How many times does he have to get these stories wrong before ABC News cans their hapless and constantly wrong "investigative correspondent" Brian Ross? We suspect he'll be allowed to keep screwing up, again and again and again, so long as his screw-ups result in lots of media attention. Little wonder Ross is one of the only broadcast network news stooges invited on Bill O'Reilly's show, again and again and again.

Gawker's John Cook takes apart Ross' big "scoop" yesterday, which swept both the wingnut and non-wingnut media alike --- cooking up the alleged Fort Hood shooter Army Major Nidal Malik "Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda".

Those "contacts with al Qaeda"? Um, not so much, as Cook details. Turns out that Hasan's "attempt to reach out to al Qaeda" were, in actuality, three emails sent to the imam of the mosque that Hasan attended in Virginia in 2001, back when two of the 9/11 hijackers, reportedly, also attended the same mosque. The cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, has since moved to Yemen where he has reportedly spoken out in favor of al-Qaeda.

The emails sent to him by Hasan? Whatever they were about, Ross doesn't know, and the FBI, who reportedly did know, apparently didn't find they warranted any action be taken.

Oh, and the "people" connected to al-Qaeda who Hasan allegedly "attempt[ed] to reach out to"? Ross now admits there was just one --- singular, not plural --- and it was al-Awlaki.

Here's our favorite passage from Cook's excellent evisceration of Ross' yet-again irresponsible coverage, proving (by ABC News' own standards) that Ross himself may well be an al-Qaeda terrorist!...

From AFP:

Well that'll certainly teach any future snipers from doing same. I guess Nidal Hasan and all the other mass shooters since 2002 didn't get the memo.

CNN has more.

There's this: KBR/Halliburton may have poisoned 100,000 in Iraq...

And now this: Pfizer broke the law by promoting drugs for unapparoved uses...

We must stop those those fuckers from ACORN immediately! It's an outrage!

UPDATE: Just in: Blackwater attempted to bribe Iraq with $1 million (tax-payer dollars!) after Nisour Square Massacre and owner Erik Prince knew about it. How much more evidence do you need? ACORN's behavior is atrocious and must be stopped!

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IN TODAY'S AUDIO REPORT: Hurricane Ida hits oil prices; EPA hits greenhouse gas emissions; China "cleans our clock"; California inks historic water deal ... PLUS: Pro-Coal coloring books for kids! ... 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': One Million Energy Star Home Owners Can't Be Wrong; On Environmental Brink, Haiti Scrambles for a Lifeline; WV Dept. of Environmental Protection finds problems at W.Va.'s coal-ash dams; U.S. Uses Less Water Now Than 35 Years Ago; Electric Eel Inspires a New Type of Battery; "Conservatives Heart Nuke Power" --- Too bad they don't "brain" it... PLUS: Is the U.S. News Media Failing to Do Its Job on Climate Change? ....

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

At some point over the weekend, our short documentary film, Rise of the Tea Bags, went over the 11,000 views mark at YouTube. Of course, by Tea Bag math, that's well over 3 million views and the media refuses to report it!!!

I was interviewed about the film, and the folks I interviewed in it, by Mike Papantonio for last Saturday's Ring Of Fire on Air America Radio. You can download [MP3] the interview, or listen to it right here [appx. 16 mins]...

And, just in case you didn't see it yet, a) what's wrong with you? and b) here's what we're talking about, as recently taped in Los Angeles on the very first day of the new "Tea Party Express II" national tour...

Guest Blogged by Rebecca M. Abrahams

On December 18, 2008, Bush IT expert Mike Connell, a highly skilled pilot, was killed in a sudden crash while flying his small aircraft from Washington DC to his Akron/Canton home airport. The cause of the crash is still unknown and under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

For more than ten months, Connell's family has been coping with feelings of disbelief, anger and confusion and has many unanswered questions about the man they knew and loved.

For Connell's widow Heather, holding her husband's New Media consulting firm together is a daily struggle.

"The more I learn about the crash the more sick it makes me - the destruction of the plane. I found a pack of the I-pod ear buds in a tree. I'm obsessed with the Blackberry. I don't have the Blackberry. I have his backpack. I have his paperwork, his schedule. None of his paperwork is burned up. One of his prayer books burned on the outside. I think there was a lot thrown from the plane."

Although mainly un-reported, there's a great deal of controversy surrounding Connell's death - largely in part because he was the architect of many Republican websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com, the site Karl Rove used for 95% of his email correspondence. Connell was also considered a key witness in the election fraud lawsuit King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell. The suit implicates Former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell, Karl Rove and others of 2004 election night vote rigging.

Attorneys in the case believe that Connell, who had not been accused of any wrongdoing, had firsthand knowledge about the missing White House emails and Rove's alleged wrongdoing with respect to the 2004 Presidential election.

His wife, and those attorneys, are not the only ones still focused on questions about what actually happened to Mike Connell nearly one year ago, and in the years prior...

With the U.S. House having passed its version of a health care insurance bill (H.R. 3962 [PDF]) last night by a vote of 220 to 215, it may be instructive to take a very quick look at a couple of the outlier votes from each party.

The bill passed with just two votes to spare, leading one to wonder if Republicans are having any regrets about having hosed their own party's candidate in the NY-23 special election last Tuesday when the two Congressional seats up for election --- the one in NY and another in CA --- both went to Democrats, but that's another issue entirely.

Let's take a look at the reasons offered by two candidates who bucked their own party's in the historic House vote last night, as each seem quite instructive on a number of levels...

Former, now-repentant rightwing fundamentalist leader, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and recent BRAD BLOG contributor Frank Schaeffer appeared on Laura Flanders' GRITtv on Friday to discuss his new book, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism), the "lies" and "incipient fascism" of the "lunatic fringe" Right, and his belief that atheists such as Richard Dawkins and others are "proselytizing" their own non-belief.

I'm sure he'll appreciate your thoughts, good, bad, or otherwise, in comments below. Here's the interview [appx. 18 mins]...

Recently from Frank Schaeffer at The BRAD BLOG:

"¢ 11/4/09: "I'm Now a 'Liberal' Because I'm a Conservative"
"¢ 11/2/09: "The Loony Right Eats Its Own"
"¢ 10/23/09: Brad Interviews Schaeffer on Green960
"¢ 10/22/09: "A Letter to Rupert Murdoch"

In 2008, election integrity advocates in Tennessee won a hard and long-fought victory as the state legislature finally passed, on a bi-partisan basis, the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA) requiring the state's wholly unverifiable touch-screen voting machines to be replaced with precinct-based optical-scan paper balloting in time for the crucial 2010 general election.

But in November of 2008, as the state was still using its completely faith-based electronic voting systems, it somehow managed to buck the national trend as the only state in the nation to see legislative gains for the Republican Party which managed to win a majority in the statehouse in the bargain. Ever since, the GOP majority, along with the Republican Secretary of State and Election Director, have been fighting against implementation of that paper ballot law.

A move in the legislature to delay the law until 2012 was narrowly defeated --- by a single vote --- earlier this year, but the state's Republican apparatchiks have continued attempts to forestall following the rule of law.

Late this week, however, a Nashville judge issued a ruling in a case brought by Common Cause seeking to force Secretary of State Tre Hargett to immediately implement the law he's so far refused to act on...

Michael Moore tweeted within the past hour, in response to yesterday's shooting spree at Fort Hood:

The wingnuts, of course, are out for blood following the shooting. Predictably, they're going after Muslims, under the presumption that the suspect, Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was acting out of incitement from Islam.

If that turns out to be true --- and there's no actual evidence to support that at this time, as far as I know --- I'd agree that any person or persons who would incite such violence should be held accountable. Just as those who'd incite similar violence --- for example, in the cases of the murder of Kansas obstetrician Dr. George Tiller or the hanging of Clay County, KY census worker Bill Sparkman --- should be held similarly accountable.

Yet, I heard few such calls from the Right after those incidents. In the case of Tiller, his accused murderer Scott Roeder was regarded by the Right as either a hero or a lone, crazy guy (depending on how far to the Right they happened to be). I've heard no condemnation from the Right, or calls for accountability for the constant, repeated, almost daily characterization of Tiller, to millions and millions of Americans over the air waves by folks like Bill O'Reilly (the most watched man on cable news), as a "baby killer", "executing babies", "death merchant", etc., even though Tiller was a medical doctor performing lawful services.

I heard no wingnut condemnation of Bernie Goldberg --- and certainly not of Christianity as a whole --- even after it was revealed that his book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And All Franken Is #37), was a major inspiration for Jim David Adkisson's shooting spree at a Knoxville, TN Unitarian Church in July of 2008 which killed two and injured seven others...

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called in the tea baggers to the Capitol in D.C. today for an "emergency house call" (that's great video!) in hopes of killing health care reform legislation. She was joined by dozens of fellow wingnut lawmakers who spoke to the disinformed crowd, promising "not a single Republican vote" for the bill before things turned strange later on.

There, in the crowd as the lawmakers spoke, among the baggers, was the following sign which, as Richard Blair notes, "not one of them denounced"...

Here's the close-up view...

On October 17th, we reported that World's Worst Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent of Sarasota, FL, had discovered in pre-election tests that her new Diebold/Premier optical-scan voting systems failed to properly read paper ballots marked with blue ink.

Her "solution": Make sure that black pens were available at polling places, and otherwise have election officials duplicate blue-inked ballots by hand (and in secret, naturally, where the voter wouldn't be able to watch).

While an attempt could be made to encourage voters to use black ink at the polling place, there was no real way to ensure that absentee voters used black ink, other than try to encourage them to do so.

So, naturally, the inimitable Ms. Dent sent out thousands of sample ballots [PDF] encouraging votes to use "a blue or black pen"...

Dent, of course, is the same disastrous Supervisor of Elections who presided over the 2006 FL-13 Congressional race in which 18,000 electronic ballots in Democratic-leaning Sarasota disappeared from the county's ES&S touch-screen systems, in a race decided in favor of the Republican by just 369 votes. Later, she actively campaigned --- by placing leaflets in the polling place! --- to keep those touch-screen machines in use, despite that failure, and despite a measure on the ballot in the same election calling for a move to paper ballots.

Since the state now requires paper ballots, Dent chose to install the newest Diebold/Premier optical-scan systems, the ones that don't read blue ink properly, despite the fact that they had not been federally tested or certified for use at the time. Florida does not require federal certification tests for voting systems before using them.

Heckuva job --- as usual --- Kathy!

A big tactical move today by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in the Environment and Public Works Committee, which she chairs, in working around the Republican boycott this week of mark-up on the climate legislation bill. Very smart, and a big twist in that story as she's out-foxed the GOP stallers, obstructionists, and denialists! At least for now.

Check out Boxer's surprise move, and get caught up on where the roller coaster ride of climate legislation in the U.S. Senate stands for the moment, in today's Green News Report!

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IN TODAY'S AUDIO REPORT: The German Chancellor goes green in the U.S. Congress ... PLUS: Ups and downs, high drama, and a huge twist in the roller coaster of Senate climate legislation ... 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': America's Most Toxic Cities --- See where your city ranks!; California Lawmakers pass sweeping water legislation; Hunting for Tuna: The Environmental Peril Grows; Philippines targets $2.5 billion geothermal development; Canadian Government Powerless to Recall Toxic Toys; Farm Groups oppose EPA Review of Weed-killer Atrazine ... PLUS: The Snows of Kilimanjaro: going, going, gone ....

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

Guest Blogged by Frank Schaeffer

I grew up in a fundamentalist missionary family that in the 1970s and 80s morphed into my father's activity as one of the founders of the Religious Right. We would hobnob with Republican leaders from Ronald Reagan to Gerald Ford and the Bush family, Jack Kemp and many others. One day it dawned on me that the far right of the Republican Party --- in other words its base --- actually hates America.

The Religious Right reveled in rising crime statistics, "family breakdown" statistics, failing public schools and so forth. As I explain in my book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism), if crime started going down, or public school test results started going up --- without the country "turning back to Jesus" --- then that would prove that somehow "we" were wrong.

We wanted our country to fail because it had "turned away" from what we believed to be true.

Combined with the fact that we began to lose parts of the culture war, when it came to other Americans beginning to recognize gay rights, expanding women's rights, abortion rights and such, the Religious Right and the Republican Party infected gun-toting America with a chip on its shoulder about a mile wide. This led to the myth that "they" (fill in the blank, gays, Jews, blacks, liberals --- whatever) are "taking away our country from 'us'"...