Guest Blogged by John Gideon

As was expected the corporate media picked-up the latest in Diebold's sordid story --- which we reported first here last Friday --- with articles by Ian Hoffman yesterday and today and even the Associated Press stepped in as well.

Unfortunately the headline of Hoffman's article yesterday characterized the security hole as being a 'glitch'; which this certainly is not. It is also not a 'flaw' as it was characterized by today's Hoffman and AP articles. (Ed note: Hoffman has been very good at reporting on all of these related stories, so we don't wish to be overly critical of him, but rather point out the inaccurate characterization.)

This is a 'feature' that was knowingly installed by Diebold. It was not a mistake or something that was overlooked in the design of the software. It is not a 'bug', 'glitch', 'flaw', 'error in programming' or any other simplistic name. Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor and veteran voting-systems examiner for the state of Pennsylvania has said this:

Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Avi Rubin, who published the first security analysis of Diebold voting software in 2003 had this to say:

In the meantime the state of Georgia has decided that there is nothing that they have to do because their administrative rules already mitigate the problem. Of course, they made that statement without knowing what the full problem is.

A redacted copy of the Hursti "Critical Security Alert: Diebold TSx and TS6 voting systems" can be found at BlackBoxVoting.Org. Bev Harris guarantees that the redaction only resulted in 50 words being removed from this copy of the report.

Finally, I would be remiss in not pointing to this final line of Dan Goodin's article for AP:

Uh, Dan, you could have had a more timely article, and probably scooped Ian Hoffman if you had read The BRAD BLOG on Friday, where you would have found the whole story posted exclusively that day.

It's about time that the corporate media begin looking to the blogs as a source instead of ignoring us like we aren't here. Or at least admitting that they're looking to the blogs as a source, instead of only attributing those in the MSM.

Will Dan Goodin or the AP post a clarification to their story? We're not holding our breath.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

Just hours ago Betty Ireland, the Secretary of State of West Virginia filed a formal complaint against ES&S with the federal Elections Assistance Commission. A story in the State Journal quotes Secretary Ireland:

There have been failures all over the state. A small sampling of problems gives us:

The national media? Mums the word for them, it seems.

"Obsessively?" Me? (He says as he writes this at 4:39am) Well, maybe. But someone's gotta.

So begins the editor's intro to a piece I was invited to submit to the Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism's Watchdog site. The invitation came from Deputy Editor, and Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin, so I was honored to accept.

I was asked to submit questions for mainstream media folks to ask of Elections Officials about our current Electoral Train Wreck-in-Progress in hopes that someone in the MSM might actually do so. These are the tough questions which, frankly, ought to be asked of every damn Election Official in the country by every damn responsbile media person.

Several questions were edited out by Dan before posting for reasons that I don't completely understand. But as I consider him one of the good guys (who occassionally even links to BRAD BLOG from his WaPo page) I won't hold it against him.

So here's the piece as posted at Nieman Watchdog. (Including a swell pic of yours truly!)

And for the hard-cord Election Reform junkies, read on for the extra bonus questions which didn't make the cut. Who knows? Maybe someone in the MSM may one day want to know what they completely failed to ask about...

David Edwards picked up on these over the weekend, but didn't have the chance to get them all posted here.

A full frontal coordinated attack on John Conyers was launched over the weekend by the GOP as their newest last-ditch attempt to save their asses this November. The tactic has now come down to the rather sad: "Vote for us or we might lose!"

Apparently the GOP's pliant cohorts in the media, including Russert, Stephanopolis, Matthews, the front page of the New York Times and, of course Fox, were all too happy to lend a hand to their efforts. Here's a round-up of a few of the most obvious efforts...

Russert and Stephanopolis do GOP Duty...

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Chris Matthews Takes His Turn...

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Fox, Reliably, Brings up the Rear...

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UPDATE: David Swanson has a few choice words on the organized Conyers attacks.

As the corporate mainstream media shakes their head in clueless wonder about the Porter Goss resignation at CIA, (they're "stunned", "suprised", "can't imagine what else must be going on to have brought this on") the clues have been bubbling for the last week or so on the Internet.

We associate ourselves with Josh Marshall's initial take...

Muckraker has, in fact, been all over various points of the developing scandal for the last week or so. We recommend you keep your eyes over there as things move foward.

Underscoring the bizarre state of our national corporate mainstream media, Josh made a related point earlier today, prior to the Goss announcement. As readers were wondering why TPM and their Muckraker site were giving so much attention to the Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) incident which, readers comments had suggested, just distracts from all of the more important GOP scandals, Josh defended their coverage with this reply...

Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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Earlier this week, a European Parliament committee released a report saying that the CIA had illegally detained people and used secret 'rendition' flights to transport them to other countries or secret CIA prisons where they were expected to be tortured.

Several members of European Parliament met in Macedonia today to investigate the story of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen, who was abducted by the CIA. After being kidnapped, he was then 'rendered' to a U.S. prison in Afghanistan and held for 5 months.

The E-Voting Train Wreck continues...

This from a statement released today by the Indiana Secretary of State (to get just a tiny idea of what this statement is in reference to see the "Train Wreck" article linked above...and just about every other damn thing we've been running here at BRAD BLOG for the last God-knows-how-many weeks/months/years)...

The Indianapolis Star begins their coverage this way:

NOTE TO NATIONAL MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Please pay no attention whatsoever to any of the above. It's just a small local story. Nothing of interest. No pattern here here that effects our country as a whole in any way. All is well. Please enjoy your Easter Holiday break! Thank you.

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?!)

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?...

Hopefully this will be my last words on the disgraceful incident involving the arrest, removal and detention of Cindy Sheehan, who gave the life of her child in defense of this country, just prior to Tuesday's State of the Union address.

This latest canary-in-the-coalmine story made the front page of WaPo today, and reveals quite clearly both the Media's and at least one Republican's bias against those who do not agree with the George W. Bush Administration...As well as the disregard for our Constitutional Freedom of Speech. At least by the Republican.

The WaPo article, written by Petula Dvorak, first reveals the pro-administration media bias and/or their consistent inability to fairly report on an unfair situation. Note this early graf:

In other words it's implied here that Beverly Young, the wife of Congressman Bill Young (R-FL), who was removed from gallery at some point during Bush's speech wasn't arrested because, unlike Sheehan, it didn't come to that. Mrs. Young must have been polite (she wasn't) requiring no arrest, while Sheehan must have been unruly (she wasn't) requiring arrest and hours of detention.

The fact of the matter, however, as clearly explained later in the article, is that Mrs. Young was never threatened with arrest at all, unlike Sheehan who was frog-marched out of the chamber and handcuffed from the get-go. And that was even with Sheehan being polite in every respect, by all accounts of the story, while Young was abusive towards the cops, calling them "idiots" (that night, and even later after their eventually apology) and, as WaPo points out, "Witnesses said her words for him were much saltier the night before."

As I mentioned yesterday in my article on "Cindy Sheehan's Unequal Treatment Under the Law", the Wingnuts who've been busy trying to equate Sheehan's treatment with Young's ("They were both asked to leave, so clearly there's no political bias here!" say the apologists) have also overlooked the fact that Young was asked to leave much later. After the cops already had an embarrassing situation on their hands. As WaPo reported...

It's clear that Mrs. Young would have been left alone with her "Support the Troops" T-shirt and would not have been asked to leave, had not the cops already had the Sheehan situation on their hands, and needed to cover their asses.

Finally then, it's revealed in the story that the hypocritical Congressman Young himself would likely not have said a word about Sheehan's treatment (which was much worse than his wife's) had his wife not been asked to leave. He admits as much:

So the woman actually arrested, detained, and perhaps even "roughed up" was no problem for Young's "standards" because he "totally disagree[s] with everything she stands for."

Welcome to the amazingly slipperly slope...as it gets still slipperier and slopier every damn day in this country.

Still unclear? See how Judge Anthony Napolitano --- who defended Sheehan on Fox News, ostensibly, once it became clear she broke no rules or laws --- reportedly contrasted Young's T-shirt with Sheehan's. Young's, said Napolitano, in regard to the "Support the Troops" T-shirt, was "a Republican T-shirt."

Fox happily took up the meme on their website:

The "opposite message"?!

It's a dangerous fucking line we're crossing here in America 2006. Pay attention.

ALSO... It's not just the MSM who get the story wrong in their rush for political points. Blogger Glenn Greenwald reports on tons of Wingnut bloggers who couldn't wait to lie about the Sheehan story to their readers...and then refuse to correct themselves after it was proven how incredibly wrong they were.

Last June, 42% of Americans in a Zogby poll felt that Bush should be impeached if he lied about the War on Iraq while 50% opposed.

Earlier this month, in a new poll by Ipsos, a majority of 50% were in favor of impeachment, while just 44% were opposed.

And today, the latest poll from Zogby asking the same question, says 53% support impeachment of Bush while just 42% oppose.

In the meantime, even while the Mainstream Media were relentlessly discussing impeachment every day, wall-to-wall, about Bill Clinton back in September and August of 1998 (while hardly mentioning it today in relation to Bush) "only 36% supported hearings to consider impeachment, and only 26% supported actual impeachment and removal" according to a study of 16 major polls which asked the question back then (versus the 3 major polls now, 2 of them which had to be funded by American citizens donating to AfterDowningStreet.org.)

ImpeachPAC.org, a new organization from the AfterDowningStreet.org folks (of which The BRAD BLOG is an affiliate) have begun raising money for Congressional candidates who support impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. They have much more on all of the above.

UPDATE: Two commenters have taken us to task for what they consider to be a misleading headline on this item, noting that the 53% who "support Bush Impeachment," as the headline states were answering whether or not they would do so "if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq."

Though we did make that point clear in the first sentence of the article, the commenters (one of them an habitual troll here at BRAD BLOG, but we do not discriminate) still had a problem with the headline.

When we posted this article, what we didn't delve into (mostly due to lack of time) was what the sponsors of the poll --- who similarly headlined their article announcing the results as "53% of Americans Support Impeachment," by the way --- also discussed how many Americans feel already that "Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq."

From their article:

Thus, 53% of Americans support impeachment "if Bush did not tell the truth" and anywhere from 52% to 57% believe he did not tell the truth.

Do the math. We stand by the original headline. (And still hope Bush gets a blowjob so impeachment proceedings may begin.)

{Blogged by Brad on the road...}

The fight for democracy in America --- even as we still scratch our head with continued wonder that a "pro-democracy" movement is actually necessary in the United States of America in 2005 --- continues to be a difficult one. But the fight is well worth it. Even as our victories tend to come in small, but continually accruing pieces.

We're not supposed to be talking about this issue at all, 11 months after November 2nd, 2004...and yet more and more are doing so every day. The Mainstream Corporate Media may not get it yet. But the ranks of great patriots who give a damn about their country continues to burgeon as the noise in favor of an accountable democracy increases every day due to the folks like the good readers of The BRAD BLOG who take their civic duty to heart.

Here are just a few of the latest positive signs in the continuing fight for a free, fair, verifiable and transparent democracy that many would prefer we simply didn't even discuss. We will continue to do so nonetheless. The burden is well worth carrying. The rewards for doing so are well worth the effort.

Debra LoGuercio, editor of Winters Express and columnist in Daily Republic and elsewhere, makes it a hat trick with her third column in as many weeks on our tenuous Electoral System. She was haunted by the siren sounded by our first article on the Diebold insider we dubbed DIEB-THROAT, who alerted us to the Dept. of Homeland Security website where a Cyber Alert was issued last year prior to the election about the vulnerability to hackers in Diebold's central tabulator software. That vulnerability has, by Diebold's own admission, never been addressed.

In her latest column titled "E-voting fraud is an American issue" LoGuercio joins the ranks of those of us who continue to be stunned at the remarkable indifference by the Mainstream Corporate Media to what DIEB-THROAT refered to as "one of the greatest threats democracy has ever known":

Again, read her full column to find out about her response from AP and NBC affiliates when she contacted them about all of this, and see if you can find a way to help swim together with her efforts. It's well worth it, and the support means the world to folks like us who go out on a limb on these matters...even when doing so may be neither popular nor the easiest thing to do.

In the meantime, there are signs that more and more folks are taking notice of what is going on and walking out on that limb as well. C-NET's News.com ran an article yesterday by Declan McCullah headlined "E-voting hobbled by security concerns".

The first couple of grafs:

The article covers both the ongoing concerns, and the internal debates --- even amongst election reformers --- about how and when to produce and count paper ballots...or "receipts" as they are regrettably becoming known in many circles.

On the point of the difference between reformers on these issues, I hope to produce a one-page "Declaration of Democracy" in the next couple of weeks, a page on which we worked diligently at the Portland Election Reform summit. I believe we can bridge the differences between reformers on these matters to get everyone on the same page. I've been working hard on that effort personally behind the scenes, and hope to have something to show for it in the next couple of weeks. Just by way of a heads-up...So that perhaps we may be able to "swim together" on these issues.

A second article from News.com published yesterday over at ZDNet covers a similar discussion on the problems with E-Voting vulnerability and the need to open the software for inspection:

And finally, there it was yesterday...smack dab in the middle of The New York Times: a full-page ad that asks the the too-obvious questions, "Would you trust a bank that refused to issue ATM receipts? Will you trust your democracy to voting machines without them?"

The ad calls for support of Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) H.R. 550 "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005" which we generally support as a good first step towards accountability. (You can send your words of support as well to your folks in congress quickly by using Velvet Revolution's easy Email generator here.)

Here's the very welcome ad, signed by many election reformers. Amongst them, our friend the heroic Robert Koehler (listen to our interview with Koehler at the Portland Summit as broadcast on The BRAD SHOW by clicking here and selecting HOUR 3.)

To read the full text of the ad in PDF format, click it, or click here.

Let's all keep swimming...together...

If you need some added inspiration to keep up the fight for democracy, we'll strongly recommend this great song [mp3], courtesy of Victoria Parks. "It's well worth fighting for..."

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

Project Censored has presented its annual compilation of the most important stories ignored by the mainstream media over the past year... and the rigged presidential election of 2004 came in at number three!

In normal times, the theft of a presidential election, and the virtual media blackout that followed it, would be an easy choice for the top spot. But then again these times are far from normal.

Here, according to Project Censored, are the top ten censored stories of the year:

It's official. Just in from the folks at Conyer's office...Fighting on every front...God bless him...In the DC area next week? Go help 'em make some noise!

Better yet, write to C-SPAN today and ask them to cover this event!!! We spoke with Conyers' office earlier this morning, and they made it clear they would appreciate any help that "6 or 7" of you might be able to provide in encouraging C-SPAN to be there!

Predictably, the promised "Did E-Voting Work?" coverage from CNN's Judy Woodruff didn't add much to what we've already covered here. The only notable issue is that she discussed the GAO investigation reported in the previous item here and other concerns about E-Voting, as well as giving a mention to the up-coming Ohio Recount and the quarrels about thereof. Reporting on those items at all on CNN is a step up at least! So we'll take that as a luke-warmish good sign. (CNN's report on the GAO Investigation is now online. Woodruff's report on video is here.)

In the meantime, real reporter Erica Solvig of the Cincinnati Enquirer slightly advances the Mysterious Goings-On in Warren County where you'll recall, unlike any other county in all of Ohio, all media were locked out from witnessing the vote tallying on Election Night. Warren County was amongst the last to report their results and one of the top Bush counties in Ohio. The reason given by Election Officials for the lockout was due to "terror warnings" they were said to have received from FBI/Homeland Security officials. It turns out the FBI has denied giving any such warnings to anybody in Ohio.

In today's Enquirer Solvig reports that the lockout was planned in advance:

Not sure what we learn from that, other than the plan to lock-out reports was made in advance and Election Officials have been inaccurate about even that. Still no word on why it was all done at all, but hopefully Solvang will keep digging!