This is freakin' brilliant: "Chevy's 'Make Your Own Tahoe Commercial' idea not exactly going as planned".

Too funny.

(Hat tip to Huff Po...and another BRAD BLOG reader who tried to point me to these earlier, but whose name I've forgotten. With apologies.)

After being suddenly tossed off the air to make room for yet another religious station in Arizona, Air America Phoenix has found a new home and begins a new broadcast day at Midnight tonight!

They will now be heard at KPHX 1480 AM in Phoenix, or via aaphx.com on the web! Congrats folks! And welcome back! Arizona needs ya now more than ever!

And thanks to all of those BRAD BLOG readers who answered our calls for action in support of AAR Phoenix over the last month or two! It's nice to win one every now and again, huh?

But more good news for progressives in Phoenix, as the smartest man on radio, Peter B. Collins, will begin airing out there as well (on a different station, I believe) beginning the week after next. And judging by his brilliant regular Friday afternoon guest (5:20p PT), I'd say Phoenix is in for an embarrasment of Progressive riches! UPDATE: Peter B. contacts us to say he'll be on KPHX as well! His show will air on tape delay at 10p-1a Mon-Fri!

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, of VotersUnite and VoteTrustUSA

The "DVN Top 5" is a feature in the weekly voting newsletter of VoteTrustUSA. The March 27 edition can be found here. The selection of what will be the "Top 5" for each week and where it goes on the list is all mine. The fact that you may disagree with my choices is great because it shows that you have been reading the DVN articles that I've posted throughout the week here on The BRAD BLOG!...

Having a problem with some users not being able to comment as being told they are "Banned". Trying to figure out and fix the problem now. Apologies for whatever reason it's occuring...Hope to have it taken care of shortly.

UPDATE: Fixed? If you had previously not been able to post a comment this morning, please try and post one here to see if we've gotten the problem fixed. If you still can't post, please let me know. Thanks!

Ann Coulter and Al Franken had a high-priced debate out here in Los Angeles this week. Here's a bit of coverage of the event from Rob Eshman in The Jewish Journal. Haven't seen much other coverage out there, though I haven't looked too terribly hard. Please feel free to post links in comments if anything else of note on it out there.

Otherwise, Ryan M. McCaffrey, publisher of the conservative Harvard Salient takes down Coulter from a more academic perspective in an article titled "Ann Coulter's Treason:
Killing the future of the conservative movement" as published a few weeks ago. It followed on the heels of her infamous "Ragheads Speech" embarrassment at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in DC. Not that any of those in attendance who greeted her with a standing ovation were embarrassed in the least. Neither were the pols who shared the limelight with her like Cheney, Frist, Santorum, and other America Haters of the same ilk.

The title of McCaffrey's piece should give you an idea where he --- a seemingly real conservative (versus the phony Coulter et al) --- stands on the Republican Rockstar, but here's a few quick licks:

Both links come courtesy of Dan Borchers of Citizens of Principled Conservatism, and our our resident Conservative Coulter-o-phile who covered her CPAC appearance for The BRAD BLOG last February.

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 John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

California, and I suspect, many other states, are heading for a 'train wreck' with regard to their new voter registration data bases. Many state primaries will feature disenfranchised voters. The screaming from voters who were registered but find that they are no longer may end up drowning out the news about the failing voting machines. Counties in Texas are speaking out against the heavy-handedness of ES&S. Their machines failed and when the counties refused to pay until they are fixed, ES&S refused to do any work for next weeks run-off elections. The counties have no choice but to bow down to ES&S....