Well, that's somewhat amusing. An 800 number that I just gave out to folks while on the Thom Hartmann Program for the U.S. Capitol Switchboard has now apparently been switched to an "adult" phone service! Whoops!

Please use this one instead: 1-800-828-0498

I've just tested it, and it gets you through to Congress. Successfully. Though perhaps not as much fun as the other number, this one will allow you to ask for your Congress Members and tell them it's time to ban DRE touch-screen voting machines once and for all! No more excuses.

Even the New York Times editorialized just last week that "electronic voting has been an abysmal failure" and then they went on (finally!) to call for a federal bill "banning the use of touch-screen voting machines."

Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) has filed an amendment to the fatally flawed Holt Election Reform Bill (HR 811) that restricts such machines, but even that doesn't go far enough. Worse, the House Rules Committee may not even allow her amendment to be debated or added to the bill. So call your reps, and demand that they amend the Holt Election Reform Bill (HR 811) to ban touch-screen voting machines and to require a paper ballot for every vote cast in America!

Holt's bill does not do that right now --- no matter how much propaganda you are given to the contrary by the bill's supporters!

Please don't dial the other number that I gave out on the air. As Peter B. Collins --- who's sitting in for Hartmann today --- said: that number is apparently for Sen. David Vitter's private use only. Our apologies for the confusion. Especially to the Senator.

A short follow-up from Dan Rather Reports to his recent landmark investigative report on "The Trouble With Touchscreens", in which he exposed ES&S' undeclared sweatshop, producing faulty voting systems in The Phillipines.

We're told that he'll have more to come in the following weeks on the scandalous --- and still completely unexplained --- exposé on the seven Sequoia Voting System employee/whistleblowers who detailed how they were forced to use faulty paper (and purposely misaligned chads in Palm Beach County only!) for the punch-card ballots used in the 2000 general election debacle in Florida.

We've followed that up a bit ourselves and so far, Sequoia and their spokesperson/VP Michelle Shafer have failed to explain how the scheme happened or who was behind it. They did, however, offer up some documents they said would clear their name. It turns out, however, that those documents may concern the ballots created for the primary election in Palm Beach, rather than the general, where the ballots where allegedly --- and demonstrably --- gamed to ensure hanging-chads and other spoiled ballots of all sorts.

(You can watch the entire original jaw-dropping program in three segments here.)

Congrats to John Gideon and VotersUnite.org for the mention in Rather's quick update as seen below...

Blogged by Brad from...LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA!

Home again. Finally. After three months on the road, I wish I could say it's good to be back. But for the moment, I'll remember how incredibly difficult it's been to keep up with everything while on the constant move for so long, and will just be glad that I'm back in one place. For at least a few weeks.

Though the gods seem to laugh and the news seems to conspire to keep me blogging even more frequently from the road at times than when I'm at home...Nonetheless, for those long hours when I was barreling down the highway from coast-to-coast over the past months, guest-hosting radio shows, engaged in some super-secret mission or another, or otherwise sneaking in a few hours off the grid, on a mountain, or both, there are a bunch of folks who are owed much thanks.

To all of the tremendous BRAD BLOG guest contributors who kept the joint lively and up-to-date with important news and commentary while I was otherwise occupado, I thank you. The talented list of folks who contributed here over the past few months, in case you hadn't noticed, includes the following impressive list (in no particular order):

Joseph Cannon of CannonFire; Jon Ponder of Pensito Review; Bob Bancroft of Voters Unite; Miriam Raftery of Writer, Ink; Clint Curtis of ClintCurtis.com; Steve Huff of CrimeBlog.us; Emily Levy of VelvetRevolution.us; John Washburn of Washburn's World; Margie Burns of MargieBurns.com; Arlen Parsa of The Daily Background; Rebecca Mercuri of Notable Software, Inc.; Tom Courbat of SAVE R VOTE and Bo Lipari of New Yorkers for Verified Voting.

Additionally, much always-reliable heavy lifting was performed for the duration by BRAD BLOG perennials DES, Alan Breslauer of HotPotatoMash and Agent 99 of neufneuf. As ever, guys, thank you.

But there is one person whose efforts deserve extra special mention here, and not just for the extra duty he's had to pull at The BRAD BLOG for the past few months...

Written "at the tail end of a 15-month deployment" in Iraq, seven U.S. service members filed a devastating opinion piece in the New York Times last August 19th, headlined "The War as We Saw It."

Their insightful, nuanced, and intelligent piece countered the simplistic "We're makin' progress!" message of the Administration, the Republicans, their Media Talking Heads, and General Petraeus. It began this way...

The troops on the ground concluded that "Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise," adding, "we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence."

Yance T. Gray and Omar Mora of the 82nd Airborne Division, two of the service members who wrote the op/ed "at the tail end" of their 15-month deployment, were killed outside of Baghdad on Monday.

According to Editor & Publisher:

They are now, indeed, "heading back home."

Another of the seven, "Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head while the article was being written. He was expected to survive after being flown to a military hospital in the United States."

(via A.J. Rossmiller at AMERICAblog)

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Before Washington Week with Gwen Ifill aired last Friday on PBS its corporate sponsor, The National Mining Association (NMA), ran a ridiculous piece of propaganda which I could not let go unanswered. The mashup to the left (4:37) adds a little reality, courtesy of Bill Moyers, to the mining industry's commercial.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

The California "Top-To-Bottom Review" of state certified voting systems was to include four investigations; Security (Red Team), Accessibility, Code Review, and Document Review. All of the reports were released soon after they were presented to the Secretary of State, Debra Bowen; all but the Document Review.

Why has the Document Review been kept from the public? What is contained in those reports that we should not know? The Secretary of State's Press Office will only say, "We don't know when they will be released."

In his "Not Quite a Blog 2.0" Joseph Lorenzo Hall, one of the members of the document review team, reveals that each team member had to agree to the following secrecy:

On Sept. 6 those 45 days of confidentiality had passed and Joe spoke about some of the basics with regards to the reports. He did not go into any specifics. In his blog he revealed the following...

Guest Blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today:

If the head of our military in Iraq doesn't know if the war there is making us safer, who does?

Blogged by Brad from somewhere in the Nevada desert...

On the road for many hours today, hopefully for the last time this "Summer."

Have been working hard over the last day or two, and again today, to try and help move things forward with some sensible federal Election Reform in time for 2008. We'll see if we have any success. Even on the roll.

But as I'll be off the net for the bulk of today/tonight, here's an open thread to keep you busy on 9/11's sixth anniversary when I know that you, like most Americans, have just one thing on your mind: Was Britney's performance all that it should have been on MTV's Video Music Awards?

Guest Blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

After months of hype, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday about the status of George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Although neither of Bush's men uttered the exact phrase, the essence of their testimony could be summed up in three little words: "Stay the course."

Republicans --- especially the half-dozen or so GOP senators facing election in unsafe seats next year --- will take comfort in Petreaus's promise to recommend ending the surge by next summer. But even if Petreaus recommends reducing deployments to pre-surge levels, and if Bush agrees to it, the only surprise will be that the surge strategy itself was not a false cover for a permanent troop build-up. (And that remains to be seen.)

The stark reality is that Bush's current Iraq policy draws heavily from the playbook of his predecessor from Texas, Lyndon Johnson. The Vietnam War decimated LBJ's presidency, forcing him to leave office with no resolution in sight. Just as LBJ left the mess he created for Nixon and Ford to clean up, now Bush intends to leave his war in Iraq to his successor. As Ken Pollack at Brookings put it: "Bush has found his exit strategy."

Nothing matters --- not the safety of the troops, the lives and well-being of Iraqis, the viability of the U.S. military, or, certainly, the anti-Iraq war sentiments of a majority of Americans --- none of it matters in the face of Bush's urgent desire to rewrite his epitaph so that it won't say the war he started based on deception, divisiveness, and rank ineptitude was lost on his watch.

This strategy is as flawed as it is cynical. Look again at Johnson. Handing Vietnam to Nixon did nothing to improve his legacy. What saved Johnson's reputation was the fact he signed the Civil Rights Act, plus his stoic leadership in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.

Bush has no accomplishments --- nothing --- to weigh against this disastrous war. And the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. troops and innocent Iraqis will die for the impossible goal of salvaging his place in history just compounds his disgrace.

UPDATE FROM BRAD: The good Pokey Anderson sends us this toon, which meshes neatly with Jon's commentary above...

Plus...Liberal, terrorist-loving, America-hating, cut-and-run, surrenderer George Will says "the surge has failed"...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Women serving in the military today are unlikely to share General Petraeus' rosy outlook given during his "Surge" testimony before Congress today. Because, as NOW on PBS reported last Friday, government compiled statistics show that nearly 1 in 4 active duty women in the military are victims of sexual assault. By contrast, during the much shorter first Gulf War, "about 15% of the women were raped."

The problem is compounded because many female soldiers fear the consequences of reporting such incidents. Also, little appears to happen when assaults are reported. According to the broadcast, there were 1,400 investigations of sexual assault last year which have resulted in only 72 court-martials.

Guest Blogged by Bob Bancroft of VotersUnite

Just over a month has passed since California Secretary of State Bowen’s ground-breaking “Top to Bottom” review was made public. The study, conducted over the course of nearly half a year, took a comprehensive look at electronic voting machines that directly record and tabulate votes. The results were unambiguous.

According to the report, “all systems analyzed were inadequate to ensure accuracy and integrity of the election results”. Computer scientists found that the secret software “contains serious design flaws that...attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes.” Despite the oft-cited rationale that e-voting expands the franchise for people with disabilities, the report starkly concluded that “[N]one met the accessibility requirements of current law”.

This report, along with countless others, leaves little doubt as to the correct course of action. As the New York Times put it in a recent editorial, “Electronic voting has been an abysmal failure.” The editors of "The Paper of Record" joined election integrity activists and watchdog groups across the country in calling upon Congress to ban these machines.

In fact, some members of Congress have caught on. Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) said in a recent statement, “The wealth of data and opinions on this topic are so strong that I feel Congress would be remiss if we do not allow a debate on the question of whether and how Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting Machines should be used in federal elections.”

Despite all of this, Democratic House leadership continues to push Rep. Rush Holt's HR 811, a bill so badly compromised that one member of the powerful House Rules Committee reportedly referred to it as “Microsoft 811”. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) was referring to the fact that some of the bill’s most vital protections were stripped, replaced by new, vendor-friendly language allegedly supplied by Microsoft.

So it seems the most vocal opposition to this Democrat-sponsored bill comes from fellow Democrats. The irony was not lost on House Republicans, who took some satisfaction pointing out the in-fighting. All of this begs the question: why does House leadership continue its stubborn support of e-voting?

Only Majority Leader Steny Hoyer knows for certain.

Meant to post this some time ago. As seen a few weeks ago on a street corner lamp post in Kansas City, MO, at the intersection of Baltimore and 38th...

* With apologies to the legendary Freeway Blogger...who actually has a new, killer 60 second video demonstration of how he plies his trade. So here's that as well. Perhaps more germane, if not nearly as amusing as the above (at least to me). Buckle up...

From Crain's Cleveland Business...

Bravo, Mr. Dimora. Of course you should!

But, ah, here's the rub...

We'll leave you to parse the phrasing of that last quote as you may.

The article goes on to point out that Dimora wants to "scrap the Diebold touch-screen system" after it turns out the county paid "$6.5 million above the $1.9 million originally budgeted for extra help and training before the November 2006 election."

Yes, but think of all the trees they saved! (That would be irony. For all of you Republicans following along.)

By Brad Friedman from Richfield, UT...

As we reported from a source late last night, today's scheduled hearing in the House Rules Committee for Rush Holt's Election Reform Bill (HR 811) has been canceled. The same source had also said that if the hearing was canceled, it could mean an "indefinite hold" for the controversial legislation.

Today, Republicans are predictably enjoying what has been termed as a Democratic "split," by The Hill, and a Democratic "revolt," by Politico, in the majority-led Rules Committee, once known as "The Speakers Committee" since it's generally the last stop before legislation hits the House Floor. It's also the place where the leadership determines whether amendments will be allowed to be brought for such legislation.

Of course, what Republicans seem to find most amusing is that Democrats in Congress don't necessarily march in lock-step, as they do. Instead, the Democrats seem to have this crazy idea that in a democracy, there should be actual, responsible debate, care, and attention to details for an Election Reform bill which would have enormous national consequences to every local, state, and federal race in the union for decades to come. Go figure.

"Democrats believe in democracy, unlike that monolith we had before," committee chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) told The Hill.

Nonetheless, the Republicans are attempting to make partisan hay from the situation. Minority Leader John Boehner's website described the situation as a "House Committee Meltdown" yesterday. A spokesperson for David Drier (R-CA), the ranking member on the House Committee described the situation as "chaos."

They're all right. Democracy is chaos. Though the Holt bill has been largely dysfunctional from the get-go as its lead author, Rush Holt (D-NJ) began with a very open process, inviting many voices (including our own) into the bill's drafting process, but then shut down the process in favor of both fear and agenda-driven interests...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Richfield, UT (Bruce Funk Country!)...

[UPDATE: As we reported from our source late last night in the article below, the Rules Committee hearing today was indeed canceled. See below for more details.]

Have been on the road all day, so playing late-night catch up. So here's a few tid-bits, items, rumors, and innuendos as we've been able to collect them from various sources concerning the latest on the fate of the Holt Election Reform Bill (HR 811) in the U.S. House and the proposed Susan Davis (D-CA) amendment for it.

To briefly recap, Davis's amendment, if allowed by the House Rules Committee to be considered with the bill, would limit use of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines to one per polling place on Election Day, but allow their full use during Early Voting periods. Unlike CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen's similar restriction, her amendment, as currently drafted, would not require a 100% manual count of the touch-screen "paper trails." Many more details on that amendment reported here yesterday, followed by a full statement we received from Davis herself later in the evening, in which she described the matter of whether to use DREs or not as the "800 pound gorilla" that folks in Congress, up until now, have been largely afraid of debating at all.

But that seems to be changing quickly.

The New York Times last night gave the idea of a full ban on DREs a boost when they called for exactly that in a long-overdue editorial in this morning's paper calling E-voting an "abysmal failure." They said, "It is unfortunate that the [Holt] bill does not contain a provision banning the use of touch-screen voting machines," adding, "There is still time before the bill becomes law to add a ban on touch-screen voting." And, "If the House fails to do so, the Senate should," and that putting it off to 2012 --- as Davis's amendment as currently drafted does --- is "too long to wait." Huzzah.

Now to the latest updates at this hour...