A federal judge has just issued an injunction to keep the new Photo ID requirements at polling places in the state of Georgia from moving forward. As reported many times on The BRAD BLOG, the requirement for photo ID at the polls would disenfranchise anywhere from 10 to 20 million Americans who do not have driver licenses --- mainly the elderly, minorities, the poor and other urban dwellers.

The call for Photo ID at the polling place is the latest attempt by Republicans who hope to further disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters across the country. The effort has been pushed hard by the self-declared "non-partisan" phony GOP "voting rights" group calling themselves the American Center for Voting Rights and was called for by the shameful Baker/Carter National Election Reform Commission, which was led by disenfranchisement expert and Bush family crony James A. Baker along with high-level GOP operatives from the ACVR.

This just in from AP...

In a news release just issued to The BRAD BLOG, Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), ranking minority member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, lauded the decision to stop what he referred to as "a modern day poll tax."

Says Conyers in the release: "Truth be told, the issue should have never reached this point - the Georgia Legislature should never have passed this modern day poll tax, the Governor should not have signed it, and the Justice Department should have intervened to stop it. That is why 21 Members and I asked the Department to prevent this law from taking effect."

The full press release from Conyers office follows...

In an extremely detailed 2891-word page one Washington Post report today by James V. Grimaldi and Susan Schmidt, Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH) is tied to at least four different aspects of ongoing probes being carried out by criminal investigators looking into the corruption of GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay --- both of whom have been indicted recently on charges relating to the various investigations.

Ney has not yet been indicted, but the WaPo exposé ties him to several different scandals including the SunCruz casino boat fraud/murder investigation (for which Abramoff has recently been indicted), several illegally funded overseas vacations, support of Indian gaming in apparent trade for favors received in the form of cash contributions and other gifts from Abramoff and --- yes --- the apparent "fixing" of an election administered by Ney of telecommunications companies to determine who would receive a large contract at the U.S. Capital building.

Ney is chairman of the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. BRAD BLOG readers will remember Ney's committee as holding a "show hearing" earlier this year on "Election Irregularities in Ohio" during the 2004 Presidential Election. That hearing, which attempted to whitewash the thousands of troubling reports calling the Ohio election into question, called just one witness from a "voting rights" group. That witness turned out to be Mark F. "Thor" Hearne of the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), self-described "non-partisan" organization which had appeared out of the blue just days prior to the hearing. Hearne, identified himself in the hearings as a "long time voting rights advocate", but failed to mention that he was actually the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. The other "non-partisan" founder of ACVR was Jim Dyke, former RNC Communcations Director, and recently installed White House spokesman for Dick Cheney.

(BRAD BLOG's full special coverage of ACVR, the so-called "non-partisan" GOP front group masquerading as a "voting rights" organization, can be found here.)

The WaPo story reports that Ney is currently "under investigation by Florida federal prosecutors looking into Abramoff's acquisition of SunCruz, according to sources familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity."

Excerpts from the full WaPo report follow...

{Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org}

The CEO of Smartmatic Inc., Antonio Mujica, has been denied a tourist visa by the US embassy and will not be allowed to return to the United States according to a recent report in VCRISIS, a Venezuelan news source.

Smartmatic Inc. is the Florida-registered, Venezuelan-owned parent corporation of Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the leading voting machine companies in the US. Its ownership has also been tied to Hugo Chavez and other shadowy multi-national organizations.

No reason is given for denying renewal of Mujica's visa in the VCRISIS article which describes an agitated confrontation with US Embassy officials. According to the story, Mujica "argued that he was legal, that he had an important company in the USA and that he had to travel with urgency to that country."

Sequoia Voting Systems was recently purchased by Smartmatic from a UK firm for $16 million. The surprisingly small sale price has brought into question the stability of Sequoia Voting Systems, which would seemingly stand ready to make millions of dollars in sales of voting systems around the United States as money from the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) continues to pour out to counties and states. However, the company's ability to provide technical support to their customers has now come into question as this blogger was recently told by a high level official at a competing American-owned voting machine company.

Sequoia is also involved in a lawsuit filed by attorney Paul Lehto in Snohomish County, Washington. The suit calls for the county's contract to be voided with the company due to the proprietary "trade secret" software used by the company. Lehto has published a report detailing a number of disturbing irregularities found in Snohomish's general election last November.

The Smartmatic company slogan is "All Things Connected". Setting aside whether all things being connected in an election system is a good thing (it isn't), their website has the following text on the front page:

The irony here...and now...of course, is that the entire situation demonstrates how utterly dysfunctional the election administration in America has become. While US law allows a Venezuelan man to control the secret counting of America's votes, the US State Department doesn't consider him fit to enter the country, even temporarily.

Further pointing out the absurdity of it all, in a media release published earlier today at VoteTrustUSA, Ellen Theisen, Executive Director of VotersUnite.Org says, "It's ironic that when we take vote-counting to Iraq, we take it in the form of paper ballots deposited into clear plastic ballot boxes, but in our own country, vote-counting is in the form of electronic ballots and secret software controlled by a man our government has declared ineligible to set foot in the country."

Just another day in the decline of American democracy...

(Ed note: Is it us, or does that woman in the red sweater there look suspiciously like someone we know? Just asking.)

According to our friends at RAW STORY, the plans that Armed Forces Radio had to add the progressive Ed Schultz Show to its current "Conservative"-only line up of talk shows has been changed as of this morning...

Read RAW's whole story to find out the possible reason for the military's flip-flop and last minute decision to NOT stay the course...

So I'm driving to an important appointment yesterday, to which I'm late, when I hear Tammy Bruce on TalkRadio 790 KABC, the powerful ABC station out here in Los Angeles, out and out lying to her listeners.

She's telling them that Valerie Plame/Wilson was not a covert CIA agent. That she couldn't have been because "she drove to work every day at the CIA building." That she was nothing more than a bureaucrat with a desk job at the CIA and so she was never outed.

Never mind that the CIA themselves requested the current Dept. of Justice investigation into the outing of one of their agents, or the myriad CIA officials who have testified that indeed she was very much a covert agent.

Furthermore, the former "liberal" turned...whatever she's turned...also instructs her listeners that Plame/Wilson could not have been covert because she posed in photographs with her husband Joe Wilson months before she was ever mentioned in the press by Bob Novak.

Needless to say by now, for anyone with a nickel's worth of information on the matter, Bruce was horrifically wrong on both accounts. (For just a partial refutation, since my time is short today, from a CIA classmate of Plame/Wilson's, you can read this.) And since Bruce was asking for folks to call in with their opinion on the matter, I did.

While driving, I got through right away to the show via my cell phone. Her producer asked what I was calling about. I identified myself as "Brad Friedman from The BRAD BLOG," and mentioned that "Tammy is completely misinforming her listeners about the Plame affair. That I'd be happy to correct the record having spoken to both Joe Wilson and others at the CIA on these matters, and I'd be happy to give her the real information about what's going on."

Her producer puts me on hold for a minute, and comes back to say, "Please send Tammy some email at TammyBruce@KABC.com and you can give her your thoughts."

I say: "Well, I'm in the car driving right now, so I can't email her."

She says: "You can send her email anytime..."

I say: "Wait, are you not going to put me on the air to talk to her to correct the record?"

She says: "Right."

I say: "Why not?"

Guest blogged by David Edwards

Arianna Huffington supplements her Huffington Post analysis of Judy Miller's and The New York Times' latest account of Miller's role in Traitorgate by appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources this morning.

In her article and later on CNN, Huffington identifies the biggest fault in Miller's account:

CNN Reliable Sources:
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Talk Left focuses on a statement by Miller's lawyer, Bob Bennett, made this morning on ABC's this week that further implicates Libby in attempting to influence Miller's testimony. Hunter at Daily Kos concludes that "Libby is in deep, deep trouble here."

AP quotes Bennett from his appearance on ABC:

ABC This Week:
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Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Larisa's newest blog entry at Huffington Post is called On Liberating Something, and it all sounds extremely liberated, if you ask me.

It starts like this:

and I think you'll enjoy reading the whole thing (in other words, click here!).

Guest blogged by David Edwards

Enjoy these video clips from Bill Maher's latest episode...

Opening: Bush/Cheney Ad Streaming Video in Real Format Windows Media Format	Maher's Monologue Streaming Video in Real Format Windows Media Format
Panel on Iraq and Terror Streaming Video in Real Format Windows Media Format	New Rules and Rant on Miers Streaming Video in Real Format Windows Media Format

In a wistful mood this evening...as apparently is Jane Hamsher who does a fine job of looking both back and forward at Rove's big day today --- four and half hours with the Grand Jury --- as an eery calm seems to set in before the TreasonGate Storm that is most assuredly headed this way.

Thanks also to Jane for pointing us towards DeLay's latest desperate gasp. Something tells us that this (hopefully) soon-to-be "old school" video may end up in a museum some day in the "America's Decade of Shame" section. At least we hope so anyway.

Actual Conservative George Will unleashes on Republican "Faux Conservatives" in his NEWSWEEK column this week.

While his column raises the question of why it has taken so long for Will to finally get firmly on board the bandwagon of honest-to-God Conservatism in calling out the Republican Party and their leaders for their phony use of the "Conservative" label for little more than cynical partisan expediency, The BRAD BLOG is impressed enough with his no-holds-barred column to award him our "Intellectually Honest Conservative Award".

We hope this award --- very rarely bestowed these days due to the overwhelming dearth of actual Conservatives willing to call out their fake "Conservative" brethren for what they are --- may soon find still more recipients as the Conservative Momement finally begins to distance themselves from the disaster that is the Bush Presidency and the failed Republican Leadership in Congress.

By way of making the case for Bush and the Republican-led Congress' complete avoidance of true Conservative values, consider this point amongst many from Will's latest piece:

While we have many and various policy disagreements with true Conservative philosophy, we welcome the general tenets of Conservativism as applied towards American discourse and policy-making. What we are appalled by however, and have been for some time, is the continuing phony use of the "Conservative" label for pure partisan gamesmanship and political opportunism. That, even while the supposed "Conservatives" in control of every branch of the Federal Government have grown its size --- including so-called non-military discretionary spending --- beyond anything that any of the most "Liberal" Presidents or Congresses have been able to do in the history of the country!

And yet, a majority of Republican voters, according to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, continue to blindly support the anything-but-Conservative borrow-and-spend Republican "President" and Congress.

In that regard, Will is particularly on-target in his attack on the beseiged, disgraced and ethically-challenged Rep. Tom DeLay. In a blistering attack, Will describes the fallen U.S. House Majority Leader as one "who neither knows nor cares any more about limited government than a camel knows or cares about calculus."

He then continues to take on what he describes as the "faux conservatism" of today's Republican Party as sold out to the D.C. lobbyist's brand of what Will describes as "K Street conservatism."

Quoting Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee who charges that some Republicans think "big government is good government if it's our government," Will unleashes on the entire "faux conservative" cabal in Washington:

He closes with a remarkably lucid assault on the abandonment of virtually all true Conservative values --- including a complete abdication of the bedrock Conservative notion of personal accountability --- by those now (for the moment) in power in Washington in general and in the White House's War on Iraq in specific:

All of which leaves us scratching our head in continued wonderment and asking, along with Eric Alterman, who commented on a new Pew Research poll released today by asking "You couldn't have figured this out, say, last November?"

Alterman's question was directed to the American people, a majority of whom for the first time, the Pew poll finds, now say "George W. Bush's presidency will be judged as unsuccessful" and that "By a 2-1 margin, people said the Bush administration has had a negative impact on politics and the way government works."

Setting aside what the people actually said last November --- since we have no real way of knowing due to the disastrous gutting of a once fairly-reliable and once fairly-transparent Electoral System in this country --- it's perfectly appropriate to direct Alterman's question towards Will. Where the hell was he last November?!

Nonetheless, given the dearth of Republicans who still maintain an actual set of Conservative Values --- better late than never, we guess --- we'll go ahead and award Will the coveted BRAD BLOG "Intellectually Honest Conservative Award" today. We offer it in the hopes of "shaking the bushes" to encourage other true Conservatives to step out from the shameful, murky, self-deceiving and destructive cynicism of Power-before-Policy and Politics-before-Country brand of "Faux Conservatism" that has hijacked and perhaps irreconcilably destroyed both the Conservative Movement in America and the Republican Party along with it.

{Thanks to Des for tips to both Will's and Alterman's pieces.}

During a discussion about "parental notification" for teen abortions on this morning's Bill O'Reilly radio show, the "no spin" host vibrated with a charge that Planned Parenthood encourages teen abortions so that they can "get paid for every abortion they're involved with."

I heard the smear merchant, O'Reilly mention it this morning, but as I'm in the middle of a mountain of stuff, I knew I wouldn't have time to look into it and blog it myself. I shouted out to the good folks over at Media Matters, who record such things all day anyway, and they just now blogged the item (with a courtesy tip of the hat, to yours truly): [emphasis theirs]

The full Media Matters item offers information on how Planned Parenthood is actually paid, along with the audio clip from the segment.

And, by the way, MM, who's always looking out for Bill O'Reilly, encourages folks to send in such tips to mm-tips@mediamatters.org.

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

According to a late-night e-mail from Larisa Alexandrovna, Raw Story is currently featuring an article by Jason Leopold which starts like this:

No kidding. There's a lot more to the story and you can read it here.

You gotta love her, don't you? Larisa Alexandrovna not only gave us a heads-up when Jason Leopold's article hit the net; she also contributed research to the article! So: three cheers for Larisa Alexandrovna! Hip Hip ... no, seriously: Read more here.

Guest blogged by David Edwards

As we noted earlier, on tonight's broadcast MSNBC's Countdown presented a report called "The Nexus of Politics and Terror".

In a piece which mildly reminds us of the BBC series The Power of Nightmares (video here), Countdown host, Keith Olbermann, provides evidence that politicians may use the fear of terror attacks to accomplish political goals.

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Read more at MSNBC's Bloggerman...