Rush Limbaugh is a disgusting human being. But you probably knew that. If you didn't, audio from his show today --- which is broadcast over our public airwaves to some 15 million Americans a day, and even over U.S. Armed Forces Radio --- makes it as clear as ever.

First, as highlighted by Media Matters, Limbaugh made light of foreign journalists, including two reporters from the New York Times, being rounded-up in Cairo today because being detained while covering a story of huge import to this nation and the world, by a regime that has spent decades torturing such people is, of course, hilarious...

Next, later on in the very the same show, after he's learned that two Fox "News" reporters had been beaten and hospitalized following detention in Egypt, suddenly Rush gives a damn, and says he was just "kidding before about The New York Times"...

Moral depravity. As appalling as it gets.

For the record, as White House correspondent Paul Brandus tweeted last night as the round-up was beginning, "79 journalists were killed around the world last year - just for trying to tell a story."

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 849 journalists have been killed since 1992. Isn't that hysterical, Rush?

UPDATE 2/4/11: ABC News has compiled a rather lengthy list of the journalists rounded-up in Egypt this week and what happened to each. Rachel Maddow explains why she believes it is being done.

UPDATE 2/5/11: Thanks to UK's Guardian for citing our coverage in their own coverage of Egypt yesterday, helping the world to understand that Limbaugh does not represent the true values of this nation.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Midwest digs out and Australia dries out --- just two of this week's 'Storms of the Century'; Oh, look! Glenn Beck misrepresents climate science (again)!; GOP's solution to Egypt's unrest: more offshore drilling! ... PLUS: Obama talks sexy, sexy energy efficiency ... 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): Judge: Gulf Claims Czar not "independent" of BP; 85% of oyster reef ecosystems lost; Green Jobs: Laid-off coal miners now installing solar panels; EPA to restrict pesticide testing on humans; Huge profits & huge taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil; FedEx CEO calls for end to oil; EPA plans new limits on toxic chemicals in drinking water; EPA proposes no changes to carbon monoxide limits; China to spend trillions on new nuclear power, high-speed rail; UK's forest sell-off will cost more than it saves; US unlikely to meet electric car goals by 2015 ... PLUS: A vision of the future: the path to 100% renewable energy by 2050....

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"The problems the protesters are trying to address are extremely deep-seated"¦Egypt and other countries of the region have just been through a neoliberal period which have led to"¦high concentrations of extreme wealth and privilege, tremendous impoverishment and dismay for most of the population." Noam Chomsky, 2/2/11

As more than a million protesters are said to have "flooded into central Cairo" this week, demanding an end to Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian rule, William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, explained a little understood fact about the "tens of billions of dollars" in US military aid used to prop up the authoritarian Mubarak regime.

It is money that Egypt never received, as he explained during an appearance on Democracy Now (see video at end of article):

Hartung, however, has merely focused upon the military component of a much broader scam --- foreign aid --- which John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and in The Secret History of the American Empire exposes to be corporate welfare designed to enhance the power and control of a corrupt and brutal corporate Empire that benefits only a select few local authoritarian elites and the billionaires at the pinnacle of U.S.-based, giant multinational corporations. All at the expense of the great mass of humanity and a sustainable planet...

Via AP...

No time, at the moment, to even begin responding to, or digging into, this one. But seems like we should put it on your radar. So for now, there it is. Please have at it.

For the record, the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been re-authorized by Congress four times since it was originally created and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The VRA's most recent re-authorization, for another 25 years, was signed by George W. Bush in 2006 after it was passed by the Republican-led U.S. House 390 to 33, and by the U.S. Senate in a unanimous 98 to 0 vote.

[Hat-tip @PourMeCoffee via Twitter.]

[Hat-tip @KBZeese on Twitter.]

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: The unreasonableness of Glenn Beck; Snowmageddon --- AGAIN --- across the U.S.; Natural disasters are expensive; Happy Birthday to the car!; ExxonMobil's latest profits...to die for; PLUS: Progressives expose the 'Kochtopus' ... 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): Polar bear swims 9 days searching for ice; US farmers get approval to plant GMO alfalfa; Chamber calls Obama's clean energy plans "ridiculously premature"; WV among worst for mercury pollution in US; Pipeline company denies responsbility for MI oil spill; Interior Dept.'s new "Scientific Integrity Officer"; Senators vow to strip Obama climate power; San Bruno pipeline explosion called "tip of the iceberg"; Controversial nuclear reactor design moves forward in U.S.; EPA moves to curb pesticide testing on human subjects ... PLUS: The ethical dilemma at the heart of climate economics ....

The words "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW" are famously chiseled above the main portico of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington D.C. But is one of the Justices seated in that building, with a lifetime appointment, now receiving special treatment under the law instead?

Evidence is mounting that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas violated federal law by failing to report his wife's annual salary of more than $120,000 per year from conservative political organizations by checking "NONE" on the box for "Non-Investment Income" for his wife Virginia on judicial Financial Disclosure Reports for the last 20 years.

According to the "self-initiated amendment" letters [PDF] signed by Thomas as dated Friday, January 21, 2011, and stamped as "RECEIVED" by the Judicial Conference of the U.S. Committee on Financial Disclosure on a Saturday, January 22, 2011, the Justice failed to reveal such sources of spousal income even on his original nomination disclosure forms during his contentious 1991 confirmation hearings.

One of the amendments hastily filed last week by Thomas states that he "inadvertently omitted" spousal income from as far back as 1989 "due to a misunderstanding of filing instructions." Though it has also been reported that he did report other spousal income on some disclosure reports up until 1996.

Virginia Thomas' income from The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, totaling $686,589 from 2003 to 2007 according to Common Cause, was omitted from the forms entirely, as was her Heritage Foundation employment from 1998 to 2003 and other sources of "non-investment income" from as early as 1989.

When reached by phone for comment on Friday, two different officials at the Judicial Conference were particularly hostile in response to questions from The BRAD BLOG in regard to what appeared to be special treatment afforded the Supreme Court Justice, allowing him to deliver the amendment letters for twenty years of inaccurate financial disclosure forms on a Saturday when the federal government office is not usually open to the public. The swift processing of Thomas' documents, carried out as the news of his false filings was about to break in the media, allowed subsequent news reports to downplay the issue as having already been handled, old news.

Moreover, Thomas' 'inadvertent omissions' appear to be in violation of U.S. federal law, in contradiction to suggestions from the Los Angeles Times' original reporting on this matter last weekend. That report, breaking the story publicly, quoted a judicial ethics expert from Northwestern University School of Law as asserting that Thomas' failure to report his wife's income was "not a crime of any sort."

It would appear that the law professor was wrong.

Closer examination of the original disclosure forms that Thomas filed and signed year after year, quite directly suggests crimes were committed, though none of the mainstream corporate media reports on this issue, to our knowledge, have bothered to focus on that point. According to the statute clearly printed on the disclosure reports filed by Thomas, just below his signature on each, the Supreme Court Justice could be held accountable for his omissions by penalties under the U.S. Code including as much as a $50,000 fine and up to one year imprisonment, or both, for each violation of the federal law. Even stricter penalties are also a possibility --- at least if one believes that even U.S. Supreme Court Justices are subject to the Rule of Law...

Via TPM who asks, "What 'Shellacking'?"...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"The Egyptians have risen up. They're not going home until their demands are realized"¦.until justice and democracy is restored," says the highly respected Dr. Mohamed ElBaradai, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over Al Jazeera English. "The state of Egypt is in a state of collapse."

ElBaradai, who returned to the country earlier this week, "called upon the Egyptian army to take the side of the people," and called upon Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to immediately step down.

What is unfolding on the streets of Egypt may well be confirmation of one of the core observations presented by Howard Zinn, who died one year ago this week...

Once again, Big Government Republicans are trying to put federal bureaucrats between you and your doctor, while at the same time making the world safer for rapists by redefining the meaning of "rape" entirely. Via Nick Baumann at Mother Jones...

Let freedom ring!

Here's what happened last night in Egypt (late last night in U.S.):

And with that, Egypt effectively "vanished from the Internet" yesterday as the uprising against a repressive, U.S. backed regime began to take full bloom and, as of this hour, continues to rage.

Meanwhile, back in these United States, folks like Sen. Joe Lieberman are pushing a bill, the "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset" act, to make provisions for a U.S. government "Internet Kill Switch" to allow them to do the same. Now why would folks like Lieberman want that?

The latest revision of this bill, according to FastCompany, "bans judicial review over executive decrees" to take down all, or portions of, the Internet.

On a very related note... Thanks to the Internet, you can watch the uprising in Egypt going on as we speak, via Al Jazeera English's streaming live coverage here, just in case you find that CNN and the others are still offering wall-to-wall coverage of Charlie Sheen. You can also follow ongoing Twitter reports on Egypt via the #Jan25 and #Egypt hashtags.

And on another very related note... The recent uprising, revolution and new government in Tunisia was triggered, in no small part, thanks to a U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks detailing the corruption of the ruling family. That revolution helped spark the one going on right now in Egypt, where the people have taken to the streets to challenge the thirty-year, iron-fisted rule of Hosni Mubarik, a long-time U.S. ally.

WikiLeaks has now released U.S. cables describing "routine and pervasive" use of police brutality and widespread torture by the Egyptian state, our allies, against "criminals, Islamist detainees, opposition activists and bloggers," as The Guardian describes the leaked cables today.

In Yemen, another ally of the U.S., citizen protests inspired by Tunisia and Egypt are also reportedly underway. And this morning, rumors of unrest in Syria were also spreading via Twitter.

With very real democratic revolutions happening in the Middle East --- one of the purported excuses once given for the U.S. invasion and mass murders in Iraq --- coming about through peaceful uprisings (but for governmental aggression in response) there, thanks in no small part to WikiLeaks, wouldn't folks like Joe Biden be wise to reconsider his recent, offensive assessment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a "high-tech terrorist"?

Perhaps not. Perhaps the Vice President has good reason to stand by that astonishing incitement of violence against a private Australian citizen and an organization neither charged with, nor convicted of, any crimes against the U.S.. After all, we have, for decades, been propping up the repressive Egyptian regime with billions of dollars in funding and armaments. And, by way of reminder, it is being reported that the tear gas canisters being hurled against Egyptian citizen demonstrators right now are clearly and proudly marked as "Made in the U.S.A."

But, of course, "they hate us for our freedoms." So remind us again, Mr. Vice President, who are the terrorists --- high-tech or low-tech --- here?

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: From the greenest State of the Union speech ever, to the State of Wisconsin --- Obama calls for clean energy jobs, and as the GOP flip-flop on 'Cap and Trade' continues, Gingrich calls for abolishing the EPA, and Sarah Palin calls on donuts to save the nation... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Cost of climate change two times higher than Fed's estimate; Australia's PM calls for 'flood tax' for cleanup costs; Rise in childhood cancers parallels rise in toxic chemicals; The Oscar-nominated short Green Doc you must see; TX defies EPA on power plant pollution permit; Was Genghis Khan history's greenest conqueror?; 20 dead in Colombia coal mine blast; PA fracking blowout dumps toxic chemicals in state forest ... PLUS: SkepticGate!: Climate change-denying scientist revealed to be funded by oil industry ....

[Update 1/27/11: IL's Supreme Court has determined Emanuel meets the residency requirements to run for Mayor in Chicago, overturning the lower court's ruling referenced below. Not that any of that makes any difference in regard to the details about Chicago's voting system as offered in the following article. So please read on.]

Perhaps you've been keeping up with the kerfuffle over the past day or two over former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's bid to be on Chicago's ballot in the upcoming February mayoral race there. On Monday, a court determined his residency status was not sufficient and ordered him removed from the ballot, while on Tuesday the court of appeals has temporarily stayed that order, leaving him on the ballot for now, after agreeing to hear his appeal.

But in modern-day Chicago, "appearing on the ballot" is not quite as straightforward as one might think, given the 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems now forced on hundreds of thousands of voters in the Windy City.

Over the years, we've covered specific failures of the very same Sequoia e-voting systems that are used in Chicago and elsewhere across the country, as well as the remarkable duplicity of the company's top officials. So it seems like this would be a good moment to remind folks of the most disturbing Sequoia/Chicago related incidents.

One involves Oprah's "lost" vote on the Sequoia touch-screen systems used there in the 2008 Presidential general election, the other involves the CEO of Sequoia Voting Systems simply lying to Chicago officials about his company's direct business partnership with a Venezuelan e-voting firm tied to Hugo Chavez, and the fact that the Venezuelan firm, Smartmatic, still owns the intellectual property (IP) rights to the e-voting systems used by Chicago voters --- even as the new owners of Sequoia continue to lie about it...

YOU LIE! Just thought we'd get that out of the way right off the bat.

As usual, we'll be watching --- and Tweeting --- the State of the Union right along with ya. And maybe even with Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas, all of whom are reportedly skipping the speech tonight. Guess they have better things to do.

In what is described as an "unprecedented" move, National Journal has posted what is said to be the complete text of the speech in advance of the usual embargo.

Have any thoughts along the way (or after)? Feel free to share 'em below in comments...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Getting "Gas"-y at the Oscars; Freakin' Frackin'; Natural disasters are expensive; Catastrophic flooding, drought around the world ... PLUS: The State of the Union ... 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): Texans rebel against TransCanada oil pipeline; McCain: 'Ethanol is a joke'; China leapfrogs past U.S. in wind power industry; Secret EPA study implicates new pesticide in decline of bees; Bloom fuel cell breakthrough (in financing); Is Biomass clean or dirty energy?; Warnings on leaky Alaska pipeline two years ago; Record melt of Greenland Ice Sheet in 2010; House GOP to grill Oil Spill Commission; More battles over mountaintop coal mining projects in Appalachia; Big cleanup questions linger at Hanford Nuclear Superfund site ... PLUS: 10 Common Misconceptions About California's Cap-and-Trade Program ....