We're getting really tired of picking on Democrats. But with clueless Senators like Nebraska's Ben Nelson, it seems like we continue to have little choice.

Picking up from where we left off yesterday regarding this morning's vote in the Senate Rules Committee on whether or not to send a recommendation for approval on the FEC nomination of the DOJ's GOP "Voter Fraud" flim-flam operative, Hans von Spakovsky, to the full Senate. Again we again defer to Paul Kiel's TPMMuckraker report that the Democrats, thanks to a defection from Nelson, were unable to reject the nomination outright and will have to pick up the fight on the Senate floor, where the GOP (unlike the Dems) will march in lockstep to get what they want. Even from the minority...

More on the evil von Spakovsky here.

More details on today's negotiations here, including Feinstein's statement: "I don’t feel that this is an unbiased individual." Minority Leader Mitch McConnnel's (R-KY) hardball in return: "None of these nominees will move across the Senate unless they move together."

In related your-right-to-legally-cast-a-vote-is-under-attack news, as Arlen Parsa covered for us in a bit more detail earlier, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Democratic challenge to Indiana's voter disenfranchising Photo ID law.

The very smart Election Law Blog's Rick Hasen sees this as good news for opponents of such laws, but we've got our money on a 5 to 4 ruling in favor of the GOP law, created (by Thor Hearne and Friends) in the hopes of keeping Democratic voters from being able to cast their votes on Election Day. We hope we're wrong, but Bush's Supreme Court hasn't given us much to be hopeful about.

You'll note the supporters of the restrictive, Jim Crow-type legislation have been unable to offer a single case of a voter in the state voting as someone else at the polling place.

Perhaps Sen. Ben Nelson would like to issue a resolution in support of such laws? Idiot.

Guest Blogged by Arlen Parsa of The Daily Background

The good news is that for the first time, the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the issue of whether or not GOP-supported laws that require voters to present specific types of photo identification at polling places are constitutional.

The bad news: it's Bush's Supreme Court.

The New York Times reports today that SCOTUS will consider the issue after mixed rulings in several states where photo-ID laws have both been upheld and struck down. A bit of background from the Times:

Both the ACLU and the NAACP plan to argue the case, which is an appeal from a lower court, against the Indiana law before SCOTUS in the coming months. Remarked the lone dissenting judge from the lower court ruling, Terence T. Evans, "Let’s not beat around the bush. The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic." Now there's a judge that doesn't mince words!

AP reports the following comments made Tuesday by the unimpeached Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia concerning his decision to overthrow American democracy in the 2000 Presidential Election:

We wonder what other decisions by the SCOTUS that Americans should "get over." We wonder if the voters of Florida who were denied their expressed intent to elect Al Gore should also "get over it." Doubtless, the more than 3000 U.S. troops killed by George W. Bush's unnecessary war have no choice but to "get over it."

Deceptively attempting to justify his wholly incorrect and unconstitutional decision by playing the unequally applied "Equal Protection Clause" card once again, Scalia reportedly added, "Counting somebody else's dimpled chad and not counting my dimpled chad is not giving equal protection of the law."

Interestingly enough, Scalia and the SCOTUS have stood by and allowed all forms of un-Equal Protection in Elections ever since --- from the myriad different voting systems and "standards" now used, to the myriad ways in which votes by voters in the very same county are counted differently and at different times. In other words, the repugnant democracy-hating Scalia is full of shit.

As pointed out --- though somewhat cryptically --- in the AP piece by Mark Sherman, subsequent study of the actual ballots in the state of Florida in 2000 showed that, in fact, had all of the them actually been counted (we know, it's a quaint idea) Gore would have won [PDF] the state, and thus the Presidency.

Speaking of which, Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson says: Run, Al, Run. We concur, and offer John Lennon's "(Just Like) Starting Over" as our suggestion for the campaign's victory song.

(Hat-tip Michael Roston at RAW STORY.)

"Breaking" news report videos here...

Received this moments ago from our friend Tony Trupiano of The Tony Show who received it himself via Email just moments after going off the air and thus was not able to run it. He tells The BRAD BLOG that he considers his source for this to be "golden"...

This report seems to sync up with a report just out at RAW STORY which independently confirms the "tomorrow between 10 and 11 am" timeline, as well as with Bob Novak's column this morning which reported that "Rehnquist also will announce his retirement before the week is over."

UPDATE 7/8/05: No retirement announced as of 11am ET today. RAW STORY has more...

I don't have much to add here, but with everything else going on, somehow this AP story seems to have gotten overlooked today. And yet it's quite notable, so here it is...

At least something is still going right in this country and even the Supremes didn't screw this one up! Yet.