As The BRAD BLOG has been reporting for months, the recount of the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election was gamed by Ohio elections officials and voting machine company employees who violated state laws requiring a random recount of precincts in order to determine if a hand recount of entire counties would be necessary.

Reports that county officials and voting machine companies colluded to assure the hand recount would match with the initial machine recount have been reported for months and yesterday the first indictments were handed down.

According to today's Cleveland Plain Dealer...

Amongst the reports on this matter that The BRAD BLOG has carried since last November, is the case of Hocking County election board worker Sherole Eaton, who filed a sworn affidavit that an employee from voting machine company, Triad had offered a "cheat sheet" to her and other county officials on how the recount might be carried off to assure the entire county would not need to be recounted by hand. He also allegedly removed and restored a harddrive from the county's central tabulating machine prior to the recount, according to Eaton, also in violation of Ohio state law. Eaton is currently challenging her firing as improprer.

Ohio law calls for a random selection of 3% of a county's precincts to be carried out by hand. If that random recount doesn't match the initially reported count, a full recount of the county would then be necessary. Eaton was subsequently fired from the board after making her claim public (our BRAD SHOW interview with Eaton is here [mp3]).

As well, RAW STORY had reported last January that several recount witnesses had testified to stickers having been placed over Kerry/Edwards votes on ballots before they were fed into vote tabulators during the recount in that county. (Our BRAD SHOW interview with two of those witnesses, Stephen Spraley and Eric Gifford, is here [mp3]).

(Hat tip Ray Beckerman!)

Guest blogged by David Edwards

New Orleans ex-mayor, Sydney Barethemly, pleads with President Bush to allocate the resources to save New Orleans and make it a safe place once again. He says that the president must focus and make saving the city and the 80,000 trapped people a priority. He believes that if we do this on the President's schedule then it may be too late.

Video from CNN American Morning (Windows Media)

To find more information about the organizations that are coordinating efforts for New Orleans, Democratic Underground has provided an excellent list of Hurricane Disaster Relief Resources.

In another RAW STORY exclusive, our good friend Larisa Alexandrovna has some very interesting words from retired U. S. Army Colonel Michael Pheneger, whose credentials seem quite impressive:

More importantly, he makes a ton of sense, especially when he says things like:

and

I've been saying the same sorts of things for how long now? When is Larisa going to interview me??

I'm kidding of course but I can't help it; this is so repulsive, and it has been so blatant, and it has been going on for so long, if I didn't bring some humor to the discussion I could never force myself to write about it at all. No, it isn't funny. It's atrocious and it's outrageous and it's very serious ... and seriously, it's encouraging to see someone with the credentials and experience of Colonel Pheneger, telling it like it is!

So a big BRAD BLOG thank-you to retired U.S. Army Colonel Michael Pheneger and another big thank-you to the very lovely and extremely talented Larisa Alexandrovna.

You can read all of Larisa's interview with Colonel Michael Pheneger here.

We'll be wrapping up tonight, LIVE from Camp Casey II as the big tent comes down.

Most of the folks have now moved on from Crawford and the tent is filled with many of the volunteers, bloggers, vets and families who will be here until tomorrow's final move out of town.

We'll be back on the air (Listening links at www.BradShow.com) tonight at 9pm ET (8pm CT, 7pm MT, 6pm PT), for a final wrap-up during the "talent show" of the volunteers and those other die-hards who are still here at Camp Casey II.

Join us, as we broadcast LIVE from Crawford, TX for what (we hope) will be the last time...If the Radio, Democracy and Internet Gods permit us.

Please consider this an Open Thread for tonight's show, and spread the word where ya can.

{UPDATE from Winter Patriot: DONATIONS are still badly needed. If you can help in this regard, we'd certainly appreciate it. You can Donate via Credit Card or PayPal or you can Donate via Snail Mail and if those options don't appeal to you then you can always do some gift shopping at The BRAD STORE. Thanks to you and your financial support Brad is still on the air. Gasp! Sigh! And thanks again!!}

And yet another UPDATE from WP with a summary of your live listening options:
The IBC Radio Network
WhiteRoseSociety (Option 1)
WhiteRoseSociety (Option 2)
KPFTX.org
OmRadio.com
RadioPower.org

Open thread blogging below, as usual. Please join us if you can!

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The BRAD SHOW returns, LIVE and RAW and coming to you direct from Crawford, Texas. As usual, the show is scheduled to start at High Noon Central time, 1pm Eastern, 11am Mountain, 10am Pacific. That's 6pm in London, and 7pm in Paris and Prague [we think!] ... So please join us this morning, afternoon or evening, as the case may be.

THIS IS SCHEDULED TO BE THE FINAL DAY of BRADcasting from Crawford, Texas. As Brad has written:

LISTEN LIVE via:The IBC Radio Network
or at WhiteRoseSociety (Option 1)
or WhiteRoseSociety (Option 2)

Once again we remind you that The BRAD SHOW is still supported primarily by listener donations, and we need more listeners and more contributors! So please pick up the phone, or send some e-mail, and tell all your friends about The BRAD SHOW. You (and they) will be glad you did.

But as always, we depend on you. How can you help? You can Donate via Credit Card or PayPal, or Donate via Snail Mail, or shop at The BRAD STORE. We thank you for your support.

LIVE OPEN THREAD BLOGGING below: click on the "comments" link at the bottom-right corner of this item to join in.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Psst! As the "front man" for The Whispering Campaign, I get all kinds of stuff via e-mail, including a couple of news summaries compiled by people and/or organizations who have nothing to do with Brad or The BRAD BLOG ... they found The Whispering Campaign as soon as we went public and they offered to send us things and we said "sure" and it comes to me ... I read some of this stuff and scan the rest, usually, if I have time, but I never quite know what to do with it. My first impulse it to share it... but the quantity poses a bit of a problem, because I can hardly even find time to read it, let alone blog about it. I mean there's just all this stuff happening every day. Or every week. As the case may be.

I call it "the blizzard". You can only examine so many snowflakes before you freeze to death standing up. [Apologies to any matsodons in the audience; I agree it was a tasteless joke.] So mostly I just scan this stuff and say "thanks" under my breath, and keep going ... you know how it is: Life in the fast lane, Surely make you lose your mind, mm, Are you with me so far?

... and ... I've been thinking it might be good to find some snippet of one of these newsletters and post it, to see what BRAD BLOG readers think of it ... but what to post? and when? and how to "package" it? and so on ... a lot of questions remained unanswered ... until I saw that somebody with no known connection to The BRAD SHOW or The BRAD BLOG ... someone who, to my knowledge, had never even heard of The BRAD SHOW or The BRAD BLOG... had sent me a news compilation that mentions ... very prominently ... are you way ahead of me here??

Look, here's a short excerpt [with a wee bit of emphasis added]:

There's more, of course.

Brad and our favorite Crawford photo-blogger, AlaskaGyrl, on the air Sunday in our state-of-the-art broadcasting facilities in Camp Casey II...

She left today. We miss her already.

(NOTE: Thanks to Ben Burch at WhiteRoseSociety.org, The BRAD SHOW's special coverage from Camp Casey is re-airing all night long here or here!)

Guest blogged by David Edwards

On Sunday evening, Martin Sheen took the stage at Camp Casey II in Crawford to express his support for Cindy Sheehan and the cause that has brought so many protestors to President Bush's doorstep.

The Brad Show, the only radio show with live coverage of the evening's events, has part one of Martin Sheen's speech in available in the Operation Noble Cause archives.

The photo is from AlaskaGyrl.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The BRAD SHOW returns, LIVE and RAW and coming to you direct from Crawford, Texas. As usual, the show is scheduled to start at High Noon Central time, 1pm Eastern, 11am Mountain, 10am Pacific. That's 6pm in London, and 7pm in Paris and Prague [we think!] ... So please join us this morning, afternoon or evening, as the case may be.

LISTEN LIVE via:The IBC Radio Network
or at WhiteRoseSociety (Option 1)
or WhiteRoseSociety (Option 2)

On today's show, Brad hopes to interview several Bush supporters ... and that should be fun!

Once again we remind you that The BRAD SHOW is still supported primarily by listener donations, and we need more listeners and more contributors! So please pick up the phone, or send some e-mail, and tell all your friends about The BRAD SHOW. You (and they) will be glad you did.

But as always, we depend on you. How can you help? You can Donate via Credit Card or PayPal, or Donate via Snail Mail, or shop at The BRAD STORE. We thank you for your support.

LIVE OPEN THREAD BLOGGING below: click on the "comments" link at the bottom-right corner of this item to join in.

U.S. Army Specialist Tomas Young has some questions for George W. Bush. He's never met with the Commander-in-Chief who sent him into Sadr City, Iraq in a canvass covered truck during a massive uprising in that city on April 4, 2004. The same city on the same day that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey was killed.

Tomas was lucky. He was only paralyzed from the chest down. Amongst other things he'd like to ask of Bush, is why he won't allow funding for stem cell research which might eventually restore the spine that he lost in Bush's War. A spine, as Tomas explained to us yesterday on The BRAD SHOW, which apparently Bush has never had.

Tomas and his new wife Bree (also pictured), came to Crawford from Kansas City on their honeymoon to "stand" in support of Cindy Sheehan.

We now have our interview with Tomas up in the BRAD SHOW "Operation Noble Cause" Archives shortly, with much more news, sound and the stories of the people of Camp Casey on today's LIVE BRAD SHOW from Camp Casey beginning at HIGH NOON in Crawford (1p ET, 12p CT, 11a MT, 10a). We are hoping to feature several Bush supporters on today's show!

Until then, WhiteRoseSociety.org is looping the previous days BRADcast throughout the night (live listening links here and here).

We have now broadcast 42 hours of LIVE coverage from on the ground in Crawford, Texas in the last seven days, simulcast over at least 7 different radio networks at various times, including Air America for several hours on Saturday. All hosted by your friendly citizen blogger, Brad Friedman. We are the only broadcast "organization" to feature such live daily coverage!

Your DONATIONS continue to be greatly needed and very much appreciated in order to help make all of this possible!

(Photo courtesy of Alaskagyrl.blogspot.com)

UPDATE: Tomas Young's interview with The BRAD SHOW and other audio highlights have been added to the Operation Noble Cause archives!

UPDATE 2/12/06: A profile of Tomas Young was run today on 60 Minutes and includes a brief shot of our interview from Camp Casey with Young. Details, video here...

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The BRAD SHOW returns, LIVE and RAW and coming to you direct from Crawford, Texas.

LISTEN LIVE via:The IBC Radio Network
or at WhiteRoseSociety (Option 1)
or WhiteRoseSociety (Option 2)

URGENT REMINDER: The BRAD SHOW is still supported primarily by listener donations ... and we still need more listeners and more contributors! So please pick up the phone, or send some e-mail, and tell a few friends about The BRAD SHOW. You (and they) will be glad you did.

But as always, we depend on you. So please Visit The BRAD STORE and/or Donate via Credit Card or PayPal and/or Donate via Snail Mail.

LIVE OPEN THREAD BLOGGING below: click on the "comments" link at the bottom-right corner of this item to join in.

We've got a lot of photos of interviews and such, but are having problems pulling them off our camera and getting them onto the net (just one of the many continuous uphill battles out here, like crashed computers, overheated equipment and hosts, etc...). These photos, however, were sent to me, and I was actually able to receive them (go figure!) so here's a few from yesterday...

Air America's Randi Rhodes showed up yesterday during our 6th hour of LIVE programming (we did 9 yesterday) just before we began our simulcast with Air America's Laura Flanders Show. Randi waited in line during our "Lightning Round", where we were quickly trying to get the voices of as many people in the crowd on air as we could, to surprise us and say hello. Unfortunately, she's not broadcasting from Crawford...other than on RAW RADIO's The BRAD SHOW...

We'll try to get Randi's "cameo" into The BRAD SHOW "Operation Noble Cause" highlights soon!

We were honored to serve as hosts to the folks from Laura Flanders show on Air America to help them get up and on the air during the final three hours of our show on Saturday...Here she is...

And finally...here's a shot of Cindy Sheehan sitting down with us for her first one-on-one interview since returning to Camp Casey after going to Los Angeles to tend to her mother who'd had a recent stroke...

Much more today as we beginning at HIGH NOON in Crawford, as usual. We'll be back at Camp Casey today and hope to be carrying LIVE all of the events and rallies on the stage in the big tent. Rumor has it we'll hear from Rev. Al Sharpton, Randi Rhodes and perhaps Martin Sheen (the real President of the United States...Perhaps he'll be able to tell us what the "noble cause" is.)

In the past six days, we've broadcast over 35 hours of LIVE coverage on the ground in Crawford, Texas over at least 7 different radio networks!

We'll be here till it's all over...and thank you very much for the SUPPORT where you can afford to lend it!

UPDATE: Randi Rhodes' visit with The BRAD SHOW and other highlights have been added to the Operation Noble Cause archives!

Guest blogged by Chris Floyd

INTRODUCTION {by Winter Patriot} Once again I am honored to introduce a masterful contribution from one of the English-speaking world's most literate truth-tellers, the honorable Chris Floyd. An American journalist living in England, whose column on world affairs, "Global Eye", is published weekly in The Moscow Times, the proprietor of the excellent blog Empire Burlesque, and a good friend of both The BRAD BLOG and The Whispering Campaign, Chris Floyd joins us once again, to share a column that was published in Friday's Moscow Times. And this time he has brought a spark of hope.

Here's Chris:

In his inaugural speech last January, President George W. Bush repeatedly invoked images of unbridled, ravaging destruction as the emblem of his crusade for "freedom." Fire was his symbol, his word of power, his incantation of holy war. Mirroring the rhetoric of his fundamentalist enemies, Bush moved the conflict from the political to the spiritual, from the outer world to the inner soul, claiming that he had lit "a fire in the minds of men."

But words are recalcitrant things; they have their own magic, and they will often find their own meanings, outside the intentions of those who use them. Bush has indeed inflamed the minds of men --- and women --- with his military crusade. But it is not the "untamed fire of freedom" that scorches them: it is the fire of grief and outrage at the lies that have consumed the bodies of their loved ones. This bitter flame burns in the rubble of blasted houses in Iraq and in the quiet, leafy suburbs of America, where the dead are mourned and the mutilated are left as the enduring legacy of Bush's cruel, wilful and unnecessary war.

This "fire in the mind" has now found its own symbol, in the unlikely figure of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain American soldier. Here again, Bush's war-rousing words have gotten away from him. Sheehan's campaign --- which began as a lonely vigil outside Bush's vacation ranch and has now spread across the country --- centers on a single, simple request: that Bush explain to her what he means when he describes the war as "a noble cause."

Sheehan is no professional activist, no savvy insider or political junkie. She's an ordinary citizen, whose unadorned speech has none of the sweep and grandeur of Bush's expensively tailored rhetoric. But she has one thing that his professional scripters can never put in the presidential mouth: truth.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The BRAD SHOW continues, LIVE and RAW and coming to you direct from Crawford, Texas.

LISTEN LIVE via:The IBC Radio Network
or at WhiteRoseSociety (Option 1)
or WhiteRoseSociety (Option 2)

This promises to be a very big day. Air America will be broadcasting with us beginning at 6pm Central Time; other networks are planning to broadcast along with us as well. For more details, click here.

URGENT REMINDER: The BRAD SHOW is still supported primarily by listener donations ... and we still need more listeners and more contributors! So please pick up the phone, or send some e-mail, and tell a few friends about The BRAD SHOW. You (and they) will be glad you did.

But as always, we depend on you. So please Visit The BRAD STORE and/or Donate via Credit Card or PayPal and/or Donate via Snail Mail.

LIVE OPEN THREAD BLOGGING below: click on the "comments" link at the bottom-right corner of this item to join in!

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

The BRAD SHOW returns, LIVE and RAW and coming to you direct from Crawford, Texas.

LISTEN LIVE via:The IBC Radio Network
or at WhiteRoseSociety (Option 1)
or WhiteRoseSociety (Option 2)

This promises to be a very big day. Air America will be broadcasting with us beginning at 6pm Central Time; other networks are planning to simulcast as well. For more details, click here.

URGENT REMINDER: The BRAD SHOW is still supported primarily by listener donations ... and we still need more listeners and more contributors! So please pick up the phone, or send some e-mail, and tell a few friends about The BRAD SHOW. You (and they) will be glad you did.

But as always, we depend on you. So please Visit The BRAD STORE and/or Donate via Credit Card or PayPal and/or Donate via Snail Mail.

LIVE OPEN THREAD BLOGGING below: click on the "comments" link at the bottom-right corner of this item to join in!