Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Yesterday, The President said that he "declassified the NIE" because he wanted people "to see the truth" about intelligence used to bolster the case for war on Iraq.

The corporate media dutifully reported The President's misleading remarks without correcting his misinformation. The Bush Administration is built on lies and, yesterday, Bush added another lie.

MSNBC's Countdown correctly points out that only specific parts of the NIE were leaked to a few sympathetic reporters. The leaked information provided a defense for statements the President made that exaggerated Iraq's desire to acquire nuclear weapons. Other parts of the same NIE that was not given to reporters, show that the leaked information was false.

In fact, the President had been informed multiple times that the information leaked from the NIE to defend his statements about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were "baseless". In short, the President knew that false information was being used to discredit Joe Wilson.

Yesterday, Bush knew that he was misleading Americans by saying that he released the discredited NIE intel because he wanted people "to see the truth." The same lie is being told over and over again and the corporate media refuses to call the President on it.

In this video, Keith Olbermann, Joe Wilson and David Shuster do not hesitate to point out the twisted intelligence, misinformation and outright lies of the Bush Administration. Playing time is about 10 minutes.

Read this if you're not up to date on the story so far. More coming on Tuesday...

In the meantime, we're happy to point to Clint Curtis' recent statement lauding Palm Beach County Florida Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson for taking action so far in this matter. Said Curtis, noting the irony of it all, "many Floridians...still recall Ms. Coulter calling our elderly voters 'hapless' and our statutory recount process 'a subterfuge for fraud, error and outright theft' during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election."

(And if you're not up to date on the Clint Curtis story either...where have you been? Please read this. Thank you.)

UPDATE: Complete Exclusive, including Ann Coulter's Florida Voter Registration Application --- on which she lied about her "Legal Residence" is now here...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Wolf Blitzer interviewed former Ambassador Joe Wilson this afternoon during CNN's Situation Room. Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, have been victims of a Bush Administration effort to stop the American people from learning that intelligence was twisted and misused to lead the country to war on Iraq.

Bush ordered that parts of the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) be used to rebut a New York Times op-ed written by Joe Wilson. Wilson charged that the administration had had purposefully used baseless intelligence to inflate Iraq's nuclear ambitions.

Today, during a Q&A session with students, Bush said that he had released information from the NIE because he wanted people "to see the truth". In this interview, Joe Wilson sets the record straight by pointing out that the President only released part of the NIE to rebut Wilson's charge. If The President had wanted the people "to see the truth" then he would have also released other parts of the NIE which expressed serious doubts about the information Bush used to rebut Wilson's charge. In fact, by releasing more information which he knew to be faulty, George Bush just fed Americans another lie.

This video contains Wolf Blitzers' complete interview with Joe Wilson. It runs about 10 minutes. Wilson does a great job explaining some of the nuances of the case. He talks fast so you might want to watch it twice.

More on the Phone-Jamming charges against (so-far) Republican officials. The matter now seems to be reaching into the White House as reported by AP:

Read the full story for many more details, but it should be noted that the White House hired Tobin to work their North-Eastern regional campaign in 2004 even after they already knew he was under investigation for the 2002 charges. He was only asked to leave his '04 post once the reports of the '02 investigation became public knowledge.

(Hat tip to RAW STORY.)

Working on several items, so we'll defer to RAW STORY's coverage of the story.

Suffice to say, Karl Rove spoke to Republican lawyers this weekend (carried on C-SPAN) and thanked them for their work ensuring "clean elections" in 2000 and 2004.

He singled out Mark F. "Thor" Hearne by name. Hearne was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. who, along with RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, created the so-called non-partisan "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR) just three days before being called to testify before Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) U.S. House Administrative Committee hearing in March of 2005 on the Ohio Election. The front group, which declared tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, has still failed, to our knowledge, to disclose any information of it's funders or proof of their 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan status. They operate out of a PO Box in Houston, TX, though neither of their founders live in Texas.

ACVR was the only "Voting Rights" group called by Ney to testify at the hearings, and identified himself only as a "longtime advocate of voter rights" in his testimony. He failed to mention his connections to Bush/Cheney '04 Inc.

Hearne and ACVR have done little more since they opened shop beyond creating propaganda reports to suggest that their is an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud in the country to encourage state legislatures around the country to implement Democratic voter disenfranchising "Photo ID requirements" at the polls. Their charges of a voter fraud epidemic has been roundly disproven in various court cases around the country. (Though it does appear that at least one voter, Ann Coulter, seems to have engaged in voter fraud lately.)

The "non-partisan" Dyke went on to work for the White House to flak for John Roberts during his Supreme Court nomination, and now works out Dick Cheney's office.

Ney, who pushed the so-called "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA) through Congress in 2002 --- the bill which urges all States and Counties in the country to impliment hackable electronic voting machines by 2006 --- recently stepped down from his chairmanship of the House Admin Committee after being named in the on-going Jack Abramoff investigations. His former chief of staff, David DiStefano is Diebold's main lobbyist in congress, as BRAD BLOG reported in January, and Diebold has made thousands of dollars in so-far unexplained payments to Abramoff's old firm, Greeburg Traurig.

See RAW's story for Rove's comments about Hearne and the other "non-partisan" GOP attorneys over the weekend.

For more information on the "non-partisan" tax-exempt ACVR scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney '04 National General Counsel Mark F. "Thor" Hearne and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG's full Special Coverage of the "American Center for Voting Rights" at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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On April 7th, Wired News first reported on a class action lawsuit filed against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). AT&T is accused of allowing the NSA to monitor phone and internet communications without a warrant.

An AT&T whistleblower, Mark Klein, has come forward with testimony and documentation. Klein provides specific details about how the spying program intercepted AT&T customer communications. The NSA installed "secret rooms" in AT&T switching centers throughout the country. Live communications signals are split off into the secret room. Powerful data-mining computers installed in the room can sift through the millions of live signals.

CNN put together this short video report including comments by an EFF attorney.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Today after giving another Iraq/War-on-Terror PR speech at Johns Hopkins International Studies School, President Bush took questions from students in the audience. When compared with recent Q&A sessions, the President appeared to be relaxed to the point of laughing off the some of the tougher questions.

Bush may have offered a little bit more information about his role in using the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for political retribution. He was asked how future intelligence employees could trust the Executive Office in light of the Plame Wilson case. Bush responded that he had declassified the NIE "for a reason" but refused to say much more.

This video has about 8 minutes of clips from The President's Q&A session.

By John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Normally this space is taken with my ideas of what are the "Top 5" voting news stories for the week. Today I am going to use this space to talk about what I see as the beginning of a disaster in the making with our elections. This isn't the election fraud that some point to when they talk about the vendors and some elections officials. It's not about recounts or audits. This is a real, get your hands around it, happening problem that will disrupt our election process if we do not do something about it now. While we have been involved in all of our issues about Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or "touch-screen") voting machines or paper ballots the electronic voting machine vendors have been wreaking complete havoc across the country.

So far this year two states have conducted primary elections. In Texas there is at least one candidate who has stepped forward and has challenged the election because of anomalies in vote counts and known voting machine failures. One county's machines counted some votes up to 6 times which resulted in approximately 100,000 more votes being counted than were cast. Though the vendor, Hart Intercivic, initially blamed the problem on human error, they finally had to admit that it was a programming error and not poll workers or voters who had erred. In Illinois some county officials are threatening to withhold final payment of funds on contracts with Sequoia Voting Systems because of failures with their machines that ended with results in the primary not being known for over a week after the voters went to the polls. In both states the involved vendors were very successful in the media with deflecting the blame from their machines to "human errors" or "glitches". However, when you listen to people who were there and who saw and worked through the problems you get a very different picture...

We haven't been able to cover it at all until now with so much going on, but the latest ad by VelvetRevolution.us which ran a couple of weeks ago in the Op/Ed section of WaPo hit such a chord we were able to raise the money to run a similar version of the ad in last week's NY Times.

(DISCLOSURE: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR)

The ad, which focuses on Bush's recent drumbeating and chest thumping for a War on Iran in light of his plummeting poll ratings (haven't we seen this bad movie before?), brought still more interesting reaction in it's second incarnation. More on that in a second.

We're kind of tired, at VR, of being out in front of so many of these issues (Election Reform, Media Reform, Downing Street Memos, getting Out of Iraq, Accountability for Bush/Cheney) before the media and the politicians figure it out. But now it seems that's where we are again. For an example, see Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article just out, which reports the Bush Administration "has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack."

As if that's not disturbing enough, Hersh's article, as well as another report today from WaPo points out such an air attack is being planned to include the use of tactical nuclear weapons! Hello?!

Rather than waiting until after it's a done deal, as with Iraq, the time to push back is now. Especially since Fox "News", as David Edwards reported this morning, is already back in their reliable embedded position for the Bush Administration and this morning were all too happy to smear Hersch on the air.

Most of the reaction to VR's ads on Iran have been extremely supportive. And then there was this postcard we received late last week...

FRONT:

BACK:

Oh, well. Can't please 'em all. (And we're still trying to figure out that "ADL ISLAMIC" comment which seems a tad oxymoronic to us, but what do we know about Christianity?)

If you'd like to piss off other good "Christians" like our big fan above, please donate generously to VR so we can continuing spreading the love --- and getting the word out to the public about what's really going on here! --- through more such campaigns in the future.

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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In a recent article, published by the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh presents Bush Administration plans to take military action against Iran. According to Hersh, high ranking members of the Administration are advocating the use of nuclear weapons in an initial air strike on Iran.

This morning, Fox News anchors attempted to trash Hersh's reputation and defended the use of nuclear weapons on Iran.

Had a hoot sitting in as Guest Host for my buddy Peter B. Collins last Thursday on KRXA in Monterey (and a few other affiliates). If you didn't catch the show live, please enjoy the archives below as you see fit. Some fun, and occasionally harrowing, interviews here for your listening pleasure...

HOUR 1 [MP3]
BRAD rants on the state of our electoral system meltdown and interviews FAIZ SHAKIR, of the Center for American Progress, on the breaking news that day of Bush revealed as the Leaker-in-Chief.

HOUR 2 [MP3]
A full hour-long interview with the great and high-larious cartoonist/blogger, TOM TOMORROW of This Modern World. On tooning, on blogging, on his new book, Hell in a Handbasket (please buy it!) and on the most obnoxious bumper music I could possibly find --- Also he points us to a 2003 strip he did on the horror that is Diebold Electronic Voting Machines.

HOUR 3 [MP3]
First half-hour, Emery County, Utah's 23-year elected County Clerk, BRUCE FUNK, on being locked out of his office after having the temerity to allow an independent examination of Diebold's touch-screen voting machines in his county. He explains the harrowing details of what was found and what has happened to him since. Don't miss this one, especially if you haven't yet heard his story. You can send a note of support for him right here...

Second half-hour, the legendary ED ASNER --- Lou Grant himself --- on Hollywood and Politics, his encounter with Ronald Reagan and all other manner of stuff. Includes Asner telling Brad to "Shut up!" What more could ya want?! Enjoy!

Tom Tomorrow (real name, Dan Perkins, by the way) of This Modern World was a guest of mine on ThursdayThe Peter B. Collins Show where I was Guest Hosting. (Audio archives posted here.).

After complimenting him on his keen ability to reflect the current zeitgeist well ahead of anyone else, I asked him how he chooses his topic. His answer, paraphrased, whatever he happens to find funny. I asked if he found anything funny about Electronic Voting Machines.

Apparently he did. And, as usual, long before most of us understood the true nature of the threat to democracy posed by these god-awful machines. He pointed me to this Halloween strip originally published on 10/23/03 (notice the name on the computer monitor)...

No wonder he calls himself Tom Tomorrow...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Yesterday our friends at OpEdNews.Com featured an article that includes an interview with the former CEO of AccuPoll, a voting machine vendor that recently went bankrupt. In the article by Sean Greene of electionline.org the CEO, Dennis Vadura is quoted as saying:

Now, finally, an industry insider and 'mover-and-shaker' has stepped forward to echo what many of us have been saying for the past two or three years. The remaining vendors are doing all they can to prove that Mr. Vadura is right. That fact is borne out by the following two stories:

In Nebraska, home state for Elections Systems and Software (and home of one of the owners of this private corporation, Omaha World-Herald), 69 of 93 counties do not have their paper ballots for early voting even though early voting began on Monday. Nebraska joins Indiana and other states that are not able to conduct elections because ES&S cannot provide the ballots that they are contractually responsible to deliver. In defense of it's partially owned subsidiary, the World-Herald misinforms it's readers with this gem:

There is no new type of ballot required by HAVA and there is no standardized form for optical scanners. This is all just hype to cover-up for the failure of ES&S to do its job.

In another indication of a vendor's failure to meet its contractual duties, the Richmond (IN) Palladium-Item reports that Fidlar Elections, a mid-west representative for Diebold, has failed to deliver paper ballots to 11 Indiana counties that can be read by optical-scanners. The state's mandated absentee voting (early voting) began on Monday and the bad ballots were not reported until Tuesday so all voters who voted on Monday are now being given an opportunity to vote again, when good ballots are received.

Quality control? Apparently not, after all its just elections. As Mr. Vadura correctly states, "You just have to look at the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances".

Yesterday our friends at OpEdNews.Com featured an article that includes an interview with the former CEO of AccuPoll, a voting machine vendor that recently went bankrupt. In the article by Sean Greene of electionline.org the CEO, Dennis Vadura is quoted as saying:

Now, finally, an industry insider and 'mover-and-shaker' has stepped forward to echo what many of us have been saying for the past two or three years. The remaining vendors are doing all they can to prove that Mr. Vadura is right. That fact is borne out by the following two stories:

In Nebraska, home state for Elections Systems and Software (and home of one of the owners of this private corporation, Omaha World-Herald), 69 of 93 counties do not have their paper ballots for early voting even though early voting began on Monday. Nebraska joins Indiana and other states that are not able to conduct elections because ES&S cannot provide the ballots that they are contractually responsible to deliver. In defense of it's partially owned subsidiary, the World-Herald misinforms it's readers with this gem:

There is no new type of ballot required by HAVA and there is no standardized form for optical scanners. This is all just hype to cover-up for the failure of ES&S to do its job.

In another indication of a vendor's failure to meet its contractual duties, the Richmond (IN) Palladium-Item reports that Fidlar Elections, a mid-west representative for Diebold, has failed to deliver paper ballots to 11 Indiana counties that can be read by optical-scanners. The state's mandated absentee voting (early voting) began on Monday and the bad ballots were not reported until Tuesday so all voters who voted on Monday are now being given an opportunity to vote again, when good ballots are received.

Quality control? Apparently not, after all its just elections. As Mr. Vadura correctly states, "You just have to look at the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances".

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Yesterday, Mr. Bush delivered another Iraq War PR speech which was sponsored by the nonpartisan World Affairs Council of Charlotte at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina.

After the speech, Bush accepted questions from the audience. Harry Taylor shamed The President with his question. Taylor mentioned NSA domestic spying, detaining Americans with being charged, policies that hurt the enviroment. Taylor told Bush that he was ashamed of the U.S. Government. Taylor finished his question by saying, "I would hope you have, from time to time, the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself... inside yourself."

In this video, Soledad O'Brien interviews Harry Taylor about his televised of berating President Bush.