Old Republican scam artists never die. They just create new shell corporations and rely on the fact that mainstream corporate media is unlikely to bother connecting any dots. So let's connect a few, shall we?

Yesterday at Salon, Craig Unger, author of Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove's Secret Kingdom of Power (a new book which tracks quite a bit of Rove's 2004 election chicanery, including the mysterious death of Ohio's GOP election tech guru Mike Connell, etc) wrote about Rove's ties "to shady GOP operative Nathan Sproul".

Sproul is the paid Mitt Romney political consultant and the man at the center of the GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, who, though the RNC claimed they had fired him after fraudulent registration forms were recently discovered in some 12 Florida counties, is still at work on behalf of Republicans in 30 different states, according to the LA Times. The long history of voter registration fraud allegations against his companies since 2004 are so toxic, that Sproul says the RNC asked him to create the shell company, Strategic Allied Consulting, this past June without his name on the corporate filings in order to hide his involvement. (RNC spokesman Sean Spicer claims he's unaware of such a request, though Sproul tells us he stands by the assertion.)

Unger points to the letter [PDF] we posted late last week from Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D-TX), ranking member of the U.S. House Elections subcommittee, sent to Rove, with a series of questions about his involvement with Sproul, including the purposes of some $750,000 that Rove's American Crossroads Super-PAC paid to Sproul, as well as questions about Rove's dealings with Sproul and his companies "during the 2000 and 2004 Presidential campaigns".

While the Congressman requests a response from Rove by October 23, "so that every American who is eligible to vote may go to the polls on November 06 confident that neither you nor any of your political organizations is engaged in an effort to undermine the integrity of our electoral process," if "Bush's Brain" stays true to form, he'll simply ignore the Congressional inquiry entirely.

In this case, once again, he may have very good reason to, as Rove's relationship to Sproul and the Strategic Allied Consulting firm now appear to be even closer than Rep. Gonzalez had suggested in his letter last week.

It now appears that Strategic Allied Consulting has the same corporate mailing address in Virginia as Rove's American Crossroads PAC. Imagine that...

[This article now cross-posted at Salon...]

Questions continue to grow about Nathan Sproul and his various companies' multi-million dollar work for the Republican National Committee, despite claims that they've broken ties with him on the heels of a nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal. A virtual clone of his discredited Strategic Allied Consulting firm appears to still be operating on behalf of Republicans in at least 10 states.

At the same time, Democrats in Congress are now asking for official answers from both Sproul and very senior Republicans, according to new letters obtained by The BRAD BLOG.

Sproul went on the record with us, briefly, to address some of these issues in his own defense, before he was ordered by his newly hired crisis response manager to stop speaking to us all together.

When the RNC invested $3 million to hire Strategic Allied Consulting, a company quietly created this August by Sproul, a paid political consultant to Mitt Romney, and then instructed state GOP affiliates in seven key battleground states (FL, NC, VA, NV, CO, WI and OH) to do the same, they knew very well about his companies' long documented history of alleged electoral misconduct and voter registration fraud.

The longtime GOP operative's voter registration and "Get Out the Vote" firms have been accused, during election after election, of destroying and altering Democratic voter registration forms, though no formal charges have ever been filed against him, despite repeated urging from high-ranking members of Congress and others. Sproul's long track record of improprieties was bad enough that before they would give him the contract as their national voter registration group this year, according to Sproul himself, the RNC "asked us to do it with a different company name."

Subsequently, Strategic Allied Consulting is alleged to have collected fraudulent voter registration forms. Some of those forms had the addresses of existing Democratic voters changed so that some of Florida's county election officials now worry that voters could be disenfranchised when they go to the polls this November and find they're no longer registered at their old precinct, or even in the same county. The fraudulent forms were collected by Strategic and submitted by the Florida GOP (which paid Sproul's firm some $1.3 million for voter registration work, their largest single expenditure in the 2012 cycle) in at least 12 different FL counties.

When the RNC then publicly claimed to have "fired" Sproul's new company, after the fraudulent forms came to light, it's likely that the RNC also knew full well that many of their state GOP affiliate organizations were still quietly employing Sproul's firms for partisan work in a number of other states.

RNC spokesman Sean Spicer played dumb about having asked Sproul to create the firm without his name on it --- "To my knowledge, no one requested that" --- though Sproul told The BRAD BLOG during an on the record conversation, eventually aborted by his recently hired crisis manager David Liebowitz, that he stands by his assertion.

"I'm not going to comment on this further," Sproul told us when we'd asked for specifics, since the RNC appeared to be calling him a liar, "but I'm not retracting my prior comments either."

Perhaps even more disturbing is the evidence suggesting that his companies are still operating in states around the country under different names. That, despite the RNC's claims to have "severed our relationship" with Sproul, and the assertion that they "acted swiftly and boldly" to cut ties with the group only after the allegedly fraudulent registration forms came to light in Florida (and as Democratic registration forms were also alleged to have been destroyed by Strategic workers in other states, such as Colorado and Nevada.)

When we asked Sproul directly: "Do your other companies still work for the RNC or other state or local parties?", his response came back as a blunt, "No."

In a response to a follow-up query, when we asked Sproul to explain evidence suggesting that his companies were, in fact, still operating elsewhere on behalf of Republicans, he walked back his original denial a bit.

"I know you have additional questions, including many about SAC [Strategic Allied Consulting] and its affiliates and work we've done in other places and for other clients," Sproul said. "Those questions fall either outside the bounds of what I can discuss or outside the bounds of where I'm comfortable going in this story. I hope you'll understand."

And yet, as still more evidence is emerging to show that Sproul may have been less than forthcoming in some of his responses to The BRAD BLOG (he has refused to respond to additional, specific follow-up queries on this emerging evidence, after Liebowitz was brought on board as his crisis spokesperson), Congressional Democrats have similar questions about Sproul's work with the GOP and if it may be continuing even now.

Senior Democratic members of the U.S. House Elections, Judiciary and Oversight Committees seeking answers --- from Sproul, RNC Chair Reince Priebus, as well as GOP heavies Karl Rove and former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie (now a senior adviser to Romney) who founded one of the top Republican Super PACs and paid Sproul some $750,000 for unspecified work --- about what Sproul's operations may still be up to, despite the RNC's recent public, if unsupported, claim of a "zero tolerance" policy for election fraud and those who practice it...

Fox "News" is now informing their viewers to get ready for President Mitt Romney! It's gonna be a rout this November, according to the Rightwing media outlet's latest "updated election forecasting model" for the November 2012 election.

That "model" today includes Romney winning every single swingstate, with the exception of Nevada. That would include Romney wins in Pennsylvania, where the TPM PollTracker average currently has Obama up by 4.4 points, and Wisconsin, where Obama is reportedly up by 8.5 points in TPM's combined poll average. (See all of TPM PollTracker's swingstate averages here).

So here's what all of that now looks like today in Fox "News" World...

To be sure, Romney has seen a significant bump in pre-election national polling on the heels of last week's first Presidential Debate. There is still a dearth of reliable state-by-state polls since the debate, however, that might lead to Fox' predictions seen above. Nonetheless, they're now on the record trumpeting the upcoming Romney Landslide.

Most importantly here: Anything can now happen on Election Day. There will be no "anomalies" in the computer-reported results, because, as Fox and their paid analyst Karl Rove will be happy to remind you on Election Night, "[Fill in the state] had been predicted to go for Romney for some time".

Some, such as National Journal's Matt Vasilogambros, who posted the above graphic today on Twitter today, are "LOL"ing about it. I'm not so sure this Fox "News" flag plant will necessarily prove to be quite as amusing as some of the Twitterati are regarding it as today.

It's about the narrative, stupid.

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[This article now cross-posted at Salon...]

The Republican Party of Florida's top recipient of 2012 expenditures, a firm by the name of Strategic Allied Consulting, was just fired on Tuesday night, after more than 100 apparently fraudulent voter registration forms were discovered to have been turned in by the group to the Palm Beach County, FL Supervisor of Elections.

The firm appears to be another shell company of Nathan Sproul, a longtime, notorious Republican operative, hired year after year by GOP Presidential campaigns, despite being accused of shredding Democratic voter registration forms in a number of states over several past elections.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Strategic Allied Consulting has been paid some $667,000 this year by the FL GOP, presumably to run its voter registration campaigns in the state. That number, however, does not account for another identical payment made in August. The Palm Beach Post is reporting tonight that the firm received "more than $1.3 million" from the Republican Party of Florida "to register new voters."

The firm is not only tied to the FL GOP, but also to the Mitt Romney Campaign, which hired Sproul as a political consultant late last year, despite years of fraud allegations against his organizations in multiple states.

Moreover, the firm is also reportedly operating similar voter registration operations on behalf of the Republican Party, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a number of key battleground states this year, including North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado. Strategic Allied has recently taken steps to hide their ownership by Sproul's notorious firm, Sproul & Associates.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Election Susan Bucher confirmed to The BRAD BLOG late this evening that she turned over 106 suspicious voter registration applications to the Florida State Attorney during a meeting yesterday afternoon in Palm Beach, after the "questionable" applications were submitted to her office by a worker for Strategic Allied.

The forms were said to all have similar signatures, changed addresses and party affiliations, and other defects which appear to have all been done by the same hand.

The case emerging in Florida tonight mirrors a similar incident reported earlier this year when more than a thousand fraudulent voter registration forms were discovered to have been turned in to the Sacramento County, CA Registrar of Voters by a group hired by that state's Republican Party.

But that's not the only similar case, as a massive GOP voter registration scheme, which appears to involve the upper-echelons of the national party, begins to emerge...

According to a new poll out today, voters in Minnesota may be getting wise to the state Republicans' scheme to suppress the votes of minorities, the elderly, students and the poor, all of whom have the annoying habit of voting in favor of Democrats.

After MN's Democratic Governor Mark Dayton vetoed a law passed by Republicans in the legislature last year that would have required state-issued Photo ID for voters at the polling place before they were allowed to cast their vote, the Republicans decided to bypass the Governor and take the issue straight to the voters.

Without a single Democratic vote, and opposed by the state's chief election official, Sec. of State Mark Ritchie (D), GOP members of the legislature voted to put the issue up for a Constitutional Amendment referendum on the ballot this November.

While the wording of the ballot question itself was challenged by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups who charged that the language chosen for the ballot was purposely deceptive and failed to detail the real effects of the Amendment, at the time we first wrote about the matter in July, our legal analyst Ernie Canning noted that, if the referendum was allowed on the ballot, there was a very real chance that it might be supported by voters who, he said, have been "utterly deceived [in the] court of public opinion" about the need for such a restriction.

Citing a May 2011 poll of Minnesotans by the Star Tribune, Canning noted that a whopping 80%, at the time, supported the adoption of photo ID restrictions in the state.

The bad news is that, despite some skepticism displayed during the recent MN Supreme Court hearing about the ballot question (as well as the legalities of such a Constitutional Amendment itself, which was not at issue during the case heard by the court, whose justices are all appointees of former Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty), the court eventually decided to allow the initiative to remain on the ballot this November as written.

The good news, on the other hand, is that, following an uptick in mainstream media coverage of the issue over the past several months, while a slim majority in the state still favor the amendment, support appears to be nose-diving, at least among Democrats and independents, according to a new survey by the Star Tribune...

Today, in a courtroom in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held a hearing to determine whether Republican Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson was correct in his verdict [PDF] last month when he stunned plaintiffs by upholding the state GOP's polling place Photo ID restriction and refusing the ACLU/Advancement Project's motion for a temporary injunction before this November's Presidential Election.

The voting rights groups are challenging the law on behalf of eight, mostly elderly, plaintiffs plus the League of Women Voters of PA and the NAACP and other civil rights groups, as a violation of the state Constitution's guaranteed right to vote. Last week, The BRAD BLOG's Ernie Canning detailed their powerful appellant's brief, arguing that Simpson erred in his ruling.

The plaintiffs had originally predicted a "slam dunk" victory in the lower court case, given the remarkably poor presentation offered by the Commonwealth, and the myriad of evidence presented in their favor, showing that some 1.6 million otherwise eligible voters could be disenfranchised this November, in addition to the state's own admission before the trial began that the Commonwealth was unaware of any "investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania" and that no "in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absence of the Photo ID law."

So today's hearing was key and, according to The Nation's Ari Berman, was played out before "a packed, standing room only courtroom."

While the state Supreme Court currently consists of three Democrats and three Republicans (the fourth Republican judge on the bench is currently suspended, pending a corruption investigation), a split verdict would mean the lower court's decision to allow the GOP's restriction on voting would stand.

But there were hints today that at least one Republican judge may be skeptical about the state's claims that nobody need be disenfranchised by the GOP-enacted law which would take effect, for the first time, in the November Presidential election, just 54 days from now...

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Yesterday, Alabama's former Democratic Governor Don Siegelman returned to federal prison to complete his 6 and a half year sentence on a bribery conviction for a transaction which has never before been considered "bribery" in the history of this nation.

The prosecution was brought about during the Bush Administration by close friends of Karl Rove and presided over by a Judge who served as his client. Despite a plea from 133 former state Attorneys General, both Republican and Democratic, detailing the political nature of the prosecution and the dangerous precedent set by charging "bribery" against someone who never received a penny of person enrichment, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case earlier this year, and Siegelman was forced to return to prison yesterday, ironically enough, on September 11th.

I interviewed Siegelman just over one week ago, as he and his daughter Dana were about to head to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC to raise support for a petition campaign for a Presidential pardon. I aired the maddening interview today on my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show.

Aside from the obvious horrific nature of this prosecution, it was instructive to hear, once again, about Siegelman's 2002 re-election which, he says, was stolen from him after he went to bed on Election Night having been named the winner, only to be awoken the next day and told that some 5,000 votes had been supposedly mis-allocated by the electronic tabulation system and re-allocated, in the middle of the night in one Republican county, without the public or media watching, from him to his opponent Bob Riley (whose campaign manager was both a close friend of Rove and the husband of the U.S. Attorney in Alabama.)

Siegelman was never allowed to count the paper ballots that were supposedly mistabulated by the electronic voting system. (Also, see my short video interview with Siegelman on this at the DNC in Denver in 2008, shortly after he was freed on bail during his appeal.)

After the interview with the former Governor, who was once believed to be Presidential timber before being taken down by Rove, I was joined live on the show by his daughter Dana. She updated us on her difficult day saying goodbye to her father yesterday when she and the rest of her family dropped him off at the federal facility in Oakdale, LA. She also discussed her pardon campaign at FreeDonSiegelman.org and her bizarre, chance meeting with Rove himself at last week's DNC, which she guest blogged about here at The BRAD BLOG earlier this week.

Today's BradCast also included coverage of the breaking events in the Middle East after attacks on two U.S. diplomatic missions and Mitt Romney's shameful missteps; the stunning new 9/11 revelations from Kurt Eichenwald on Monday night; and the latest Green News Report with Desi Doyen...

Download MP3 here or listen online below [appx 58 mins]...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: A Tale of Two Conventions: wrapping up the DNC vs. RNC; It's official: 2012 shaping up to be hottest year on record; Shell begins Arctic drilling, but the Arctic has other plans; PLUS: 9/11, and the consequences of ignoring warnings ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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The New York Times posts an absolutely startling account by Kurt Eichenwald tonight, on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, charging that the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential briefing memo was just one --- and a very late one at that --- in a series of dire warnings given to George W. Bush by the CIA.

While the famous "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." briefing was released "in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack," Eichenwald reports, and was publicly marginalized by the White House as "an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack," read along with other similar, even more dire, if still-classified warnings, that claim by the Bush White House was absurd.

Eichenwald, who says he has "read excerpts from many" of the CIA briefs prepared for Bush which preceded the 8/6/01 warning, details a number of them, and reports that the Bush Administration, and "the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon", were determined to ignore them. They even went so far, he says, as to believe that "the C.I.A. had been fooled."

"According to this theory," Eichenwald writes, "Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat."

"In response," to the months of ignored reports --- including a May 1 briefing warning that "a group presently in the United States" was planning an attack and that, as a June 22 brief noted, an attack by al-Qaeda could be "imminent" --- on June 29, "the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real."

"The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden," that briefing read. It warned that Bin Laden operatives were planning attacks very soon that would have "dramatic consequences" and major casualties.

Another brief from July 1, according to Eichenwald, warns that the operation was delayed, but "will occur soon." On July 9, according to "intelligence I reviewed", says Eichenwald, an extremist linked to al-Qaeda "told his followers that there would soon be very big news." But the report, even after all of the others, still failed launch the White House into action. There were more. All, it seems, were downplayed, marginalized or all but ignored, even leading "apoplectic" CIA Counterterrorism officials, at one point, to consider seeking "a transfer so that somebody else would be responsible when the attack took place."

The report is short and an actual news bombshell. Go read it. As a side note, it says quite a bit about today's New York Times that they decided to run this as an "Op-Ed". In any event, please read it, and keep it in mind when you hear the lie yet again, on this latest anniversary of the horrific 9/11 tragedy and beyond, that "Bush kept us safe."

He did anything but.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Our guest blogger Dana Siegelman is the daughter of Don Siegelman, the former Democratic Gov. of Alabama. He is scheduled to report to federal prison on September 11 to serve the remaining 6 years of a prison sentence after being prosecuted and found guilty in 2006 by friends and colleagues of Karl Rove, on charges of bribery. The former Governor received no money, or anything of tangential value in the transaction, and no explicit quid pro quo was found in his trial. The supposed "bribe" was by a local hospital executive, Richard Scrushy, who donated $500,000 to a fund favored by Siegelman, and meant to support a state lottery that would send underprivileged children to college. In return, prosecutors charged, Siegelman appointed Scrushy to a state hospital board, even though he had already been appointed to serve on the same board under three previous Governors (two Republicans and a Democrat). Such a transaction has never before been considered a crime in this country.]

There was rumor of Karl Rove's presence echoing in the halls of the Time Warner Cable Arena at the Democratic National Convention in North Carolina on September 5th, 2012. For some reason, since he dared show up to the DNC, I immediately felt it was meant to be that I meet him in person.

I mean, here I am petitioning for a Presidential pardon to lift my father's 78 month prison sentence that came at the hands of many GOP operatives set on taking my dad --- a Democrat, and the only man to have served in every statewide office in Alabama --- out of politics.

One of those operatives even swore under oath, in front of Congress, that Rove played a key role in making sure the U.S. Department of Justice was on board to see my dad's political prosecution --- as CBS' 60 Minutes reported back in early 2008 --- through to the end.

As you may imagine, my heart was beating at the prospect of confronting Rove in person, if the opportunity arrived. He had refused to testify when he was subpoenaed by Congress, and while several journalists have asked him about it, he has dodged the questions by saying he only learned of the case by reading it in the news, or that he only met some of the prosecutors involved, but not the woman who claimed she actually spied on my dad at the direction of Rove. As ABC's George Stephanopoulos told Mr. Rove after asking him about the Siegelman case, "But that's not a denial." I agree!

The main players in my father's prosecution, U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, her husband Bill Canary (who ran my father's opponent's campaign), former Alabama Attorney General now 11th Circuit Federal Judge Bill Pryor, and Federal Judge Mark Fuller have all been connected to Rove.

Political prosecutions were prevalent during the Bush years. The federal judges he appointed to the bench were vetted by Rove, and Bush loyalists were hand-selected to serve as U.S. Attorneys. Studies have shown that prosecutions were brought against Democrats at a rate of seven-to-one over Republicans during the Bush regime. Many of those prosecutions were completely political, amounting to hundreds of ruined political careers and the imprisonment of innocent people, such as my father.

I didn't know what I was going to say to Rove when and if I met him, but I felt I should say...something. Ironically enough, I was standing in the middle of the hall at the Charlotte Arena, waiting to meet a young man to introduce to my father for possible media coverage. That man was also named Karl. I didn't know what this Karl looked liked, so I was looking around to make eye contact with someone that I was supposed to meet.

Then, I saw Rove walking directly toward me with his security...

Chalk up another blow to transparency and an informed electorate, and another judicial victory for the democratic perversion known as corporate "free speech."

Last week, in Minnesota Citizens for Life, Inc. v Swanson, six of the eleven jurists serving on the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeal struck down the provisions of a Minnesota statute requiring corporations which create separate political funds in excess of $100 to file periodic financial disclosure reports with the state.

The case had been filed by three corporations, all of which contended that the reporting requirements were so onerous as to amount to a de facto ban on corporate free speech that violated Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission [PDF]. That argument had been rejected first by a U.S. District Court Judge and then by way of a 2-1 Eighth Circuit panel decision. The majority on that panel had noted that even Citizens United recognized the government's right to "regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements" so long as the government did "not suppress that speech altogether."

On rehearing before the full 8th Circuit, Chief Judge William C. Reilly, a George W. Bush appointee, writing for the six member majority, acknowledged that the Minnesota statute "does not prohibit corporate speech." The majority ruled, however, that that state statute entailed excessive regulation which included an "ongoing" reporting requirement on the part of the corporate political fund that continues unless or until the corporation dissolves the fund. Chief Judge Reilly described that burden as both "onerous" and "monstrous."

The five dissenting jurists, which also included George W. Bush appointees, vigorously disagreed...

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I'd say I was stunned to see a local TV news reporter --- any TV news reporter, frankly --- asking the President directly about his targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens, except that the reporter was Cincinnati Fox 19's Ben Swann.

Swann's reporting was key last February, in covering the Maine GOP's attempt to steal the state's caucuses for Mitt Romney, while largely everyone else in the corporate mainstream media had dutifully moved on to whatever the "next state" was at the time.

As Glenn Greenwald tweeted, here we find a "local anchor doing real journalism". Imagine that. Someone get this guy a network gig, please!

Here's his questions to President Obama last night on the U.S. drone strikes which targeted U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son in Yemen, both without any form of due process...