[Ed Note: L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan was my guest on Wednesday night to discuss this report and its associated issues, as I am guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show again this week. The audio archive of that interview is now posted here. - BF]

-- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's office has issued a 5-page report on the complete failure I experienced while attempting to cast a ballot on the county's electronic voting system during this year's June 8th statewide primary.

The failures that I encountered last month --- as I detailed that night --- mirrored, almost exactly, those that occurred when I attempted to use the very same system, at the very same polling place, during the statewide primary in June of 2008 when the ES&S InkaVote Plus e-voting system that time had misprinted 4 out of 12 of my votes.

This time, it didn't misprint my ballot because I caught the problem --- on two separate machines --- before getting to the point where the system would have printed out my ballot. And this time, just as they concluded after a detailed investigation last time, L.A. County Registrar Dean Logan's office is chalking it up to, essentially, 'human error', in addition to limitations and inadequacies of the e-voting system itself...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

[Ed Note: Ernie Canning appeared as my guest on last night's Mike Malloy Show to discuss Feldman's conflicts-of-interest and the government's appeal described below. The audio archive of that interview can be heard here. - BF]

In a powerful and carefully-crafted 5th Circuit Court of Appeal motion [PDF] filed in Hornbeck Offshore Services vs. Salazar --- a motion which did not touch upon the question of whether U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman's substantial investments in the oil industry mandated a recusal --- the government argued that, in enjoining the Department of Interior's six month suspension of offshore drilling on just 33 "of the approximately 3,600 structures in the Gulf dedicated to offshore oil exploration and production," following the BP/Transocean Deepwater Horizon disaster, Judge Feldman abused his discretion by substituting his own personal judgment over matters that, by statute and federal regulations, are the province of federal officials.

The Department of Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement ("BOEMRE") have the legally mandated duty and authority to regulate such matters, the government is arguing.

"While Plaintiffs’ concerns appear limited to the next financial quarter," the motion explains, "[the Department of] Interior must ensure not only that OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] drilling operations are safe and secure but also that the Nation’s fisheries, coastal ecosystems, and other public lands continue to provide jobs, recreation opportunities, habitat for wildlife, healthy ecosystems, and economic resources for all of the public."

The appellate motion by federal officials calling for a stay of Judge Feldman's recent preliminary injunction on the exploratory drilling moratorium will be argued before a three-judge panel on Thursday...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below!]

We're back again tonight filling in as Guest Host on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show. We'll be BradCasting LIVE all this week from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Please join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in!

The LIVE chat room will be up and rolling again here at The BRAD BLOG during the show, so come on by for that as ya listen! (The Chat Room will open at the bottom of this item a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

So far scheduled for tonight's show...

• JUDGE VIC RAWL, Four-term South Carolina state legislator and circuit court judge, and recent Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate nomination until the state's 100% unverifiable ES&S e-voting system declared unknown, jobless candidate Alvin Greene the "winner" of the questionable election on June 8th. We'll discuss that, his extraordinary protest hearing before the state Democratic Party, and where he'll go from here after finding what he calls "systemic software problems" and a "lack of election integrity" in South Carolina.
• ERNEST CANNING, member of the California state bar since 1977, political scientist and, most importantly, a guest contributor to BradBlog.com, on the case for impeachment against deep water drilling moratorium Judge Martin Feldman.
• PLUS: Other stuff on my mind and yours via calls at 877-520-1150, tweets to @TheBradBlog, a likely visit from the lovely DESI DOYEN of the Green News Report and whatever else comes up between here and there...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates around the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show. Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: A damned fine show, if I do say so myself. But you'll let me know if I'm wrong. All of it recorded and posted for posterity in audio archives (and even chat archives) below...

Tom Ricks, author of the best-sellers Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 and The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, on the June 27, 2010 Meet the Press after arguing to Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) that leaving Afghanistan now would lead to an "endless war" ("I think if you want an endless war, Congresswoman, leave Afghanistan right now, and you'll find us having to go after al-Qaeda again and again there for decades."):

Um, yeah. Bingo. (On the "alternative fuels" part, not the 'can't leave now' part.)

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: A solar boost from Obama; Tarballs in Texas; And a blimp to the rescue... PLUS: Record heat hits Northeast and climate scientists exonerated --- AGAIN --- but climate change deniers still report it this way [cue: crickets] ... 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): How does sewage treatment actually work?; Political protests over fuel costs idle much of India; Scrubbing CO2 from atmosphere would be a long-term commitment; China sentences Tibetan environmentalist to five years in prison; China fears consumer impact of growing middle-class on global warming; Judges nuke Obama's plan to dump Yucca Mtn. dump; Detergent industry does the "impossible" --- adopts voluntary ban on phosphates ...PLUS: Retrofitting suburbia: The task at hand? ...

[UPDATED with audio archives from tonight's show at bottom.]

I'll be filling in as Guest Host on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show LIVE all this week from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 9pm-Midnight ET (6p-9p PT). Hope you'll join us for the mid-summer festivities by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in!

As usual, our LIVE chat room will be up and operating here at The BRAD BLOG during the show, so I hope you'll join us for that as well! (The Chat Room will open below a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

So far scheduled for tonight's show...

• GOV. DON SIEGELMAN, Former Governor Alabama, prosecuted for "bribery" and "honest-services fraud" by Karl Rove and the politicized Bush DoJ, on last week's U.S. Supreme Court rulings which vacated his absurd conviction, and remanded it back to the 11th Circuit Appellate Court, on where his case goes from here.
• MAC MCCLELLAND, Mother Jones' human rights reporter/blogger joins us LIVE from the Gulf where she's been covering the BP oil disaster, and the continuing efforts to keep media from covering the ongoing devastation.
• PLUS: Other stuff on my mind --- and on yours via your calls at 877-520-1150, your tweets to @TheBradBlog, and whatever else comes up between here and there...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates around the country and also on Sirius Ch. 146 & XM Ch. 167. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or via MikeMalloy.com.

Click here to jump into our LIVE Chat Room during the show. Or just see below!...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Once again, three hours flew by! The audio archives follow below, along with the archives of the chat room if you'd like to listen and read along at the same time!...

It's slightly inside baseball, but the laugh should be worth the quick trip here. So, in short, if you're not familiar with the backstory: Conservative Libertarian-ish journalist/blogger Dave Weigel was recently forced to resign from his new job at the Washington Post covering the "conservative" movement, after rightwingers released stolen, off-the-record emails from a private listserv called "JournoList", set up many years ago by Washington Post journalist/blogger Ezra Klein for random discussion and kibutzing between center to center-left progressive and liberal journalists. The selectively quoted Weigel emails included some snarky (if pretty funny) comments about some of the wingnuts he is forced to cover on his beat.

In the ensuing brouhaha, and shameful response by WaPo, Klein decided to shut down JournoList entirely and delete its archives so they couldn't be further used to selectively "ACORN" other members of the list. (For the record, no, we've never been a member of that email list.)

Thereafter, Rightwing sleaze-monger, Republican operative, opportunist and conspiracy theorist Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 to anyone who anonymously gave him the entire JournoList archives.

So far, there have been no takers, but it looks like Breitbart may now owe our friend Skippy the Bush Kangaroo at least part of that $100k! Check out Skippy at what may perhaps be his absolute --- and most high-larious --- best...

While Skippy does a fine job of making Breitbart look like a jackass in the highly recommended link above, in truth Breitbart doesn't need much help. If you missed it the first time, don't miss this exclusive video interview with Breitbart that we ran a few months ago, during the height of exposing his ACORN "Pimp" Hoax scam. The video is reposted below for your convenience...

Taking a break this year from our annual re-publication of the Declaration of Independence, to offer instead some of our favorite Independence Day/Weekend tweets so far this year. For the record, you can follow The BRAD BLOG on Twitter right here: @TheBradBlog. Hope you all have a safe and happy 4th! --- Brad

From @WestWingReport:

From @JamisonFoser:

From @OTOOLEFAN:

From @OTOOLEFAN:

From @RepJackKimble:

Guest Blogged by Sue Wilson

Just days after resigning as Chairman of the Tea Party Express, Mark Williams, former talk show host at Sacramento's KFBK radio, began encouraging people to file claims for the BP fund which is being set up to provide financial assistance to those damaged by the Gulf oil spill. He's not just encouraging residents of the Gulf or those who do business with Gulf Coast fisheries to file claims; he is encouraging everyone in the country to file a claim against BP, and brags about having done so himself.

Williams asserts on his blog, MarkTalk.com, that in so filing, people are not stealing. He writes, "You are only recouping some of your own money that the Obama regime is stealing from you to redistribute," and he cites fund administrator Ken Feinberg as telling people "we should '...all file a claim…' because specific criteria for valid claims has not yet been set."

He further writes, "Let's show the Marxists who occupy our government and their flying monkey supporters what life under socialism is really like when the productive stop producing and join the gravy train."

The BP fund, according to a conversation I had with Feinberg's office this week, "is paid entirely by BP." Even the administration of the fund is paid by the private corporation which caused the spill. "There are no merits to claim that U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill."

Nonetheless, Williams describes the fund as run by "Marxists", constituting "life under socialism", and as nothing short of a "gravy train". Yet, oddly enough, it's the "conservative" Mark Williams, whose agenda could lead to the waste of untold numbers of tax-payer dollars...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"Fact, the world has divided into rich and poor as at no time in our history," warns Maude Barlowe, head of the Council of Canadians and a founder of the Blue Planet Project.

"Fact, global climate change is rapidly advancing, claiming at least 300,000 lives and $125 billion in damages every year," she says. "Called the silent crisis, climate change is melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban centers. Almost every victim lives in the Global South in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and not represented here at the summit."

Speaking out as a counterpoint to last week's billion dollar, G-20 Summit, whose leaders she referred to as a "global royalty, who have more in common with one another than they do with their own citizens," and as leaders who came to Toronto with an agenda which offers "more of the bad medicine that made the world sick in the first place—environmental deregulation, unbridled financial speculation, unlimited growth, unregulated free trade, relentless resource exploitation, tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to Social Security and a war on working people," Barlowe delivered a must-see, fact-filled condemnation of a bleak economic and ecological future that is at the heart of what she described as "savage capitalism."

The video and text transcript of excerpts from Barlowe's powerful "Savage Capitalism" speech, courtesy of the July 2nd, 2010 Democracy Now!, follow below...

Fox "News" Channel has been using this grossly distorted, incorrectly named and deceptively skewed chart on a number of its "news" shows of late...

But the chart is entirely, utterly, and reprehensibly misleading, as well as, yes, flat out wrong. In truth, here is an actual chart of U.S. job losses (and gains) since December of 2007:

But that's not all that's wrong with the chart at the top that the liars at Fox are using to deceive the chumps who watch (and believe in) the garbage they're being given under the knowingly false name of "News". Not by a long shot.

See Media Matters' for more eye-popping, visual, demonstrable, independently verifiable facts about this latest of utter lies from the shameless America-haters at Fox "News".

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: BP Disaster now Worst Ever in the Gulf --- and worse than any of us can imagine; BP was ready for walruses, but not hurricanes; John Kerry, ready as ever to compromise... PLUS: Baby it's hot outside, around the world --- and on Capitol Hill ... 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): Solar-powered plane set for pioneering night flight; U.S. fines BP for underpayment of gas royalties to Indian tribes; Dengue fever re-emerges in U.S.; Fossil fuel subsidies dwarf global clean energy; Fisker to build electric cars in old GM plant; Asia gripped by water crisis; Fannie & Freddie derail home energy retrofit incentives; New Zealand implement Emissions Trading; Arctic hyper-sensitive to global warming ...PLUS: Green Up your Red, White & Blue! Tips to have your greenest July 4th evah! ...

"...[W]ithout full transparency of results, this fraud would not have been uncovered." - Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos founder, 6/29/10

There's an interesting bit of news today --- ironically enough, from Daily Kos --- which underscores the importance of citizen access to, and transparency of, election data, at least if anyone ever hopes to be able to root out and/or discover fraud, be it in elections or virtually anything else.

I say "ironically enough," because Daily Kos --- including both its founder Markos Moulitsas and a number of its front-page writers --- have, for years at their site, poo-pooed concerns about election fraud and e-voting by disinforming their readers about the very serious concerns presented by the disastrous election system used in most of the U.S. By marginalizing such concerns as little more than "conspiracy theory," they have continued to ill-serve both their readers' and their own self-interest (that of electing Democrats to office) in the bargain.

More, in a moment, on today's news from Kos himself, accidentally underscoring the long disservice his site has offered to readers on the e-voting front. But first, a personal incident involving hamburgers yesterday also serves to underscore, yet again, a related issue, and why hand-marked paper ballots --- and actually bothering to count them --- is an absolute imperative for Election Integrity...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!
IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Hurricane season in the Gulf begins with a BP bang; Saving the BP baby turtles ... PLUS: Impeaching the BP judge? ... 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): "Climategate" Continues To Sputter Out; G20 protests focus on Canada's mining and tar sands; Uranium mining health effects linger, even 30 years later; Antarctic crustaceans in peril? Jet Hypermiling across the Atlantic saves fuel; Potentially Harmful Chemicals Used in Pa. Drilling; New mine safety legislation unveiled ...PLUS: The other oil spill: Millions of gallons oil spilled on CO lands...

Near the end of an article today on an investigation now underway by South Carolina officials into how the unknown, unemployed Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Alvin Greene was able to afford the state's $10,440 filing fee to get on the ballot in the first place, the Associated Press quickly summarizes the "multiple theories" forwarded to speculate on how it was that Greene could have garnered a 59 to 41% "victory" over former state legislator and Circuit Judge Vic Rawl in the recent Democratic U.S. primary:

I guess there were just no other possible "theories" for Greene's still inexplicable "victory". Nothing that AP could come up with --- nothing at all to inform readers about --- despite the recent, official, formal five-hour hearing, filled with evidence and actual experts, at that "protest lodged by Rawl."

So, it must have been the "e" at the end of Greene's name that made more than 100,000 South Carolinians vote for a man who never campaigned and who they never heard of. Yeah, that must have been it.

In related news, I've officially changed my name to Brad Friedmane and am hereby announcing my candidacy for President of the United States in 2012. I hope this notice serves to get me elected, as it's the only campaigning I will be doing between now and then. Should be more than enough though. Measuring the Oval Office for drapes even as we speak.