in 2008, we've got a swell bridge, beautifully located near Manhattan, to sell ya.

But just to drive home the point that we're equal opportunity disbelievers, there's this old standby from the Obama camp, later in the article...

We're fairly certain the following video, shown at the recent TX GOP convention (where they were selling racist Obama buttons, incidentally), isn't meant as a joke. It just plays that way, for those of us who happen to live on Planet Earth...

Between this and some of McCain's ads, and the lack of actual issues for Republicans to run on this year, perhaps the plan this year is to out macho the Democrats. It's all they've got, perhaps. Even if it comes across kinda gay. But maybe that's just us...

(Hat-tip Mark Crispin Miller)

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

Updating a story The BRAD BLOG reported on Monday, the Texas Republican Party has now moved to distance itself from a vendor who sold buttons at the party's state convention that bore a racist message about Barack Obama: "If Obama is president ... will we still call it The White House?"

According to The Conservative Voice, the Texas GOP says it will donate $1,500 in rent paid by the button's vendor, Republicanmarket.com, to victims of the flooding in the Midwest.

Said Texas GOP spokesman Hans Klingle, "This vendor need not apply to another Texas GOP state convention. We will neither tolerate nor profit from bigotry."

How "conservative" is the Texas GOP? The Conservative Voice notes that in "1998, the Log Cabin Republicans, the nation's largest organization of gay Republicans, was denied a booth at the GOP state convention in Fort Worth and likened to the Ku Klux Klan by a Texas Republican Party spokesman. 'We don't allow pedophiles, transvestites or cross-dressers, either,' then-GOP spokesman Robert Black said at the time."

The fact that the Texas GOP has shifted to the left on an issue like this backs up assertions by Arianna Huffington and others that liberal positions are increasingly becoming mainstream.

Who says Republicans don't have class? From the Dallas Morning News blog's report on the Texas GOP state convention...

If you're interested in their items, their website is here. Their slogan: "Patriotic and Republican Products at Republican Market." I guess the above is an example of one of the Republican products. No clue if they've actually got any patriotic ones.

But if you'd like to find out about that, or anything else, you can email them at: sales@republicanmarket.com. More info on this impressive outfit is available here.

(Hat-tip BRAD BLOG reader GM)

UPDATE: Our friend Mike Rogers points out that Republicanmarket doesn't bother to show that particular button on the buttons page at their slimy website for some reason. Go figure. Not sure why, since, as commenter Creid points out, they aren't embarrassed about running this sexist garbage. Again, very very classy stuff.

UPDATE 6/19/08: The Texas GOP distances themselves from Republicanmarket.com, bans vendor from future events. Details now here...

Texas' Republican Attorney General has found that there's little or no "voter fraud" of note down there either, despite a promise two years ago, according to the Dallas Morning News, to "root out what he called an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas," and his creation of a special unit which "tapped a $1.4 million federal crime-fighting grant" to expose the election stealing rascals.

For all of his crime-fighting in those two years, across the big Lonestar State, TX AG Greg Abbott has prosecuted just 26 cases, "all against Democrats, and almost all involving blacks or Hispanics," according to the Morning News, most of which resulted in "small fines and little or no jail time."

Additionally, almost all of them (18 of 26) involved mail-in absentee ballots where elderly voters were "illegally" given assistance in mailing their ballots, versus in-person voter impersonation of the type that cynical GOP attempts to mandate draconian polling place Photo ID restrictions are purportedly meant to deter. (In reality, they are meant to deter Democrats from being able to cast their legal ballots, so Republicans can more easily "win" elections.)

Just eight of the 26 prosecuted cases, the Morning News found, out of Abbott's two-year effort, involved any kind of ineligible or manufactured votes --- only 2 actually involved individuals casting fraudulent ballots at the polls, the rest were registration fraud issues --- and none of them revealed any larger conspiratorial scheme meant to effect the results of an election.

In the meantime, critics charge Abbott has been ignoring complaints about Republican election skulduggery, and we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that nobody has bothered to prosecute Republicanist Ann Coulter, for her several demonstrable voter fraud-related felony crimes in Florida despite, dead-to-rights evidence as published by The BRAD BLOG since early 2006.

We'd also like to point out, that in addition to there not being "an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas," there is similarly no such epidemic among space aliens either. Though Ted Rall suggests we may wish to implement some new measures there too...just in case...

[Updated post show with audio archives below, and moving this item up to the top so you're sure to catch the great news, lots of it, that came in late today, as covered live on the show!]

I'll be jumping in for my friend Peter B. Collins to host the last hour of his syndicated radio show tonight at 5pm PT (8pm ET), as he'll be broadcasting from Missoula, Montana, but will be unable to do the final hour of the show, when I'm usually his weekly guest.

So...as my guests this week, splitting the hour, we'll have...

• Journalist STEVEN ROSENFELD from AlterNet, to discuss his excellent reporting of late from the front lines of the "Republican War on Voting" battlefield and the outlook for November 2008.
• Conservative icon RICHARD VIGUERIE to discuss his blistering op-ed yesterday calling for the "immediate resignation" of the GOP leadership in light of what he describes as the "looming disaster" he sees his party facing this fall as "the conservative movement has been set back 10-20 years – possibly even permanently," by George W. Bush, Karl Rove and friends.

We'll also have an update on the latest news from the MO Senate, on its final legislative day, as Republicans there try to push through a disenfranchising Photo ID/Voter-Suppression Constitutional amendment before the November election!

I'll be BradCasting live from the studios of KTLK AM1150 in Los Angeles. Though they don't carry the PBC Show (but should!), I'm much obliged for their assist. If lucky, we'll be coming atcha out of Stephanie Miller's studio, and thus plan to leave behind the wonderful smell of democracy to greet her on Monday morning.

Listen live on air, or via the Internets, and call in with your questions at 888-5-PeterB (888-573-8372)! Or post your questions here in an Open Show Thread and I'll try to notice them while on air!

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Wow...Great news all around! We'll call it Voting Rights Victories Friday! Here's the audio archives from tonight's 3rd hour of the PBC Show!

First up, Mindy Mazur of AmericaVotes.org reports the attempt by the MO GOP Senate to pass a state Constitutional amendment to allow voter disenfranchisement through new, draconian Photo ID and citizenship requirements goes down in flames, as the final day of the MO Senate legislative session ends without a vote on it, due to the outcry against the measure! Great work, guys!

Then Steven Rosenfeld of Alternet.org joins us to break the news that GOP voter fraud zealot Hans von Spakovsky has finally withdrawn his nomination to the FEC, and as if that's not enough, Arizona finally agrees to allow for voter registration at welfare clinics as they are supposed to, under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993!

Finally, the legendary and iconoclastic Richard Viguerie of ConservativeHq.com joins me, as I try to hold his feet to the fire a bit, on conservatism, Rush Limbaugh and even Ronald Reagan. He also says he's "honored and thrilled" to accept the BRAD BLOG "Intellectually Honest Conservative Award" we bestowed him with earlier this week. Feel free to hold my feet to the fire, and let me know how I did.

Broken into two parts, commercials removed for your listening pleasure...

• Mazur & Rosenfeld (appx 19 mins) MP3 download or listen online here...

• Viguerie (appx 23 mins) MP3 download or listen online here...
  

(Apologies for the late archive posting, but I was so pleased by the good news, I went straight out from the studio to celebrate by checking out my old hero's new film.)