I could use a toon break...

(Hat-tip, BRAD BLOG toon sherpa Pokey Anderson!)

As we wait for the 3-judge panel in Minnesota to issue their verdict in former Sen. Norm Coleman's U.S. Senate race, in which the Democratic challenger Al Franken was found to be the winner by a bi-partisan state canvassing board, D.C. lawmakers are cranking up the political battle which awaits beyond that decision, which could come any day now, and its predictable appeal to the MN Supreme Court by the loser (who will "probably" be Coleman, according to his own attorney).

Sen. "Big Bad" John Cornyn (R-TX), the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Conspiratorial Committee (NRSC), is now threatening "World War III" if the Dems try to seat Franken before a U.S. Supreme Court appeal is completed, or even a new federal suit that could be filed by Coleman in U.S. District Court if he chooses...even if those additional judicial processes could take "years"...

Tesla Motors revealed its all-electric Model S sedan last week in Los Angeles. At half the price of its Roadster model, which was $109,000, the Model S will be priced at $49,900 after tax credits ($57,400 before such credits). "After factoring in savings on gas," Tesla points out, that's "comparable to a $35,000 Ford sedan," the New York Times reports. A blog item from the Times describes the Model S as "sleek, sporty and sexy."

Tesla hopes the price tag will come down to "less than $30,000," as the price "will presumably go down as the technology improves." They plan the manufactured version to get 300 miles to a single charge, with a 45-minute recharge time.

While the company has raised millions from private investors, they need still more to be able to set up a production plant, which they plan to do in Southern California. But, for the moment, they are waiting on federal loan programs, as the credit market has otherwise locked up, according to the Times.

In the meantime, Detroit's big three automakers are also asking for federal funds and, in advance of President Obama's announcement of plans for the auto-industry, he has reportedly demanded that GM's CEO step down. So let's add one plus one here...

For you whipper-snappers out there, The BRAD BLOG is now Twittering via this link, if you'd like to keep up with the latest on your mobile phone, or however, you enjoy being tweeted.

We are also now available via Amazon's cool new wireless Kindle reader. A Kindle subscription to The BRAD BLOG is $1.99, and allows you to keep up with things here from anywhere (presuming you can afford the Kindle 2's still-high $359 initial price tag, in any case, which we can't.) You can watch a quick 2-minute Kindle demo video here, if you're curious.

See ya from...out there...Oh, and P.S.: Big thanks to the great Ray Beckerman for setting us up at Twitter!

UPDATE 3/31/09: Josh Marshall has some interesting thoughts on the Kindle and on the future of carbon-based books in general...

- Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG

"I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that's an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to...make bad things happen," CIA cybersecurity expert Steven Stigall explained, in a stunning presentation to a U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) field hearing held one month ago in Orlando.

As initially reported earlier this week by Greg Gordon at McClatchy, "Stigall said that voting equipment connected to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren't connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven U.S. states have banned or limited wireless capability in voting equipment, but Stigall said that election officials didn't always know it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines."

"The CIA got interested in electronic systems a few years ago," Gordon reports Stigall as explaining at the EAC hearing, "after concluding that foreigners might try to hack U.S. election systems."

But as disturbing as Stigall's presentation was, what's almost as disturbing is that it took more than 11 days, McClatchy's coverage, a number of FOIA requests from VotersUnite's John Gideon (a frequent guest blogger here), and a couple of articles from BRAD BLOG alum, Michael Richardson of the Examiner (his coverage is here and here), before the EAC finally released the complete transcript of the meeting [WORD], including Stigall's remarks.

"The presenter did not provide the presentation, 'Computers and Elections: The Growing Potential for Cyber Vote Fraud', to the EAC, so we have no materials responsive to your request," Gideon was told in response to his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the EAC, as reported by Richardson. "We received the transcript on March 16, 2009, and it will be publicly available in the next few days."

As of last night, 10 days since the EAC admits they received the transcript of their own event which had taken place 20 days earlier, they had neither sent it to Gideon in response to his request, nor posted it on their website. As of this morning, a month since the hearing, it's finally up on their website, thanks in part, no doubt, to the pressure brought on the EAC by the public to do so. Even then, Stigall's remarks are not posted separately, as other presentations are, but rather, one has to go looking for the full transcript of the actual event to find it. So why both the delay and obfuscation from the famously dysfunctional (a nice way to put it) federal agency? Make your own best guesses, since there is no official explanation for the moment.

Happily, there were others at the meeting who had transcribed the CIA cybersecurity expert's startling remarks --- decimating the idea of supposedly "secure" e-voting --- independently, who then helped to bring it to the public's attention. Clearly, the strongly pro-e-voting EAC had/has little intention of doing so themselves.

Stigall's presentation, and we've got much more of it excerpted below, include a passel of disturbing thoughts. Many of them we've tried to impart on these pages for years, including comments which point up the dangers we've tried to warn about concerning pre-election voting machine "sleepovers" at the houses of pollworkers, and more indications of the dangers of Sequoia Voting Systems clandestine, on-going relationship with the Hugo Chavez-tied Venezuelan e-voting firm Smartmatic, as we reported exclusively here one year ago --- to little interest from the corporate media, despite Sequoia's claims to federal investigators that they had severed all ties with the firm...

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IN TODAY'S REPORT: Democrats undermine Obama's climate legislation; the EPA steps up and gets stepped on? PLUS: Worldwide Blackout & more volcanic "fallout" for Bobby Jindal...All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, hate mail, love letters? 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.

Info/links on stuff we talked about on today's episode, plus MORE green news, all follows below...

It's been a bad month for Diebold (DBD), what with the findings in CA that their voting machines drop votes and their audit logs allows deletion of records; their admission that all of their voting machines fail to record ballot deletions, and that their ATMs were hacked, likely by insiders, just to point to a few of their recent embarrassing headlines.

But things are getting still worse by the minute, it seems. This, from Cleveland's Plain Dealer today:

There are more details at the Dealer (though caution is advised: most of their reporting is based on statements given by Diebold, so bring plenty of grains of salt!).

That said, The BRAD BLOG broke an exclusive story, in August of 2007, concerning a mass sell-off by 10 Diebold officers who had all managed to unload hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stock, each on the very same day on Aug. 7th, when the share price was near an historic high. It fell quickly and preciptously thereafter (15% in the next week alone) following news of Diebold spinning off its election company into a "new company" named Premier Election Solutions.

The largest sale of stock made on that day, Aug. 7th 2007, was by Kevin Krakora, the CFO who stepped down today. He had sold $167,107 worth of stock (3,150 shares) at the near-historic high of $53.05 per share.

Diebold stock plunged in value more than 50% over the next several months, following the mass Aug. '07 selloff. It's been falling ever since, with one exception in March of 2008 when United Technologies Corp. (UTC) attempted an unsuccessful takeover of the company. The stock shot up momentarily on that news, but has been largely falling again ever since.

Shares of Diebold closed on Wednesday at $21.53, down 5.4% on the day. The last time the stock was at that bargain basement price was prior to George W. Bush's "election" (aided in part, by the way, by a Diebold tabulator in Volusia County, FL, which gave negative 16,022 votes to Al Gore --- an anomaly which has never been explained by anyone).

We couldn't tell you whether the news of Krakora's stepping down today has anything to do with our coverage of the questionable insider trading in August of '07. Or whether it stems from other questionable Diebold activities --- they've been facing a class-action securities fraud lawsuit from shareholders since 2005; under SEC investigation since 2006; and under DoJ investigation since 2007; and admitted overstating '07 earnings in early 2008.

But if we helped in any way, you're welcome, America!

Guest Blogged by Parke Bostrom of the Humboldt Transparency Project

At the California Secretary of State's public hearing regarding the possible decertification of Diebold's tabulator systems, GEMS v1.18.19, in relation to the "Deck Zero" covert deletion of 197 ballots in the November election, the audit log's magical "clear" button, and the GEMS audit logs failing to report when ballots were manually deleted by the operator, Diebold/Premier representatives tried to shift blame for the 197 deleted ballots onto the Humboldt County, CA, Registrar of Voters, Carolyn Crnich.

Crnich responded, "If you're saying that your system needs to be checked every damn time we turn it on, I agree with you."

Crnich's use of an expletive seems to have pushed Diebold/Premier's legal counsel over the edge, causing them to reach for and firmly press the "nuke" button in response, by petulantly informing the county of termination of licensing for the use of any of the company's products.

Several days after returning to Humboldt, following the hearing in Sacramento, Crnich received two letters from Premier. Both letters arrived in a single envelope, but unlike Premier Khrushchev's two letters to President Kennedy, Crnich did not get to choose which letter to respond to....

Guest Blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"It will remain one of democracy's best jokes that it provided its deadly enemies with the means by which it was destroyed." - Joseph Goebbels

Gradually, as the veil of secrecy lifts, a growing number of Americans are beginning to comprehend the lawlessness of the cabal which seized control of the White House in 2000 in what amounted to a judicially-aided coup d'etat.[i] This lawlessness extended across the board. It included the packing of federal agencies with lobbyists from industries they were designed to regulate, deception to take this nation into a war of choice, fraudulent no-bid contracts, torture, extraordinary rendition, warrantless NSA eavesdropping on the entire stream of domestic electronic communications, and, if Seymour Hersh's recent allegations are accurate, the creation of a highly secretive "executive assassination ring" which reported only to Dick Cheney's office and which had "been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people and executing them and leaving."[ii]

The reaction of leading Democratic politicians to these unprecedented high crimes has been ambivalent, at best. Even before she assumed the role of Speaker, Nancy Pelosi announced that impeachment was "off-the-table," thereby enabling two more years of executive lawlessness, not to mention the nation's economic demise. Pelosi evaded so much as mentioning their high crimes until February 2009. President Obama acknowledged that "no one is above the law," but added that the focus of his administration is to look forward, not back.

There are fundamental deficiencies in the President's formulation. First, it is impossible to observe the rule of law without looking back. It would make no sense, for example, for a man charged with armed robbery to come before a judge and say, "Well, the robbery was in the past. You've got to look forward. I have every intention of abiding by the law in the future. So why prosecute me?" Second, looking forward does not mean handling current events at the expense of the rule of law. The point is to look far enough into the future to appreciate that the same people who brought us the last eight years of executive lawlessness could one day return to power...

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IN TODAY'S REPORT: Today we're gonna party like it's 1989...in Alaska...because it's the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster in Alaska; and the 20th anniversary of the eruption of Alaska's Mount Redoubt, now blowing up again (and in Bobby Jindal's) face; and the 20th anniversary of the global agreement to save the ozone layer, thus saving Alaska, and everywhere else in the world...PLUS: Poo and Pee Power gives "bio-gas" a whole new meaning...All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters? Let's hear from ya, Alaska! Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived for disaster exhausted Alaskan's listening pleasure at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

Info/links on stuff we talked about on today's episode, plus MORE green news, all follows below...

Since I first covered the story of the arrest of election officials (including a circuit court judge, the county clerk, the school superintendent and other members of the county elections board) in Clay County, KY, for buying and selling votes, as well as manipulating votes on electronic voting machines without the knowledge of voters, folks have been asking about the political affiliation of the conspirators and whether they were working on behalf of any particular political party.

The subject came up, as well, while I was on the Mike Malloy Show last Friday discussing these arrests, as they had just come to light.

You can download the MP3 of that interview, or listen to it online here (appx. 17 mins)...

While the federal indictment [PDF] notes that a number of those involved in the cabal appear to be members of the local Democratic Party, the scheme also involved at least one conspirator who served as the Republican Party's polling place judge at one of the precincts. Clay County is also a heavily Republican county.

On this point, a commenter who wrote in to respond to last week's article, who claims to be "from Clay County" and to know "each of the people arrested," writes that "ALL of the eight arrested this week" were actually Republican. "They registered as Democrat and took leadership roles in the local party to control precinct officer seats, ensuring all officers at the precinct were hand picked." I can't yet confirm that fact, but that reader's comment is posted in full below, with another one from a Kentucky writer, as both contain some helpful background.

Of course, it could still very well be the case that the crooks were Democrats at work. Either way, from what I'm able to understand about the scheme so far, it seems that it was more about personal power and financial enrichment than anything else. If they were Democrats, they don't seem to have been particularly successful in affecting Democratic wins in their county, even though their scheme was "successful" enough to be repeated election after election and year after year. At the heart of their scheme, after all, was bribing money out of candidates in order to be placed on a "slate" that the cabal would then help to get elected.

As the commenter suggests, it could well be that these "Democratic" officials were only signed up as such in order to affect primary elections (in order to ensure the weakest possible "D" candidate, for example) or even in hopes of adversely affecting general elections as "Democrats," secretly working on behalf of the Republican Party.

I've been unable to learn the party affiliations, yet, of the candidates who paid to be on their "slate," which, once we learn that, could be somewhat instructive. Maybe. But until then, a major point that I'd to make in any case: I don't really care what their party affiliations were.

Here's why...

Michelle Shafer is the "Baghdad Bob"-in-chief of the e-voting industry. She's the VP and spokesperson for Sequoia Voting Systems and spokesperson for the e-voting industry as a whole via the Election Technology Council (ETC), a "trade group" created and sponsored by the nation's top four e-voting companies (ES&S, Sequoia, Diebold/Premier, and Hart Intercivic) to help spread their anti-science, anti-reality, pro-e-voting propaganda.

In the very last line of an article published on Thursday, on yet another e-voting related issue (which we may cover in more detail later), Michelle "Baghdad Bob" Shafer is quoted thusly:

As irony would have it, Thursday was also the very same day that news broke of the arrest of a cabal of election official insiders --- including a circuit court judge, the school superintendent, and a number of both Democratic and Republican polling place judges --- charged with having used the electronic voting system to compromise election after election, from 2002 to 2006 in Clay County, Kentucky.

Of course, very strong evidence exists that many other elections have been similarly manipulated on electronic voting systems by election insiders (see here, for just one example), including by both election officials and employees of the various private vendors whom Shafer represents. Much of that evidence, however, has been held at arm's length from citizen election integrity advocates under the absurd argument that that information is a proprietary, legally-protected trade secret. That specious argument has been made for years by the very government-funded corporate welfare queens, like Shafer's companies, that have been paid by our government to privatize our public elections.

So it's been difficult, at least until last week, to point disinformation experts like Shafer to the very evidence that reveal her statement, repeated time and again, to be a lie --- thanks in no small part to the "trade secret" claims of folks like Shafer. Get it? It's a helluva self-perpetuating scam...

From bit-tech.net:

ITWire explains: "It appears to be an inside job, as it uses undocumented functions of the ATM software and appears to use the printer. This suggests the people behind the malware have access to the Diebold software".

"Undocumented functions" just like those found on Diebold voting machines, naturally. And "access to the Diebold software" such as that gained by either a company insider, or someone who happened to find the source-code for Diebold's voting machine software just left by the company, available for download by anyone, on an unprotected Internet site...

Unfortunately, despite a valiant effort from listeners of the Peter B. Collins Show earlier this week, Peter tells me that he will indeed be forced to wrap up his show tonight, at least in its current format, as announced last week. This afternoon, from 3p-6p PT, will be his final syndicated broadcast, and with it, the last of my weekly Friday appearances at 5pm PT on his show. (You can listen via this link as we wrap things up today.)

Peter tells me that he plans to return in podcast format --- no official announcements yet as to where and how, on that --- sometime this June. So we'll have that to look forward to, at least, even as the people's airwaves lose one of the nation's most important progressive voices.

I'm also informed that Scott Dick, progressive talker, military expert, retired army major and yes, foodie, will be taking PBC's place for two of the three hours on KRXA 540am in Monterey, CA , the original flagship station for Peter's show. I've been extended the invitation to continue on as a regular weekly guest on Scott's show as well, which I hope to work out, and will look forward to.

But, for now, thanks for everything Peter. It's been a helluva ride over the last 4 or 5 years. Oh, the places we've been...

POST-SHOW UPDATE: My final appearance on PBC's show, during his final hour today, follows, along with the final moments of the hour/his show --- and even a KRXA 540am ad stuck in the middle, a surprise to me, with Peter B's voice announcing he'll be a regular weekly guest on Scott Dick's show, and a plug for my weekly appearances there as well! (Guess that's been finalized then! )

Today I was happy to bring some very good news to the show, as a welcome coda on a whole bunch of the stories PBC and I have covered over the years. So it's a good day. Thanks for the kind words, my friend. And Happy Trails...

Download MP3, or listen online below (appx. 14 mins)...

According to a transcript of a radio appearance this week by former Senator Norm Coleman's attorney, Joe Friedberg, the Republican will most likely lose his election contest against Al Franken for the U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota.

Hotline's Jennifer Skalka quotes Friedberg as conceding that Coleman will "probably" lose when the 3-judge panel currently deliberating the case, which both sides rested last week, announce their verdict.

"I think it's probably correct that Franken will still be ahead and probably by a little bit more," Friedberg admitted, after announcing that he was "done" with the case.

The Democratic challenger, and now apparent Senator-elect Franken was certified by the bi-partisan state canvassing board to have received 225 more votes than Coleman, out of some 2.9 million cast, at the end of the painstaking, transparent, post-election hand-count of all of the states paper ballots. During the course of Coleman's election contest, which followed that hand-count, Franken gained another 50 or so votes after it was determined that a number of legally cast absentee ballots were inappropriately rejected by election officials.

The 3-judge election contest panel may reach their verdict at any time. Among their decisions is expected to be a finding on whether another 2000 or so rejected absentee-ballots, submitted for consideration by both Coleman and Franken, were "legally cast" and if their results should be added to the final totals. Even so, statistics mavens --- and results of already-counted absentee ballots --- suggest that Coleman will likely have a difficult time closing the gap against Franken, even if all of those currently-uncounted ballots are counted and added to the totals.

Coleman's lead attorney, Friedberg, would now seem to be admitting that and hanging any last hopes he may have on "a constitutional argument, and it's an argument suitable for the Minnesota Supreme Court, not for the trial court."

Our previous coverage of the Coleman/Franken election contest, is indexed here.

The short transcript, posted by Hotline, from Wednesday's interview with Friedberg on KFAN's Dan Barreiro Show, hosted by fill-in Ron Rosenbaum, follows below...