From Noah Schactman at Wired's "Danger Room" blog...

Seriously, people. Why won't somebody please buy me off?! I'm a "prominent blogger," or close enough to it. I'm starving over here. Where are you, CIA? Military? George Soros? It's tax time for crying out loud, and rent is due!

In lieu of the big bucks, hopefully you will consider buying me off. Therefore, with plenty of premiums to "sell" you in return, I am now cutting the price for 'em!

See this post for how you can receive your choice of any or all of the following, beginning at just $5...

• DVD of Uncounted, signed by the filmmaker, David Earnhardt
• CD of Duhmocracy, signed by the singer/songwriter Victoria Parks
• Copy of Troubletown Told Ya So book, signed by cartoonist/author Lloyd Dangle
• Copy of Politics as Usual board game, signed by nobody (though I'll sign it if you really want me to!)

Take your pick from the premiums above, most available beginning at just $5/month sustaining subscription to The BRAD BLOG. We could use it. Seriously.

...At least until Wal-Mart, Diebold, or the U.S. Army come knocking.

And if you don't wish to become a sustaining monthly supporter but still want to support, you can, of course, just toss us a few bucks. We'll take that too. $50 or more tossed this way, will get you that signed copy of Uncounted, a gazillion dollar value!

(Hat-tip BRAD BLOG read "TH")

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today was a busy day in Congress. Two election related bills went through “mark-up” in the Committee on House Administration. One bill, sponsored by Rep. Susan Davis and others, would allow no-excuse absentee voting. If passed voters would no longer have to give doctor’s excuses or proof that they will be out of state. It will be the voter’s choice to vote absentee. Also marked-up was a bill sponsored by Rep. Rush Holt and others that would reimburse states and local jurisdictions that opt in for a vvpat and/or audits. Both bills were amended and passed out of committee. ...

Is this your America?

The long saught DoJ "Torture Memo" written by John Yoo, offering a defense to George W. Bush and his sadistic friends to order the torture, and even killing, of detainees, has finally been made available. Not by the DoJ to Congress as they'd long sought, but to the ACLU via a FOIA request. (Thank you, ACLU!)

Yoo's document is some 80 pages long, offering what he feels --- or what the Administration wanted him to feel --- is a reasonable legal defense for the use of torture, even where it is explicitly disallowed by international treaties to which the U.S. has signed on.

Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker, who offers his own summary on all of this, has posted one of the more remarkable sections here.

In short, that 7-page section amounts to:

As mentioned last Friday, over the weekend, I spoke at CA Common Cause's "Media Reform Conference" out in Pasadena. The panel discussion, "Have the media undermined our democracy?" included myself, along with Congresswoman Hilda Solis (D-CA), Alex Nogales of National Hispanic Media Coalition, Jonathan Taplin of USC Annenberg School of Comm. and Kevin Uhrich of the Pasadena Weekly. It was moderated by Tracy Westen of the Center for Governmental Studies.

The short video of my opening remarks, naming names and doing what I do, along with my comments on the panel --- naming still more names and still doing what I do --- during the Q&A section, follows below. Text transcript (courtesy of VelvetRevolution's Emily Levy), follows below that...

Text transcript of the remarks follows below...

We admit to being perplexed enough by Matthew Mosk's Sunday article in WaPo, claiming that GOP "voter fraud" zealot Hans von Spakovsky, formerly of the DoJ Civil Rights voting unit, was "cleared" by a U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) inspector general's report, to poke around for a few minutes trying to figure out who this Mosk was, and how the hell he figured the report "cleared" von Spakovsy of anything.

vS was one of the notorious villians at the DoJ who politicized the hell out of the Civil Rights division by turning it into a blunt instrument to keep minority voters from being able to cast their lawful vote in any way he could figure out how to do.

He is also the failed nominee for the FEC who still has yet to show enough grace to remove his name from consideration, as he has singlehandedly succeeded in ensuring that the commission is entirely crippled, unable to vote on anything without a quorum, during an election year.

As the IG's report on whether the EAC was inappropriately influenced, by von Spakovsky and others, to withhold and the re-write a bi-partisan study on voter fraud, the then-chair of the EAC, Paul DiGregorio --- a Republican himself --- said that “too many of [von Spakovsky’s] decisions are clouded by his partisan thinking”...vS “certainly tried to influence...There’s no question about that," and that, the EAC chair felt that "von Spakovsky thought he should use his position (on the EAC commission) to advance the Republican Party position.”

Mosk used his WaPo article then, to quote vS alleging that the "conclusions (of the EAC IG report) represented a personal vindication" for him. Huh?

We got distracted by other business, and were unable to finish our poking around to figure out what Mosk might have been after, and why this article, on a report published three weeks ago suddenly became "news" to the Washington Post, with "clearance" of von Spakovsky as the central meme.

J. Gerald Hebert, over at the Campaign Legal Center Blog seems to have come away with the same perplexed reaction, opening his article yesterday with...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

As of today the New Jersey Secretary of State takes over all election duties from the Attorney General. This could change the state’s opinion on the Sequoia issue. Will the SOS be an advocate for the county election officials or side with the vendor? Time will tell.

A software error from Diebold is responsible for the revelation that John McCain won the Nov. general election.

Iowa Governor Culver signed legislation today that forces counties that use DREs to now purchase optical-scan machines. Another state added to the long list of states that have turned their backs on DREs and the voting machine industry that supports DREs....

No, this is not satire, like the recent hilarious Onion video on Diebold, nor is it an April Fools gag. It's actually just Diebold. Who, as usual, is joke enough all by themselves...were it not for the hundreds of thousands of dead people due, in no small part, to their incompetence and/or treachery, of course.

Here's the beginning of their latest press release...

Yes, they had to launch a new initiative to actual "care" about things. And yes, the word "caring" is actually in quotations in the original announcement.

In regard to the environmental part of their new campaign to "care," a company spokesperson is quoted in the release as saying, "We are evaluating all of our products to ensure whenever possible we are offering a recycled alternative."

On that point, ironically enough, in Florida of late, things have gone somewhat backwards for Diebold on the recycling front. Rather than using "recycled alternatives" in their products, it is their products themselves which are quickly becoming the recycled. Literally.

As the Tampa Tribune recently reported, thousands of the company's touch-screen voting machines, recently outlawed in the Sunshine State, are being hauled away by a recycling company to be "shoved into a two-story-tall machine that will mash them into bits that will be separated and recycled."

Can't make this stuff up. And let us repeat: Nothing in the above story is an April Fools joke!

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Progressive Democrats of America hosted Islamic scholar Reza Aslan, author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam" in Los Angeles on Sunday night at an event moderated by Bree Walker. Video of the entire conversation can be found below broken down into individual Q&A to make each part easily accessible:

The dirty little secret about the "Bush Doctrine" and how the last eight years have "opened up a Pandora's box" (6:53)

American misperceptions about the Muslim community (3:21)

Click link below for many more videos...