Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Richard Engel's War Zone Diary is an amazing special that aired last night on MSNBC. This video (9:53) is roughly edited from the original hour and is not intended as a substitute. Each scene was picked for its own content and without respect to the ongoing narrative. Also, while most of the hardcore scenes - mutilated bodies and the like - have been edited out, there is still much that is difficult to stomach and could be offensive. You can find out more about Richard Engel and the special here.

(Hat-tip BRAD BLOG emailer "Jazzolog")

Courtesy of The Onion...

Another criminal investigation has begun in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where two elections officials were found to have rigged the 2004 Presidential Election recount.

A special prosecutor has now been appointed to look into the early printing of absentee ballot and early voting election results prior to Election Day in 2006. As well, the investigators will be looking into a network cable which was left plugged into a tabulator computer overnight, allowing for unauthorized access all night long.

Fox 8's I-Team has a good video report.

As well, The BRAD BLOG has learned that Ohio's new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, will be personally delivering termination notices to the county's four Board of Elections members tomorrow. On Monday, Brunner demanded the resignation of the entire board in Ohio's most Democratic-leaning county. The head of that election board, Bob Bennett, is also the chair of the Ohio Republican Party. He has vowed to fight Brunner in court, which, we're told by sources, she welcomes.

It should be noted that the illegal printing of election results prior to Election Day was recently discovered as well by Election Integrity advocate John Brakey, down in Pima County (Tucson), Arizona. That discovery has led to a lawsuit currently in hot progress down there.

Was a nationalized effort in place to print out election results prior to elections, to allow for the last-minute pinpointed targeting of Get Out the Vote efforts? We'll stay tuned...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Senator Barbara Boxer has a little talk with Senator Exxon, uh, James Inhofe who did not want to let former Vice President Al Gore answer his questions on global warming. It was Gore's first appearance on the Hill since January, 2001. Lou Dobbs covers the entertaining bit (1:32).

Finally. Someone is actually bothering to test the voting machines which voters have been complaining about as flipping their votes for years. In Montgomery County, OH, where an official complaint was recently filed by 20 voters who claimed vote-flipping on their Diebold DRE touch-screen systems, comes this refreshing, if disturbing, report from today's Dayton Daily News...

From Jacobs' lips to God's ears.

Oh, and there's this little tidbit from the story:

Ah, yes. The trucking company dunnit! That's the ticket!

(Hat-tip again to BRAD BLOG reader "A Concerned Citizen" for the heads up!)

Just out from Waxman's office. A letter [PDF] to House and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairs Conyres and Leahy disputing Bush's contention yesterday that he is giving Congress "unprecedented" access to White House information and officials.

The letter begins this way...

Click here for the full letter [PDF], which outlines not only numerous White House officials who testified under oath before Congressional committees during the Clinton Administration, but even Bush Administration officials who were allowed to do so, as recently as last week!

This page at the House Oversight Committee has links to additional info and reports on the matter.

The Saturday before last I was interviewed on Air America's Ring of Fire with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio concerning my call for the Election Reform Bill (HR811) by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) to be amended to include a full ban on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems.

The interview was pre-taped, and an edited-for-time version was aired. The complete, unedited version of that 15 minute interview, along with a text-transcript is now posted here.

This past Saturday, Ralph Neas, the president of People for the American Way (PFAW), one of the groups supporting the Holt Bill as is, and fighting against a ban on DRE voting systems, was interviewed on Ring of Fire. I had been critical of PFAW's unwaivering support of the bill during my interview the week before (as I have been in many articles here and elsewhere), so Bobby Kennedy asked Neas, a number of times, to answer directly to some of my criticisms.

The audio of that interview as well as a text-transcript, is also now posted here.

Now before I get to a huge number of concerns about the Neas interview and what I see as the dangerous PFAW position, and not to stack the deck (but I will anyway), Papantonio concluded his interview with me as follows, which I then promised to quote on the blog, so here it is...

Citizen journalist, Arlen Parsa spent some time pouring through last night's document dump from the DoJ, and sends us the following today, with a link to his exclusive...

Guest Blogged by BRAD BLOG's D.C. correspondent Margie Burns

"We don't have a law that would make war profiteering specifically a federal crime," Sen. Leahy (D-VT) said in this morning's efficient hearing conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee, so he is introducing one.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is busy these days --- what with the scandal over White House manipulations of the prosecutorial function of the Department of Justice, the continuing scandals of war profiteering in the "war on terror," and other oversight matters, the Committee is in jeopardy of being overstretched. In fact, it already is overstretched.

The room was full for this morning's hearing, which I attended, on "Combating War Profiteering," but, as with last week's House Oversight Comittee hearings with Valerie Plame et al, this one was also scantly attended by GOP'ers. Of Republicans, only the co-chair of the committee Arlen Specter (R-PA) and --- to do him justice --- Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) graced the hearing with their presence. The co-chair could do no less, and indeed did little, though I noticed that both he and Leahy alluded to their past jobs as prosecutors, from which it can safely be inferred that they too think the current manipulations of US Attorneys --- prosecutors --- by the DOJ look very bad...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

On Friday Bill O'Reilly was arguing to guest John Flannery, in light of Khalid Sheik Mohammed's mass confessions, that the United States doesn't torture. What made O'Reilly's stance particularly perplexing was that back in September, 2006, ABC's chief investigative reporter, Brian Ross, appeared on The Factor and explained, to O'Reilly's approval, that torture was actually used by the United States. Nonetheless - back in the present day, PsychoBoy O'Reilly's memory seems to have erased itself, as he accuses Flannery of "buying all that propaganda"...for believing exactly that which O'Reilly had previously espoused.

But wait! Much more O'Reilly Video-a-palooza below!...

3,000 pages were just released to the House Judiciary Committee by the Dept. of Justice in re: the U.S. Attorney purge. Judiciary is getting 'em posted as quickly as they can, even as we type. Says Conyers in a statement just released:

Looks like it'll be a long night for the folks at Judiciary, and likely much longer for Josh Marshall and friends at TPM. Happy reading, all!

Earlier from U.S. News & World Report:

Accountability sucks, huh? Welcome to it. We believe your nightmare is just beginning.

Using often inaccurate characterizations of my position, and the position of those like me who are in favor of amending Rep. Rush Holt's Election Reform Bill (HR811) to include a ban on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, often called "touch-screen") voting systems, my friend Steve Rosenfeld filed an article today at AlterNet titled "Are Voting Machine Purists Standing in the Way of Reform?" which is critical of my position.

The piece is in direct response to an article of mine published at AlterNet several weeks ago on the false arguments being put forward by supporters of Rush Holt's Election Reform Bill (HR811) --- folks like PFAW, Common Cause, MoveOn, etc. --- in trying to see the bill passes as is and in opposition to an amendment that would ban dangerous, unverifiable, disenfranchising DRE voting systems.

In the editorial, Rosenfeld, describes folks like me, misleadingly, as "voting machine purists" and inaccurately suggest we have an "all or nothing approach" to Election Reform. Further, he goes on to mischaracterize a number of provisions of the Holt bill, as well as many of the arguments that have been made in favor of banning DREs.

I just spoke with Steve...

Just out from AP...

The issue comes in the wake of two Cuyahoga County Election Officials recently found guilty of rigging the 2004 Presidential Election recount and subsequently sentenced to the maximum 18 months in prison after they refused to cooperate with the state's special prosecutor, Kevin Baxter.

Both Baxter and the district court judge, Peter J. Corrigan, indicated they believed the conspiracy to game the recount was part of a larger, higher-reaching conspiracy. "It seems unlikely that your superiors wouldn't know what you were doing," Corrigan declared during the sentencing.

Brunner told the Plain-Dealer this morning that the convictions were "so serious that I don't think I had any alternative" but to request the resignations of the entire board. "It has to do with public confidence and perception," she said.

In a news conference this morning, Bennett vowed to fight Brunner in court rather than leave on his own accord.

Cuyahoga County's then-Election Director, Michael Vu, who was not charged in the incident but has since resigned, had previously admitted that sealed ballot boxes were opened and secretly counted prior to the state-mandated recount in order to assure the recount would not reveal any inconsistencies with the officially reported results. He has since recanted his original story.

After the recent sentencing, Bennett, who was ultimately responsible for overseeing the convicted elections officials --- supposedly one Republican and one Democrat --- who rigged a presidential election recount in his county said, incredibly enough, "the convictions are a travesty of justice."

The issue also underscores an important point we've been trying to make for years: Despite the claims by disgraced former Buckeye State SoS J. Kenneth Blackwell and his operatives (including Bennett) for the travesty that occurred in 2004, which suggest that Ohio's supposedly "bi-partisan" structure of county elections boards --- theoretically all comprised of two Republicans and two Democrats each --- prevents any partisan malfeasance, those boards and the officials who work under them have always served ultimately at the pleasure of the state SoS. That power and pressure were wielded frequently by Blackwell during his tenure, resulting in a host of not-so-bipartisan decisions and oversight from Ohio elections officials in 2004 and beyond.

UPDATE: We heartily recommend "OhioRebel's" superb citizen journalist coverage at ePluribus Media, with many useful additional details. Would that the non-citizen journalists were as thorough!

Guest Blogged by Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.Org

I challenge anyone to put forward an actual disadvantage of amending Representative Rush Holt's bill (HR 811, "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007") to ban electronic ballots. With a few moments' thought, I can list five bad things (which opponents might anticipate) that such an amendment would NOT do and fifteen good — actually, critical — things it WILL do.

Is there even one way in which electronic ballots serve our democracy better than true paper ballots?

I claim that an amendment banning electronic ballots has LOTS of advantages and NO disadvantages — for our country and its democracy, anyway. And I challenge anyone to think of a democracy-serving reason why NOT to amend it. "The bill won't pass with the amendment" doesn't count. I'm looking for a genuine disadvantage of the amendment.

Here's what I see. Tell me if I've missed something….