Conyers responds to Fox "News" having shown him instead of now-indicted Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) during their "breaking news" report yesterday, and FNC's pathetic "apology" today for the "error." (Details and video of both instances here.)

Says Conyers' office in a statement sent to The BRAD BLOG moments ago:

Oh, my god. Brad Schlozman is testifying right now before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Former US Attorney Todd Graves, whom Schlozman replaced after Graves was pushed out, will testify later.)

I don't usually care to cast personal aspersions, but this guy sounds exactly like a chipmunk. Not kidding.

He's being questioned on his partisan 'Voter Fraud'/ACORN prosecutions right now, and Feingold is currently asking a line of questioning that could lead to Thor Hearne and the ACVR scam. We'll see...

Listen/watch for yourself at C-SPAN 3 online...

UPDATES/LIVE OBSERVATIONS...
[NOW UPDATED WITH COMMENTS FROM A DOJ SOURCE]

• Leahy: "Mr. Schlozman, you seem to have broken AG Gonzales's record for saying 'I do not recall' in your testimony so far."

• Schlozman says he spent "25 to 30 hours" preparing for this testimony today.

• ...Says he doesn't think 'Voter Fraud' indictment brought in Missouri just days before '06 election (in violation of DoJ written guidelines) influenced the election, despite MO RNC press release issued in wake of the indictments. A previous case Schlozman/DoJ brought against the Democratic Missouri SoS alleging problems with voter rolls was later dismissed as the judge found "that the United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States...Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred." - Video of the exchange, with an angry Leahy, now here...

• 12:41pm PT - Committee takes a recess...

• 1:10pm PT - Committee now back in session. Live observations continue below...

Guest Blogged by Howard Beale of Fired Up! Missouri

The Kansas City Star just can't help itself. When it comes to high-level reporting on the issue of the national GOP's attempts to politicize justice and steal elections with its phony "voter fraud" project, it seems there's no story that the Star's editors can't make mushier and more GOP-friendly.

Today the Star again does with a piece by Greg Gordon of news syndicate McClatchy what it did to a Gordon story from some weeks ago, refusing to print some of the most important facts underlying the lack of factual basis for GOP allegations of voter fraud.

Most notable in the Kansas City Star version of today's Greg Gordon piece for McClatchy is the treatment of the disposition of the Department of Justice lawsuit against the state of Missouri regarding voter rolls. Of the suit, Gordon writes (emphasis added):

The KCStar's rewrite of that graf rips out its substantive guts. The McClatchy-owned Star goes with this GOP-friendlier construction instead...

Details on the sentencing are at Firedoglake.

We hope to have more on the sentencing later today from BRAD BLOG D.C. Correspondent Margie Burns, who is at the sentencing hearing this morning (and who hopes also to get to the Schlozman and Graves testimony in today's Senate Judiciary Committee, as well).

While it may be notable simply that Fox "News" bothered to report on a Congressional indictment at all --- oh, wait, this one concerned a Democratic member, so of course they reported it, silly! --- by now it's hardly notable at all that Fox, either accidentally or on purpose (hardly matters anymore), played the race card, again, in the most abhorrent way.

TPM's Josh Marshall has the skinny, and the video, right here...

UPDATE 6/5/07: Wow. Fox's version of an "apology" for showing Conyers as Jefferson was run today. About as feeble as it could possibly be and still be labeled an "apology" by any stretch of the imagination. See for yourself...

LATER UPDATE 6/5/07: Conyers issues statement on tepid Fox "apology." He was never contacted by FNC, and doesn't appreciate it. Full statement now here...

For months, supporters of Rep. Rush Holt's Election Reform Bill (HR 811) - from computer scientists such as David Dill and Avi Rubin to extremely powerful advocacy groups such as People for the American Way (PFAW) and VoteTrustUSA --- have been telling critics who believe that Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen systems are antithetical to democracy that an amendment to his bill, requiring a ban on such systems, could not be passed by Congress.

They appear to have accepted the talking point as gospel, and thus have argued that any attempt to amend the current bill (and the matching one in the Senate) is a fruitless endeavor, and we should therefore support the bill as is because something is better than nothing.

In the case of PFAW, they've actually been responsible, in no small part, from selling that line to the public.

Never mind that if the many respected Election Integrity advocates and computer scientists repeating that unsubstantiated argument actually announced they would not support any federal Election Reform legislation that failed to include such a ban --- one which most of them have said they'd support (PFAW not included) --- we might actually get such a ban added to the bill.

Nonetheless, despite my best efforts, I have yet to be able to find a single congress member who supports the bill as currently written, without such a ban, who will go on record --- or even admit off-record --- that they would vote against the Election Reform bill if it included a ban on DREs.

I have yet to be able to find one.

Anyone have a name for me? Even just one?

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Hapless Democratic strategist Bob Shrum's comments on this morning's Meet The Press are fascinating in their own right but have added resonance considering U.S. House candidate John Russell's Guest Post early today, concerning last November's Florida elections. Shrum believes (and allegedly Gore too) that Gore won Florida and the 2000 election. He also tells an interesting story about Gore joking about Bush getting caught cheating the day before the election. Cheating, elections, Florida, seems like an epidemic.

Guest blogged by John Russell, 2006 Democratic Candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida's 5th Congressional District

Just prior to the 1pm start of a recent U.S. House Administration Committee meeting, about which I had received third-hand notification that several contested Congressional elections from 2006 (including my own) were to be brought up and recommended for dismissal, I made several calls to House offices in the vain hope that I might be able to have our Constitutional rights protected and upheld.

Pragmatist that I am, I offered House Administration Committee Counsel, Tom Hicks, my thoughts, hoping that he would bring my concerns to the Committee’s attention. Understanding fully the genesis and context of this meeting --- held without notice to the contestants --- Mr. Hicks was apparently poised to enter one of those smoke-filled rooms we used to hear about.

Apparently, at that point, there was no citing of Constitutional rights convincing enough for this group of rascals to interfere with their plans to “slide our contests under the rug” and hopefully out the doors of Congress. I concluded my voice mail plea not to ignore our Constitutional right to due process by asking Mr. Hicks, “This is still America… is it not?”

The blatant disregard of the Federal Contested Elections Act and the U.S. Constitution by members of Congress exhibited in this meeting is beyond the pale. The Committee members’ audacity is only exceeded by the dearth of factual information regarding policy and political issues provided to the general public by the now defunct Fourth Estate, which has been replaced by the corporate media. As a candidate for federal office, I have now become completely acclimated to the ways and means of the liberally right-wing media in how candidates are at once dismembered, or accordingly contrived, by “The Establishment's” voice...

Guest blogged by DES

We started out the long holiday weekend last week with a delicious rant from HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher --- so sad to see him go on hiatus again, since the news never takes a holiday...

We found out that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doesn't really keep track of pesky details like casualty numbers for our troops. Greg Palast followed up his bombshell post from the week prior with a snarky rebuttal to critics of his evidence regarding electoral machinations by RNC-opposition-researcher-Vote-"Cager"-turned-Rove-aide-turned-partisan-U.S.-Attorney, the newly-resigned Tim Griffin. The revelation on late Thursday night that House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) is examining Palast's evidence should help to quell the quaking boots, who appear to fear there is no "there" there...

Obviously, The BRAD BLOG believes there is plenty of "there", but no need to take our word for it --- even the DNC (here and here) and Slate finally noticed "vote-caging" just this week, and the Department of Justice is looking into allegations of illegal partisan hiring practices at the DoJ, too!

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald confirmed, again, in a new court filing that Valerie Plame was indeed covert at the time of her unprecedented outing, and he directly implicated VP Dick Cheney in the scandal. Did the rightwingnuts admit they were wrong? Of course not! Video Blogger Alan Breslauer gave us a personal montage of New Orleans, a living monument to preventable outcomes of incompetence --- still destroyed, still struggling nearly two years later. Maybe Karl Rove can drop in with some of that butter, root beer, and toilet paper ...

Read on and be prepared for what the cat drags in this coming week...

Following up on our earlier piece, praising the DNC for their media release concerning vote caging issues, we find this superb and scathing condemnation also released today by the DNC, headlined "Bush Administration Owes Apology Over Assault on Voting Rights"...

The release goes on to list a panoply of Republican voter disenfranchisement efforts from FL to WI to OH to CO to NV and more. Kudos. Had they been as aggressive in their report on Ohio after the '04 Election, we might not be fighting our way out of the nightmare we now find ourselves in.

(Listen to my '05 radio interview with the report's Exec. Dir. Vincent Frey [MP3] admitting that they didn't find any fraud in Ohio, essentially, because they didn't look for any!)

And sadly, as Democrats seem destined to shoot themselves in the face with ill-conceived Election Reform bills in both the House and Senate, the nightmare will likely continue no matter what. As we've tried to explain to DNC folks many times, you can fight to ensure every legal voter who wants to vote gets to vote, but if those aren't counted correctly, it ultimately means absolutely nothing.

Nonetheless, we'll keep our eyes forward for the moment, and hope the DNC continues to realize the breadth of what has been going on, and what will continue to go on unless they do something about it and finally stand up once and for all for both American values and voters.

Even the DNC seems to finally have taken notice of the vote caging as mentioned in last week's testimony by Monica Goodling (and subsequently covered in some detail here --- most recently in this late-breaker last night --- if almost nowhere else, until yesterday's excellent Slate article by Dahlia Lithwick).

Describing her piece as a "MUST READ," the DNC issued an alert this morning linking to and quoting several excerpts from her piece. The alert begins this way...

No new information here really, other than the fact that the DNC itself is at least partially getting into the game. They have, of course, notoriously stayed far far away from aggressively contesting or questioning election fraud issues --- including even this vote caging business, which was first reported back in 2004 --- until (perhaps?) now. Even this much took them more than a week, since Goodling's bombshell admissions during her testimony occurred a week ago last Wednesday.

But now that a Republican has acknowledged it, we guess it's safe waters for the DNC to wade into.

What, us snarky? Anyway, we'll take what we can get, and are happy to see them finally on it. A little. Let's hope they continue...

UPDATE: Dems issue scathing release, 'Bush Administration Owes Apology Over Assault on Voting Rights." Good for them. Details here...

From this week's San Diego Reader...

If you don't understand the above, a) You need to visit The BRAD BLOG more often, b) See this, and then c) See this, and then d) Pray for the good voters of the People's Republic of San Diego.

Thanks to artist Neal Obermeyer for paying attention! More good stuff from his own official site.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Out on the campaign trail today John McCain tackles the question of whether the U.S. can reclaim the moral high ground in light of torturing prisoners of war. In addition to stating his disappointment that all the other GOP presidential candidates expressed their approval for torture during the second Republican debate, McCain noted the "sharp dividing line between those who have served in the military and those who haven't." McCain continued:

McCain also blows up many other oft-given reasons for torture in this short clip (2:55).