Guest blogged by DES...

Just thought we would take a moment to applaud the stellar work of Josh Marshall and his reporters over at Talking Points Memo and sister site TPM Muckraker, for their dogged pursuit of the truth underlying the firings of eight U.S. Attorneys --- a story that has led to serious questions over the prosecutorial independence of the U.S. Department of Justice. (This isn't Marshall's first time at the rodeo --- the "Duke" Cunningham and Jack Abramoff scandals also sprung from Marshall's keyboard, among others back when the MSM didn't find them worth much of their time.)

Saturday's edition of the Los Angeles Times gives credit where credit is due, acknowledging Marshall & Company's stellar work --- in a huge feature story on the front page, no less!

Hopefully Mainstream Corporate Media denizens will take a cue from the LA Times and cite the blogs they use as sources. Give credit where it is due. It's really not that hard. Maybe now the MSM can all move on from the ridiculous old vs. new journalism feud-mentality and get on with the pursuit of the truth.

Congratulations to Talking Points Memo and TPM Muckraker. You guys rock.

(Photo credit: Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles Times continues to beg readers to cancel their subscriptions altogether.

Their latest plan: Dump the progressive, interesting, non-white comic strips.

Last week, the Times decided to dump both Candorville, whose strip we've been running here from time to time --- the only one, mind you, that we're aware of which dealt with the e-voting issue directly. La Cucaracha, the paper's only Latino-based strip (in LA!), was dumped at the same time.

The latter was re-instated after a flood of reader complaints. So far, no return of Candorville, however, the last African-American related strip of note in the once-great Los Angeles newspaper, now gutted by its conservative Chicago Tribune owners/rapists. The Trib also recently canceled the strip as well.

We've gotten to know Darrin Bell, the strip's creator, a bit over the last year or so. He sent The BRAD BLOG the following announcement a few days ago on the latest corporate-media idiocy, noting that though his strip has been dumped, "Blondie and Marmaduke are still safe" at the Times.

The only good news in the bargain: The world's unfunniest "comic strip," Mallard Fillmore, has been put out of our misery. Finally. A dead duck we can all be happy about.

"Without at least one of these two papers," Bell writes in regard to the cancellations at both the Times and the Trib, "Candorville can't continue to annoy the knuckledraggers in two of our most important cities, and the strip itself may not be long for this world."

He also asks that complaints be sent to readers.rep@latimes.com. We join him in that request, and are happy to post his note in full below...

(In which we subtly bite the very Huff Po hand that feeds us...)

"On Electronic Voting: We Were Always Right, They Were Always Wrong..."

An article in the conservative Wall Street Journal tomorrow covers a number of E-voting meltdown/train wreck issues around the country, including the nine lawsuits currently in progress around the country to push back these damned, untested, unsecure, hackable machines and other points of which The BRAD BLOG has been reporting over the last many many months.

We're glad to see them finally take notice and report on these problems to the nation.

The niceties now set aside, the article minimizes the myriad severe problems and security issues throughout. One way of doing that, is referring to these problems as "glitches" no less than five times by our count. Another way of doing that, is quoting Election Integrity attorney Lowell Finley of VoterAction.org in half a sentence. And devoting the rest of the quotes in the piece to spokespersons from Diebold (known liar, David Bear) and ES&S, along with unsecure electronic voting proponent (and cowardly disinformation expert), AZ Sec. of State, Jan Brewer.

None of the many Election Integrity advocates, computer science or security professionals, apparently, were allowed to refute the silly apologists disinformation statements of Brewer, Bear or Ken Fields of ES&S.

Still, one passage from late in the article is just flat wrong:

Sounds a whole lot like David Bear talking there. The fact is, the so-called "Hursti Hack" in Leon County, Florida in December, 2005, covered in some detail by the mainstream media, confirmed by CA SoS and Diebold proponent Bruce McPherson's own independent analysis [PDF], proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that both a hacker and an insider could electronically manipulate the vote.

We're happy to see the national coverage. It would be nice if they could avoid such statements that are demonstrably wrong and misleading.

National media may feel free to contact us. We'll be happy to help you avoid such easily avoidable errors and will put you in touch with all manner of experts who can help you understand what's really going on here.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

As was expected the corporate media picked-up the latest in Diebold's sordid story --- which we reported first here last Friday --- with articles by Ian Hoffman yesterday and today and even the Associated Press stepped in as well.

Unfortunately the headline of Hoffman's article yesterday characterized the security hole as being a 'glitch'; which this certainly is not. It is also not a 'flaw' as it was characterized by today's Hoffman and AP articles. (Ed note: Hoffman has been very good at reporting on all of these related stories, so we don't wish to be overly critical of him, but rather point out the inaccurate characterization.)

This is a 'feature' that was knowingly installed by Diebold. It was not a mistake or something that was overlooked in the design of the software. It is not a 'bug', 'glitch', 'flaw', 'error in programming' or any other simplistic name. Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor and veteran voting-systems examiner for the state of Pennsylvania has said this:

Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Avi Rubin, who published the first security analysis of Diebold voting software in 2003 had this to say:

In the meantime the state of Georgia has decided that there is nothing that they have to do because their administrative rules already mitigate the problem. Of course, they made that statement without knowing what the full problem is.

A redacted copy of the Hursti "Critical Security Alert: Diebold TSx and TS6 voting systems" can be found at BlackBoxVoting.Org. Bev Harris guarantees that the redaction only resulted in 50 words being removed from this copy of the report.

Finally, I would be remiss in not pointing to this final line of Dan Goodin's article for AP:

Uh, Dan, you could have had a more timely article, and probably scooped Ian Hoffman if you had read The BRAD BLOG on Friday, where you would have found the whole story posted exclusively that day.

It's about time that the corporate media begin looking to the blogs as a source instead of ignoring us like we aren't here. Or at least admitting that they're looking to the blogs as a source, instead of only attributing those in the MSM.

Will Dan Goodin or the AP post a clarification to their story? We're not holding our breath.

"Obsessively?" Me? (He says as he writes this at 4:39am) Well, maybe. But someone's gotta.

So begins the editor's intro to a piece I was invited to submit to the Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism's Watchdog site. The invitation came from Deputy Editor, and Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin, so I was honored to accept.

I was asked to submit questions for mainstream media folks to ask of Elections Officials about our current Electoral Train Wreck-in-Progress in hopes that someone in the MSM might actually do so. These are the tough questions which, frankly, ought to be asked of every damn Election Official in the country by every damn responsbile media person.

Several questions were edited out by Dan before posting for reasons that I don't completely understand. But as I consider him one of the good guys (who occassionally even links to BRAD BLOG from his WaPo page) I won't hold it against him.

So here's the piece as posted at Nieman Watchdog. (Including a swell pic of yours truly!)

And for the hard-cord Election Reform junkies, read on for the extra bonus questions which didn't make the cut. Who knows? Maybe someone in the MSM may one day want to know what they completely failed to ask about...

David Edwards picked up on these over the weekend, but didn't have the chance to get them all posted here.

A full frontal coordinated attack on John Conyers was launched over the weekend by the GOP as their newest last-ditch attempt to save their asses this November. The tactic has now come down to the rather sad: "Vote for us or we might lose!"

Apparently the GOP's pliant cohorts in the media, including Russert, Stephanopolis, Matthews, the front page of the New York Times and, of course Fox, were all too happy to lend a hand to their efforts. Here's a round-up of a few of the most obvious efforts...

Russert and Stephanopolis do GOP Duty...

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Chris Matthews Takes His Turn...

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Fox, Reliably, Brings up the Rear...

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UPDATE: David Swanson has a few choice words on the organized Conyers attacks.

As the corporate mainstream media shakes their head in clueless wonder about the Porter Goss resignation at CIA, (they're "stunned", "suprised", "can't imagine what else must be going on to have brought this on") the clues have been bubbling for the last week or so on the Internet.

We associate ourselves with Josh Marshall's initial take...

Muckraker has, in fact, been all over various points of the developing scandal for the last week or so. We recommend you keep your eyes over there as things move foward.

Underscoring the bizarre state of our national corporate mainstream media, Josh made a related point earlier today, prior to the Goss announcement. As readers were wondering why TPM and their Muckraker site were giving so much attention to the Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) incident which, readers comments had suggested, just distracts from all of the more important GOP scandals, Josh defended their coverage with this reply...

As John Gideon asked in today's Daily Voting News, why is it that the Financial Times of London is reporting on our nation's electoral meltdown this year, while the national mainstream media in America couldn't seem to care less?

The rest of the piece covers much of the territory --- the lawsuits, the ES&S failures, the Dieobld hacks, etc. from all over the country --- that we've been covering here over the last several weeks in regard to our approaching E-Voting "train wreck". You know, the one that we've written article after article about, complaining that the local media is reporting the stories as if they are solely local problems, while both they and the national media fail to connect the dots which clearly show that these problems are happening everywhere...and on a massive scale.

FT even bothers to mention the almost completely ignored (by the mainstream corporate media in this country) GAO Report on electronic voting which we first broke here, and then waited and waited as every national newspaper and wire service in the country completely ignored it.

FT even managed to advance the story a bit! Go figure!...

Well, heck, how hard was that?! Thank you, FT!

Oh, well. To paraphrase what they say about Vegas...What's reported by the The BRAD BLOG, stays on The BRAD BLOG.

At least until it's picked up by a respected foreign media outlet.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Earlier this week, a European Parliament committee released a report saying that the CIA had illegally detained people and used secret 'rendition' flights to transport them to other countries or secret CIA prisons where they were expected to be tortured.

Several members of European Parliament met in Macedonia today to investigate the story of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen, who was abducted by the CIA. After being kidnapped, he was then 'rendered' to a U.S. prison in Afghanistan and held for 5 months.

Before I register my complaint here with Matt Taibbi's otherwise excellent article on the background of "Mr. Republican" Jack Abramoff and "The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington," as published in the April 6th edition of Rolling Stone, I'll point to this smart graf amongst many such smart grafs in a very well-researched and informative piece:

Taibbi's piece covers in detail some of the many scams that Abramoff and the rest of the nationwide Republican Network of dishonest, opportunistic players who now comprise the power structure of the Republican party --- or the "vast rightwing conspiracy" as Hillary correctly described it. It's an ugly, but accurate portrait of those who have hijacked all that America was supposed to have stood for while an otherwise distracted and/or media-whipped public was trained to look the other way --- or otherwise give the benefit of the doubt to some very very bad guys who have earned no such benefit.

Those bad guys now run the country, its government, its corporations and its media virtually in its entirety. And more shamefull still, they've got goons played for suckers who are so daft and gullible that, to this day, they run around and play apologist for these people who --- I guess they don't realize it --- are fucking them hard up their own asses with their own hard-earned money and blindly offered good-will. You'll find many of those dopes repeating Fox "News" and Limbaugh-isms over Thanksgiving dinners everywhere, and otherwise plying their foolish and self-destructive trade wherever they can. A stroll through some of the most trollish comments left here at The BRAD BLOG reveals these people have left only the dimmest of connections to Reality as it exists in 2006 on the planet Earth.

With those accolades for Taibbi's work now out of the way, allow me to point to this earlier graf in his piece (emphasis added)...

"Lurking in the background" must be MSM code for: Reported by BRAD BLOG but otherwise ignored.

We're glad to see Taibbi pick up on some of our reporting as he writes...

...But it would certainly help to keep such bad guys from affecting so much corruption and damage for so many years before they actually get busted, if Taibbi would be kind enough to point out some of the sources --- independent, alternative, "blog" or otherwise --- who have been trying to blow such whistles for so long.

With appropriate credit and recognition from the mainstream, as we opined a several weeks ago, reporting such as ours and many others would likely have the effect of stopping the bad guys before they manage to wreak quite as much havoc on our once-great American democracy.

We'd hope that even the usually independent-minded Rolling Stone would keep such important points in mind by choosing to give appropriate attribution where possible in their future reporting. As we've said before: It matters.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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CBS News reporter Lara Logan appeared live from Iraq on CNN Reliable Sources on Sunday morning. She issued a stern rejection of the notion that Iraq reporters are biased towards negative stories.

Lara Logan's genuine outrage makes this a must see clip!

From CNN's trancript:

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars

It's official. Just in from the folks at Conyer's office...Fighting on every front...God bless him...In the DC area next week? Go help 'em make some noise!

Better yet, write to C-SPAN today and ask them to cover this event!!! We spoke with Conyers' office earlier this morning, and they made it clear they would appreciate any help that "6 or 7" of you might be able to provide in encouraging C-SPAN to be there!

As if to say "Fuck off, Americans! We're busy with more important things!", The New York Times is running a smarmy little piece in tomorrow's Week in Review under the headline: "Still Unhappy About the Election? Here's a Place You Can Vent."

It's a piece about some of the email that's been sent to the "National Association of State Election Directors" --- whoever the hell they are --- complaining about the way the election was run and the way votes were counted, mistabulated, or whatever.

The New York Times has been bravely leading the way in ignoring the story of America's failure to hold an honest, clean and transparent election. Even though they've had time to dismiss the whole affair as "the conspiracy theories of leftwing bloggers."

Their criticism and sniffing dismissal of those of us who give a damn about getting this story right and told to the American people accurately is ironic coming from the "newspaper of record" which spent a year helping us get into a war by becoming the unquestioning lapdog of the Bush Adminstration's rhetoric and inaccurate propaganda. They had to issue an apology for their crappy reporting. And they've got the gall to criticize "bloggers" for covering this story?!

Still Unhappy About the NYTimes Disgraceful Coverage of This Story? Here's a Place You Can Vent!

UPDATE: I've decided to help The NY Times do their job. Please see these 15 Unanswered Questions about the Election Results that they may wish to investigate. Apparently they need a cheat sheet to get started!

Well, that was fun. Just finished up the interview on the Pacifica Network's LA/Santa Barbara affilliate KPFK with host Jerry Quickley about blogging the whole story of the Election 2004/Voting Irregularity, Fraud, Mistabulation mess.

A fairly wide ranging conversation about how the blogs have played a key part in the story, the nap the mainstream media is largely taking, and how important it is that bloggers (aka CITIZENS!) are willing to examine what the corporate media, by and large, is apparently afraid to touch until the actual smoking gun shows up in their lap for them.

Quickley, by the way, is a madman. He also rocks. I look forward to doing it again soon.

I was able to nab the live stream from KPFK's site, so listen if ya like. About 17 minutes in your choice of 3 deliciously flavored formats:

God save Public Radio.