Never thought I'd miss the 2000s, but if this week is any indication of what's to come, can we please roll back the clock?

Hundreds of thousands died in Haiti. Detainees were revealed to have been murdered in American custody at Gitmo. Democracy died again in Diebold's Massachusetts. A faint hope for reviving the death of the public's airwaves dies yet again as Air America dies. And the U.S. Supreme Court commits mass murder of everbody and everything else that had still been left teetering.

Worse. Week. Ever.

As it happened, I was previously scheduled to be a guest on Peter B. Collins' podcast yesterday to discuss MA. Suffice to say, the conversation ended up a bit broader, and a great deal darker.

If you'd like to listen, if you can stand to, it's now posted here...

The editors at the UK's Guardian asked me to ring in yesterday on "mavricky maverick" Sarah Palin's new gig at Fox "News". And so I did. A sample...

Among the nice things about about writing for the Guardian is the exceptionally dry English wit in the comments section --- at least when I'm lucky enough that a piece of mine gets posted in British primetime before the ugly American wingnuts show up to start hitting the comments button a few hours later.

As of now the piece has some 224 comments. The first hundred or so, before the Fox "News" trolls awoke across the pond are quite smart. Thereafter, they're also amusing, but in a different kind of way. Enjoy...

It's my final night guest hosting for the The Mike Malloy Show from Dallas' AM 1360 Rational Radio. It's almost their last night on the air too, unless an angel flies in to keep progressive radio on the public airwaves in a city that needs it as much or more than any!

We're on again from 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT) and, as last night, we'll be VIDEO WEBCASTING the entire show! Check back here just before showtime for the live video feed embedded below (if you can stand to look at me for three hours).

If you'd like to use your public airwaves tonight --- before they disappear in Dallas --- the call-in number this week only will be: 800-277-1637, ext. 703. Our handy-dandy live chat room will be up and operating here during the show, along with the video feed, so jump into the conversation there as well! (We'll open it a few minutes before airtime, see down below.)

TONIGHT...

• Mis-reported/under-reported stories of the year and/or decade! (Gonna need more than three hours, I think!) My top stories and yours at 800-277-1637, ext. 703
• PLUS: We'll be checking in with some old friends along the way! Tune in to find out who they are!

Malloy's show is nationally syndicated on a number of air affiliates around the country, also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio streams here or here!

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show, hosted by Zen mistress "Agent 99". Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE & AUDIO ARCHIVES: Thanks for a great week in Dallas, guys! The audio archives, rants and all, are now below, along with the archive from our live chat during the show. Enjoy! Happy New Year! And thanks to Mike and Kathy for allowing me to sit in once again. Always a pleasure and honor!...

I'm guest hosting the The Mike Malloy Show again tonight (through Wednesday), LIVE from AM 1360 Rational Radio in Dallas, from 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Please tune in!

The call-in number this week only, for access to your public airwaves is: 800-277-1637, ext. 703.

Our LIVE chat room will once again be up and operating here during the show, so jump into the conversation there as well! (We''ll open it a few minutes before airtime, see down below.)

So far scheduled for tonight...

• ANDY WORTHINGTON, blogger/journalist, historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 759 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison and filmmaker (with Polly Nash) of the new documentary, Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.
• CHARLES JOHNSON, founder and publisher of the formerly rightwing Little Green Footballs blog, (now estranged) co-founder of the still rightwing Pajamas Media, on why he left the Right, what the hell is wrong with the wingnuts, and how/if we can ever get back to political sanity in this country.
• PLUS: My rants, Karl Rove's newest divorce, your calls at 800-277-1637, ext. 703, and whatever else comes up along the way...

Malloy's show is nationally syndicated on a number of air affiliates around the country, also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio streams here or here!

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show, hosted by the ever-patient "Agent 99". Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE & AUDIO ARCHIVES: Much cool to get the video stream working tonight for the first time for am1360! Sorry for the voice/picture delay in the first hour, but I think we finally got it fixed. Anyway, other than that, I believe it was another good show, and audio archives are now posted below! Chat room archives are posted below them for your replay pleasure...

I'll be guest hosting the The Mike Malloy Show tonight through Wednesday. This time around, I'll 'Bradcasting' LIVE from AM 1360 Rational Radio in Dallas, from 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Please tune in!

If you'd like to use your public airwaves tonight, the call-in number this week only will be: 800-277-1637, ext. 703.

Our handy-dandy live chat room will be up and operating here during the show, so jump into the conversation there as well! (We''ll open it a few minutes before airtime, see down below.)

So far scheduled for tonight...

• IGOR VOLSKY, of Center for American Progress, contributor to the book Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer, on where the hell we are now in the ongoing fight for health care reform.
• FRANK SCHAEFFER, former rightwing fundamentalist leader, BRAD BLOG guest contributor, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism) on America-hating Republicans, and his controversial case for Barack Obama.
• PLUS: My rants, your calls at 800-277-1637, ext. 703, and whatever we want to talk about at the end of this crazy year...

Malloy's show is nationally syndicated on a number of air affiliates around the country, also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio streams here or here!

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show, hosted by the ever-patient "Agent 99". Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE & AUDIO ARCHIVES: "Explosive" fun from Texas! Audio archives of last night's show are now posted below (sorry for the delay, due to tech prob) and the archive of last night's chat room is posted below that. Enjoy! And see ya again tonight!...

I'll be appearing for a Q&A in St. Louis on Tuesday (12/15 @ 7:30pm), after a screening of Patty Sharaf's award-winning documentary, Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story featuring both myself, and our reporting here at The BRAD BLOG on the Republican computer programmer turned vote-rigging whistleblower.

The screening is part of the traveling Burning Fuse Film Festival which hits Webster University's Film Series this week. Murder, Spies... will screen Tuesday, December 15 @ 7:30 in St. Louis at Webster's Winifred Moore Auditorium, 470 E. Lockwood, Webster Groves, MO, Directions/Map, More info: 314-968-7487.

Hope you'll stop by and say hello! Here's a flier [PDF] if you're in the hood and feel like helping to spread the word!

(NOTE: If you're not near St. Louis, or even if you are, but would like to support our work, we are still offering DVDs of the film, as signed by both myself and Sharaf, as premiums to supporters of The BRAD BLOG. We enjoy no corporate or foundational funding, so we appreciate whatever you are able to offer to help us continue our work. See this item for details...)

My latest special to the Right-leaning Gouverneur Times of Upstate NY details multiple "urgent" warnings that state and federal officials received over the last year from multiple election advocacy groups concerning the dangers and pitfalls of the state's e-voting pilot program which came crashing down on voters during the recent NY-23 Special Election for the U.S. House.

They were warned, over and over and over again, about the dangers of using uncertified e-voting systems in real live elections, yet, despite the concerns expressed by experts about using real voters "as guinea pigs," it appears officials took no action in response.

Here's my exclusive over there...

I've covered the problems and failures in NY-23's recent Special Election for U.S. House in a number of previous articles here at The BRAD BLOG, detailing some of the early problems with results as they emerged, pointing out that, thanks to Republican precedent in 2006, it now no longer really matters whom the actual voters may have voted for, but arguing that a full manual hand-count of paper ballots would be appropriate nonetheless.

Over the holiday weekend, the good Richard Hayes Phillips --- author of the book Witness to a Crime, in which he painstakingly detailed, ballot by ballot, the scandal which was the Ohio 2004 Presidential Election --- reported on some curious numbers he's now found in that election, over at the right-leaning Gouverneur Times. As luck would have it, Richard is a resident of NY-23 himself, and seems to be finding that both "impossible" and then many more "improbable" tallies were certified, as NY tested its Seqouia/Dominion e-voting systems on live voters, in a real, live election, for the first time earlier this month.

Both of his pieces are worth a quick read over there.

And now, the Gouverneur Times has asked me to put together a bit of a "backgrounder" for them on all of these e-voting nightmares, and how they pertain to NY-23, since it seems that right-wingers, for some odd reason, are somewhat lacking (up until now anyway) in real information on just how dangerously insane our privatized system of e-voting in public elections has become. Too much time spent being fooled by ACORN-conspiracists like Andrew Breitbart and Fox "News," I guess.

My piece for them, "NY-23, Sequoia and the Private Corporate Takeover of Your Once-Public Democracy," as written over the weekend, following the latest in a string of embarrassing "concessions" and "un-concessions" by the Conservative Party's Doug Hoffman, is now their front page lead story if you (or Breitbart) care to give it a look.

My latest piece at the Guardian today, as written under the auspices of the Commonweal Institute (where I am a Fellow),seems to have stirred up the Tea Baggery on both sides of the pond.

I always love the commenters on columns I do at the Guardian. My favorite exchange there so far this morning begins with commenter "Zounds" objecting to my points with: "Active discourse also requires a wider range of intellectual influences than all the American news channels offer."

To which "jcpenny", apparently an American, replied: "I've never seen British Tellie to provide the variety the American Tellie does. Perhaps our forebarers had a reason for leaving?"

To which "Zounds" replied hilariously in turn: "I believe the lack of variety on British TV was indeed the primary reason the Pilgrim Fathers gave."

:-) Add your own two cents and read the full column here...

I was in-studio and on-the-air this morning with a couple of my favorite cats, Rick and Doran of Digital Village, featuring the most maddeningly-catchy theme song in all of radio, on KPFK (L.A. and Santa Barbara's Pacifica station).

We talked e-voting, including "open source" secret vote-counting machines (the latest ill-considered fad sweeping the nation), Internet voting schemes (the other latest ill-considered fad) and transparently overseeable hand-counting ("Democracy's Gold Standard"), DieboldReturnOurMoney.com, the Rise of the Tea Bags, Muppets, Glenn Beck (about whom questions are being asked as to whether he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990), and much more...

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx. 28 mins]...

At some point over the weekend, our short documentary film, Rise of the Tea Bags, went over the 11,000 views mark at YouTube. Of course, by Tea Bag math, that's well over 3 million views and the media refuses to report it!!!

I was interviewed about the film, and the folks I interviewed in it, by Mike Papantonio for last Saturday's Ring Of Fire on Air America Radio. You can download [MP3] the interview, or listen to it right here [appx. 16 mins]...

And, just in case you didn't see it yet, a) what's wrong with you? and b) here's what we're talking about, as recently taped in Los Angeles on the very first day of the new "Tea Party Express II" national tour...

The Wall Street Journal's cowardly liar and "voter fraud" fraudster John Fund appears to be running out of fresh "voter fraud" lies to feed to Fox "News" viewers. According to Media Matters today, in advance of tomorrow's gubernatorial election in New Jersey, expected to be a very close race, Fund appeared on Fox's Glenn Beck show and related an anecdote of supposed fraud now going on in the Hispanic community in Camden.

"People are going door to door in parts of Camden with Hispanics that don't have very much knowledge of English, and they're saying, 'We have a new way for you to vote, la nueva forma de votar; just fill out these papers.'"

Trouble is, the incident that Fund claims is going on right now actually happened in Philadelphia 16 years ago, as even Fund himself admitted in his own WSJ column published just hours before his appearance on Fox today...

For various reasons, now seems a good moment to mention that The BRAD BLOG was honored this year with a prestigious Project Censored 2010 award for our coverage of the mysterious death of the GOP's IT guru Mike Connell. Connell, for those unfamiliar with the story (see background links at bottom of this article) was in the process of testifying about his rumored role in helping the GOP carry out fraud in Ohio's '04 Presidential Election when he was then reportedly threatened by Karl Rove. Weeks later he suddenly plunged to his death in a single-engine plane crash just before Christmas last year as he was preparing to land near Akron, on his way home from one of his frequent trips to D.C..

My colleagues Mark Crispin Miller and Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane were also honored by PC for their own coverage of the story.

Project Censored, based out of Sonoma State University, has been highlighting overlooked stories each year since 1976, and was recognized by Walter Cronkite as "one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured our newspaper and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism."

In addition to our "Excellence in Investigative Journalism" award from PC this year, as highlighted in their annual "Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010," I was also asked to write a chapter on problems faced by voters in Election 2008 for this year's book, Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09.

Co-Editors Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff have been kind enough to offer us a number of signed copies at a reduced rate so that we can offer them as premiums to readers of The BRAD BLOG to help continue our work here.

The 9,000 word chapter I wrote for the book is titled "Election 2008: Vanishing Votes, Disappearing Democracy and Media Misdirection" and includes sections named "And You Lose Your Vote! And You Lose Your Vote! And You Lose Your Vote!..."; "First Worst in the Nation"; "America Flips Out, Media Barely Notices, Parties Barely Care"; "Democrats Nowhere to be Found"; and "Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain."

If you'd like a copy of this great book (Makes a great holiday gift! I'll sign it as well, if you wish!), chocked full of important, overlooked stories from the last year or so, along with follow-ups to them --- and a lot of real information on the story of Election 2008 seen here for the first time in print --- please do one of the following:

• Donate $50 or more to The BRAD BLOG
• Alternately (and even preferably!) sign up for a monthly sustaining donation of $15 or more in the blue box in the right sidebar on this page, or
• Send a check for $50 or more via snail mail, (note when sending that it's for "Censored 2010"), to: Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594, Los Angeles, CA 90028

Your support is greatly appreciated, and tremendously needed, as we receive no foundational or corporate support for our work here! Your contributions are largely the only thing that keep us going! So thank you in advance for any help here!

Links to The BRAD BLOG's most recent coverage of the Mike Connell story follows below...

So we went out to Griffith Park out here in L.A. on Sunday to check out the kick-off day for the new "Tea Party Express II" national tour. Thought we might meet some interesting people and file a quick video report. Met a lot of interesting people, and so ended up making a short film of sorts. Enjoy. Spread the word. Go tell the story ("both sides")...

UPDATE 10/29/09: Boy, it's tough to compete with the Tea Baggers in the satire department, even when they're not actually trying to be satirical. As God is my witness, coming to you with a straight face this Thanksgiving --- Tea Party: The Documentary Film!...

UPDATE 11/9/09: As of today, we've had more than 11,000 views of Rise of the Tea Bags at YouTube. By Tea Bagger math, that's more than 3 million views! And yet, the media refuses to report it!!! Also, here's my interview on Air America Radio's Ring of Fire discussing the video...

I'll be sitting in for Angie Corio on Live from the Left Coast on Green960 (KKGN-960AM) in San Francisco tonight (Friday) from 6p - 8p PT (9p - 11p ET).

Scheduled for tonight's Media-Reform-a-Palooza:

• FRANK SCHAEFFER, former rightwing fundamentalist leader, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back on his "Letter to Rupert Murdoch" calling for an end to Fox "News'" inciting of violence, and his endorsement of VelvetRevolution's StopDomesticTerror.com campaign.
• SUE WILSON, filmmaker of Broadcast Blues on the the epic fail of the FCC to carry out their duty in overseeing the corporate abuse of our public airwaves and the Democrats failure (see my article "The Media Need a Fair and Balanced Doctrine" at Alternet to do anything about it.
• PLUS: Supporting the White House attempts to hold Fox "News" accountable and your calls on all of the above (866-960-5753)!

You can listen via the live Internet stream here or here if you're not in the Bay Area. Please tune in, stream in, call in and join the LIVE online chat room during the show at lftlc.com/LIVE!

POST-SHOW UPDATE: I'm delighted that our friends at KRXA 540am in Monterey, CA also decided to pick up and simulcast last night's show as well! Thanks to those who tuned in and called in!

Thanks to the good folks at LFTLC.com for removing commercials, these "hours" are appx. 40 mins each...

HOUR 1: White House v. Fox "News". And Frank Schaeffer on the looming danger of rightwing extremism...
Download MP3 or listen online below...

HOUR 2: Sue Wilson on reforming the media...
Download MP3 or listen online below...