Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com

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

George Stephanopoulos interviewed 2004 Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards on Sunday's edition of ABC ThisWeek.

Edwards repeated his charge that President Bush is "the worst President of our lifetime." He also condemned Bush and Cheney for doing serious damage to the country. From foreign policy to domestic policy, Edwards said that it "will take us forever to recover" from the Bush Administration. The former V.P candidate also blasted breaking the law and ignoring the Constitution to spy on Americans.

From this week's issue of New York magazine...

(Hat-tip to BRAD BLOG reader Sarah M.)

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Tomorrow we have primary elections in Arkansas and Idaho. Arkansas is iVotronics while Idaho is a mixture of ES&S op-scan with AutoMark or Sequoia Edge. Did you think the machines used in Allegheny County Pennsylvania were new? If you did you were wrong. In fact, they are used machines with some coming from New Orleans. Those machines have not stopped traveling either. They are now on their way to their permanent (maybe) home in Tennessee. Yes, two days before the deadline set for Tennessee counties to sign their contracts with ES&S, the vendor told the state HAVA coordinator that any county wanting to contract with ES&S would have to accept used machines. The coordinator just shrugged his shoulders and did nothing. ...

New pre-trial filings by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the Scooter Libby perjury trial related to the outting of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, seem to draw Dick Cheney still closer to the center of the scandal, MSNBC's David Schuster is now reporting.

In the newly released documents, defendant Libby denies having seen Cheney's handwritten notes on the margins of a 2003 NY Times op/ed, in which Cheney raises questions about Plame's involvement in former Ambassador Joe Wilson's fact-finding trip to Niger. In the op/ed, Wilson exposes what he didn't find on that trip --- evidence that Saddam was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger.

(See BRAD BLOG's report, as filed last week by David Edwards, with video and other details as the NY Times marginalia was disclosed.)

From Schuster's report this evening:

RAW STORY has the text transcript and reports that Rove's legal team expects a decision on his indictment "at any time".

Here's the video, just out from MSNBC's Hardball, including the new details as reported by Schuster...

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

High-larious. From last Saturday's SNL. Courtesy of Crooks & Liars...

Go, Ion, go!...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Crittenden County Arkansas trained all of their poll workers Saturday morning. Four hours of training and throw them to the wolves on Tuesday. A newspaper in Ohio correctly points out a fact we have been talking about for quite sometime now: the cost of elections is going to markedly rise for school, water, fire and other districts who hold small elections for bonds, initiatives and levies. The same will be true for small town elections when they are not held on the same day as county and state elections. In other words those small elections will be driven to be held with the larger elections which will increase the size of our ballots and the complexity of those elections. Benton County Arkansas Election Coordinator Jim McCarthy said. "To make the voting process go as smoothly as possible, we would urge everyone who can to use a paper ballot. We have not had a sufficient amount of time to do adequate training for our pollworkers with the electronic ballots, and it's going to stop everything, or slow it way down, if they try and do that." County Election Commission Chairman John Brown said the company has "bitten off more than it can chew," leaving nearly every county in the state dealing with the same problems as Benton County. "ES&S has oversold itself all over the country," McCarthy said....

Things aren't looking good for our friends at Diebold. Even NEWSWEEK is finally paying attention as Steven Levy files a report for this week's issue on the story we broke two weeks ago.

(Just pointing that out, so you generous BRAD BLOG donors realize you're getting your money's worth by getting the scoops long before the rest of the world even wakes up And by way of torturously cryptic value-added teaser: Much more to come from other major MSM sources in the near future. Much.)

But back to NEWSWEEK...Levy's piece begins this way...

With that said, we recommend you read Levy's piece --- it's not long --- for a few more thoughts and details. But we'll nitpick one or two of them here. Most notably taking the opportunity to highlight Diebold's desperato spokesman, David Bear's latest gasp...

Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) has made such a jackass of himself, so frequently of late, in his desperate bid to save himself from a challenge to his U.S. House Seat in Florida's 24th district this fall, that we can't help but begin a new feature we'll call "Feeney Watch" for a while here at BRAD BLOG.

Feeney's emerging strategy: Act like he's an actual conservative again, distance himself from Bush for the first time ever, and otherwise do anything he can to get his name in the paper for anything other than the mounting corruption charges against and around him.

Here's his latest jackassery, for which he recieved a spanking from none other than his idol Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia --- from today's WaPo (We'll try to get caught up with some previous Feeney Foolishness in the days and week's ahead)...

Of course, Feeney is running against vote-rigging whistleblower Clint Curtis this year, whose story we originally broke here at BRAD BLOG in December of 2004. Curtis has alleged --- amongst other "Tom"-foolery --- that Feeney asked him to create a vote-rigging software prototype when they both worked for Yang Enterprises Inc. (YEI) in Florida in 2000. In addition to being YEI's general counsel and registered lobbyist, Feeney just also happened to be the Speaker of the FL House at the time.

No conflict of interest there, of course, just because YEI had millions of dollars in state contracts.

Speaking of millions of dollars, Feeney's got 'em, as he's one of the top-tier money-collectors in the Tom DeLay/Jack Abramoff Big-Buy GOP network.

Curtis, on the other hand, is raising his money the old fashioned way: By earning it. From regular old citizens. Please feel free to help him do so. He needs it!

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Crittenden County Arkansas hoped to have gotten their ballot programming for their iVotronic machines yesterday afternoon. They are being forced by the state to use the machines in the primary on Tuesday. Because of late arriving software and then having the software come in with mistakes the first time, the county had planned on not using the machines at all. Now they must gather all 150 poll workers today, which is "Graduation Day" for Arkansas schools, and give them a crash-course in how to operate the DREs. This is a recipe for disaster. Someone at ES&S has admitted that they knew there was a problem with their iVotronics that affects the votes of tall voters. However, their spokesperson is now denying there is a problem and that it is up to the voters to check their votes and everyone just loves using the iVotronics so there can be no problem. "ES&S workers" were responsible for some ballots being counted twice on PA primary night so vote counts in Luzerne County were not correct. The 'undervote' rate in Allegheny County Pennsylvania seems to be very high according to reports....

This morning, NPR's Weekend Edition covered the latest trouble with Diebold's touch-screen systems. They went to Pottsville, PA during last Tuesday's primary election.

The producer on the story had contacted us last week, prior to the story, for some background information. The resultant report, aired this morning, was generally a good --- and for a chance, accurate! --- one, we think.

By way of quick summary: Diebold spokesman Mark Radke explains the latest security hole, which had caused a lockdown of all Diebold touch-screen machines in PA, just days prior to the election, was there for a good reason --- to update software quickly, he says.

No explanation, of course, for why Diebold didn't feel it necessary to warn PA themselves about such a need for these extreme measures long ago. Especially since they were warned about the problem as long ago as January 2004.

Johns Hopkins computer science professor, Avi Rubin, says he can't think of a problem ever revealed in a voting machine as severe as this one --- the one which Radke predictably downplays --- adding that a TIVO system has more built-in security than a Diebold voting machine!

Radke says the physical security of the machines would make it impossible to exploit the security hole. Radke, of course, knows he's just spinning. Rubin makes that clear in his response, explaining how he could have compromised an election in about 5 seconds as a poll worker through this ridiculous vulnerability.

-- Listen to the full report (about 5 mins) here...

...And let us know what you thought of it in comments.

UPDATE: Barb Burt over at CommonCause, blogs on the NPR item as well this morning, giving it high-marks, along with a few other notable thoughts.

UPDATE 5/24/06: A text transcript of the NPR report is now included below...

From AP...

In April of 2005, we reported on those machines, the UniLect Patriots, being decertified in PA.

Previously, on November 4, 2004 --- two days after the Presidential Election --- we reported that more than 4,500 votes were completely lost on the same machines in Carteret County, NC.

That same day, in the same report, we discussed the same machines in use in Ohio on Election Day.

While the incident in NC led to new laws in the state requiring full source-code submission to the state by Electronic Voting Machine vendors, and the problems in PA have led to state decertification and now a lawsuit against the company, we're aware of no action that has ever been taken by the state of OH to investigate what might have happened and whether or not votes were similarly lost on UniLect Patriot machines in the Buckeye state that same night.

Good thing what happened in OH on November 2, 2004 wasn't all that important.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Trouble seems to be brewing in West Virginia where SoS Betty Ireland has requested every county to determine their losses due to poor support from ES&S. Those losses will be used in an investigation into the vendor's missed contractual deadlines and lack of support. At the same time many county clerks are speaking out about the late support from the SoS against ES&S. Last Wednesday I posted an article regarding ES&S charging $8.50 for a roll of thermal paper for the iVotronic machines in White County Arkansas. Today I called White County and verified that the paper is, in fact, thermal paper and it is used for their vvpat....

I've been very quiet here over the last 24 to 48. Not by choice, and not for lack of stuff to blog about, but because much is going on. All of which I hope to be able to share in various bits, pieces and scoops soon. Thanks to David E. and John G. for their efforts here in my absense in the meantime. Should have more as soon as I can come up for a bit of air.

In the meantime, our new friend and fellow LA Blogger, "scribes" of MartiniRepublic.com has been pestering us endlessly for links from the very popular BRAD BLOG over to his very fine and endlessly snarky site. Virtually none of those gentle requests have been fulfilled.

So he's come up with an even cleverer way to get me to link to him. He's done a short email interview with me, so now I can't help but link over to his site! Smartly done, scribes! Read the interview here for a few bits of mostly unreported, sometimes amusing and occassionally scandalous tidbits of BRAD DIRT about which you may not know (and may not even care to know!)

Otherwise, scandalize me all you wish in comments on this item to be considered an Open Thread...Until I return...