[Updated at bottom of article with video of trial testimony and the judge's dismissal of the case.]

Along with everything else that's been going on over the past week or two in the criminal investigation hand count of the 2006 Pima County (Tucson), AZ, special election (see our detailed special coverage here and here, with a bit of followup coming tonight, by the way. [UPDATE: Here's that late report.]), local election integrity watchdog John Brakey has had a trial of his own to contend with this week, following his arrest last September, while serving as an official observer during a post-election hand-count "audit" of the state's primary election on behalf of both the Democratic and Libertarian Parties.

As The BRAD BLOG reported at the time, Brakey had noticed that a number of ballot bags, selected for the hand-count, had missing or broken security seals on them. When he asked about them, he was promptly arrested on the orders of Pima's "Election Director Gone Wild" Brad Nelson, a Republican and long-time foe of Brakey's.

The case against Brakey, heard in court this afternoon, was dismissed by Judge Luis Castillo after the county presented its evidence on the charges of "trespassing," as we were informed today by Brakey and his attorney Bill Risner, who wouldn't even need to plead their own case to the judge today...

Guest Blogged by Ernest A. Canning

“This long delay in the seating of Minnesota’s second U.S. Senator has come at a time when our state badly needs help from Washington. Since Election Day, Minnesota has lost 56,000 jobs. Since Election Day more than 9,000 Minnesota families have lost their homes to foreclosure.”
--Senator-elect Al Franken (D-MN), 4/13/09 statement

The Monday, April 13, 2009 decision [PDF] came as as no surprise, certainly not here at The BRAD BLOG where we concluded on Feb. 22, 2009 that former Sen. Norm Coleman’s legal challenge to the Jan. 5, 2009 bi-partisan MN state canvassing board's determination that Al Franken had won the U.S. Senate election was “dead in its tracks.”

Earlier this month, at a time when the mainstream media got it wrong, we accurately reported that the April 7, 2009 order [PDF] meant that the last of the lawfully cast votes had been counted; that Franken won, and; Coleman lost. We went on to predict that the three-judge panel would likely “provide a written explanation of its denial of any other relief…when it enters a final judgment…” We added: “But make no mistake. There are no more votes to be counted. 312 votes is the margin of victory for Al Franken over Norm Coleman.”

In fact, there were no more votes to be counted, as we reported, even as the bulk of the rest of the media hedged their bets. So with the votes all tallied determining that Franken was the victor, and Coleman lacking any legitimate legal recourse, what are Franken's legal and political options, and when might he finally take his rightful seat in the U.S. Senate?...

IN TODAY'S AUDIO REPORT: Goodbye Tax Day '08, Hello Tax Day '09 (with big new incentives to sweeten the deal); Birds taking the long way home; "Greenwashing"; PLUS: Solar power...in SPAAAAACE.... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips or 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' (links below): Six Degrees of Tom Delay, or How a Climate Denier Helped the EPA Get Its Groove Back; abandoned housing developments reverting to nature; Norway lays claim to (part of) the Arctic; the high energy cost of spam; AND: the Somali pirate problem --- toxic dumping and overfishing to blame? ....See below for more!

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

-- Brad Friedman, A BRAD BLOG Special Report

In a letter written to the Arizona Attorney General's office on Monday, as obtained by The BRAD BLOG, the attorney for the Pima County (Tucson) Democratic Party has expressed a concern that thousands of ballots from a disputed 2006 special election, which should be in the AG's possession, may instead be "missing".

"Many thousands of ballots that should be in the ballot boxes in your possession don't exist," attorney Bill Risner writes in the 3-page letter [PDF] to Donald E. Conrad, Chief Counsel of the Criminal Division at the office of state Attorney General Terry Goddard. The alarming allegations come as the second week of an extraordinary hand-count of paper ballots, part of a criminal investigation into the '06 election, continued in Phoenix on Monday.

A spokesperson from the Attorney General's office says she believes the count will be concluded on Wednesday, though that could change. It was originally scheduled to conclude last week.

The AG is conducting a criminal investigation into allegations that that election may have been electronically manipulated by election official insiders. The special election created Tucson's Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) in May of 2006, and funded it with a joint bond measure to the tune of $2 billion over ten years. The Pima Democratic Party had endorsed the two RTA ballots questions in the election, but they now question the legitimate success of the measures. They've been bringing court cases to access ballot materials, and have been demanding a hand-count of the ballots for a number of years. Similar RTA initiatives had failed in four previous elections before they were finally passed in 2006.

"If we are correct," Risner wrote in his Monday letter to the Attorney General's office, concerning the absence of as many as 19,000 paper ballots, as estimated by observers of the counting in Phoenix, "the question arises as to what happened to those ballots." The latest mystery adds still more fuel to the already high-stakes, long-sought hand-count, and raises new questions in the nearly three-years long investigation into the 2006 election results.

If the ballots are indeed missing, did they ever actually exist? Was the Diebold electronic ballot box stuffed? Have ballots been surreptitiously removed by someone for some reason? Or have observers miscalculated the number of ballots being examined? The AG's Press Secretary Anne Titus Hilby tells The BRAD BLOG she's aware of the allegations of missing ballots but could not speak to that point in any more detail "until the examination is concluded"...

Welcome aboard MORE new affiliates! Bob Kincaid's Head-On Radio Network joins the GNR team!

IN TODAY'S AUDIO REPORT: Florida homes stink!; FDA under fire (again); McDonald's may reduce pesticides in fries; PLUS: The cardboard box that could save the world; And the Utah college student indicted for saving public lands from destruction...All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, college student indictments? 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' (links below): Alaskan volcano still threatens oil facility; Are America's suburbs in danger of becoming the new slums?; the Oil Price Shock of 2008 may have triggered the current economic downturn; Robert Redford confronts the NIMBY problem in renewable energy sites....See below for more!

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

That's right, according to AP tonight, following the just released final ruling [PDF] from the 3-judge election contest court in Minnesota, Senator-elect Al Franken (D-MN) is not the "winner" of the election. Rather, he's merely the "leading vote-getter."

Are they kidding?! "Leading vote-getter"?! Apparently not.

Will that be how AP reports the results of elections on Election Nights from now on? The one with the most votes counted in the unofficial results will be the "leading vote-getter"? Somehow, we've got the feeling that AP's headline refers only to this race, and only since it's Franken, not Coleman, who actually won.

As The BRAD BLOG pointed out late last week, Franken isn't "leading" as the New York Times, MSNBC and others reported it last week after the court's final tally of all lawfully cast ballots concluded. And he certainly isn't the "leading vote-getter." Franken won. After one of the most painstaking and transparent hand counts, and then one of the longest election contests in U.S. history, it has been determined that Franken received more lawfully cast votes than anybody else in the race. Period. Furthermore, he has no legal leg to stand on in his likely appeal(s), as we detailed last week. All of that makes Franken the winner of the election, and former Sen. Norm Coleman the loser.

If Coleman wishes to try to overturn Franken's win --- and he's promised an appeal to the MN Supreme Court at the very least --- that's up to him. But Franken won the election. Got that AP? New York Times, et al?! Is that so difficult to report accurately?!

UPDATE 5:41pm PT: The rest of the media, other than AP, appear to be doing better in reporting on Franken's win tonight...

UPDATE 7:13pm PT: NY Times' headline: "In Minnesota, Another Blow to Coleman". Apparently "the paper of record" continues it's allergy to the word "win," along with AP. Downplaying the facts of the matter, Adam Nagourney writes tonight:

"Further diminishes his hopes of holding onto his seat"?! That, despite the rather clear pronouncement in the MN court's ruling today [PDF]:

Is that unclear?! In most worlds, other than the Times' and AP's in 2009, that would mean Franken has won. But the Times, like AP, just can't seem to say it. Now why would that be?

UPDATE 7:53pm PT: A commenter at DU notes wryly:

I'm impressed, frankly, with the unflinching outspokenness of Meghan McCain (John's daughter) in her quest to restore sanity, and a future, to the Republican Party. No idea whether she'll have any success --- at least for the foreseeable future --- but her willingness to stand straight up to her own party's not-minimal thuggery is impressive.

Today, McCain is out and out calling for the GOP to "Go Gay" by embracing same sex marriage (she still calls it "gay marriage," but that's because she's still a Republican), and begins her case by pointing out that it was the GOP deity himself, Ronald Reagan, as Governor of CA in 1978, who fended off a ballot proposition which would have outlawed gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.

"Reagan’s argument centered around the idea that parents already had all the rights they needed to protect their children and that the government did not need to interfere," McCain notes, pointing to an actual conservative doctrine which the GOP has all but abandoned in their bigoted, unConstitutional demands for Big Government intervention into the private lives of homosexual Americans.

I'm digging fairly deeply into the details of what could be a tremendously important story to come (unrelated to this issue), so for the moment I'll just leave you with a few of the money quotes from her essay at The Daily Beast today:

She finishes with the incredibly overly optimistic notion: "I believe the Republican Party has, at this moment, the opportunity to come forward and play an instrumental role in securing gay rights." Nonetheless, she deserves credit and kudos for having the courage to say it. It's a pity it'll likely fall on so many deaf, crazy, tea-bagging ears.

Discuss.

Spent a lot of long-overdue, late late-night hours over the past week or so, stretching my PHP, CSS and HTML skills well beyond their limits in service of some fairly substantial code optimization --- with more still to come --- in hopes of trying to make things run a bit faster here. Did I succeed?

(Note: You may need to hit SHIFT-REFRESH once or twice to get all the updated files into your cache. Other than that, if you come across any unexpected glitches or odd behavior, please let me know!)

Happy Easter --- Pagan or otherwise --- to all of our goyisha friends.

(And a hat-tip to PDA's Tim Carpenter. Sorry to out you Tim, but I figured you'd appreciate the link, nonetheles.)

By way of begrudging public service to those in the community at large who may not understand why so many --- such as Rachel Maddow as seen in the video at right --- are having such a difficult time not bursting into laughter whenever discussing the nutty rightwing "tea baggers," we offer this link to the Urban Dictionary in hopes of allowing you too in on the joke.

Between the whackazoid self-proclaimed tea baggers and the anti-marriage, anti-homosexual hate group National Organization for Marriage's new, unfortunately acronymed "Two Million for Marriage" (2M4M) campaign, seriously, you folks may wanna do just two or three minutes of Googling before you come up with your next new, snazzy, self-identifying catch-phrase.

Or, at the very least, consult former Congressman Dick Armey for some advice first.

Late this week, Politico's Anne Schroeder ran details of a purported public showdown, in a D.C. steakhouse, between Karl Rove and Jason Roe, the former Chief of Staff to FL's former Republican U.S. House Rep (and alleged vote-rigging conspirator) Tom Feeney.

During the exchange between Rove and Roe, as reported by Schroeder, Rove tells Roe that he has a file on Feeney, and Roe, who was angry with Rove for cracks he'd made on Fox "News" at Feeney's expense just after the extremely corrupt FL Republican had lost his 2008 election, says angrily to Rove: "You guys wouldn't be in the White House without Tom."

Given the coverage we've offered over the years on Feeney, and former Republican computer programmer Clint Curtis' allegations against him, several folks --- including our friends Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel and Patty Sharaf, filmmaker of Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story --- sent us the link to the Politico article, asking our opinion on what Roe may have meant by that crack.

In the interest of keeping links to that story from continuing to pile up in our Inbox, here's our take on Roe's purported comment to Rove...

No. He's not crazy at all. Glenn Beck pours metaphorical "gasoline" on "himself," his viewers, and his imagined newly-tyrannical America, and his own, and his viewers', rapidly accelerating, self-perpetuated sense of victim-hood. When he/they eventually --- and it shouldn't be long at this rate --- actually light the match and blow themselves/us up, feel free to point back to this item, when we're told "who could have predicted it?"...

Beck's daily hour on governmentally subsidized cable TV, and three hours daily on our publicly owned radio waves, is a tremendously responsible use government welfare, and reflects brilliantly on our Founding Fathers' guarantee to one single industry --- and one single industry only (the press) --- in our U.S. Constitution.

That's a very responsible use of that singular Constitutional dispensation, Glenn. Keep up the bad work.

BTW, in case you missed it on Wednesday, Jon Stewart --- an actually responsible steward of public largess --- spoke directly and brilliantly to the crazies like Beck and Hannity and O'Reilly and Levin and Bachmann et al, by informing them (since they don't seem to know): "I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing...that's not tyranny, that's democracy"...

That video --- actually worth watching and taking notes --- follows below...

Over the last few months, it looks like the wingnuts have undertaken a specific and systematic effort to try and downrate items that don't reflect well on them at places like REDDIT and DIGG.

Of course, lots of recommendations on those two sites result in thousands --- if not hundreds of thousands --- of more eyeballs to the various stories we run here at The BRAD BLOG --- stories which are often not seen anywhere else in the media, even in the Progressive Blogosphere for that matter!

So your REDDITs and DIGGs actually do matter quite a bit, particular now since the wingnuts seem to have begun their downrating campaign. Click here to see the amazing number of DOWN votes at REDDIT, for example, for last night's "Franken Isn't 'Leading'; He Won and Coleman Lost" story. Without all that downrating, the story would easily have made it to the front page of REDDIT for a long while, and therefore been propagated across dozens of other key sites on the net as well.

It takes about 30 seconds to sign up for REDDIT and/or DIGG the first time, and then you can remain logged on forever. It then takes less than 2 seconds to vote for and/or uprate our stories here at The BRAD BLOG without even leaving this page by hitting the REDDIT and DIGG vote icons for stories that you believe are important to get out there.

Your 2 seconds of a mouse clicking matters. Really. And, as ever, your help is much appreciated! (And thanks to those regular DIGGers and REDDITers who already help out!)

Guest Blogged by Ernest A. Canning, with Brad Friedman

In his March 31st article at Media Matters, Eric Boehlert contrasted the difference in corporate media coverage between Florida's 2000 Presidential election contest and Minnesota's 2008 U.S. Senate election contest. "Norm Coleman's a sore loser," Boehlert argued, and asked "Why won't the press say so?"

He details the striking difference in the corporate media coverage of the two races, where Florida 2000 was both much closer and, as it would determine the Presidency of the United States, arguably more 'important' to get right, and yet the constant media framing continuously painted Al Gore as a "sore loser" for not bowing out 'gracefully' or 'admitting defeat' in the days following the razor-thin election (which, as we would learn later, Gore had actually won, having received more votes across the state of Florida [PDF] than George W. Bush, had the U.S. Supreme Court not kept the ballots from actually being counted).

But to go one further than Boehlert, we'd ask not why the media fail to describe Coleman as a "sore loser," but rather, why it is that --- particularly since Tuesday's final count of any remaining, lawfully cast, previously uncounted absentee ballots --- the media fail to describe Coleman as the loser at all, much less a sore one.

From the New York Times to AP to MSNBC, and even Democracy Now! et al, despite all countable ballots having now been counted, and clear rulings having been issued by both the MN Supreme Court and the bipartisan three-judge panel overseeing the contest, the media seem to have developed an aversion to using the "L" word --- loser --- in their coverage of the MN contest. Perhaps it's because they're listening to only one side of the argument (Coleman's), but the facts of the case, and the many clear court decisions, leave no question that Franken is the winner, and Coleman is the loser. So why won't they say so?...

Welcome aboard to our new partner/affiliate: Huffington Post GREEN!

IN TODAY'S AUDIO REPORT: The electrical grid under cyber-attack; No salmon for California fishermen (again) this year; Banning black cars?; PLUS: George Will smacked down, by his own paper! .... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters for George Will? 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' (links below): Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), climate expert?; Looking to Australia for clues on the effects of climate change; Another salmonella nut recall --- for pistachios; Recession causes drop in gasoline use; PLUS: A breakthrough for algae biodiesel?....See below for more!

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