As posted by NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, which explains the above as follows:

[Hat-tip and Happy Mothers Day to BRAD BLOG reader CA.]

Earlier this year, The BRAD BLOG offered an exclusive exposé on how one Registrar of Voters in Fresno County, CA almost single-handedly put a stop to the attempted statewide post-election hand-count of last November's failed Prop 37 (the ballot initiative which, if it had prevailed, would have required Genetically Modified Foods to be labeled as such when sold on store shelves.)

The count was stopped by the outrageous, seemingly arbitrary, and almost certainly illegal cost being charged for the hand-count, as solely determined by Fresno County's Registrar Brandi Orth. (She was attempting to charge some $4,000/day to hand count ballots in her county, versus $600/day in Orange County and $500/day in Sierra County, where the Prop 37 proponents had already been able to successfully hand-count ballots in their attempt to authenticate the computer-reported results in those counties.)

At the time, we pointed out the need for standardized pricing for such post-election counts in California (and anywhere else where that is not already the practice) in order to keep Registrar's from inappropriately using, or appearing to use, their extraordinary power to block such post-election initiatives with the arbitrary pricing for "recounts".

A few weeks later, we highlighted another case where a post-election contest in California was called off, this time a race for Mayor in Stanislaus County's town of Riverbank, when the Registrar there had been charging what amounted to some $2,000 an hour to the candidate who was reported by the computer count to have lost her election by just 53 votes.

Now, Bev Harris of Black Box Voting offers an interesting, amusing, and maddening short tale that dovetails with both of those stories: An election itself that seems to have been blocked --- one that would have determined the balance of power on the Riverbank City Council (the very same city where the Mayoral hand-count was recently called off) --- because the price being charged to the City Council by the Stanislaus County Registrar (the very same Registrar who was charging the candidate $2,000/hour for the Mayoral "recount" there), was exorbitant, and, once accepted anyway, was a day late for the state deadline, according to the County.

"Stanislaus County first quoted the ridiculous fee to hold the election," Harris told me, "and when Riverbank agreed to move ahead, Stanislaus County then said it was too late to do so, by one day." In this case, keeping the City Council from holding their election at all, had they not found a workaround (in this case, contracting a private firm to hold the election, rather than relying on the County, and hand-counting the single race election, rather than computer-tallying it), would have had serious political repercussions for the town.

See Bev's story for the full details, on what the City Council in the 4 square mile town has decided to do in order to fill their vacant seat to end an existing 2-2 deadlock on the Council --- and how the entire matter might well be blamed on the town's White boys...

This pretend "scandal" is still going on, still makes no sense, and is still no less stupid now than it was last year when the Republican Party foolishly thought it would somehow be their key to winning the White House.

If you've been trying to make sense of this still pretend "scandal", this is just about the best explanation of it that I've seen to date. Please proceed, Mr. Stewart...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Senate GOP walks out, obstructs Obama's EPA nominee; OMB says EPA regulations pay off 10 to 1; Honeybee losses accelerate in US while feds stall on action; Another coal export terminal bites the dust in OR; PLUS: Shocker: Consumer Reports has a new all-time favorite car... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): "God won't save us": Sen. Whitehouse blasts GOP "magical thinking"; China cracks down on US trash exports; Debunking out-of-date clean energy conventional "wisdom"; Disease ravaging Africa's staple food crop; Crater reveals troubling future of global warming; US envoy's floats new climate treaty plan; BPA may lower testosterone; Leak shuts down MI nuke plant; Good news - Greenland melt rate to slow ... PLUS: Warning: Even in the best-case scenario, climate change will kick our asses ... and much, MUCH more! ...

It might be funny, but for the fact that beating back the Internet Voting virus --- even here in California, where it is Democrats who are being dumb enough to push for it, despite warnings from virtually every world-class computer scientist and security expert in the world that it's an insane, non-solvable idea --- but it appears that voting for NBC's show The Voice may have been hacked this week.

According to a statement from NBC tonight:

Here is how Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org just described what happened at the top of tonight's show in an email to a group of Election Integrity folks...

Whenever there is an e-voting failure, corporate mainstream media tends to downplay it as little more than a "glitch", "hiccup", "snag", or "snafu". So far tonight, they haven't disappointed in their gentle descriptions of the failure that seems to have struck The Voice's voting procedures...

Today on the KPFK/Pacifica BradCast:

My take on what happened in the 100% unverifiable Mark Sanford "victory" over Elizabeth Colbert Busch in South Carolina's Special Election for the U.S. House on Tuesday; How the media are pulling "an Iraq" all over again on the supposed use of chemical weapons in Syria; a bunch of great callers (including one who completely disagrees with me on Internet Voting); Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report; and all of the Jodi Arias and Benghazi news you will ever need!...

Download MP3 or listen online below...

Not for nothing, but this article is number 10,000 at The BRAD BLOG. That's right, we've now filed some 10,000 items on these pages since January of 2004, as our 10th year of investigative journalism, blogging, trouble-making and muckraking continues. (I say "some 10,000" because there are certainly several score or more over the years that never got published for one reason or another.)

I had been planning to run another mini-fundraiser of late, to try and add some fumes to our bone dry gas tank, so today's 10k landmark seems as good a reason as any.

My plan: if we can just raise $2 for each blog item we've run over the past ten years, that should keep us in pretty good stead through the end of the year! Given our history of fundraisers, however, I suspect we'll be able to raise the tiniest fraction of that at best, and I'll have to bother you all again in the near future. That's what happens without corporate money, foundational money or political partisan money. I hope you understand.

So, for now, if you're able to spare $2 or $20 or $200 for the tip-jar, to help support what we've done during almost 10 years and 10,000 articles, I would very much welcome it!

You can contribute with either a credit card or PayPal at the link above (and below). Alternately, snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" is always very welcome and much-need too.

Alternately, if you are able, monthly sustaining subscriptions of any amount are very much appreciated and quick and easy to create, via credit card or PayPal, as you prefer, to help keep us alive year round! (For amounts other than those in the drop-down box below, please see the form in the light blue box mid-way down our right sidebar where you can specify any number you wish!)

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My thanks for whatever support you can offer. And now on to 10,001...

Just after the March primaries for the U.S. House Special Election in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, the race between Democratic candidate Elizabeth Colbert Busch (Stephen Colbert's sister) and disgraced former Republican Gov. Mark Sanford was said to be "a toss-up", according to surveys by Public Policy Polling (PPP), one of the most accurate polling firms across the entire country during the 2012 President Election cycle. They had Colbert Busch up by 2 points over Sanford in that early pre-election poll.

Just over two weeks ago, as news broke that Sanford was due to appear in court after his ex-wife claimed he had been caught trespassing at her home, PPP found that Colbert Busch's lead had expanded to 9 points in the race.

Over the weekend, in their final polling, PPP found the gap had closed, and Sanford was leading by 1 point in a race they described, one again, as "a toss-up".

Tonight, South Carolina's same 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems that declared the unknown, unemployed, never-once-campaigned-anywhere Alvin Green to have somehow defeated four-term state legislator and circuit court judge Vic Rawl to win the 2010 Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, declared Mark Sanford the winner over Elizabeth Colbert Busch by a 9 point landslide...

The unverified and unverifiable computer-reported results tonight led PPP's Tom Jensen to tweet: "I feel bad about our SC-1 polling, I'd feel worse if there had been any indication from any other polling that Sanford landslide was coming".

Neither Jensen nor PPP should feel bad. There was no more indication that a "landslide was coming", than there is proof tonight that it actually came.

We explained last month, in detail, why the votes cast in this race on SC's oft-failed, easily-manipulated ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system would be 100% unverifiable. As Vic Rawl, a Colbert Busch supporter and the man who inexplicably "lost" to Alvin Green told us at the time, no matter what the results would be tonight, no matter how inexplicable they might be, "the fact is, there's not a darn thing that anybody can do about it."

While it's completely possible that PPP's pre-election numbers were entirely wrong, or that the disgraced Sanford legitimately, somehow, achieved an 18 point turnaround in just two weeks, the voters of SC will never know one way or another if he did or didn't. Once again, we have another 100% unverifiable faith-based election in the world's once-greatest democracy.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Amid early wildfires, CA Governor Brown warns climate change is getting expensive and deadly; Record fine in natural gas pipeline explosion; JPMorgan accused of Enron-style energy market manipulation; It's official: 2012 the 9th hottest year on record; PLUS: Rightwingers buy money-saving lightbulbs - unless it helps the environment... All that and plenty of Fox 'News' bashing in today's Green News Report!

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At the beginning of last month, The BRAD BLOG explained in detail why it was that, no matter who South Carolina's 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems declare to be the winner of tomorrow's special election for the U.S. House, there is virtually nothing that either supporters of Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D) or of former Gov. Mark Sanford (R), can do about it.

If there are questions about the results, too bad. The state of SC doesn't care. They don't want citizens to be able to oversee their own elections. The results will be 100% unverifiable as determined in secret by computers --- at least for those votes cast on election day at the polls, versus those cast on paper via absentee ballots.

The voting systems in use on Tuesday, as we noted in our previous article, will be the same ones which inexplicably declared the unknown, unemployed, non-campaigning Alvin Greene to be the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate over the veteran state legislator and former circuit court judge Vic Rawl back in 2010. That race shouldn't have even been close. It was thought to be Rawl's in a rout, prior to the results being announced by the computer voting systems, which had a different idea.

Tomorrow's election, however, despite the 1st Congressional District having gone for Romney over Obama in a big way in 2012, is believed to be very close, according to pre-election polls.

When we wrote our April article, Colbert Busch (Stephen Colbert's sister) was seen to be barely leading the disgraced Sanford, in what was described by Public Policy Polling (PPP) as "a toss up" at the time...

[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

So, wait. It wasn't the Syrian regime, but rather the Syrian rebels who used sarin nerve gas recently? That's the story being reported tonight by Reuters, from actually named sources among U.N. investigators. But will anybody notice? Or, with Israeli airstrikes already under way, and the neo-cons already demanding another new war, is the news too little, too late...again?

The week before last, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, reading from a letter sent by the White House to Congress, announced that the Administration believes that the Syrian government recently used chemical weapons against its own people. If true, it would be a move which President Obama had previously described as a "red line" and a "game changer" in the Administration's policy on the two-year old civil war still raging in that country.

Hagel's statement was somewhat measured [emphasis added]: "Our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin."

A few days later, during a Presidential press conference, Obama himself was also measured, even back-tracking somewhat on the claim that it was "the Syrian regime" which used the chemical weapon, as Hagel had initially announced, setting off "Breaking News!" tweets around the globe.

"What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don't know how they were used, when they were used, who used them. We don't have a chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened," the President said, seemingly responsibly. "And when I am making decisions about America's national security and the potential for taking additional action in response to chemical weapon use, I've got to make sure I've got the facts."

He went on to decry "rushing to judgement without hard, effective evidence," that he planned to work with "neighboring countries to...establish a clear baseline of facts", and that he had "called on the United Nations to investigate."

But the war genie was already out of the bottle. At least for many in both the corporate media and the neo-con Right...

These guys recently called me "a gatekeeper". That's not fair. I run these messages because they are important, not because The Empire tells me to. That part is just incidental.

An ambitious election reform bill supported by state Democrats and the Colorado County Clerks Association, which is largely made up of Republicans, will soon land on the desk of Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, despite the objections of Republican lawmakers and the state's extraordinarily partisan Republican Sec. of State.

The bill has now been approved by both chambers of the Colorado legislature --- along party lines in each --- but must be approved again in the House due to "technical" amendments from the Senate. But while it may be too late, partisans and lawmakers would have been wise to look carefully before leaping in support of this bill which offers both excellent reforms and reasons to be very concerned about one of its central provisions.

John Tomasic of the Colorado Independent offered a detailed report earlier this week on the major concerns and somewhat confusing partisan divides on both sides of this particular piece of legislation.

There's a lot of good, long-overdue provisions in the sweeping, 126-page bill [PDF] (mercifully summarized on pages 2 through 4). The key provisions --- and main points of contention --- are summarized this way by Tomasic:

Tomasic goes on to explain that the bill, dubbed "The Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act", is sponsored by Democrats in both the CO House and Senate, but it's "based on a plan approved by a large bipartisan majority of clerks who run the state's elections county to county. The Colorado County Clerks Association reports that 75 percent of the 64 clerks in the state support the bill. The Association is anything but a left-wing cabal: At least 44 of the clerks, some 70 percent, are Republican officeholders."

The politics on this one may be understandably confusing to some --- particularly with a former Republican Sec. of State favoring the bill, and the current Republican Sec. of State ardently opposing it --- but the professed concerns of the latter (that the expanded registration provisions will lead to "voter fraud") are largely nonsense. While the advocacy of the former (pushing broad expansion of vote-by-mail ballots to every voter in the state) ignores very real fraud concerns...

As we noted last week was likely to be the case, when the entire Republican state Senate GOP caucus came on board in support, today marriage equality became the law of the land in Rhode Island.

We'll let Fox "News" tell you about it, since it surely pains them to do so.

RI becomes the 10th state in the union to allow gay couples to enjoy the same constitutionally-protected equal rights to marriage as everyone else.

Our condolences to all of the straight couples in those states who have had their marriages destroyed because of it.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Weather Whiplash: record May snowstorm in Minnesota, early May wildfires in California; Who paid for last year's billion-dollar record crop disaster? YOU did; Myth-busting: 40th anniversary of Newsweek's "coming ice age" blunder; PLUS: Surprise! Fox 'News' lies about the term 'climate change' ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): What would 'wartime mobilization' to fight climate change look like?; You Won't Believe What's in Your Turkey Burger; Most Americans clueless about global scientific consensus on climate change;
Billionaire Koch Bros attack renewable energy standards in the states & launch new front group; Oslo runs out of garbage, imports it from rest of the world; Climate Change: Top Investors Will Feel Heat of New Epoch ... PLUS: Unburnable Fuel: Either governments are not serious about climate change or fossil-fuel firms are overvalued ... and much, MUCH more! ...