Last night on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, correspondent Aasif Mandvi offered some of the best journalism we've seen on television in quite a while.

It wasn't particularly funny, union supporters are going to hate it, Walmart is going to love it, but credit where it's due.

This is the sort of journalism that Rightwing con-men like Andrew Breitbart, James O'Keefe, and their acolytes pretend to be producing. It's journalism they could and even should be producing. But as they are political/partisan con-men/hitmen/hacks, they've chosen to throw away all of their credibility to the point where they are outclassed even by a comedian like Mandvi. Then again, the same can be said for many of the so-called journalists in our corporate MSM who rarely manage to offer anything as serious, substantive --- or scathing --- as Mandvi's report from last night...

-- Guest blogged by Joyce McCloy

Well there's a twist! Hopefully you weren't drinking coffee when you read the headline.

How often do you hear of a voting vendor saying they really really (really!!) do not want to break the law, but state officials are forcing them to? But that's exactly what's about to happen in North Carolina where the first statewide use of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) could produce, according to some, a "train wreck" this November.

Four years ago, the state legislature created new rules for special elections needed to fill vacancies in the state's appellate courts. They apply when an opening occurs on the bench after the primary but at least 60 days before the general election. If more than two candidates file to run, voters are asked to indicate their first, second and third choices on the ballot. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the winner is determined by adding the second- and third-choice votes.

But while election officials are mandated to run IRV elections, there is actually no state or federally certified software to tally Instant Runoff Voting on North Carolina's e-vote systems and the representative for the vendors, ES&S and PrintElect, says the companies "cannot be held responsible for issues as a result of IRV"...

Over the weekend, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski announced she would run as a write-in candidate this November after reportedly losing a close GOP primary race to far Rightwing "Tea Party" candidate Joe Miller.

The three-way race, along with Democratic candidate and Mayor of Sitka Scott McAdams, could prove to be a serious challenge for Alaska's historically-dicey optical-scan voting system made by Diebold. Given the shortcomings of the system which otherwise employs the concealed vote-counting of centrally tabulated ballots, the need to hand-review write-in votes this November could present a unique opportunity for citizens of the 49th state to oversee at least some of their own electoral system --- for a welcome change.

Statistical polling analyst Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight blog is now hosted by The New York Times, has been suggesting that Murkowski's seemingly-Quixotic bid, while still a long shot, may actually prove to be "viable" as a write-in campaign. But whether or not Alaska's voting system is up to task may be a different matter, and an additional hurtle for Murkowski to overcome...

Just three days before the November mid-terms --- and for no particular reason, other than it seemed "reasonable" --- Comedy Central's tag-team news/satire team Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will hold rallies on the mall in Washington D.C.

Game changers? Or just a really really good time? Or both? We'll see. Here are their rather hilarious competing announcements from last night in case you missed them (each coming after a false start in both cases)...

STEWART VIDEO - "Take It Down a Notch For America"...

COLBERT VIDEO - "Fighting Creeping Reasonableness"...

For more information, see their "competing" officials websites...

RallyToRestoreSanity.com

KeepFearAlive.com

UPDATE 9/19/10: Glenn Greenwald offers a cogent analysis of the "false equivalency" seen in Stewart's intro to his event which suggests a comparison between baseless extremist cries from the Right that "Obama is a socialist who wasn't born in the U.S. and hates America" to the very real cries from the Left for accountability in the case of alleged war crimes committed by the Bush Administration, as cited directly by the U.S. Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."-Mark Twain

One of the basic axioms of law is that fraud vitiates consent. One of the foundational principles of democratic governance is that legitimacy rests on the informed consent of the governed. Come November, those principles will be tested in California.

Billionaire Meg Whitman, a former EBay CEO who surpassed the $100 million mark in campaign spending nearly a month prior to the traditional Labor Day kickoff of the Fall campaign, who, by Sept. 16, had donated a record-smashing $119 million of her own funds to her campaign, who refused to meet with former California Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and Republican State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poisner in a pre-primary debate, has knowingly sought to fill the gaping knowledge deficit created by the corporate media's gross neglect of its fourth estate responsibilities with disinformation about Brown, her Democratic opponent.

When confronted by an analysis which exposed a powerful but deliberately deceptive ad (video below) which shows former President Bill Clinton accusing Brown of lying about his tax record based on a CNN report which is now known to be erroneous, Whitman's spokesperson, Darrell Ng dismissed the idea of pulling the deceptive ad as "ridiculous"...

As our friends the Tea Baggers have been temporarily instructed to give a damn about "the deficit", even while so many of them have been instructed to support deficit ballooning tax cuts for millionaires which will add trillions to the debt over the next decade, it seems it might be useful to run this chart for them, since clearly too few of them have yet to see it on Fox "News"...

Hope that helps clear things up a bit. Ya know, facts 'n' stuff. You're welcome.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Primaries are over - is an (even more) brain dead Senate in our future?; 2010 tied for warmest ever --- so make like the walruses and head to the beach! (Or like the denialists and put your head in the sand); Louisiana's river of dead fish ... PLUS: The really, really, really final stretch for BP's oil well? ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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Yesterday's hotly contested race for the GOP's U.S. Senate nomination in Delaware ended in victory for the state's moderate, much-beloved former Governor and nine-term U.S. Congressman Mike Castle --- at least according to the tabulation of ballots cast in the race which can actually be verified by anybody as having been recorded accurately as per the voters' intent.

From the State of Delaware's Elections website with 100% reporting:

Nonetheless, the Tea-Party/Palin/DeMint-endorsed Christine O'Donnell, who was getting trounced by the popular Castle in pre-election polls until only recently after losing twice before in her quest for a U.S. Senate seat, was declared the "winner" of yesterday's race and --- as The BRAD BLOG detailed yesterday --- nobody can prove whether the voters of Delaware actually selected her or not.

Appropriately enough for the far Rightwinger, the "victory" was 100% faith-based, since it's strictly impossible to know if even one citizen's vote cast yesterday on the 100% unverifiable e-voting machines Delware forces voters to use on Election Day was recorded accurately...

Beginning this afternoon I'll be sitting in with Harrison on Los Angeles' commercial-free Pacifica Radio affiliate KPFK on Wednesday afternoons from 3p to 4p PT (6p to 7p ET). I'll be in-studio with him most weeks for an hour of trouble-making and muck-raking and hope you'll tune in! We've got alotta muck to rake.

He's a busy guy, which you'll find out via his "Go Harrison!" website where you can also get a live streaming feed for the show.

KPFK is heard on air at 90.7 FM in the big L.A. market, on 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara and coast-to-coast and around the globe via KPFK.org where there are more live streaming options for ya. The call-in number is: 310-737-TALK. Feel free to give us a shout!

UPDATE 9/16/10: Here's the audio from my first outing with Harrison on KPFK yesterday.

MP3 Download or listen online below [appx 54 mins]...

Also, here's my appearance with Nicole Sandler on Radio Or Not this morning, in which we were able to focus on many more of the e-voting issues than we were able to get to on KPFK yesterday (as per Ernie's request).

MP3 Download or listen online below [appx 30 mins]...

In addition to the primary elections being held in New York today --- where long-ago predicted failures are reported to be occurring with their new e-voting system as we described earlier --- elections are also underway today in Delaware, D.C., Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.

To find out which type of voting system will fail and/or or be 100% unverifiable in each of those states, please see VerifiedVoting.org's Verifier for details.

One of the races certain to get most attention tonight will be the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Delaware where the Tea Party/Palin/DeMint-backed Christine O'Donnell has seen a last minute surge in support, according to pre-election polls, against GOP-establishment supported Rep. Mike Castle. The popular Castle was thought to have been a shoo-in for the Republican nomination until recently, as well as the likely victor over the Democrats presumptive nominee Chris Coons.

But Coons currently cleans O'Donnell's clock in pre-election polling, so the GOP race has become a contentious one.

We point all of this out by way of noting that Delaware has just three counties, all of which force voters to use 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen, but in this case push-button) voting systems on Election Day. The systems are made by Danaher Controls, one of the smaller, lesser-known e-voting companies in the U.S., though large enough to have been made infamous when hundreds of their machines reportedly broke down during Philadelphia's May 2006 trainwreck election. In 2004 Verified Voting and the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a short paper [PDF] detailing various other problems with the systems in Tennessee and Ohio elections going back to 1992.

While we've yet to hear of problems today on the machines in the "First State," we thought it might be a good time to mention that no matter whom the voting machines report as the winner in any of the races, including the hotly-contested GOP Senate primary, there will largely be next to nothing that can be done to challenge the results --- other than, perhaps, counting the smaller number of paper-based absentee ballots for accuracy. (The paper-based absentee ballots will initially be tabulated by Diebold AccuVote op-scan systems, the same type of system used to flip the results of a mock election in HBO's Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy. You can watch that hack here as it occurred live.)

The Danaher DREs being used in Delaware today make for 100% faith-based elections. As with all DREs, after the polls close tonight it will be strictly impossible to verify that even one vote cast on them was recorded accurately as per the voter's intent, for any candidate on the ballot.

In the event that the e-voting systems report a close election tonight, well, too bad.

UPDATE 7:15pm PT: With 85% of the vote "counted," and a reported 54%-46% margin, AP has declared O'Donnell the winner. Details...

UPDATE 10:32pm PT: Castle actually defeated O'Donnell! But, um, only on the ballots that can actually be verified. Details in comments...

UPDATE 9/15/14 1:44pm PT: More on the virtually reversed "paper versus plastic" numbers in DE's GOP U.S. Senate primary now here...

Problems with New York's new electronic voting system are being reported across the state today, according to the New York Times. Today's primary elections mark the first statewide use of the new, paper-based optical-scan systems which have been been the cause of much controversy among election officials and Election Integrity advocates over the last several months and years in the Empire State.

New York is the last state in the union to replace their older election system --- much of the state, as well as all of New York City had previously used mechanical lever machines --- with new-fangled, failure-prone, easily-manipulated computerized systems following the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 which was enacted in the wake of the 2000 Presidential Election debacle.

In New York City, where Wall Street Journal reports the problems are "most severe" --- including reports from Mayor Bloomberg on "reports of broken and missing scanners, poor customer service and poll sites opening two to four hours late" --- the new systems are made by ES&S, the nation's largest voting machine company, and one with a storied history of election failures.

The systems used in other parts of the state are largely manufactured by the Canadian firm Dominion Voting, formerly as a partnership with Sequoia Voting Systems. Dominion eventually bought out cash-strapped Sequoia's portion of the NY state deal before buying out Sequoia entirely earlier this year. The purchase of Sequoia, then the nation's third-largest e-voting firm, on the heels of their purchase of Diebold/Premiere just weeks prior, has vaulted Dominion, virtually overnight, to one of the largest e-voting vendors in the U.S..

[Read The BRAD BLOG's recent exclusive on the Dominion purchase of Sequoia, and their attempts to cover up the continuing relationship that Sequoia has with a Venezuelan firm tied to President Hugo Chavez.]

Some state election officials and Election Integrity advocates alike had long-warned against the implementation of these new systems, going so far as to take the issue to court and to testify to the inability of certifying the accuracy of elections run on the new machines.

According to the Times this morning, some polling places "did not open for more than 90 minutes" in Brooklyn; elsewhere, every ballot scanned "was returning a the 'system error'" message; and across the state, there have been reports of "longer-than-usual delays and troubles with the scanners that are supposed to swallow and tabulate the new, SAT-style ballots"...

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Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

This November, California voters will be afforded a rare opportunity to directly decide whether to legalize and tax the lawful cultivation, processing, distribution, sale, and consumption of marijuana by and to individuals over 21 years of age.

By approving Proposition 19, formally labeled the "Regulate, Control, Tax Cannabis Act of 2010" [PDF], voters will take an important first step towards ending the costly, hypocritical, and liberty-destroying "war on drugs" which, like its predecessor (Prohibition), has created a lucrative niche for criminal organizations --- hypocritical because the covert agencies of the U.S. government have long engaged in drug trafficking in support of Empire even as the so-called "War on Drugs" has provided a convenient excuse for supporting brutal dictatorial puppet regimes whose function it is to serve the interests of what John Perkins described in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man as the "corporatocracy"...

From today's "9-12"* rally in D.C....

Dave Weigel has more photos from the same event...

[Update: TPM has more...]

[Hat-tip NewLeftMedia]