Guest blogged by Ron Brynaert

What if an arrest warrant related to an ex-prime minister's assassination was sent to Great Britain for an ex-dictator on the lam but nobody in America or England covered it?

Nearly a month ago, on February 6, I wrote at The BRAD BLOG asking if the U.S. media was enabling a U.S.-enabled dictator:

[More information on the warrants and highlights from a UN report condemning Musharraf's government can be found at my last BRAD BLOG article.]

If you haven't read anything or seen anything or heard anything in the American or British media about this case since, perhaps, Saturday the latest, that doesn't necessarily mean nothing has happened. Quite the contrary, in fact. But, apparently, the US and UK media haven't felt you needed to know about it...

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IN TODAY'S SPECIAL RADIO REPORT: (Rebroadcast from 2/15/11) All-out Info War: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation's largest & most powerful corporate lobbying firm, caught plotting a $12 million disinformation campaign against progressive U.S. organizations, journalists and citizens, including yours truly...

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): "Peak coffee"?; Polar ice sheets melting faster than predicted; Honeybee declines go global; House hearing on climate change science; Buying insurance on climate destabilization; No boom for cellulosic ethanol; NYC bike lanes will determine the future of urban planning; Pee power!; China unveils green targets; Eco-farming doubles yields in Africa; TransCanada pipeline deal benefits Koch Bros.; Zero-energy transparent TV debuts; 4 energy breakthroughs from ARPA-e; NYT fails to report out objective scientific facts; Quebec brakes on fracking while PA gov hands over fracking authority to energy CEO; BP shirks responsibility for Gulf spill ... PLUS: Farewell to Discovery... and much, much more! ....

Still on the road and still a bit under the weather, so here's some very quick hits for now...

Naturally Premature Resigners: NPR CEO Vivian Schiller has resigned following the resignation of chief fund raiser Ron Schiller (no relation) after the latter Schiller was featured in a secretly video-taped attempted hit piece with two of convicted criminal and Republican con-man James O'Keefe's flunkies performing as members of a Muslim foundation. Having watched the edited version of the video tape, I have no clue as to why anybody at NPR has resigned. (Sidenote: Imagine if even half of the RWers who committed actual crimes, real ones that actually hurt and/or killed people, resigned in shame as fast as non-RWers resign in shame after having committed absolutely no crime at all.)

Pro-Life in IL: Gov. Pat Ryan (D) signs a bill banning the death penalty in the state. It is the 16th to do so. Prisoners previously on death row have had their sentences commuted to life without the possibility of parole. Welcome to the civilized world, Illinois!

GOP War on Voting in FL: Gov. Rick Scott (R)'s executive clemency board pulled a fast one by changing the rules for re-enfranchising former felons after former Gov. Charlie Crist (R) had previously restored their voting rights. "The board did not release the proposed rule changes to the public until moments before the meeting began and limited public testimony to two-minutes per person for a total of 30 minutes before unanimously approving the changes," reports Palm Beach Post. "Civil rights advocates, including five black lawmakers, objected to the rule changes, saying there is no evidence the current process ... is not working." Leon County Supervisor of Election, and election integrity hero Ion Sancho says the board is turning back the clock to FL's post Civil War era with restrictions "whose sole purpose was to ensure that the former slaves of this state could never reintegrate into the society."

GOP War on Voting Nationwide: ThinkProgress details GOP efforts in 22 states around the nation to impose new polling place Photo ID restrictions likely to disenfranchise millions of elderly, minority and student (read: Democratic-leaning) voters. That, even though there is no "voter fraud epidemic" in this country, or any state in the union, at least not among Democrats. Republican voter fraud, however, as we noted late last week, when IN's new GOP Sec. of State was indicted on 3 counts of felony voter fraud, is a different matter all together.

2012: Newt Gingrich says he cheated on his wife because he loves his country so much. Or something. Sarah Palin won't be in the first GOP Presidential Debate at the Reagan Library (which reminds me that she's only ever been in one national debate, and that was with just one person, Joe Biden. I have a feeling she'll not want to participate in any "real" debates with a bunch of other folks, and therefore, while I don't make predictions, I'll predict she will not be running for President.)

In Memoriam: David Broder, WaPo's "Dean of the Washington Press Corps," died today at the age of 81. The death of the Washington Press Corp itself, however, has yet to be officially reported, even as its passing occurred quietly years ago without public notice.

Discuss.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) is clearly not a fan of opposition view points. At least not when they are in opposition to his own. Last night wouldn't be the first time he simply gavelled a meeting to a close in order to shut out the voices of those who disagreed with him.

At a Town Hall meeting in a library in Wauwatosa, WI, on Monday night, as TPM reports, Sensenbrenner suddenly adjourned the event after just 27 minutes as citizens expressed their disagreement with the speaker, state Sen. Leah Vukmir (R), concerning the state GOP's attempt to legislate away their freedom to collectively bargain as public employees.

After Sensenbrenner abruptly shut down the event --- something he has done before, but in the U.S. House --- the crowd on hand erupted into cries of "Shame! Shame! Shame!", echoing Democratic law makers in the state Assembly a week and a half ago after Republican members suddenly opened a vote on the "Budget Repair Bill" without warning at 1am, and closed it seconds later before nearly a third of the chamber had even had a chance to cast their vote.

Before we flash back to what Sensenbrenner did in 2005, here's what the end of the event looked like last night in Wauwatosa...

Sensenbrenner --- who had previously been a fan of rowdy Town Halls over the last year or two when corporate-manipulated "Tea Party" protesters were attempting to shout down Democratic elected officials over the so-called health care reform bill --- has a record of simply shutting down debate when he is not in favor of the viewpoints being expressed...

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NO RADIO REPORT THIS WEEK: We're on the road this week and, as luck would have it, at least one of us is under the weather to boot. So we'll be taking a very very rare week off from fresh Green News Reports, but will return next week with more independent green news, politics, analysis and snarky comment! We apologize to you, and the planet, for any unforeseen inconvenience....

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Tim DeChristopher convicted; Pacific NW coal-free by 2020; Waxman rails against Koch influence; China’s 5-Year Plan on environment; Suit blocks new Massey permit; CEJ: No energy policy; Climate change deniers mislead congress; GOP dismantles enviro protections; 10k EV vending machine charging stations for Japan; Fears of EPA "overreach" wrong; Suppressed NASA data on toxic rain from BP oil spill; EPA scrutiny of fracking pollution in PA; Climate deniers needed to establish "social consensus" on climate change?; ExxonMobil victory in Alaska spill; Tongass NF to get fed protection ...PLUS: A Dark Warning on Global Oil Demand....

In Friday's Daily Beast, University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos called for the removal of Justice Clarence Thomas from the U.S. Supreme Court bench, as based on 20 years of scofflaw, criminal behavior in withholding disclosure information on his wife Virginia "Ginni" Thomas' hundreds of thousands of dollars of income from Rightwing organizations which also happened to benefit from Thomas' votes on a number of SCOTUS opinions, including last year's infamous Citizens United decision.

Several weeks ago, The BRAD BLOG was among the first to specifically detail Thomas' years of "knowing and willful" violations of the U.S. criminal code, even as the mainstream corporate media largely ignored or downplayed those violations of the Rule of Law in their limited coverage.

In his column, Campos speaks to those crimes specifically, echoing our own analysis that they "certainly constitute a misdemeanor, and quite probably a felony, under federal law."

The law professor gives voice to the same questions so many of us have been asking about all of this: "Why is it likely that no consequences will be visited on a Supreme Court justice who has committed a series of criminal offenses? Why is this story not a full-blown scandal? And why did Clarence Thomas do what he did?"

He then goes on to offer the troubling answer to some of those questions by explaining...

What do GOP superstar Ann Coulter, the head of the GOP's California voter registration firm Mark Anthony Jacoby, and, as of yesterday, Indiana's newly elected GOP Secretary of State Charlie White all have in common? Unlike the four-decade old community organization ACORN, each of the Republicans appear to have committed voter fraud and/or voter registration fraud.

Coulter's well-documented acts of voter fraud and voter registration fraud took place in 2005 in Palm Beach County, FL, and were preceded by likely acts of voter fraud in Connecticut in 2002 and 2004 as well. Jacoby's voter registration fraud in CA led to his 2008 arrest and subsequent guilty plea. And now White, the new chief election official in IN, the state with one of the most draconian voter suppression polling-place Photo ID restriction laws in the nation, has been charged with three counts of voter fraud (as well as additional counts of perjury, financial institution fraud, and theft), just two months after being sworn in last January, for having lied about his address when he voted in last year's GOP primary...

We were under the impression that the tens of thousands of citizen protesters in Wisconsin, standing up against Big Government's attempt to take away their freedoms over the last three weeks, were extremely peaceful. But, apparently, that's because we were relying on actual news reports and evidence and stuff.

So, in the interest of fairness and balance, here's what's actually going on in Wisconsin, according to Fox "News"...

We are hoping that Fox "News" "reporter" Mike Tobin survives the dangerous conditions under which he's been working. Covering the mobs in Cairo was nothing compared to the dangers faced by Fox in Madison!

Of course, in our never-ending quest for fairness and balance, we should probably also point out that the man who "punched" Tobin, as discussed in the video above, didn't actually punch him at all. But we only know that because a liberal non-Fox camera happened to be rolling, so that camera should not be trusted. Neither should liberal Eric Boehlert of the liberal, George Soros-funded propaganda outlet Media Matters. He highlighted more evidence this week attempting to suggest seemingly phony WI reporting by Fox "News." Obviously, his actual, independently-verifiable evidence is probably of the liberal nature as well, so feel free to ignore it.

Also, WI's Republican state Sen. Glenn Grothman, as seen in the video above being overrun by the "dare I say, violent" and "angry mob" chanting "Shame! Shame! Shame!" was shouted down after he appeared on television referring to all of the protesters as "slobs." That appearance by Grothman, however, was on the liberal MSNBC, so, ya know. (Later, he would go on to admit that "there were many friendly people in that crowd" and "courteous people there" and that he never "felt threatened," but, again, ya know.)

For the record, as Bill O'Reilly is only too happy to remind us nearly every day, any mitigating information out there which suggests Fox's reporting is less than truthful or accurate should be ignored because they remain the most popular cable "news" channel in the nation. Therefore, what Fox "News" reports is truthful and accurate. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be so popular, now would they? Suck on that, Liberals!

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Eastern Cougar goes extinct; Climate activist Tim DeChristopher goes on trial for fighting to save public lands; "Slash & Burn" Republicans cut the EPA, despite the trillions in dollars it saves; PLUS: Radio. Active. Water. Frack that! ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Navy Secretary says alt. fuels will save money and lives; Chevron employee: routine dumping of toxic chemicals in Ecuador; EPA Extends GHG Reporting Deadline; China's 5 year plans for green growth; Google backs climate-change insurance start-up; China faces up to 'terrible' state of its ecosystems; Underwater kite-turbine may turn tides; Combining solar PV with Thermal; CA salmon to triple this year?; Salazar says 'show me the money'; Conservatives oppose climate adaptation, too; Australia: farms "particularly vulnerable" to climate change; Microgrid electricity onthe rise; Global Public Health Implications of Electricity and Coal Consumption; Schwarzenegger calls for Tunisian-style green revolution; Charles Koch hypocritically blasts "Crony Capitalism" ... PLUS: How Koch Industries makes billions by demanding bailouts and taxpayer subsidies ....

Well, this seems about right. Most impressively, the video below explains how corporations are legally required to put the interest of shareholders and the maximizing of profits above all other concerns.

This is just one of the reasons we were so critical of Obama's recent address to the damnable U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest corporate lobbying group in the nation, wherein he seemed to be grovelling for them to work together in the interest of creating jobs for Americans. Silly, that. The corporations he was meeting with have a legal fiduciary duty to maximize profits. Period. They have no requirement to do anything else. In fact, they have a legal responsibility to do nothing but!

In short, corporations will not behave in the interest of the public unless and until they are legally required to do so. Anything short of that is simply whistling past the graveyard and/or a more political kabuki theater.

This video, featured by the DemocracyIsForPeople.org campaign to help the push for a Constitutional Amendment that would undo the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous 5 to 4 Citizens United decision last year by requiring that First Amendment rights apply to human beings only (or, at least, not to for-profit corporations) does a very fine job of explaining in simple terms the entire fine mess this country now finds itself in. It's well worth the 8 minutes it takes to watch...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Dems call for probe in U.S. Chamber of Commerce plot to target citizens like us; Indictment in WV coal mine disaster investigation; Deepwater drilling permits resume in the Gulf, but that's still not good enough for Republicans; Climate scientists in fake 'ClimateGate Scandal' vindicated --- AGAIN; PLUS: More on the WI GOP power play to privatize Wisconsin's power plants ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): NYT "fracking" bombshell: toxic & radioactive water dumped in rivers; US v. Tim DeChristopher, climate activist; House Democrats launch investigation into 'fracking' on public lands; Anonymous turns firepower against Billionaire Koch Bros.; 80% of US antibiotics go to factory farm animals; Ad Age slams Chevron ad campaign; House Republicans bring back styrofoam; SunChips tries again with quieter bag; Supreme Court halts NYC's push for hybrid taxis; NYC classroom scores 100% PCBs; Soaring oil prices, a popular argument for just about anything; BP fund lawyer to refuse 100k Gulf spill disaster claims, while BP asks judge to dismiss them; Australia stuck with desalination white elephant; Skyrocketing water bills anger GA residents; Glenn Beck says 350.org is part of a communist plot (and Bill McKibben's response); Arctic sea ice at new record low ... PLUS: China leadership issues stunning warning on climate & growth...

Washington Post's Dan Eggen reports tonight for Tuesday's paper that "more than a dozen" Democrats in the U.S. House are now calling on "Republican leaders" to open an investigation into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plot which had been set to target the Rightwing lobbying firms' perceived political enemies (which turned out to include me and my family at the top of their list, as reported in detail previously) with a proposed $12 million smear, forgery, fraud, and disinformation campaign.

While the Democrats letter calling for a Congressional probe will not be released until Tuesday [Update: The full text of the letter is now posted at the end of this article below], Eggen's reportage makes it clear that their concerns focus on the same disturbing point which we highlighted in one of our first detailed reports on this matter. Namely, that the Chamber's law firm Hunton & Williams was organizing the plot with three government-contracted cyber-security/intelligence firms that had planned to turn tools developed for the "War on Terror" against U.S. citizens, journalists, and progressive organizations [emphasis added]...

As we also noted some weeks ago, Eggen reports, "The companies proposed forming a 'corporate information reconnaissance cell' and discussed tactics such as creating online personas to infiltrate activist Web sites; planting false information to embarrass U.S. Chamber Watch and other groups; and trolling for personal information using powerful computer software."

Those "other groups" would include the non-profit, non-partisan advocacy organization VelvetRevolution.us, as co-founded by The BRAD BLOG, in response to VR's StopTheChamber.com campaign launched in late 2009 to help expose the U.S. Chamber's perfidy and mafia-like tactics in their extremist Rightwing corporate "advocacy". The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the nation's largest corporate lobbying firm and has spent millions in disinformation campaigns fighting against clean energy legislation and health care insurance reform, just to name two of their recent projects.

While a Congressional investigation would normally be a no-brainer in a plot as pernicious as the one exposed here --- revealed by the release of tens of thousands of emails detailing highly dubious, and most likely illegal, schemes of this sort --- the fact that the U.S. Chamber and its member corporations also spent millions as the top funders of Republican Congressional campaigns in 2010 makes the likelihood of such hearings questionable in the now-GOP-controlled House.

A letter to Attorney General Eric Holder at the Department of Justice, demanding a special prosecutor be assigned to this case would be equally, if not more appropriate. Unfortunately, the DoJ is also compromised in this affair, having been the ones, incredibly enough, to refer the Chamber's law firm Hunton & Williams to the Bank of America for a parallel plot with the same three private security firms, in order to target WikiLeaks with a focus on discrediting their perceived supporters such as Salon journalist Glenn Greenwald. Given the DoJ's dubious involvement here, it seems similarly unlikely that they would take up such an investigation themselves either, but a letter calling for same from Congressional members might help.

In more new developments in this story tonight...

On Thursday night, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert waded into the HBGary muck with an explanation of the scam that the cyber-security intelligence firm, along with two other firms (government contractors all) were putting together for law firm Hunton & Williams on behalf of Bank of America, in hopes of discrediting journalists and organizations that supported WikiLeaks.

As readers of The BRAD BLOG likely know by now, a parallel $12 million scheme was being hatched by the same law firm and same three cyber-security firms on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, targeting me and my family, as well as other citizens and progressive organizations the U.S. Chamber had regarded as their enemies.

(I was likely targeted due to my roll in The BRAD BLOG's co-founding of the non-profit, non-partisan VelvetRevolution.us which has, since late 2009, been running a StopTheChamber.com campaign to expose the insidious, mafia-like tactics of what has become the largest, most extreme corporate lobbying outfit in the nation. Relatedly, late last week, VR filed a complaint with the D.C. Bar Association against the three H&W attorneys heading up these schemes. I hope to have more on that at a later date, but you can now read the complaint yourself right here [PDF]. Legal Times coverage is here, Washington Post's coverage today is here.)

Though the U.S. Chamber side of the plot is not discussed here, here's Colbert summing up the scheme as proposed for Bank of America...

...And here is the short interview that followed with Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald who, the same as I in the U.S. Chamber plot, was placed front and center in the Bank of America plot...

By the way, though I didn't notice it while watching a Tivo'd verison of the interview above on Thursday night --- so don't know if it was in the actual broadcast, or just added online, by someone --- PC Magazine noticed a curious anomaly at the 3:22 mark of the above video. For no more than a moment, the infamous Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta, often used as a sort of trademark by the "hacktivist" collective Anonymous (the group which inadvertently exposed both of the above described plots when they broke into HBGary's corporate servers and stole the emails describing all of this) is briefly superimposed over Colbert's face, for reasons unknown --- but amusing.

For much more on the U.S. Chamber Plot, please see the links below for The BRAD BLOG's previous coverage of this disturbing story...

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

"This is not a budget issue," the policeman speaking to the cheering protesters jammed inside of the capital rotunda in Madison, WI, shouted this weekend, "This is a civil rights issue!"

"Mr. Walker, if you are listening to me, let me tell you something," he continued through the bullhorn as the crowd rallied, "We know pretty well now who you work for. Let me tell you who we work for. We work for all of these people!"

"We're not here, Mr. Walker, to do your bidding. We're here to do their bidding!" he told the crowd in a remarkable video-taped moment posted by RAW STORY on Sunday.

While a wide swath of Wisconsin society, entailing not only both public and private union members, but students, doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers (like the one mentioned above), and fire fighters have swarmed the streets and public buildings of Madison as part of a mass movement rivaling those we've recently seen on the streets of Cairo, there is one sector of our society who should be especially angry with the Wisconsin branch of Corporate America's wholly-owned, public subsidiary, GOP, Inc.

It is the uninformed and misinformed working class stiffs, aka "Tea Partiers," who should be most disturbed by the scam they've been subjected to over the past two years (and many more). It is they who were taken in by the lies and deceptions of billionaire sociopaths, like oil-baron David Koch of the infamous Koch Industries. Koch's aim is not liberty, freedom, and jobs but American fascism, corporatocracy, and the "eternal subjugation of the common man"...

[Note: SD City Beat has now corrected their story as per our criticism in this article. See the UPDATE at bottom of this article for more details.]

The story quoted below, detailing Hannah Giles' attorneys tossing Rightwing hoaxster James O'Keefe "under the bus," comes from San Diego City Beat this week.

Please note, however, that SD City Beat's Dave Maass is still, unfortunately, misleading readers by incorrectly reporting that O'Keefe played Giles' "fake pimp partner" or that he ever "pos[ed] as a pimp" in the scam video tapes featuring deceptively and "severely edited" secretly-recorded interviews with ACORN employees.

O'Keefe never played or posed as a "pimp" in those interviews, as we spent a good portion of 2010 illustrating to the world, such that both the New York Times and its then-Public Editor Clark Hoyt both, eventually, were forced to admit in partial corrections to their repeatedly inaccurate reports making the same misleading claims.

It's a shame that Maass is still inaccurately reporting that part of the story here, as his report is otherwise good in bringing us up to date on the latest in the law suit filed against O'Keefe and Giles by former ACORN worker Juan Carlos Vera, one of those targeted by the hoax video tapes made by O'Keefe and Giles and published by their employer, Rightwing con-man Andrew Breitbart...