Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Michael Mukasey, George Bush's new attorney general --- same as the old attorney general --- has yet to order federal employees to preserve evidence related to the CIA's destruction of tapes of its torture sessions with terror suspects.

Even without Mukasey's order, however, the CIA appears to have violated a court order in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in 2004 to enforce a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding information on the treatment and interrogation of prisoners:

The ACLU brief and related legal documents are available online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

No fanfare. George Bush vetoed this one in private:

The Associated Press says that of the 43 million uninsured people nationwide, over 6 million are under the age of 18, which is almost 10 percent of all U.S. children.

Democrats plan to extend the current State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) program, as is, into next year and then force Bush to veto the expansion again during the election campaign.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

The second installment of "Bush League Justice" on MSNBC Live with Dan Abrams continued last night with an investigation into the Bush administration's "unprecedented use" of signing statements to subvert the rule of law. A signing statement is a president's written interpretation of legislation passed by congress which accompanies his signature when he signs a bill into law.

For example, in 2005 congress voted overwhelmingly to ban torture which Bush signed into law. However, Bush also included a signing statement which basically allowed him to ignore the new law.

To date, Bush has issued 1,100 signing statements which is nearly double that of all 42 presidents that preceded him combined.

Guest Editorial by Kenneth Anderson

Endlessly mundane and always uninformative, the moribund struggle for party nominations in what we so disrespectfully still call the "presidential campaign" inhabit a realm of such vacuous inanity one can palpably sense malignant tumors of ennui forming within.

While would-be Republican candidates spar for the GOP nomination by appealing to brain stem functions (that is, when they're not extolling us with tales of their heavenly devotion), Democrats carry themselves at only a marginally elevated level. This is not to say that there are not candidates --- on both sides --- who would like to raise the bar and address actual issues and policy, but those are shunned by our craven and cack-handed media mavens, who never seem to tire of their perceived role as king-maker in what has become --- for the world's "greatest democracy" --- an embarrassing spectacle of the most base and primitive dimensions. I suspect if media moguls could get Romney and Huckabee to square off in a cage fight, well, that would be next on the tour of the candidates. Who needs all this talk? Though the American public demand campaigns of substance, there appears too little of that on the political horizon, while furry idiots like Wolf Blitzer express puzzlement at the term "triangulating" as it pertains to Hillary Clinton.

What we constantly hear from the corporate media, though it is never stated quite so bluntly, is that those with the money become the kings. The American political campaign system is now a big-money bonanza for media corporations. These corporations prop up candidates with the most money knowing full well that that money will come straight back to them in the form of campaign advertising. The media are now simply advertisers for the biggest political spenders, which is perhaps the reason why the campaign cycle is now virtually continuous. It is a positive feedback loop, reinforcing in the minds of the public that the only viable candidates are the ones with the money, the polls reflect this, more money pours in for those "viable candidates," which in turn cycles right back to the media money machine.

Which is why I am constantly amazed that the so-called "progressive" blogs have chosen to endorse corporate-backed candidates like Hillary Clinton.

Though Dennis Kucinich espouses ideals resonant with most liberal voters, he is as marginalized by progressives as much as the mainstream media as "unelectable," though no one ever seems to understand or explain exactly what that means. Is it his ears?

By all appearances, blogs such as dKos, MyDD, etc, have now simply become another arm of the Democratic party and their backing of the major, big-money candidates simply because they are deemed "electable" entirely betrays the original purpose of their fora.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

According to reports from Vigo Co Indiana, where there is a recount being held for Terre Haute mayor, a court-appointed recount commission is seated to oversee the process. State law, according to the news report, requires that one of the three members of that commission be a representative of the voting system vendor. So ES&S is overseeing the recount of ballots. It is time the people take back our elections. No vendor should be allowed to be contracted to take over counting votes or sitting on commissions that make decisions in our elections.

Is Cuyahoga Co Ohio being set-up to fail yet again? That is the question being asked and answered in a blog from a county voter. Just why is Brunner suggesting to the county that they totally overhaul their voting system before the March primary?...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

The State Department stepped in and literally "rescued" a 22-year-old woman being held captive by Halliburton in Iraq for 24-hours in a shipping container without food and water after she reported being gang raped in 2005, according to Representative Ted Poe (R-TX), who intervened after being contacted by the victim's father.

Yet none of the "six or seven perpetrators" has been brought to justice and it is not even clear if an investigation was ever conducted. Attorney Brian Wice surmises that the DoD, State Department, and DoJ have not pursued the case further because they "don't want this case to see the inside of a United States courtroom."

Reprentative Poe also believes that the federal government has the obligation to pursue the case and "hold [the perpetrators] accountable."

MSNBC's Dan Abram's coverage is at right. Visit the victim's Foundation for more information.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

The first part of "Bush League Justice", a special four-day investigation by MSNBC's Dan Abrams into the Bush administration's politicization of the Justice Department, which Brad previewed yesterday, began with a look into the "department's almost unrecognizable Civil Rights Division" (at left, 8:27).

According to Abrams, the Bush administration "has turned the Division against the very people it was designed to protect. Instead of pursuing discrimination cases on behalf of African Americans, the Bush Civil Rights Division has focused on supposed reverse discrimination cases against whites and religious discrimination cases against Christians." Abrams points out that between 2001 and 2006, "not one voting discrimination case was brought on behalf of African Americans."

The segment continues with Abrams questioning former DoJ attorneys David Becker and Alia Malek about the Bush administration "stack[ing] the deck against Democrats." In one example given by Becker, congressional redistricting plans thought to favor Democrats would get "very, very, serious scrutiny" while redistrictings that favored Republicans would receive a "very hands off approach" even if, as was the case in Texas, the plan was unanimously found to discriminate against Hispanics by career Justice Department officials.

In addition to stacking the deck against Democrats, Abrams states that the Justice Department has been "hijacked" by the far right. After evidencing this claim with a couple of telling statistics, a somewhat exasperated Abrams continues, "They fundamentally changed what the Civil Rights Division does. It's no longer there to protect African Americans. It is to go after reverse discrimination cases and also to try and promote religion in schools and other public places."

Part 1 continues (at the 6:15 mark) with Abrams playing the "pretty amazing statement" by John Tanner, the current chief of the DoJ's Voting Rights Section, about minorities not being disenfranchised by Photo ID laws because they "don't become elderly the way white people do, they die first." Unfortunately Abrams, like many in the mainstream media, failed to credit The BRAD BLOG for our original video and reporting of the incident.

Despite the slight we look forward to more excellent reporting on this long overdue topic throughout the week.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

In August 1998, Gov. Mike Huckabee and his wife Janet were among 131 signers of an advertisement opposing same sex marriage and in support of resolution enacted by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) earlier that year that erroneously suggested that prototypical 1950's "Ozzie and Harriet" style marriage and family life had its origins in the Bible:

"Graciously submitting herself" to her husband is a deceptively benign formulation for the status of women in biblical times. In the Hebrew scriptures that form the basis of the Old Testament, for example, women were treated as harshly as they are treated today in conservative Islamic cultures:

• Unmarried women were not allowed to leave the home of their father.
• Married women were not allowed to leave the home of their husband.
• They were normally restricted to roles of little or no authority.
• They could not testify in court.
• They could not appear in public venues.
• They were not allowed to talk to strangers.
• They had to be doubly veiled when they left their homes.

Polygamy was commonplace, and, of course, only men could have multiple spouses. Famous polygamists from the Bible included Abraham, Jacob, King David and especially Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines.

The Bible dictates that women take an inferior role in almost every aspect of life, according to a conservative biblical scholar:

Joseph Cannon's spy-dar is beeping. He's dubious about the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes, and explains why in a post yesterday which opens with this classic line: "When the CIA tells you that a piece of evidence has been destroyed, you should react as skeptically as you would to the death of a Marvel supervillain."

Likely worth watching this week is Dan Abram's "Bush League Justice" series at 9pm ET Mon - Thur on MSNBC.

Blogging at MSNBC and Huff Po, Abrams says the series is in response to his "increasing frustration and outrage over how the Bush administration has politicized the usually apolitical Justice Department," which, he writes, has "significantly abused its authority to try to enhance power at the expense of any sense of objective justice" and has "decimated some of the most fundamental and cherished principles that define justice in this country."

Ya think?

He also goes on to focus on the breathtaking failures of the DoJ's Civil Rights division, which we've taken considerable notice of here at The BRAD BLOG --- including, but not limited to, most recently its Voting Section chief John "Minorities Die First" Tanner --- over the past several years...

Abrams goes on to point out several more troubling points about the Bush League DoJ, including a "University of Minnesota study conducted this year [which] shows that for every elected Republican investigated during this president's tenure, there were seven elected Democrats investigated."

A line in his final graf caught our eye as both the most inadvertently self-critical as well as the most incisive: "This series is long overdue."

UPDATE: Video now available at right here...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Good news today from New Jersey where S-507, a post-election audit bill, passed through the budget committee on a party-line vote even with opposition from the state Attorney General.

This week we are scheduled to hear the results of the Ohio Secretary of State’s EVEREST project. This project and resulting reports from academics and others was supposed to be Jennifer Brunner’s “Top-To-Bottom Review” with the resulting recognition comparable to that given to California’s Debra Bowen. We are still waiting to hear whether we will actually see the reports or just an executive summary that only gives us the information the Secretary wants us to hear. In the meantime, Brunner seems to be nudging Cuyahoga Co to change from DRE voting to optical-scan. While those nudges would have been great 6 months or more ago, it is questionable as to whether the county should change now. The Ohio primary is March 4 with absentee voting beginning in January. The county should now be working on ballot lay-out, ballot programming and ballot printing. This is NOT the time to make any changes. One has to wonder whether Brunner is trying to emulate Bowen or Blackwell. The jury is still out.

Links to those, and today's other notable voting news stories, all posted below...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

USA Today:

At her daily briefing today, White House spokesperson Dana Perino refused to speculate whether Scooter Libby would be pardoned over the upcoming holidays.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

On KCRW's "Left, Right and Center" political chat show last Friday, Tony Blankley, of all people, the former chief of staff for Newt Gingrich and editor of the Washington Times, the rightwing newspaper owned by cult leader Sun Yung Moon, joined Arianna Huffington and Matt Miller in tearing apart the speech on religion Mitt Romney delivered last week:

Exception should be taken to Romney's corollary statement that freedom requires religion, as well. At least three of our Founding Fathers --- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine --- were irreligious, and there is ample evidence they understood freedom fairly well (leaving aside the very large matter of Jefferson's dependence on slavery). In any case, they and others did not "require" religion in order to lay the groundwork for America's experiment with personal liberty.

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

Within hours, if not minutes, after the CIA announced it destroyed two videos made in 2002 of its agents torturing al Qaida suspects, Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey should have ordered the CIA and all federal agencies to preserve any evidence related to the filming of torture sessions involving terror suspects.

Over the weekend, the urgent need for this order was underscored by the development that other videos of other torture sessions may exist:

The CIA's announcement that the videos had been destroyed brought to mind the revelation by the White House last spring that as many as 5 million inter-office emails had been "lost." It is likely that emails contained evidence that top Bush officials, including especially Karl Rove, engaged in a conspiracy to leak, and then cover up the leak, of the secret identity of Valerie Wilson, a CIA specialist in the black market for terror weapons.

Anyone who is familiar with the fundamentals of data storage can attest that it takes a concerted effort to "lose" data stored on hard drives. This is especially so for emails, which are stored on hard drives of both the sender and the receiver as well as on outgoing and incoming email servers.

The videos, like the emails, were presumably in digital format rather than old-fashioned videotape. If so, it is more than likely that multiple backup copies were created, which increases the chance that additional copies could still exist on a disk somewhere.

Of course, the CIA has had plenty of time to track down and obliterate backup copies of the torture videos, just as White House officials have had more than sufficient time now --- eight months at least --- to scour and wipe clean the hard drives on which the 5 million emails were stored.

This returns us to the main question: Where is Mukasey? His silence and inaction on the preservation of evidence in this unfolding scandal suggests what many suspected --- that Michael Mukasey, like his predecessor Alberto Gonzales, is more concerned with the political preservation of his boss than he is with the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

San Francisco has finally certified their Nov. 6 election. They hand-counted 80,000 ballots which delayed the final certification by a month. Officials in Cuyahoga Co Ohio seem to be reluctant to get rid of their Diebold DRE voting machines even though they have caused many problems which have affected many voters....