TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport
VIA SMART PHONE: Stitcher Radio!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: We're back! With oil & gas earthquakes in Ohio; Federal court blocks EPA's new air pollution standards; Big Oil cage match: BP sues Halliburton; PLUS: Saddle up --- what's in store for green news in 2012, insane presidential race notwithstanding ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): 12 simple steps for going green in '12; Iran could disrupt but not halt oil traffic in strait; Oil giant Chesapeake behind fracking 'land grab'; "People die from hunger while banks make a killing on food"; Whistleblower: Keystone XL a potential “disaster”; US shale gas reserves wildly overestimated; 'Pay-As-You-Go Solar' for India ... PLUS: Yes, you can have 24-hour solar energy, even after the sun goes down ... and much, MUCH more! ...

Over the past week or so, while the rest of the media has been covering the "horse race" non-stop, The BRAD BLOG has, as is our wont, been keeping a close eye, as usual, on the otherwise ignored "track conditions" which can make as much of a difference in the results as anything else.

We've been reporting on a number of key points about the way the voting and counting will be carried out in tonight's Iowa Caucuses (beginning at 7p CT), all of which are worthy of quick summary here today, as all of the rules for the Republican Caucuses in the Hawekeye State --- who can vote and how those votes will be counted --- are not set by the state, but by the Republican Party itself.

The Iowa GOP has, therefore, determined that...

• No Photo ID is necessary for any voter in the Republican Iowa caucuses.
• No Photo ID is necessary to register as a Republican at the caucus site, even if you're not already a registered voter. You may then cast your vote at the caucus on the same day you've registered (without a Photo ID).
• All caucus votes will be cast on hand-marked paper ballots.
• All of those paper ballots will be counted, by hand, in public, with the results announced at each of the 1,774 caucus sites before the results are called in to a central GOP headquarters (where the results will subsequently be compiled and announced to the public and media.)

If it seems that all of the items mentioned above are ones that Republicans --- even Republicans in the Iowa statehouse and the Iowa Secretary of State's office within the past year --- have fought virulently against allowing, for years, for elections in which Democrats will be participating, you would be correct. Nonetheless, when the GOP is able to set any rules they like for their own elections --- including tonight's all-important "First-in-the-Nation" Iowa caucuses --- those are the rules that they've selected. Go figure.

So with that very good, if breathtakingly hypocritical, news out of the way, here are five quick points, from Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org, on how folks on the ground tonight can fight to try and ensure and/or oversee the accuracy of caucus results...

It was a picture perfect day for a parade in Pasadena today. The sun was shining, the temperature was warm, and the crowds were in great spirits in time for early 8am start of the 123rd annual Tournament of Roses Parade.

The parade would be covered on not one, but two local TV stations. NBC 4 would carry the live network feed hosted by Al Roker and Shaun Robinson, while the local KTLA 5 station (owned by the rightwing Tribune Media) would feature Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards in their 30th year of parade coverage.

Today's parade was "crafted to help you dream about things you can imagine," Eubanks helpfully opened with to his TV audience. The parade's theme float, "'Just Imagine' sponsored by Wells Fargo" kicked things off, followed by a flyover of a U.S. Air Force B2 Stealth Bomber and then the U.S. Marine Corp color guard on horses followed by their marching band and a jaunty rendition of the Marines' Hymn.

The corporate banks and military industrial complex received premiere TV coverage right off the bat, prominently featured at the top of both corporate network and local television broadcasts.

The thousands of marchers --- LA Weekly pegged it at some 5,000 --- from the Occupy Wall Street movement, who had been granted a permit to march, and who had come from all over, on their own dime, to participate in the parade? Not so much. Not at all, actually...

[Now UPDATED below with the archives from the year's final Malloy Show below! And it was a fun one! Enjoy!]

Tonight it's our final night guest hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show for the year and, the final Mike Malloy Show of the year, for that matter! It's also our last one before the 2012 voting finally begins...

For our New Years Eve Eve show, we'll be BradCasting again LIVE from 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 (so far):

• END OF THE YEAR/BEGINNING OF ELECTION YEAR ROUND-UP: Everything we've yet to get to this year, and everything you'll need to know as the zany 2012 election year circus will finally get under way!
• VISITS FROM FRIENDS: In addition to (hopefully) lots of calls from you guys, we may have a few visits from a few friends o' the blog!
• PLUS! Anything and everything that's on your minds at year's end as 2012 awaits, via 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: Had a great last-show-of-the-year show tonight! LOTS of fun! If you missed any part of it, the full, commercial-free audio archives are now posted below (along with the archives from tonight's chat room). A really lively end-of-year show! Until next year, enjoy!...

Votes in next Tuesday's Republican caucuses in Iowa will be cast on paper ballots and hand counted publicly at each and every caucus site, according to a report late this week from Politico's Jonathan Martin. In other words, Republicans will be relying on "Democracy's Gold Standard" when it comes to casting and counting ballots in their own election, in which they set all of the rules, even if they will not allow the same standards to be applied to elections in which Democrats will take part.

Martin's story should come as great news for Election Integrity advocates and, in particular, Ron Paul supporters who have very good reason to be concerned about the process after witnessing --- first-hand and on video-tape --- blatant voter fraud carried out by Mitt Romney supporters in years past. The news is also welcome in light of a recent report suggesting the GOP would be counting votes in secret to avoid a purported "threat" by the hacktivist group Anonymous to disrupt next week's caucuses.

Though the article, if accurate, is wonderful news, it underscores, yet again, the Republican Party's almost indescribable hypocrisy when it comes to elections. Over the years, as we have detailed on hundreds (if not thousands) of pages at The BRAD BLOG, Republicans have eschewed both paper ballots and their public hand-counting at the polling place, insisting that computer cast and counted "ballots" are far more reliable than anything human beings, with their own hands and eyeballs, are able to do themselves with everyone in the public watching. (That is, except in cases where they are challenging the computer-tabulated results of an election, in which case they insist, appropriately, on publicly hand-counted paper ballots.)

Moreover, as we reported on Wednesday, even though the GOP has worked overtime, since coming to absolute power in many states around the nation during the 2010 elections, to institute polling place Photo ID restriction laws for elections in which Democrats will take part (and be disproportionately disenfranchised by they), when Republicans are able to create all of their very own rules for their very own elections --- as is the case with the Iowa Caucuses --- they require absolutely no Photo ID for any voter, even those registering as Republican for the first time and voting on the very same day (something they also have long fought against allowing everywhere else!)...

The blatant good-for-me-but-not-for-thee hypocrisy, even for this jaded independent journalist, after this many years of covering such issues, is remarkable..

The BRAD BLOG was the first to report that the former disgraced Speaker of the House turned Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had admitted to committing massive "voter fraud" --- thousands of cases --- in his failed attempt to qualify for the Republican Presidential Primary ballot in his home state of Virginia.

Our report on Wednesday came just minutes after Gingrich's caught-on-video admission to a voter in Iowa that his campaign had "hired somebody who turned in false signatures."

"Oh, it was just a mistake," the one-time front-runner for the GOP nomination claimed. "We turned in 11,100 — we needed 10,000 — 1,500 of them were by one guy who frankly committed fraud."

To our knowledge, however, Gingrich has yet to divulge the identify of the "one guy" who "frankly committed fraud" to law enforcement officials.

We noted that by the same (completely disingenuous) standards that the GOP and its cable TV arm, Fox "News", has long applied, for years, to the now-defunct community organization ACORN (which never committed any actual "voter fraud" or even "voter registration fraud", though a few of its workers committed the later, as discovered by ACORN themselves who promptly turned them into authorities), Gingrich was, himself, the purveyor of "massive voter fraud".

Last night, while guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show (listen to top of Hour 1), we even encouraged folks to contact the special email address that Fox "News" long ago set up for reporting such instances of "voter fraud" at VoterFraud@FoxNews.com to let them know about this massive destruction of "the fabric of democracy" as then GOP Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain hypocritically described it in 2008.

And now it looks like Chris Hayes, filling in on MSNBC for Rachel Maddow last night, picked up --- "from the Department of Shameless Schadenfreude" --- on the same theme, pointing out that Gingrich himself had previously slammed ACORN in a 2009 op-ed, in which he falsely declared that "ACORN has a long history of engaging in voter fraud," due to the exact same thing Gingrich now refers to as little more than "just a mistake". (Ironically enough, in that piece, Gingrich used the fraudulent ACORN "Pimp" Hoax video tapes created by James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles and Andrew Breitbart as the basis for his entire op-ed lie.)

Here's the short video from MSNBC last night, and a few more words to follow detailing how what Gingrich Campaign did was far worse than anything ACORN was ever found to have done...

[Now UPDATED with audio archives from tonight posted below!]

We're back again tonight (and tomorrow night) guest hosting the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show as the end of the hellish year draws near and the next hellish year will soon begin. LOTS to discuss tonight, so hope you'll tune in!

We're BradCasting again 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 (so far):

• THE GOP LOVES VOTER FRAUD! And tonight, I'll prove it! With lots of "fraud" news to cover from the caucuses of Iowa to the primary ballots of Virginia and beyond!
• OCCUPYING FOR ACCOUNTABILITY I'll be joined in studio by several OccupyLA'ers who will share their stories of horrific treatment at the hands of the LAPD, as we try to bring some accountability. Also will speak with the great independent citizen journalist/web-streamer Spencer "OakFoSho" Mills on his quest for accountability for LAPD Officer Escamilla.
• PLUS! More than I have time to mention here, and everything else that's on your minds as the 2012 circus is about to begin to begin, via 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: A whole lotta show in three short hours! Now you can listen to the whole thing in about an hour and half in the commercial-free audio archives posted below. I believe that you'll find it well worth the time! Money back if not! (And see ya tomorrow night!)...

This is both hysterical and enlightening. Here, courtesy of WaPo's Ezra Klein [hat-tip Rachel Maddow], is what the Iowa polls have looked like over the past year. It also seems pretty indicative to me of the failed state of the entire Republican Party at this moment in history...

Noticing a pattern?

[A pattern about which I suspect I'll have a few words tonight and tomorrow while guest hosting the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show again from 9p-Mid ET/6p-9p PT! Tune in via air if you're lucky enough to have a progressive radio station over your local public airwaves or via SiriusXM ch. 127, or right here at BradBlog.com where we'll have live streaming links and a chat room open during show time!]

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Buried at p. AA3 of the 12/28 LAEXTRA section of Los Angeles Times, beneath the headline, "Occupy protest plan prompts beefed up Rose Parade Security" ("Rose Parade security beefed up as Occupy plans protest" in the online version) one can find news of a significant accord. But you have to read closely.

The Pasadena Police Department and Tournament of Roses officials have agreed to furnish the Occupy Movement with a slot at the end of the parade, according to Los Angeles Times, which adds:

The question now is whether the corporate-owned media will include the Occupy portion of the parade in its televised coverage or cut away to commercials at that point. We'll be watching to find out.

* * *

UPDATE 1/2/12: Well, we now have our answer as to whether the corporate TV media covered the huge Occupy turnout at the parade. Your answer is now here...

My appearance last night on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann was a round-up of a bunch of the latest voting news, from the DoJ's rejection of South Carolina's Photo ID restriction, to Newt's failure to get enough signatures to make it onto the VA Primary ballot, to the 93-year old woman who cleaned the TN state capitol for decades being told she may not be able to vote with her expired state ID, to the U.S. EAC finding, finally, that hackable ES&S paper ballot op-scan computers fail to count some votes without notice to anybody...