A few Thanksgiving treats from around the web today. This Charlie Brown Thanksgiving GOP Debate courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel [Hat-tip Eric W. Dolan at RAW STORY]...

This one hat-tip Cary Aye on the Facebook...

If you need any help understanding the joke above, here ya go. And today, Fox continues to bash Americans, even on Thanksgiving.

Other than that, our thanks to all of you for your continuing support of The BRAD BLOG, and a huge thanks to those of you who can support us today by buying a copy of Imagine Politik to help us make it to the 2012 Election cycle! You'll not be disappointed, and we will be forever thankful!

[Now UPDATED with audio archives below...]

It's our last night guest hosting the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show this week! Hope you can join us. I promise a BIG show tonight!

Once again, we'll be BradCasting LIVE 9pm-Mid ET (6p-9p PT), coast-to-coast and around the uprising globe from the studios of 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:

• CATHERINE CRIER, formerly of CNN and CourtTV on her new book, Patriot Acts: What Americans Must Do to Save the Republic and so much more!
• PLUS! Election results flipped in Utah, new news on the Venango County, PA audit of failed ES&S e-vote systems, and much more as the Occupy Wall Street uprising continues, along with your calls 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 also on SiriusXM Ch. 127. You may also listen online to the free LIVE audio stream at affiliate GREEN 960 in San Francisco or at WhiteRose Society or via MikeMalloy.com.

POST-SHOW UPDATE: On our last show before the Thanksgiving break, I'm thankful to the Malloys and all of their listeners for welcoming me so warmly each time I'm able to sit in. Thanks to you all. We had a helluva show tonight, with some very important news, interviews and calls. They all follow below in the commercial-free archives...

After the Municipal Council elections in Provo, Utah on November 8, residents had been told that Gary Winterton had narrowly defeated Bonnie Morrow for the District 1 seat --- by just 9 votes.

The margin was close enough that Morrow was allowed to ask for a recount of the paper ballots which were tallied on Election Night by the city's optical scan systems made by Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (Following years of failure of Diebold's voting systems, the company changed their name to Premier, only to see the assets of the failing company finally purchased last year by Dominion Voting, a Canadian firm which now services the machines.) The same optical scan systems are used all over the country, and are set once again for use in the New Hampshire's "first in the nation" GOP Presidential primary to be held in January.

The first "recount" of Provo's Municipal Council District 1 ballots --- carried out on the same op-scan systems that tallied them in the first place --- was held yesterday, only to be abruptly called off when the results were found to be "extremely in favor of the opposite candidate."

As reported by the Daily Herald this morning...

Yesterday's tally, the paper reports, were "coming out overwhelmingly in [Morrow's] favor," so officials planned to begin a hand-count --- as per "Democracy's Gold Standard" --- for today...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Last September The BRAD BLOG, unlike the corporate-owned media, offered detailed coverage of a U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights hearing on the spate of GOP voter suppression laws (PART 1 and PART 2).

Now, Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films has produced a powerful video that exposes the Koch-funded assault on your democracy, along with a petition that you can sign demanding that the Eric Holder-led Department of Justice live up to its name...

Several opponents of WI's Gov. Scott Walker have been receiving middle-of-the-night death threats, as they've been circulating petitions to gather signatures in an effort to recall the state's controversial anti-union Republican Governor.

According to WISC-TV/Channel 3000 in Madison...

The news outlet also reports that yard signs supporting the Recall Walker effort have repeatedly been stolen off the property of several home owners.

Last week, we reported on the plans to sabotage the signature gathering effort being discussed openly on a number of Facebook pages. Walker supporters on those pages had been seen talking about their plans to gather signatures in liberal areas of the state and then burn or shred the petitions, rather than turn them in. One person had claimed he'd "be able to destroy 15-20k signatures" or, if granted access to even more petitions, he'd "be able to destroy upwards of 15-20% of the entire collected ballots in the state of Wisconsin."

Reid Magney, the Public Information Officer for the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.), the state's top election authority, told The BRAD BLOG via email late last week that defrauding petitions is a felony crime, and that his agency has been in touch with law enforcement about the purported sabotage schemes...

Wow. Until very recently (like, today recently, when Newt Gingrich --- yes, Newt --- found himself atop two new national polls! Party like it's 1994!), this man was the front-runner for the GOP nomination for President of the United States...

UPDATE: NBC's Chuck Todd tweets to say the Cain campaign responded to the video above by saying he "Didn't say anything wrong or inaccurate, it just took him a while to recall the specifics of Libya."

And NBC's Andrew Rafferty tweets: "Cain camp tells @NBCNews that Libya video being taken out of context. Cain going on 4hrs sleep, just took him a while to gain bearings."

The complete, 5-minute answer above was..."taken out of context." Got it.

Now back to news that actually matters. Sorry for the distraction there. But sometimes the insane freak show that has replaced actual political affairs in this nation is just too much to not take notice of here. This has been one of those moments.

The effort to recall Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker begins in earnest tomorrow, November 15. As TPM's Eric Kleefeld reports, Democrats and other opponents of the WI GOP's big government removal of public union collective bargaining rights will have just 60 days to collect more than 540,000 signatures in order to put the controversial Governor onto a recall election ballot early next year.

It won't be easy, as the initiative must succeed in gathering an average of more than 9,000 signatures each day between now and the 60-day deadline in January. To make matters worse, if indications on a number of Facebook pages are to be believed, some Walker supporters are planning to sabotage the effort with a number of dirty tricks, including collecting signatures under cover and then burning and shredding the petitions...

On Sunday afternoon I found myself in a spirited Twitter debate about Occupy Wall Street, its effectiveness as a movement and, of most interest to me, the First Amendment rights of the Occupations around the country as the attempts to evict the Occupiers, by local mayors and police departments in a number of cities have been slowly, but surely, ramping up over the last several days and weeks.

This particular debate was not of the sort you're likely to see in the MSM, in that it didn't include any Rightwingers and their fake arguments. (If you're interested in one of those debates, see my radio debate with a RWer last week here.) It included a few self-identified progressives, a few self-identified Democrats and Obama supporters (who do not necessarily consider themselves progressives, and often view them with scorn), and a few attorneys. None of the participants were Republicans or Tea Baggers...

If you had the pleasure of not sitting through tonight's GOP debate on CNBC, here is the only thing you missed...

P.S. About fifteen minutes later he remembered: The Department of Energy.

UPDATE: AP's story on the flub starts this way:

"Oops", indeed.

The voters of Maine appear to have registered a stinging rebuke to their Republican Governor and Legislature's attempt to kill the state's 38-year tradition of Election Day voter registration at the polling place.

As the Lewiston Sun Journal reports tonight: "And it wasn't close."

That's an understatement. The People's Veto of the GOP bill was on the ballot tonight and, if the results are accurate as reported, the people of Maine couldn't have been clearer. Question 1 has is said to have passed by a remarkable 61 to 39% 60 to 40% margin (with 90% 98% 100% of the results in), quite literally winning in every single county in the state:

The overwhelming victory for voters' rights in the Pine Tree State comes on the heels of Maine's GOP Chair Charlie Webster embarrassing himself and his party over the last several months with his complaint to the GOP Sec. of State Charles Summers, Jr. that out-of-state college students were committing "voter fraud" in the state.

Despite some 200 names Webster submitted to Summers for an investigation, no evidence of fraud was found by the SoS. That lack of evidence of voter fraud, however, didn't keep Summers from sending intimidating letters to those legal student voters.

Nonetheless, Mainers of all stripes today appear to have soundly rejected the GOP's "voter fraud" fraud in their People's Veto at the ballot box.

"The advantage we had was the truth," David Farmer, a spokesman for Protect Maine Votes told the Sun Journal. "The facts carried the day. Same-day voter registration works and it has for nearly 40 years. Unlike other states, Mainers wouldn't stand for the erosion of their voting rights. They should be very proud of that."

They should indeed.

The contrast was stark, however, from results being reported in Mississippi tonight...

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

Those who have followed the body of my work know that I am no fan of campaign ads, which are usually democracy-destroying substitutes for in-depth discussion of matters of substance by those aspiring to public office.

But, every now and then, one comes along that is worth watching because it is both short and hilarious, like this clip of Bill Maher stating why he thinks Alan Grayson (D-FL) should again be in Congress...