On Monday night, NBC News aired its new documentary, Hubris: Selling the Iraq War, based on the book of a similar name by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. The film offered a number of new and disturbing insights since the original 2007 book was published.

While it may be maddening --- particularly for those of us who followed the massive scam as it was ongoing --- the documentary should be mandatory viewing for those who have lost sight of just how each and every single one of the key reasons used to sell the U.S. on war with Iraq was built on known lies. Each and every point --- from Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaeda, to his alleged mobile chemical labs, to his alleged nuke program, to those aluminum tubes said to have been for use in uranium enrichment, to the "fissile material" (yellowcake) he was said to have been trying to obtain from Niger --- was a lie. And each an every lie was known to be a lie by the scoundrels and war criminals who sold it to the American public and a compliant American media.

Even with its failures, and several of them are identified here, Hubris reminds us of how each and every one of those points was a scam. Period. And, while it's not expressly highlighted (but should be in a follow up!), we are reminded how none of the liars have ever faced any accountability whatsoever, despite nearly 4,500 U.S. troops killed, more than 30,000 of them wounded, well over 100,000 Iraqi citizens murdered and some $3 trillion looted from our nation's coffers. You should take the time to watch it.

The entire documentary, broken into 6 parts, narrated by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and originally aired on 2/18/2013, follows in full below...

Republican House Speaker John Boehner didn't seem to care for President Obama's State of the Union address tonight...

The Speaker "managed not to rise even for a shout-out to 'wounded warriors,' or 102-year-old Desiline Victor, who waited seven hours to vote in Miami on Election Day," notes Joan Walsh in "The night John Boehner just sat there".

But the biggest boner of the night came during Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) official Republican Response. The junior Senator and 2016 hopeful was apparently demonstrating the need for action on climate change, by personally re-enacting the nation's worst drought in fifty years. It all eventually led to what has now become known as the "gulp heard round the world"...

Don't worry, Marco. Nobody noticed. Except for everybody. And, of course, Deadspin, who has the entire moment in excruciating extreme slo-mo.

For more serious concerns about tonight's State of the Union address, see our earlier report.

The massive operating deficits that have driven the U.S. Post Office to announce an end to delivery of First Class mail on Saturdays, beginning in August, are not the product of postal service ineptitude. Those deficits are not the product of increased public access to emails or from competition by private delivery services like UPS or FedEx.

The U.S. Postal Service has been victimized by the Orwellian-labeled Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA), which embodies a scheme designed to destroy the constitutionally established U.S. Postal Service in order to privatize mail and parcel delivery. In a lame duck session, at the peak of the USPS' profitability and productivity, a then Republican-controlled Congress forced the U.S. Postal Service "to pre-fund 75 years worth of pensions" in the span of ten years, "a requirement not made of any other public or private institution." If not for the onerous and unprecedented requirements of the PAEA, the U.S. Postal Service, which is not funded by any taxes, would now be experiencing a $1.5 billion surplus.

The contrived demise of the postal service must be understood within the broader subversive goals of libertarian and right wing philosophy --- a philosophy which, despite the express provisions of both the Preamble and Article I of the U.S. Constitution, rejects the right of government to "promote the general welfare"...

Last year we spent quite a bit of time detailing what we described, with much justification, as The Year of GOP Election Fraud.

From the three felony voter fraud convictions of Indiana Sec. of State Charlie White (R), to the admitted ballot petition fraud of the campaign of Newt Gingrich (R) and of the staff of U.S. House Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R) to the attempted voter fraud by Rightwing propagandist James O'Keefe's co-conspirators, to the registration fraud allegedly committed by employees of the firm hired by the RNC to carry out voter registration in seven key swing states, to the actual apparent voter fraud of the GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and beyond, it was another year in which the Republican Party pretended there was a massive Democratic voter fraud epidemic in order to institute new polling place voter suppression laws, even while carrying out their own crime spree which largely went ignored by the very same media covering the GOP attempts to enact polling place Photo ID restrictions.

But it wasn't only the GOP superstars named above who attempted to game the system. Some of their gullible followers, who were distracted and conned into buying into the pretend "Democratic voter fraud" panic, decided to take matters into the their own hands by attempting to double-vote, claiming they were simply "testing the system".

Two different such cases in two different states led to voter fraud felony arrests last November. One of the cases, in Nevada, has now been settled with a guilty plea. The other appears to still be pending in New Mexico against a man who claims he thought his job as a Republican precinct challenger was to challenge the system itself...

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Superstorm Sandy disaster aid finally passed by Congress; Transportation Secretary to step down; Catastrophic flooding in Australia, while drought worsens in US; Poll: climate action a winner with voters; PLUS: Who in New York is paying to protest wind farms in Scotland? ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): UK's Stern: ‘I got it wrong on climate change'; Judge OKs BP’s guilty plea in Gulf oil spill; Keystone XL work veers onto wrong land; Wind Energy Surpasses Nuclear in China; Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink; EU sets common standard for elec. car chargers; Rare earth mining boom raises toxic risks ... PLUS: Exposing the Kochs: Billionaire Koch Bros. get sweet tax breaks by secretly funding climate change deniers ... and much, MUCH more! ...

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Will John Kerry, or won't John Kerry?; Sierra Club vows to break the law for climate change and to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline; Dangerous air pollution in Salt Lake City; PLUS: The Mafia wants a piece of the clean energy action ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Somebody is paying cash to anti-wind protesters (Trump?); World's biggest renewable energy storage farm opens in TX; Charting a New Course for the U.S. and the Environment; Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions; Airlines 'made billions in windfall profits' from EU carbon tax; Colorado: January red flag fire warning; Rising Sea Level: How High Could the Tide Go?; Medical Experts Warn The Rise Of Resistant Bacteria Will Cause ‘Antibiotic Apocalypse’; CNN's Brain Freeze On Climate Change --- again... PLUS: What holds energy tech back? The infernal battery ... and much, MUCH more! ...

Palm Beach Post's George Bennet wrote last week about how so-called "Tea Party" groups seem to be running away from the "Tea Party" name in places like Florida.

The South Florida Tea Party, for example --- the one that helped launch the national career of Sen. Marco Rubio and hosted Donald Trump while he was initially pretending to think about running for President --- is changing their name to the National Liberty Federation.

"As Tea Party groups go," observes Steven Benen at MaddowBlog, "the South Florida Tea Party was one of the bigger and better organized outfits."

But it's little wonder these folks are running from the name. Their popularity, and their name brand, is now plummeting along with the fortunes of the Congressional Republican Party. As Bennet notes, even Rightwing pollsters like Rasmussen are finding that support for the "Tea Party" movement is absolutely cratering...

While the short answer is that it is no doubt protected against criminal prosecution by the Speech or Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution, one can't help but think of how the successive efforts by radical 'Tea Party' Republicans, first during the manufactured "fiscal cliff" crisis, and now by way of holding a figurative gun to the head of the nation's and world's economy, in order to extract concessions that would destroy the New Deal safety net (see two Jan. 14 segments of the Ed Schultz show below), resembles the crime of extortion, perhaps even treason.

For those of us who live in California, this latest round of GOP hostage-taking comes as no surprise. Year-after-year, the CA GOP utilized the Golden State's requirement of a 2/3 vote for passage of either spending or revenue enhancing measures as a means to force austerity, such as former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's draconian $15 billion cuts to education and health care. By refusing to pass a budget, the CA GOP at one point forced the state controller to issue $2.6 billion in IOUs. And, all during the CA GOP reign of economic terror, the Golden State's budget deficit expanded --- reaching an indebtedness in excess of $20 billion despite those massive cuts.

Democracy struck back. The percentage of CA voters who are registered Republicans dropped to less than 30%. During the 2012 election, CA voters passed a relatively progressive, revenue-enhancing tax measure supported by Gov. Jerry Brown (D) by a wide margin and the GOP's ability to hold the state hostage was eliminated when Democrats achieved a super-majority in the state legislature.

As a result, fiscal sanity was restored. CA is now on track to achieving a budget surplus even as $5.2 billion has been added to the state's school, university and health care budgets.

It is appropriate that President Barack Obama, who unfortunately lacks a record of holding fast to principle, has, so far, stated that he will not give in to the latest extortion demands concerning the upcoming need to raise the debt ceiling once again. But, given the nature of the far greater damage to both the U.S. and even global economy that could be wrought by the Congressional GOP's latest round of hostage-taking, can the nation or the world await a subsequent election to deal with extortion by an organization, the so-called 'Tea Party,' that is funded and controlled by the rapacious billionaires Charles and David Koch, whose Koch Industries was described by William Koch, David's twin, as a form of "organized crime?"

Two 1/14/2013 segments of MSNBC's The Ed Show addressing GOP hostage-taking on the debt ceiling follow below...

"I didn't leave the Republican Party, it left me." – Former FL Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, 9/6/2012

"Anyone from New York or New Jersey who contributes one penny to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee should have their head examined." - Rep. Peter King (R-NY), 1/2/2013.

In the wake of the Jan. 1, 2013 decision by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to postpone a vote on Hurricane Sandy relief until after the 113th Congress was sworn in, NY Rep. Peter King's sense of betrayal, which he described as "a knife in the back" in a remarkable floor speech, is understandable, but his proposed remedy is woefully deficient.

The only way that Republicans in an entire region of the country --- the Northeast --- can achieve meaningful representation in the 113th Congress may be by way of a massive party switch. The increasingly rare breed of "moderate House Republicans" may soon only be left with the choice of emulating the late Sen. Arlen Specter's 2009 party switch, by either becoming Democrats or by becoming independents who will caucus with the Democrats.

Of course, that didn't work out terribly well for Specter either...

"If we're going to get past this almost hysterical fear of trying to do anything at all on gun rights," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked on Friday during her breaking coverage of the mass shootings at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, CT, "if we're going to try to puncture the myth that anything to reform or rationalize gun laws is absolutely, politically impossible as a categorical thing, what would happen if we just started at the edges?"

"What would happen if we just started with what even members of the NRA say they want from national gun laws? Because they want a hell of a lot more than we've got right now," she correctly noted. "The organization that they're a member of may not admit that, but when you poll their members, even they want improvements."

She is absolutely right. And so is the rank and file membership of the National Rifle Association when it comes to many of the most pressing gun safety issues. The numbers (read on) are unequivocal. They want what their leadership does not, and by huge margins. The con-men and scam-artists who run the terrorist-enabling NRA racket, on the other hand, as usual, are absolutely bloody wrong.

If we could reform gun safety laws just enough in this country to meet the wishes of the vast majority of the NRA membership, we would be leaps and bounds beyond the deadly political quagmire we have been languishing in as a nation --- thanks to the insidious liars and profiteers of the NRA leadership and the cowardly politicians afraid to take them on --- for at least a decade in this country.

The NRA's loudest and most dishonest voice is its Executive VP and chief political strategist Wayne LaPierre. He is opposed to any and all legislation that might stand a chance of making Americans safer, claiming a twisted and tortured view of the Bill of Right's 2nd Amendment as a prohibition against any and all such legislation...

A few items of late that have caught our eye, but we haven't had time to cover in detail. So, you get the Readers Digest versions for now. You're welcome!

• Susan Rice and the Democrats once again succumb to the demands of terrorists.

• Whodathunkit? But questions arise about the legitimacy of the claims made by Fox' latest wannabe James O'Keefe, about that video purporting to show an "unprovoked attack" by "union thugs" outside the capital building in Lansing, MI this week. The most amazing part? Someone at The New York Times --- yes, that New York Times --- is one of those actually noticing the big honkin' edit in the middle of the video, rather than just reporting it all as unquestioned fact.

• Eric Holder spoke about the need to protect voting rights at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. We have more than a few bones to pick about it, but we'll just point you to the actual speech for the moment.

• What's the difference between this and just stealing? House Republicans secretly --- secretly --- authorized $500,000 in tax payer dollars to defend the unconstitutional "Defense of Marriage Act". More of that small government "conservatism", apparently.

• Finally, for now, the critically acclaimed Zero Dark Thirty, the new theatrical film about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden, reportedly glorifies the torture that led to his capture and killing, even though no torture whatsoever actually led to his capture and killing.

Discuss.

45 Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House are calling on Congressional leadership in both chambers to cut $100 billion from a "bloated nuclear weapons budget" as part of the ongoing so-called "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, issued a press release citing the letter sent to House Speaker John Boehner (R), Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) and Senators Harry Reid (D) and Mitch McConell (R) charging that "Our oversized nuclear weapons arsenal fails to reflect historic reality" and that "Our spending on radioactive relics of the past requires a reality check" after the successful conclusion of the Cold War.

The 45 House Dems list unnecessary current expenditures for "refurbishing a nuclear bomb that no one wants…a Uranium processing facility we do not need…a nuclear bomber when the ones we have will last for decades."

The letter, (posted in full below) implores leadership:

While the letter from the largely progressive Congressional members appears to be a rational step in the right direction, it raises additional questions. Among them: (1) Given that two nations, the U.S. and Russia, possess 95% of the world’s nuclear arsenals, and given that each nation’s individual arsenal is capable of destroying all life on the planet many times over, does it make sense to simply trim only $100 billion from an estimated $640 billion in nuclear weapons expenditures scheduled over the next ten years? (2) Why not couple the immediate request to trim $100 billion from the nuclear weapons budget with a call for a joint resolution of Congress calling upon the President to initiate negotiations under the auspices of the U.N. for a multilateral Treaty that would entail the eventual dismantling of all nuclear arsenals?...

From Henry Decker at The National Memo (where, by way of full disclosure, I'm also a fairly regular contributor)...

Video of the ABC This Week moment mentioned above, from 12/2/2012, follows below...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below.]

Our week guest hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show continues.

As usual, we'll be BradCasting LIVE tonight from 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the globe from L.A.'s KTLK am1150 in beautiful downtown Burbank. Join us by tuning in, chatting in, Tweeting in and calling in! Our LIVE chat room will be up and rolling right here at The BRAD BLOG, as usual, while we are on the air. Please stop by and join the fun while you're listening! (The Chat Room will open, at the bottom of this item, a few minutes before airtime, see down below, just above "Comments" section.)

Scheduled tonight (so far):

• LISA GRAVES, Executive Director of Center for Media and Democracy on their call for the U.S. Senate to investigate and subpoena the Koch Brothers and hold public hearings to help expose the threat to democracy represented by "dark money" and Citizens United.
• CHARLES JOHNSON of Little Green Footballs on the Rightwing's latest pretend scandal about Benghazi and much, much more up to-the-minute wingnuttery!
• PLUS! Much more, including Allen West's surprise concession in FL-18, Desi with the latest Green News Report, and as many of your calls as we can possibly get to over your public airwaves at 877-520-1150 and your tweets to @TheBradBlog!...

The Mike Malloy Show is nationally syndicated on air affiliates across the country and on SiriusXM Ch. 127. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at our Sante Fe affiliate KTRC 1260, or our Minnesota affiliate KTNF 950 (tell them you're from "Minnesota" when asked). Also, you should be able to listen live at WhiteRose Society if the radio gods are with us.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Fun show tonight, but you be the judge! Commercial-free audio archives are all now posted below for your listening pleasure (as are the chat room archives). See ya tomorrow night, for our final night in for Malloy this week!...

In what UPI's Gabrielle Levy describes as a "passive-aggressive" Facebook post, Republican Rep. Allen West conceded to his Democratic challenger, Patrick Murphy, in FL's 18th Congressional District this morning.

Here's the first part of West's post...

With West's concession, however, there are still a few points to keep in mind moving forward...