[This article now cross-published by The Progressive...]

It took awhile. A few years even. But, on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) finally decided he'd had enough.

By a majority vote of 52 to 48, the U.S. Senate changed their rules to partially end the filibuster, invoking what some refer to as the so-called "nuclear option". The rule change, which will permit an up-or-down majority vote on all Presidential nominations for executive and judicial office (with the exception of Supreme Court nominations), is better described as the "democracy option".

The rule change, for now, would have no effect on the use of the filibuster by the minority to block legislation. Three Democrats, Carl Levin (D-MI), Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Mark Pryor (D-AR), voted with Republicans to sustain the previous filibuster rules, last changed in 1975 when the Senate amended their Standing Rules to reduce the number of Senators required for cloture --- to end debate --- from two-thirds to three-fifths.

Although there had been noise, and urging from many quarters, for a dramatic change of the filibuster rules for some time, especially after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) drew the dubious distinction of becoming the first U.S. Senator in history to filibuster his own bill, the impetus became particularly strong over the past several weeks with the outrageous block put on the nominations of every one of President Obama's nominations to the important D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal, the court which oversees federal regulations.

The result of yesterday's rule change in the U.S. Senate could well be a return, at least in part, to the Constitutionally designed functions of three different branches of government, as envisioned by our founding documents. It may also mark an end to a thirty-year scheme by Republicans to pack the courts with radical, right wing jurists...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Impasse at the UN climate summit as developing nations walk out of negotiations; Just 90 companies responsible for most of man-made global warming emissions; 'Apocalyptic' rains strike again, this time in Sardinia; PLUS: Didja hear the one about the Polish environment minister who was fired in the middle of the UN climate summit in Poland? ... All of those hot messes and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Shell Oil's self-imposed carbon pollution tax would crash coal; Superstorms cause spike in flood insurance rates; Jbets on hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars; 'Welcome to Las Vegas' sign goes solar; 70 taken ill after California chemical plant leak; Tesla: "3 fires received more headlines than 250k gasoline fires"; 'Digesting' food waste turns trash into cash; Developed countries spent $35 billion on coal plants since 2007 ... PLUS: BP back in the Gulf with largest-ever oil fleet ... and much, MUCH more! ...

Oh, what fun. This, of course, is just one of the reasons why it's important that you help support and fund the work we do here at The BRAD BLOG. We're up against the unaccountable hoodlums and thugs like the far rightwing U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying organization in the world. So we must be doing something right.

And there is no tactic too dirty for the slimeballs at the Chamber, as we're reminded again in a new report by Gary Ruskin released Wednesday by the Institute of Public Accuracy titled "Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations" [PDF].

As Ruskin notes on page 22 of the new report...

Long time readers will recall the sleazy, likely criminal, $12 million 2011 scheme plotted by the mafia-like thugs at the U.S. Chamber targeting me, my family (who have nothing to do with my work), and other progressive organizations and activists who dared oppose their corporatist, anti-American agenda in even the slightest way. Their plot involved using tools developed by private government contractors (with taxpayer dollars) for the so-called "War on Terror", and turning them against private U.S. citizens for their corporate espionage benefit...

Think I just figured out why Republicans are scared to death!!! of "illegal aliens". Republicans read the Drudge Report. And where ever Drudge says "aliens", they see "ZOMBIES!" instead.

See this section from Drudge's homepage last night for instance...

Scary, eh? Lock your doors! They're coming for you next!

Sometimes it's a good idea to get a full explanation before these things become fodder in a contentious partisan legal election contest. So that's what we've tried to do. Happily, the General Registrar of Bedford County, VA was more than willing to help.

Last week, and the week before, The BRAD BLOG devoted quite a bit of coverage to the incredibly close Attorney General's race in Virginia. As of last week, the Democratic candidate Mark Herring was certified by the state's local voting jurisdictions (counties and cities), as the "winner" over Republican Mark Obenshain by just 164 votes out of more than 2.2 million cast.

The contest is, for now, in the hands of the State Board of Elections which will issue its own official official certification of results on November 25th, after which the candidate declared the "loser" is almost certain to ask for a "recount" and potentially file an election contest thereafter, depending on the outcome. (See the last section of this article for an explanation as to why we put quotes around the word "recount", especially in Virginia.)

During the week-long roller coaster canvass by jurisdictions across Virginia following the November 5th election, there were a number of minor adjustments to local tallies as county and city election officials checked and double-checked results printed by touch-screen and paper ballot optical-scan tabulation computers from Election Night and then adjudicated provisional ballots for tally and inclusion in the final results. While most of the adjustments made during the week following the election were relatively small, each was of great significance in a race this tight.

But there were three rather large changes to the results during the post-election canvass process --- two were in the Democratic strongholds of Fairfax County and the city of Richmond, and one was in heavily Republican Bedford County. All of the large tabulation adjustments were said to have been caused by various combinations of computer tabulator and human error.

Two of them, the ones which resulted in about 1,300 votes beginning picked up by the Democrat over his Republican rival in both Fairfax and Richmond, were covered and explained in the media in some detail. (See our coverage here of the discovery of the thousands of "missing" Fairfax votes and the eventual explanation the next day. The Richmond additions are described here.) The adjustments made during the canvass by heavily-Republican Bedford County, however, which resulted in a net pick-up of about 500 votes for Obenshain, received considerably less public explanation.

Given that all of these matters may be revisited once again in a "recount" --- and the inevitable legal challenges to go with it --- we thought it might be good to get the explanation for Obenshain's big vote pickup in Bedford County on the written record. Bedford's General Registrar Barbara Gunter was kind enough to reply to our queries last week on that point, offering her explanation for the known details of the computer and/or human errors that led to more than 700 votes in the AG's race being initially misreported on Election Night in Bedford County...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Rare and deadly November tornado outbreak in US; Record and extreme weather disasters on the rise; Dangerous cleanup operation begins at Fukushima; PLUS: UN climate treaty negotiations stall ... All those dots connected and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Kauai Council overrides mayor's veto of anti-pesticide, GMO bill; Emissions of CO2 driving rapid oceans 'acid trip'; WA State: new problems with Hanford nuclear cleanup; Canada: First Nations denied injunction against fracking; Russia grants bail to some Greenpeace Arctic 30 activists; Investors 'starting to agree fossil fuels' days are numbered' ... PLUS: Colorado proposes historic air pollution regulations ... and much, MUCH more! ...

This story is horrific. It struck me even more so this morning, given that I had just been in contact with Virginia state Senator Creigh Deeds (D) last week on several occasions and had asked him to appear as my guest on the KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast.

Deeds is currently said to be in critical condition after being stabbed multiple times today in his own home, "in the head and torso," according to officials. His son Gus was found dead in the same home, the victim of "an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, adding the detail that the son "had been released Monday following a mental health evaluation performed under an emergency custody order." Joe St. George of CBS6 reports that Gus had withdrawn last month from William & Mary College.

"The son was evaluated Monday at Bath County hospital," Dennis Cropper, executive director of the Rockbridge County Community Services Board told the Times-Dispatch, "but was released because no psychiatric bed could be located across a wide area of western Virginia."

The best news that can be reported from all of this for now is that officials said at a noon ET news conference today that VA's 2009 Democratic Gubernatorial candidate was able to communicate with state police about the incident before he was airlifted to a medical facility.

I had been in touch with Deeds over the last week or two in the course of our in-depth coverage of the incredibly close VA Attorney General post-election tabulation...

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

Over the weekend, new Fox "News" lamestream media warrior Howard Kurtz was appropriately critical of the pathetic "apology" CBS' 60 Minutes offered for their bogus Benghazi report which was based entirely on a lying "witness" to the September 2012 attack. (The guy was never there, the story was completely made up.)

Fox doesn't seem to allow their videos to be embedded, but you can watch Kurtz' :97 second piece on "Why 60 Minutes apology isn't enough" right here.

While Kurtz is correct that CBS' "apology" was not nearly enough, and that the serious error requires a much more thorough investigation into and explanation for how Rightwing correspondent Lara Logan was so easily fooled by her source, and why nobody at 60 Minutes kept the false story from being aired in the first place, Kurtz completely fails to even mention one very important point. Fox "News" itself used the very same source for the basis of its own false narrative in its own series of misleading stories last year. Moreover, Fox, unlike CBS, has failed to even retract those similarly bogus reports, much less apology or investigate any of them...

From Brentin Mock of "Facing South", a publication of the non-profit Institute for Southern Studies...

Among those on the ballot earlier this month was Mount Gilead's Mayor Patty Almond, who is said to have had the support of the town's African-American community. In 2011, as Mock reports, Almond "lost" the mayoral race by just two votes, until it was discovered that "four black voters were denied ballots when their town residencies were challenged." A new election was eventually ordered by the State Board of Elections. Almond won the new election in 2012, but, thanks to the legal fight, did not take office until December of last year. So Almond served less than a year before her recent re-election contest, held on the same day that the Montgomery County Sheriff's office and four local police departments decided to "swarm" the tiny NC town...

The last graf from an AP article describing the plunge in spending by "outside" Rightwing groups, so far this year, on 2014 campaigns...

Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a former Harvard Law Professor, argued that Senators not only have the right, but a constitutional duty to change the Senate filibuster rules. She argued, in no small part to her fellow Democrats, that the rules were being abused by Republicans as part of a "naked attempt to nullify the results of the last Presidential election [in order] to force us to govern as if President Obama hadn't won the 2012 election."

Her remarks (see video and text transcript below) were made in the wake of the third occasion in which Senate Republicans blocked the nomination of an extraordinarily well-qualified female nominee to the important federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal.

"Republicans now hold the dubious distinction of having filibustered all three women that President Obama nominated to the DC Circuit," she said. "Between them, they have argued an amazing 45 cases before the Supreme Court and have participated in many more. All three have the support of a majority of Senators. So why have they been filibustered?"

"Well, the reason is simple," she explained, answering her own question. "They are caught in a fight over the future of our courts. A fight over whether the courts will be a neutral forum that decides every dispute fairly, or whether the courts will be stacked in favor of the wealthy and the powerful."

Yes. The minority party in the U.S. Senate is blocking these nominations, not because of the qualifications of these very well-qualified women, but because they are continuing a thirty-year Republican effort to "rig the courts", as Warren explains, by packing the U.S. federal bench, particularly the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals...

In a letter this week, twenty of the nation's top climate scientists urged Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) to impose an immediate moratorium on the use of hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking") as a means for extracting oil and natural gas in the Golden State.

Just days later, the state issued new draft regulations for "fracking". The new regulations were praised by the fossil fuel industry.

In the letter, the scientists warn Brown that "fracking," as applied to California's Monterey Shale Formation, would "exacerbate"¦environmental threats, particularly climate disruption, local air and water pollution, and resource consumption."

After noting that fracking "will likely rapidly increase fossil fuel development at a time when California is poised to transition to low-carbon renewable energy technology," the climate scientists expressed a number of specific environmental concerns...

Just a reminder, as we've recently completed this phase anyway, of our in-depth Virginia Attorney General election tally coverage (with more to come, undoubtedly) and as the very real effects of climate change we've been warning about for five years via our Green News Report become more and more apparent: We are funded here by reader support. We rely on you to help us keep doing all that we do. So, as we head towards our 10th(!) anniversary in January, with some difficult decisions ahead for us as we try to figure out how to keep going, please consider making that decision a bit easier for us by donating today.

Better still, sign up to become a monthly sustaining supporter! It's easy, quick, and you'll be doing more to help than you can imagine. Yes, we really need your support if we are to continue into a second decade...

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Clear Channel's Premiere Networks has reversed course. After previously announcing they would end their relationship with her at the end of 2013, the nation's largest radio syndicator has decided to keep progressive radio talker Randi Rhodes on air into next year after all.

According to an email announcement with the subject line "Randi Rhodes Show Continues!", as sent to radio station affiliates that carry Rhodes this morning, Premiere has apologized for their previous announcement earlier this week. That announcement, first reported on Wednesday by Politico, indicated that they would not be renewing Rhodes' contract as of year's end.

"In a happy turn of events, we are pleased to announce that Premiere Networks will continue to produce and distribute The Randi Rhodes Show," reads the new email sent Friday morning by Premiere's Peter Tripi, Senior Vice President of Affiliate Relations.

"In an industry of constant change, it's a pleasure to provide good news about a talk talent we think so highly of," the email continues, before concluding with an apology. "We apologize for any inconvenience the previous announcement caused, but look forward to a very successful 2014 with The Randi Rhodes Show."

Phone calls to Tripi and another Premiere executive, seeking an explanation for the quick turnabout, were not immediately returned. The BRAD BLOG was first tipped off to Premiere's decision to keep Rhodes on the air late Thursday, by a station owner who had received a call from Premiere's Director of Affiliate Marketing, Kurt Kretzschmar...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Another massive natural gas pipeline explosion in the US; Shoddy construction discovered on southern Keystone XL pipeline; Majority of red-state Americans now accept climate science; PLUS: The continuing and predicted humanitarian disaster of Super Typhoon Haiyan ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): A carbon tax would cut the deficit by $1 trillion; An innovative bamboo scooter that runs on AIR; 2013 is seventh hottest year; Warsaw talks thrash out UN climate roadmap; Climate deniers must pay $90k; Walmart's emissions soar despite green talk; Could Carl Sagan have defeated climate denial?; New 'plastic-eating' ecosystem discovered in deep ocean; US crushes ivory to stop poaching; CA faces driest year on record ... PLUS: The 9 biggest weather disasters in the next 30 Years ... and much, MUCH more! ...