I'm ducking off the grid and into the mountains until after Labor Day for some much needed R&R under the stars (unless I get really unlucky and there's a cell signal up there!)

Aside from a story I wrote over the weekend, which will be waiting for you to enjoy on Monday morning here, Ernie will be largely holding down the fort here on his own, for the first time, unless another Guest Blogger or two jumps in while I'm gone. So please be nice to him, each other, everyone else and yourselves until I'm back --- at which time you can go back to being mean to everybody again.

Lemme know what I missed! Or...on second thought...just...Peace. --- Brad

Guest blogged by Desi Doyen

Today marks the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina slamming into the Gulf Coast at New Orleans, Louisiana, on August 29th, 2005. What the Category 3 hurricane did not destroy, the man-made disaster finished off, drowning much of the beloved city, killing over 1800 people, and displacing over a million more, many permanently.

There are many ways to look at what happened five years ago today and in the horrifying days and weeks that followed. There are successes and plenty of failures to document for history. There are surely lessons to be learned, but have we even come close to learning the most important one?...

When it mattered, was based in terrifying reality, required actual selflessness and extraordinary courage...47 years ago today..."The greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation"...

First, we didn't do it.

Second, via KHOU in Houston:

Former KPFT (Houston Pacifica) radio host and election integrity advocate Pokey Anderson tells us there are some 1.8 million registered voters in Harris County, the third largest in the nation. "Harris County is huge," she writes via email this morning, "est. pop for 2006 is 3.6 million people, which is larger than the population of 23 states. That is about the size of Iowa and Vermont combined."

KTRH NewsRadio reports County Clerk Beverly Kaufman is hoping to "depend on other counties around the state, even across the country, to donate similar machines." Until God tried to intervene this morning, Harris County used 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems made by Austin-based Hart Intercivic.

A source familiar with Hart Intercivic tells The BRAD BLOG that the nation's fourth-largest e-voting company has fallen on hard times of late and does not have machines to ship to replace those lost in the fire.

If they can't get "similar machines" from somewhere, how, oh, how will the citizens of Houston be able to have elections this year?! Especially since pieces of paper, pens, eyeballs, citizen oversight and common frickin' sense were all long ago outlawed in Harris County, Texas, apparently.

Also related: This year's Harris County Pac-Man Tournament has been canceled.

UPDATE 8/28/10: The early work into determining the cause of the 3-alarm blaze, whether or not it was an accident or arson, is underway...along with determining the plan for how the county will proceed with the upcoming elections in the wake of the loss of $30 million dollars worth of unverifiable electronic voting machines...

While barreling westward across the Great Plains yesterday, I received an urgent text message from Bev Harris of the non-partisan election integrity watchdog organization BlackBoxVoting.org. She and Susan Pynchon, an election integrity advocate from Florida Fair Elections Coalition, had traveled to Shelby County (Memphis), Tennessee, following reports of massive voter disenfranchisement during the state's August 5th elections.

She and Pynchon have been in the county, on behalf of a number of the candidates affected by the apparent disaster for the last two weeks.

"Wildest election tampering yet in memphis," Harris' detailed text message read. "7 out of eight candidates black in black locations with 70 percent dems but white republican sweep."

"Ten candidates filed lawsuit today," the message continued, as she explained that over the past two weeks she and Pynchon "watched as [election officials] wheeled cartloads of computers out of the building. Thousands and thousands of votes don't add up...poll tapes in trash and much more."

"Even the candidates could not get their own results and were told they were 'not available,'" she wrote. "They certified [the elections] and STILL did not give out results until threatened by a lawyer and even then the results said 'unofficial'. There is hilarious video of repub lawyer shouting 'keep those women away from me!'"...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 do not represent Islam. Far better representatives of Islam are the over 100 Muslims who died at work in the towers that day. No one need apologize for Islam."—Hal Donahue, VoteVets.org

Seeing it as part of their duty to support and defend the Constitution and dismayed by the "toxic effect" of the never-ending "war on terror" upon our society by the process of "dehumanization" which has created "a propensity to violence, a devaluing of others, even our own citizens, and a decided lack of empathy," VoteVet.org, a nation-wide group of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is circulating an "open letter" in support of the right to build a Muslim community center near "Ground Zero"...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Aid slowly reaches Pakistan as historic flooding continues; Plastic Bag Wars in California; Another BP employee pleads the 5th; Those hungry, hungry microbes ... PLUS: The 5th Anniversary of the Drowning of New Orleans ... 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): Fossil fuel industry outspends enviro groups 7-to-1; Obama Admin sides with nuisance polluters; Billionaire Koch brothers waging a war against Obama & the environment; Teens carry 30 per cent more BPA than rest of population; Egg recall exposes flaws in nation's food safety system; Why eggs became a hazard; U.S. rejected hen vaccine despite success in UK; China traffic jam could last weeks; German scientist hands Putin frosty climate rebuke; Hot river forces costly nuke plant shutdown in TN ...PLUS: Peak Helium? Get ready for the $100 party balloon ...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

In Meg Whitman, Wall Street, 'Billionaire Sociopaths' and the Media 'Substance Deficit' I reported:

Apparently Whitman now feels that campaigning exclusively by way of paid-for propaganda (political ads) will not be enough to evade scrutiny of her economic "plan" to "rescue" California's economy (a rehash of Bush tax cuts for wealthy people and business, the elimination of climate change regulations and imposition of further draconian spending cuts to a state government already operating on life support --- a plan which a group of economists, including Stanford University's Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel laureate, have derided as policies which would "deepen California's budget crisis and are likely to reduce employment and economic growth").

Whitman has now pandered to what she may mistakenly believe was a majority of Californians who voted against marriage equality in passing Proposition 8...

I may have more to say on this later, but short on time at the moment, and since it's an older thread you may not be checking it on your own. So, for now, I'll just point you towards his comment (and mine which follows it) in reply to my recent piece on hacking Pac-Man onto a Sequoia/Dominion AVC Edge touch-screen voting machine.

(Note: I'm setting this item to "No Comments", since I'd rather any comments take place on either the initial thread on the Pac-Man Hack article, or on a future one, should I find the time to do a more thorough follow-up of this situation before dropping off the grid entirely to do some camping in the coming week before arriving back in Los Angeles after Labor Day.)

We were on the road all day long yesterday, after getting the morning's Green News Report. We finally got off the road and back on the grid as the sun was setting here in the Midwest, and as "results" began coming in from some of the five different states (Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma and Vermont) holding primary elections last night.

It seemed a good moment to ask a question on Twitter about what we'd missed so far. In the bargain, we received some interesting Twitter replies from NBC's Chief White House Correspondent and election results guy Chuck Todd, in regard to counting ballots and the fact that he (and others) were busy reporting "results" to the world, even as not one single ballot had yet to be counted by any human being in all of the United States by that point.

Here's how some of that conversation on Twitter went...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Egg-gregious egg recall gets egg-spanded (sorry); "Gulf Dead Zone" gets egg-spanded, too, as thousands of dead fish turn up, and oil continues to come ashore, as the Obama Administration gets slammed for low-balling oil spill estimates ... PLUS: The World's Longest Traffic Jam --- 10 days! And you thought your commute was bad ... 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): Safety fears raised at French nuclear reactor; Hot river forces cutbacks at TN nuclear power plant; Chilean miners trapped for four more months; Earth's Plant Growth Fell Because of Climate Change: study; New website tracks fossil fuel lobbying; Koch brothers give over $100 million and counting to right-wing groups ...PLUS: Happy "Earth Overshoot Day" - We've Consumed the Planet's Resources This Year Faster Than Ever! ...

As the disinformed and hypnotized crowd of angry protesters in downtown New York chant "No mosque here!" over the weekend, a black man in a white hat strolls through and the crowd instantly turns on him.

"Ya'll don't even know my opinion on shit," he's forced to reply in his own defense as the tension rises and the possibility of violence becomes imminent. "I'm not even Muslim!" shouts the man who, it turns out, was apparently a construction worker at Ground Zero.

Sick. August, 2010. U.S.A.

A commenter at Ballon Juice may have said it best (h/t Glenn Greenwald on Twitter): "They got one thing right: Ground Zero is being desecrated. Just not by Muslims."

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvey, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and in the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but a drastic reallocation...." Howard Zinn, "The Problem is Civil Obedience" (1970) from Voices of a People's History of the United States

Here, at The BRAD BLOG, we've spent a good deal of time addressing the duplicity of convicted federal criminal James O'Keefe and his employer Andrew Breitbart, a pathological liar, whose bogus ACORN pimp hoax proved the undoing of a benevolent community organization, ACORN.

While Breitbart received his comeuppance when he made the mistake of attempting a dishonest smear of a woman, Shirley Sherrod, who would not go quietly into the night in the face of the hard-right's distortion of her words, David Vitter (R-LA), the hard-right's Senate point man in its effort to destroy democracy and verifiable truth by smearing and then defunding ACORN is sailing towards re-election despite links to hookers and to an aide, Brent Furer, who plead guilty to an assault in which he held a knife to his girlfriend's throat and stabbed her in her hand --- Furer allegedly held her against her will for 90 minutes and threatened to kill her.

Now, comes a revelation that Vitter not only kept Furer on his taxpayer-funded payroll while tasking the girlfriend-assaulting Furer with overseeing women's issues, but that U.S. taxpayers footed the bill for the convicted Furer's travel to appear in court on the assault charge and on a DUI...

This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine....

This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine with Pac-Man hacked onto it without disturbing any of the "tamper-evident" seals supposedly meant to protect it from hackers...

Any questions?...

With the deepest and sincerest apologies to our good friend Jeannie Dean (look away, Jeannie, seriously), some things just need to be seen to be believed. And no, I don't believe this thing is a joke, despite what may be the most ironic (and awful) lyric of all time...

Yes, you read that right...

And with this, the Rightwing "civil rights" movement, has finally taken full flower. God save us all. Mindblowing Accomplished.

[Hat-tip Digby. The drink is on us. We'll join ya.]