45 Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House are calling on Congressional leadership in both chambers to cut $100 billion from a "bloated nuclear weapons budget" as part of the ongoing so-called "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, issued a press release citing the letter sent to House Speaker John Boehner (R), Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) and Senators Harry Reid (D) and Mitch McConell (R) charging that "Our oversized nuclear weapons arsenal fails to reflect historic reality" and that "Our spending on radioactive relics of the past requires a reality check" after the successful conclusion of the Cold War.

The 45 House Dems list unnecessary current expenditures for "refurbishing a nuclear bomb that no one wants"¦a Uranium processing facility we do not need"¦a nuclear bomber when the ones we have will last for decades."

The letter, (posted in full below) implores leadership:

While the letter from the largely progressive Congressional members appears to be a rational step in the right direction, it raises additional questions. Among them: (1) Given that two nations, the U.S. and Russia, possess 95% of the world's nuclear arsenals, and given that each nation's individual arsenal is capable of destroying all life on the planet many times over, does it make sense to simply trim only $100 billion from an estimated $640 billion in nuclear weapons expenditures scheduled over the next ten years? (2) Why not couple the immediate request to trim $100 billion from the nuclear weapons budget with a call for a joint resolution of Congress calling upon the President to initiate negotiations under the auspices of the U.N. for a multilateral Treaty that would entail the eventual dismantling of all nuclear arsenals?...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Crunch time at UN climate talks in Doha; More dire warnings from the Arctic; Pollution regulations really do save lives; PLUS: Exxon hates your children (?!?!) ... 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): NASA: Climate Models Project Increase In U.S. Wildfires; UN climate may never pass US Senate; Driver still missing in coal ash slurry pond breach; Oil trains on the rise in U.S.; NJ toxic train wreck won't be cleared for a week; Divide over coal trains in Pacific NW; Starving snowy oils flock south to British Columbia ... PLUS: Photos: 60th anniversary of the deadly Great Smog of London ... and much, MUCH more! ...

So, yeah, this is pretty much what it's all come to these days in the Republican Party. Imaginary "voter fraud" and imaginary U.N. tyranny...

BONUS: The Daily Show also had his own take on the Republican dysfunction in the U.S. Senate (discussed by Colbert above) which led to the embarrassing failure to ratify the U.N. treaty for worldwide accommodations for the disabled. The treaty was based on our own, very successful federal bill, the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed by Republican President George H.W. Bush twenty years ago.

Part 1 of Jon Stewart's two-parter below is worth watching for the killer John Kerry joke alone...

It was bad enough when a majority of Republicans were so disinformed after the 2008 election that they thought ACORN stole the election (almost 10 million votes, apparently) for Barack Obama.

Now that ACORN is no more (since early 2010), the massive disinformation campaign that Republicans have been suckered into believing seems to continue nonetheless. Just under a majority of self-identified GOP voters think the non-existent ACORN stole the election again this year for Obama! Those tricky non-existent bastards, apparently, somehow stuffed the ballot box 5.5 million times and never got caught even once!

From Public Policy Polling today, who note that Republicans are "not handling election results well"...

It should be noted, for any of those duped Republicans who may be reading this, that there is no evidence, none, zero, nada, that any vote has ever been stolen in any election either by ACORN or via one of the bad voter registrations submitted by one of its workers (bad registrations which were almost all discovered by ACORN themselves and turned in, along with the rogue worker who submitted them, to authorities.)

For those stooges who are still unconvinced, because they read something somewhere on the Internet about "voter fraud" in 2012, we dispatched with the most popular "massive voter fraud" myths of 2012 over the weekend right here.

Finally, as if all of that isn't pathetic enough, PPP has more sad news for a party which now seems intent on disappearing itself entirely...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Time's running for UN climate talks (and for the planet); Record winter heat blasts the Midwest (again); NY, NJ press for billions in Sandy disaster recovery; PLUS: Cannibal lobsters ... 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): Air pollution regulations increase life expectancy in US; Mississippi River near record lows, threatens 20k jobs; Typhoon Bopha kills 40 in the Phillipines; Costs double for new French nuke plant; Bye, CFLs?: Cheap lighting breakthrough; 44 hazardous pollutants near gas drilling sites ... PLUS: 4 Reasons to hope we can still avert the worst impacts of climate change ... and much, MUCH more! ...

From Henry Decker at The National Memo (where, by way of full disclosure, I'm also a fairly regular contributor)...

Video of the ABC This Week moment mentioned above, from 12/2/2012, follows below...

After four years of lousy bills, or lack thereof, brought about through unnecessary concessions, it seems as though the President has finally learned something, at least: how to make an opening bid in a negotiation.

As Josh Marshall aptly described the two party's relative positions in the so-called "Fiscal Cliff" negotiations (the specifics of which are broken down by Ezra Klein at the bottom of this article for anybody, understandably, not paying attention to all of this silliness):

The take away here is that it's a welcome change of pace that Obama not only seems to understand his upper hand in these negotiations, but he's finally learned to actually negotiate on that basis this time around.

One of our earliest and most consistent complaints about Obama has been his embarrassingly dreadful negotiation skills. In fact, that was one of our earliest documented complaints about him, way back in April of 2007.

We were reminded once again about his lousy negotiation skills in August of 2011 when he gave away the store during that year's "hostage crisis," as Congressional Republicans were then holding the routine matter of voting to raise the debt ceiling --- and both the American and global economy along with it --- hostage to extreme spending cuts.

Here's what we wrote in 2011, harkening back to our initial warning about Obama's horrific negotiation skills back in 2007...

Why isn't the FBI or the Justice Department investigating the "widespread voter fraud" that a number of Rightwingers are claiming enabled Barack Obama to win the 2012 election?

The simplest answer is that there is nothing to investigate --- at least no evidence to suggest as much at this time. Lacking such evidence, such fishing expeditions are a waste of taxpayer money, particularly when the evidence of "fraud" forwarded by Republicans to date is easily dispatched with little more than a Google search and a few clicks of the mouse.

All existing evidence suggests that President Obama soundly defeated Mitt Romney by an electoral vote margin of 332-206, and a popular vote margin of 50.9-47.4 percent. Yet, the myth that "widespread voter fraud" swung the election for Obama continues to persist on Rightwing web sites and blogs. These myths are usually divorced from the facts altogether or grounded in baseless speculation.

Let's take a look at four of the most popular myths currently being trumpeted by the Rightwingers...

There's a reason why most Republican wingnuts don't venture outside of the safe confines of Fox "News" or other venues where they won't have to face actual, reality-based information and questions from outside of their comfortable, fact-free bubble.

My conversation on air Thursday with RW "voter fraud" fraudster, commie-hunter, and fact-challenged Fox fave David Horowitz illustrated that point with crystal clarity once again. The result wasn't pretty. At least for him.

When asked for actual facts to back up his extraordinary claims about "Democratic voter fraud" --- specifically, that caretakers at his brother-in-law's residential care facility "committed fraud" by helping the brother-in-law, and purportedly sixty others at the home, to vote --- Horowitz had nothing.

He was, however, able to call me a "communist wanna be", a "liar" and an "extreme partisan" for having displayed the temerity to ask him for such facts. He was even able to pile on top of all of that by claiming (falsely) that I'd called him all sorts of names and even that I had accused him of committing fraud!

That's why these guys don't leave the Fox Fantasy World bubble.

As I say, it wasn't pretty. But the audio of yesterday's radio "interview", and the background on what happened, all follows below. I think you may enjoy it...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: 2012 set to be one of the hottest years on record; Sea levels rising faster than predicted; Plankton is in trouble; Does air pollution raise the risk of autism?; PLUS: EPA knocks BP out of federal contracting ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Superstorm Sandy to cost $79 Billion; Rising seas to swallow NYC without action; L.A. inks solar deal with Moapa Tribe; 'Buyer beware' on San Diego's desalination plant; How to destroy the planet from the comfort of home; DOE's 'Road to Fuel Effienciency'; Ex-coal executive charged in mine disaster; Jordan fights water shortages ... PLUS: Meet The Climate Denial Machine ... and much, MUCH more! ...

Earlier this week, we named former Reagan/Bush Sr. official Bruce Bartlett as the newest recipient of The BRAD BLOG's far-too-rarely-bestowed "Intellectually Honest Conservative" award for his blistering, must-read essay, "Revenge of the Reality-Based Community: My life on the Republican right-and how I saw it all go wrong", as published this month by American Conservative magazine.

Among the points noted by the long-time real (versus pretend) conservative was that he was "banned from Fox News" after the publication of his 2006 book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.

Yesterday, Greg Sargent at Washington Post quoted Nicole Dewey, Bartlett's publicist at Doubleday at the time, confirming Bartlett's assertion that while he had previously been a regular on Fox, upon publication of his book that was critical of Dubya, "no one would book him" at the pretend "news" channel.

Today, David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter (the one who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil") --- also a past awardee of The BRAD BLOG's "Intellectually Honest Conservative" award and one who has been similarly rejected by the rabid Right for his interest in the Reality-based world --- confirmed the credibility of Dewey, describing her as "one of the best of the best in the business".

But it was this remark from Frum, specifically his wicked parting shot, which cuts the deepest, and likely ensures (as if there was any question about it), that he will not be appearing on Fox "News" at any time in the foreseeable future either:

Ouch.

Perhaps he should have added: "...as far as we know."

On my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show today we covered quite a bit of ground.

From Republican admissions about the most obvious story in the world (that the Florida GOP was attempting to suppress the vote this year), to the debate over filibuster reform in the U.S. Senate, and whether it should be mended, ended, or none of the above, with David Swanson (his vote: end it!), to the latest Green News Report and a remarkable piece of audio tape from a (now former?) Bill O'Reilly fan who saw the new documentary Chasing Ice and is pissed that she's been so misled by O'Reilly and Fox "News" about climate change for so many years...

Download MP3 or listen online below [appx. 58 mins]...

FL's former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist says the GOP's suggestion "that there's some massive fraud going on" by Florida voters is "laughable".

Rachel Maddow's entire intro and interview with Crist last night is very much worth watching, and so we'll post both at the bottom of this article. But one point in particular during the interview with the Republican-turned-independent needs to be highlighted here.

Longtime readers of The BRAD BLOG will recall that it was the progressive Crist who, during his time as Governor in the Sunshine State, among other things, restored voting rights for former felons in the state, expanded early voting hours and even banned all 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems for use other than as disabled-accessible voting systems for those who might wish to use them (in order to meet the disability voting requirements in the horrible federal Help America Vote Act of 2002).

The contrast couldn't be more stark from his successor, the reprehensible current Governor Rick Scott, who spent much of this past election year rolling back Crist's improvement to the voting system, in an attempt to keep legal, Democratic-leaning voters from being able to cast their vote at all, as even other Republican officials in the state are now beginning to admit out loud.

In the following, powerful clip from Maddow's full interview last night, she asks Crist, as the former Republican Governor of Florida, about the ridiculously transparent claims by the GOP that restrictions on voter registration, the right to vote by former felons, and the shortening of early voting is "only about voter fraud" and "voting integrity."

"Is it clear to you that is just bunk?," she asks Crist who replies directly in turn: "It's crystal clear to me. You couldn't be more right, in my humble opinion. And, you know, we can say this about all these road bloacks that are put in the way of people exercising their right to vote, and we saw it in a dramatic fashion this last Election Day in Florida"...

Rachel Maddow's full intro to the interview with Charlie Christ, describing how and why he was purged by the party (likely had something to do with his progressive position on democracy!) and the full 11/27/12 interview with the former Republican FL Governor, both follow below...

We've been quite remiss by failing to offer the The BRAD BLOG's much-sought yet rarely-bestowed "Intellectually Honest Conservative" Award to Bruce Bartlett, Ronald Reagan's domestic policy adviser and George H.W. Bush's Deputy Asst. Secretary for Economic Policy.

We were reminded of our delinquency again today upon reviewing his candid assessment of the downfall of modern Republicanism and its central core of pretend conservatism as published in a must-read article for the December 2012 issue of American Conservative. The confessional includes, among many on-target money quotes, this one: "Living in the Fox News cocoon, most Republicans had no clue that they were losing [in 2012] or that their ideas were both stupid and politically unpopular."

Bartlett begins by detailing his decades-long list of unquestionably rock-solid conservative credentials, all of which have earned him exactly nothing from today's clueless, brain-addled, incurably propagandized Fox "News" "conservative" crowd. In fact, he has garnered their utter contempt by attempting to tell them the truth over the past decade or so, finding himself tossed "under a bus" along with The BRAD BLOG's very few other past "Intellectually Honest Conservative" awardees and dissident, reality-based Republicans such as David Frum and Andrew Sullivan.

"To this day," Bartlett writes, "I don't think they understand that my motives were to help them avoid the permanent decline that now seems inevitable"...