Editor & Publisher, the nation's oldest journal covering the newspaper industry, founded in 1884 has today published a version of my "Why Attribution Matters" piece (originally published at BRAD BLOG a few days ago here).

E&P has done a bit of editing and given it the new title, "Give Credit Where Credit is Due". The E&P version is published here. We'll hope we don't soil their excellent 100+ year reputation.

The piece --- which was spurred originally by AP lifting a story from RAW STORY without giving them credit for their original reporting --- covers the emerging case of Mainstream Media outlets finally picking up on so much of what Internet-based news sites such as this one, RAW, and others have been reporting for many months and sometimes years. It's nice to see them finally recognizing the newsworthiness of such reports, but disappointing to find them failing to give the appropriate credit to those of us who broke such stories in the first place. Stories that the MSM outlets might not otherwise have known about at all. See the editorial for reasons why it matters more than you might think.

In the intervening days between my writing the original piece and giving it to E&P to run, I received an Email from Jason Leopold (previously of RAW, now of Truthout.org) concerning virtually the exact same problem. In this case, a helluva story he broke for RAW in January of this year on how Michael Scanlon's former fiancee kicked off the Jack Abramoff scandals was run as an front page "exclusive" in Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on Friday this week.

I believe we'll be seeing much more of this as we move forward, and I can only hope the MSM reviews their attribution policies since "we don't give credit to blogs" as the AP reportedly said while refusing to recognize RAW for their original work, ain't gonna cut it.

Since the final line of my original piece was removed from the version of the Braditorial which ran today on E&P, I believe it bears repeating here. Paraphrasing Stephen Colbert (See? Attribution! Is that so hard!?) my piece concluded: "MSM, you're on notice."

And you still are.

UPDATE: Jeralynn has more on this at Talk Left...

FURTHER UPDATE: Now Josh Marshall is pissed off about the same thing, since the MSM lifted some four stories alone last last week from reports at his TPMCafe! His piece begins "Okay, enough is enough." Agreed! What the hell is going on here?! (Hat tip to Jeralynn for pointing Josh's piece out to me. See? Attribution again! Wasn't that simple?!)

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Video in Streaming Flash format...
Video in Windows Media format...

In this video, Senator Lindsey Graham questions John Dean and Bruce Fein at today's Censure Hearing. Besides being argumentative and contrary, it's difficult to make much sense out of the Senator's hostility.

Steve Soto of The Left Coaster has this to say about Senator Graham's performance:

Meanwhile meanwhile... The Wingnuts have discovered they too should be concerned about hackable Electronic Voting Machines, as we find in this article posted yesterday over at RedState blog --- the site co-founded by serial plagiarist and disgraced former Washington Post blogger (for three days anyway) Ben Domenech --- concerning new ownership of Sequoia by Venezuelan firm Smartmatic.

Apparently, the writer is concerned about Electronic Voting Machines only now that he's realized Smartmatic may be owned or controlled or unduly influenced by one Hugo Chavez. He goes so far as to quote these words by another blogger in his article:

While we're glad to see the Wingnuts suddenly giving a damn about Electronic Voting --- now that they're concerned about their own ox being gored by a company which may have left-leaning ownership --- we're hardly surprised that the anonymous blogger who calls him or herself "AcademicElephant" (we'll presume it's a "he") didn't seem to have such concerns about another Voting Machine Company with "connections to the George W. Bush regime [being] selected to run elections" all over our country in 2004 during one of the most contentious elections in our country's history.

But of more concern for the moment, now that Mr. Elephant has suddenly decided to be worried about such important matters as a transparent and accountable democracy, he sadly exhibits the all-too-familiar Wingnut tendency of having a problem with that whole pesky "fact thing".

By way of example, Mr. Elephant decides right off the bat to use some of the same tired old misleading propaganda in one of his early grafs...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Video in Streaming Flash format
Video in Windows Media format

UPDATE FROM BRAD: Glenn Greewald over at Crooks & Liars had a great find which he posted today in time for Feingold himself to pick up on and mention during today's hearings (video clip here). Here's the crux of Greenwald's post...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Video in Streaming Flash format...
Video in Windows Media format...

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Jill Carroll was not aware that the first (and most replayed) video taped interview would be broadcast in Iraq or internationally. In fact Carroll may not even been certain that she was free during the interview.

This video contain several clips. CNN's Nick Robertson opens with a quick report saying that Jill Carroll was not aware that the interview would be broadcast. Next, we have included the complete raw interview footage. Finally, Miles O'Brien interviews the editor of The Christian Science Monitor for some behind-the-scenes information about Carroll's state of mind during her initial release and during that first video interview.

Jill Carroll's kidnappers simply left her at the offices of the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) in the city of Amariyah. She had not been released to American or Iraqi officials at the time of the first interview.

Carroll was told that the interview would be for 'internal' party use. The IIP owns Baghdad TV so maybe it isn't surprising that they broadcast the interview.

Meanwhile...in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County, where plans to use Diebold's hackable Electronic Voting Equipment have recently been nixed, Plan B seems to be failing too. The machines they'd hope to use instead, as made by Sequoia Voting Systems, have now been shown to be hackable as well.

Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette picked up on the story yesterday, and followed up today on the testing being run in Allegheny County by Dr. Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, on the "new" Sequoia Voting Machines. The county had hoped to use these systems --- ten-year old Sequoia "Advantage" machines as purchased from Clark County, Nevada who is moving to a different Sequoia system --- in their upcoming Primary Elections in May. That plan, now may be in grave doubt.

The testing of the machines has found so many problems --- including Shamos' findings during "tampering tests" that he was able to instantly "transform a handful of votes into thousands" --- that he has now simply shut down the entire process described as "pointless" due to all of the errors in the software.

According to today's report...

As you may recall, it was machines made by Sequoia which failed so miserably across the state in Illinois just last week during the Primary Elections there. Just a handful of the many mainstream reports covering the meltdown are here, here and here.

Now pay attention...because this can be confusing...

Illinois' Cook County (Chicago) had used new Sequoia "Edge" machines in the recent primary that had been purchased by Clark County, Nevada. Since Illinois' primaries were first, and Sequoia didn't have time or inventory to fill both orders, Cook used Clark's machines for last week's contest only.

Those "Edge" machines, which failed so disastrously in Cook County, IL, are now to be shipped to Clark County, NV who is selling their own ten-year old Sequoia "Advantage" machines to Allegheny County, PA. It is those ten-year old machines which are now being tested in Allegheny and failing so horrendously.

All of which begs the questions: How well were those "Advantage" machines tested in Nevada in the last ten years? How much is Nevada now looking forward to using the new and failed "Edge" machines that they had loaned for a single use to Cook County, IL? And finally, will Clark County, NV bother to test them to find out if they too are hackable like the ones --- modified a bit by Sequoia on the way, apparently --- that they've just unloaded on Allegheny County, PA?

But back to the halted tests in Allegheny...and the claims by Sequoia officials that the problems found were "no big deal". Shamos doesn't see them as "no big deal" and is concerned that a malicious hacker could do precisely what he was able to do in these tests...

State Sen. Debra Bowen released a statement moments ago about yesterday's report that the new computerized California Voter Registration Database is summarily rejecting some 26% of all new or re-registering voters across the statewide. The LA Times reported yesterday that some 43% of voters in Los Angeles County alone have been dumped by the new system.

We'll have more on all of this soon. Working on a number of items at once, as well as being in full catch--up mode after being on the road for a week. So for now, here's Bowen's release in full...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Video in Streaming Flash format...
Video in Windows Media format...

More than 30,000 Iraqis have been forced to flee from their homes after being threatened with death due to sectarian differences. This video from ABC News reports on one Iraqi family that has been forced into exile. While the video doesn't reflect the magnitude of the problem, it is one of the first reports broadcast to a large American audience.

In the ABC News video report, Professor of Mideast Studies at Sarah Lawrance College Fawaz Gerges says, "This is the beginning of the nightmare." Fawaz's experience tells him that Iraq is at the early stages of Bosnia's ethnic cleansing or Lebanon's civil war.

You'll recall that in February the Palm Beach Post reported that "conservative" extremist Ann Coulter may have committed a vote fraud felony by signing someone else's address to her registration form in Florida and then voting in the wrong precinct --- a crime which, if convicted, could earn her three years behind bars.

(It's been pointed out to us that such bars would have to be very close together to keep her from simply slithering through them to escape...Though even at that, we're not sure there is steel strong enough to keep her from being able to chew her way to freedom. But we digress.)

A few days after the story originally broke, Coulter claimed publicly she didn't even live in Palm Beach where she reportedly committed the crime. The Post reporter who broke the story, Jose Lambiet, quickly replied that he had hard evidence that she does, in fact, live in Palm Beach (next door to town councilman Bill Brooks on Seabreeze Ave.) and he characterized Coulter's denial as "absolutely a bold-faced lie."

Yesterday the Palm Beach Post offered still more "skinny" on the latest in the Ann Coulter Voter Fraud Felony Scandal. Her denials about being a Palm Beach resident is about to be tested --- first by the Palm Beach County Election Supervisor Arthur Anderson, and then perhaps by the Florida State Attorney to whom the entire matter may be referred.

Coulter's now got 30 days to 'splain herself, according to Lambiet in the Post. Please read on...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Video in Streaming Flash format...
Video in Windows Media format...

MSNBC Countdown's Keith Olbermann interviews former Nixon White House Council John Dean. Dean is scheduled to testify at a Friday hearing on Feingold's Censure Resolution.

As Nixon's White House Council during Watergate, Dean testified before the Senate committee that eventually lead to Nixon's resignation. John Dean has compared President Bush to Nixon and says that Bush's warrantless wiretapping program is illegal.

The Friday hearing will be held by Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Arlen Specter's who strongly opposes the censure resolution. Specter withheld the names of other witness scheduled to testify.

In this interview, Dean says:

John Dean also comments on the White House Chief of Staff change and how Jack Abramoff is a threat to the Bush Administration.

Just out from AP, the Florida state Attorney General has subpoenaed the three Electronic Voting Machine companies who have all refused to do business with Leon County, FL Election Supervisor Ion Sancho since he discovered that Diebold's optical-scan voting system was vulnerable to hackers.

Sancho's discovery, revealed via a mock election test last December, showed in no uncertain terms that Diebold's systems could be hacked, the results of an election flipped, without a trace being left behind.

Since then, as The BRAD BLOG has previously reported, all three Voting Machine Vendors certified to do business in the state have all refused to sign contracts with the heroic elected official (even though sales reps from both ES&S and Sequoia had initially promised to do so).

According to AP...

At this time, it's still unknown whether the companies refusal to do business with Sancho is due to collusion on their part, or simply because ES&S and Sequoia are concerned that Sancho may actually examine their machines with the same rigor previously applied to Diebold's machines. Sancho, though we've asked him on several occassions (one of those occasions was live on The Young Turks radio show, the MP3 of that interview is here) refuses to speculate.

The now infamous "hack test" has had repurcussions around the nation, including in California where it caused the Sec. of State to momentarily pause, commission a panel of experts to analyze situation and independently confirm the gaping security hole along with finding at least 16 others, before going ahead and certifying the hackable machines in the state anyway. A group of 25 state voters recently filed a lawsuit to prevent the purchase and use of Diebold machines in the state.

In Maryland, one of Diebold's original "showcase states", the Republican Governor has called for a ban of Diebold's machines and the State House of Reps recently voted 137 to 0 to do exactly that.

For its part, the state of Florida's Sec. of State --- while recognizing the problem exposed by Sancho and warning all state Elections Officials about the matter --- has nonetheless attacked and threatened the elected Sancho with removal from office if he's unable to strike a deal with one of the vendors certified to do business in the state. That, despite wide support from around the country, and in his own county of Leon which is home to the state's capitol of Tallahassee --- otherwise known as JebVille.

UPDATE 8:09pm PT: Looks like the heat from the AG, coupled with Sancho's previous threat of legal action for breach of contract against Diebold are causing some movement. According to Tallahassee Democrat tonight:

Whether that's a good or bad thing, we'll leave to someone else to determine. But, never a dull moment.

UPDATE 3/30/06: Jim March of BBV posts the actual subpoenas and interrogatory questions sent to all three companies by the AG. Looks like he means business and seems to be building a case for collusion and anti-trust violations amongst the companies. (Hat-tip to commenter "Catherine A")

We've been dreading this. And you're not gonna like it either.

It's an entirely new can of worms in the Electronic Rape of American Electoral Democracy. The next wave --- beyond the electronic voting machines, and perhaps even more alarming --- in the arsenal of those out to game the system for partisan advantage.

No matter what we do, no matter how many successes, the Bad Guys --- those who hate Democracy and American Values --- are always one step ahead of us, it seems.

The horrifically written and, of course, ironically named "Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002" requires, as of January 1, 2006, each state to implement "a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list."

And guess who's writing the software for it, in California, Ohio and elsewhere? That's right...our old friends at Diebold, Inc.

While we've put off reporting on much of this until now --- as prompted by story out today (in the MSM of all places!) --- we've been working on an extremely disturbing part of this story for some time relating directly to all of this out in, you guessed it, Ohio. We've yet to run the story for a number of reasons. But we hope to have much more on it, in all its troubling detail, in the not-too-distant future.

For today, however, we'll stick to the report coming out of California in this morning's Los Angeles Times which says that, since the first of year, when California's new computerized Voter Registration Database has gone state-wide, Los Angeles County has "rejected 14,629 people --- 43% of those who registered from Jan. 1 to March 15."

The rejections occur, amongst other reasons, due to failures of exact matching between voter applications and the state's motor vehicle registration (DMV) database to which they are now auto-magically compared. So, if a voter registers (or re-registers after moving to a new location) as "Brad Friedman" but has "Bradley Friedman" on his driver's license, he'll be auto-kicked out of the voter registration system and may not find out until he shows up at the polls on Election Day! That is, if he even knows where to show up since he may no longer receive sample ballots and poll location information etc. in the mail!...

In case you missed it, AP recently lifted an article as researched and written by RAW STORY and published a version of it as their own. Along the way, they seem to have forgotten to give RAW the attribution they deserved for the many hours of research and work they put into the story in order to file the piece in the first place.

RAW's Larisa Alexandrovna originally discovered the gem after plowing through a bunch of Bush Administration policy statements on National Security Clearance policies and comparing the most recent version to previous versions of that same policy side-by-side. One of the RAW researchers confirmed her work and the subtle, but important changes she found, and then Larisa, along with RAW's Executive Editor John Byrne finally filed the piece at RawStory.com.

After all of that hard work, a human rights group shared RAW's story with AP who eventually filed their own very familiar story using the work as originally unearthed by RAW. They've since admitted to being given RAW's article and using it as the starting point for their own work, which walks a dangerously close line towards plagarism.

But even as they now admit that their story originated with RAW's reporting, they still refuse to give credit where credit's due. They've now given several lame and still-changing reasons for failing to acknowledge the "oversight" including "we do not credit blogs" and later, "we only credit blogs we know."

Larisa writes about the matter at Huff Po here and here, and John Byrne wrote an article covering AP's comments and comparing both articles directly for RAW here.

Setting aside the fact that RAW STORY is NOT EVEN A BLOG --- apparently any independent news source which originates on the Internet is now considered a "blog" by some in the MSM...all the easier to dismiss them by, we suppose --- The BRAD BLOG is a blog and yet we find the practice of failing to give us due credit equally objectionable for the many stories we have broken which were later picked up by the MSM as well.

Though most "blogs" do not do the sort of original reporting that we do here, it's certainly harder to argue that we're not one --- what with the word "BLOG" in our name and all. And yet, I'm forced to ask: What the hell does the word "blog" have to do with anything anyway?

Journalism is journalism is journalism. The quality of the reporting and the journalism therein is what matters no matter the name given to the media originating the work.

The reason that all of this matters is not so that Larisa or RAW or even myself or The BRAD BLOG receives some form of personal adulation or ego stroke for our hard work.

So if not for the good of our own personal self-esteem, why does proper credit to such sources really matter?...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

Video in Streaming Flash format...
Video in Windows Media format...

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart pokes fun at Bush's White House 'shake up' and exposes more ridicules Bush Administration deceptions in the process.

Stewart is not impressed with Bush's pick for Chief of Staff: