"When it Rains, it Pours" Week continues here at The BRAD BLOG...

Widely syndicated columnist Liz Smith, in the New York Post today and elsewhere (her column runs in at least 70 papers), picks up on Joe Conason's NY Observer piece from last week which pointed to our coverage of the Ann Coulter Voter Fraud issue.

In the bargain, a Fox & Friends producer has called me today to see if I might be available to appear on their show to discuss it tomorrow or the following morning (which would be about 3am or 5am my time, so if I do it, watch for the sleepless bags under my eyes...anything for Election Integrity). The producer explained that Coulter might appear after me via phone. I suggested she appear either before, or preferably at the same time, so she's not allowed to, um, say things that aren't true, as occurred last time she was asked about all of this on FNC.

As FNC tends to be, um, Ann Coulter friendly, we'll have to see if she has veto power enough to ensure I never actually get to appear to discuss it. But we'll see.

Anyway, here's Liz today:

Of course, you can read more about it, including perusing documents such as her fraudulent voter registration form and the report from the poll worker demonstrating she knowingly voted at the wrong precinct last year, via our "Ann Coulter Voter Fraud" Special Coverage page.

Good luck, Ann. Though it's taken over a year for the rest of the national media to catch on, you may finally be busted. At least in the media.

UPDATE: 3:19pm PT Heard back from Fox, who reports they "just spoke to Ann and she is unavailable tomorrow AM," so they probably won't be covering it tomorrow. Have a feeling Ann will be unavailable every AM to talk about this one. Hope they'll cover the story anyway, as I'm happy to stay up all night to help them.

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

In an article on the EAC, Congressional Quarterly had this to say:

And the National Journal reports:

Links to those stories, and more, all below...

Holy cow. When it rains it pours. Someone get us an umbrella. Quick.

Two related stories collide to suggest some possibly very bad news for our friend, the notoriously corrupt Tom Feeney (R-FL).

First this just in today from the St. Petersberg Times...:

More details in the full story on what we've been reporting for years --- in what seemed like a vaccuum until now --- on Feeney's golf junkets with Abramoff to St. Andrews, Scotland. (See this May 2006 story for example: "Feeney/St. Andrews/Abramoff and Ney/HAVA/Abramoff Connections Still Flying Beneath the Radar")

There were three Congressmen who went on those trips. The first two, Tom DeLay (R-TX) and Bob Ney (R-OH), have both been forced out of Congress in the bargain and are respectively under indictment or in jail. Only Feeney, so far, has escaped both notice and legal accountability.

That may be about to change, however, with today's news that Mark Zachares, an aide to Rep. Don Young (R-AK), will plead guilty tomorrow to accepting some $30,000 worth of goods from Abramoff, with a promise of a job down the line in an interesting scheme that could also reveal something about what Feeney might have been discussing in some fashion with Abramoff.

As AP is reporting tonight:

Feeney has insisted that there was never a deal for anything between him and Abramoff, unlike with DeLay and Ney. However, the notion of long term plans, such as the deal Abramoff was working on with Zachares, has never been discussed in relation to Feeney.

And as luck would have it, Zachares was on that trip with Feeney and Abramoff in 2003 and is cooperating with the feds --- all of which could spell out very bad news indeed for Feeney.

We've been covering the corrupt Congressman in great detail for years in relation to allegations by Florida computer programmer Clint Curtis that Feeney asked him to create a vote-rigging software prototype when they worked together at a software firm in 2000, while Feeney was serving as a registered lobbyist for the company even while he was Speaker of the Florida House. We originally broke that story in December 2004. A summary version is here.

Let's hope Curtis saved those "Clint Curtis for Congress" signs. He may need them again sooner than he might have thought.

As you can imagine, we'll be watching this one closely. And likely with no small amount of elan...

UPDATE 4/24/07: Feeney fingered as "Representative #3" in FBI filings. Details...

Given all of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC)'s extraordinary failures of late, there's little time for the moment to review them all. See our EAC category page for the tip of the iceberg.

That said then, two notable articles are published today which go to town (and rightly so) on the EAC, detailing just some of their most recent failures --- namely, their withholding and/or rewriting of two important reports for clearly partisan reasons, but at whose direction? --- and the newly awakened Congressional response to those failures. As well, a few names are named that are names we've heard named before as being at the center of the politicization of the DoJ's Civil Rights voting unit, but popping up again over at the EAC. Whodathunkit?...

"You have to firewall politics out of the Department of Justice. Because once it gets in, people question every decision you make," the former U.S. Attorney from Arkansas, Bud Cummins, told the Los Angeles Times in March. "Now I keep asking myself: 'What about the Blunt deal?'"

What about the Blunt deal, indeed.

{Ed Note: See the 5/8/97 update at the end of this story concerning Cummins denial that he ever made that comment to the LATimes}

Last Thursday we began piecing together a few previously unconnected dots in the firing of Cummins. The dots connected appear to lay out a fairly straight arrow into the the highest levels of the White House. At least if you're familiar with some of the players, whom they know, and what they do for a living.

Since we've been reporting on the high-level (just about as high as they get) GOP operative, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, for some years now at The BRAD BLOG, the connection was made quite easily once we tripped upon a key fact: Hearne's Missouri law firm, Lathrop & Gage LC, was at the center of a criminal investigation by Cummins's office. That investigation had come to public light just before Cummins's sudden --- and still unexplained --- dismissal. He was replaced by Karl Rove aide Timothy Griffin.

While the Republican Punditocracy has been running around desperately repeating the old Scooter Libby-era chestnut "No Underlying Crime!" over the days since Gonzales's woeful testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, we've been looking more into the Cummins/Hearne/Rove/White House nexus, which seems to fairly scream out "Underlying Crime!" on just its face.

And others in the blogosphere, it seems, appear to be quite ready to burst as well with news on this element of the U.S. Attorney firings....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The Pensacola [FL] News-Journal begins an editorial this way:

That, and links to other notable voting news stories from over the weekend, linked below...

Chris Bagley of the North County Times files a terrific profile today of Riverside County, CA, Election Integrity advocate Tom Courbat. The piece covers the awareness of the issue that Courbat has been able to raise in the county (and, we would add, subsequently in the nation), the procedures that have changed there due to his persistent activism, and the recent Harri Hursti appearance in the wake of Jeff Stone's "Riverside Hack Challenge," etc. (FWIW, we are also mentioned in a few grafs, in regard to the Hursti business and a bit more.)

All of the above has been carried out by Courbat --- as we say, heroically --- even while he continues to battle cancer tied to the use of Agent Orange during his Vietnam-era military service in South Korea.

Tom is one of many such quiet, and usually unrecognized, heroes around the country, to whom our nation owes a debt of gratitude which can never be adequately repaid. We're proud to recommend Bagley's article today, and hope it serves as inspiration for many others.

The announcement of the sudden passing of the Congresswoman from California's 37th district today comes as both a surprise and a tragic loss. She was the first African-American woman to chair the important U.S. House Administration Committee, having taken the chair for the first time this past January in the 110th Congress. It had previously been held by Vern Ehlers (R-MI) who had taken over from Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) after he stepped down in the wake of his Abramoff-related corruption charges.

We covered the announcement of her cancer diagnosis and subsequent request for a temporary leave of absence last week from her post as chair of the committee which is currently overseeing the scheduled mark-up of Rep. Rush Holt's Election Reform bill (HR811). Our coverage last week described who might take over the committee in her absence.

Both The Hill and AP have additional details on Millender-McDonald's passing.

(Hat-tip to Super-Duper Friend Corey K.)

Guest Blogged by DES...

Tragedy and bloodshed visited two very different worlds this week, related only by their utter incomprehensibility, when many souls were lost to violence in Virginia and Baghdad. Last week we spent quite a bit of time contrasting how each was covered in the media: a gusher of emotion over the heroism, selflessness, and senseless loss among the victims of the shootings in Virginia, yet an astounding lack thereof for the hundreds killed in the daily carnage that is today's Iraq. No attention must be paid to flag-draped coffins arriving from our wars; there are few photos and honors for the lives of our soldiers or their families.

Yet even the Bush Administration managed to get in on the act, appearing at the Virginia Tech tragedy in just over 24 hours, beating their own record of four days in responding to Hurricane Katrina. (Perhaps because the university is so near the White House...?) Bush then said at the memorial, in perhaps his all time "greatest" urecognized-irony-laden moment: "Those whose live were taken did nothing to deserve their fate --- they were simpy in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Electronic voting machines, and the U.S. EAC, which is supposed to oversee them, are still a disaster --- as we were reminded, yet again --- this time when ES&S iVotronic machines across America were revealed to have a vulnerability allowing an undetectable voter-flipping virus about which the EAC refuses to alert America. Also, Diebold Whistleblower Stephen Heller offers encouragement for the Honest American confronted with secret wrongdoing --- a must-read during these troubled times.

"Elections have consequences", and it showed most this week when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was called on the carpet before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a vain attempt to explain himself --- the attempt being in vain because there is no honest explanation for this perversion of justice.

Not to worry --- there still appears to be consequences for actual voter-fraudster Ann Coulter! But if any small good can come from this shameful period in our nation's history --- notably the U.S. Attorney scandal --- perhaps it will be the wide exposure and long-deserved death of the Republican myth of widespread 'voter fraud' --- which we've been covering for years on these pages (literally).

That, however, may be only the tip of the poisoned arrow into the Heart of Justice, as Brad revealed late in the week what could well be the "underlying crime" and direct link to the White House that the wingnuts claim isn't there. Brad tells me there is more where that came from...

There will be more --- do try to keep up. And see below for links to those stories and many others you may have missed at BRAD BLOG last week...

There is new information on the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 2006 election that shows that voting results on more than 1 in 4 voting systems failed to match up with the results on the central tabulator. The election was held under the administration of Michael Vu, the county's now-resigned Election Director who has, incredibly enough, been immediately hired up by the People's Republic of San Diego County and their former Registrar Mikel Haas (along with Vu, one of America's worst, so he was promoted by the county, naturally!) as the new Assistant Registrar of Voters...

From AP:

Amazing enough, but it gets much, much worse....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

It is amazing that different media sources can read a report (or not read it) and report on it and those reports are totally different. The recently released Cuyahoga County, Ohio report told that vote-memory card totals failed to match electronic voting machine ballot tallies in more than one quarter of the samples checked. The report also found that hundreds of votes were lost, that others were recorded twice and that software used to count the ballots was vulnerable to data problems. The New York Times reported the problems. Meanwhile the local Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the audit is good news for touch screen and that the audit showed that a tally matched the official record. It makes one question who read what in the report....

...And this one, unlike John McCain's version, is actually amusing. Even if both of them are creepy as hell...

Kudos to the creator of the video, Adam Kontras, for his prescience and sense of dark satire back in April of 2006 when it was originally released. Even as we curse him for having given McCain, the former "straight shooter"-turned-wingnut-loon, any bad ideas.

Kontras tells us he received "lots of death threats from angry Iranians not understanding it," when he first posted it, and that he still does. As we receive far too many love letters here at The BRAD BLOG, hopefully this will to serve to send a few of the irony-impaired Iranians our way for a while instead. Always happy to serve.

(Hat-tip to Justice Through Music, who's also had this on their radar for some time!)

Guest Blogged by Daniel Borchers of Citizens for Principled Conservatism

Controversialist Ann Coulter, legendary for her hate speech and elimination rhetoric (see just a few of her most notorious greatest "hits" in the chart below), is a featured speaker at tonight's New Jersey Right to Life (NJRTL) Banquet. That’s right, an advocate for death is a spokesman for life.

Presidential candidate Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), among others, will be sharing the dais with Coulter.

Despite Coulter controversies just last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC, and at the Reclaiming America for Christ (RAC) Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, NJRTL still prominently features conservatism’s most prominent polemicist.

Ann Coulter at CPAC 2006:

“I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'“

(Responding to a question from a Catholic University student about her biggest moral or ethical dilemma) “There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought 'Ann, that's not going to help your career.'“

“If we find out someone [referring to a terrorist] is going to attack the Supreme Court next week, can't we tell Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalito?”

Ann Coulter at the Reclaiming America for Christ Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 3/3/07.

“I spoke at CPAC yesterday, and I [took questions] about Obama and Hillary and Gore and global warming, and I said I was going to also have a few remarks about the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but apparently you have to go to rehab if you use the word ‘faggot.’”

“Those few abortionists were shot, or, depending on your point of view, had a procedure with a rifle performed on them. I'm not justifying it, but I do understand how it happened....The number of deaths attributed to Roe v. Wade - about 40 million aborted babies and seven abortion clinic workers; 40 million to seven is also a pretty good measure of how the political debate is going.”

I contacted both Sen. Brownback and Rep. Smith. Neither deigned to address, or even respond, to my concerns over their tacit endorsement of Ann Coulter’s views, despite my having written them to explain that…