I joined Thom Hartmann on his Big Picture TV show last night to discuss The BRAD BLOG's exclusive report from earlier in the day confirming the Virginia State Attorney General's newly launched criminal investigation into the 1,500 allegedly fraudulent signatures turned in by the Gingrich Campaign in their failed attempt to be included on the VA GOP Primary ballot...

By the way, since we broke the news yesterday morning, several outlets have picked up and/or confirmed our report. Though, frankly, not as many as one would think given the nature and scope of the story. Certainly not as many who would have picked it up had either the now-defunct ACORN, or any Democrat been accused of doing the very same thing.

Other than our report, Tommy Christopher's coverage at Mediaite was probably the most detailed (and included both my name and a link to our story), followed by Dan Roem at National Journal (who credits the story to having "broke in the liberal blogosphere" --- though at least he included a link here...even though that link was broken when I last checked), then Julian Walker at The Virginia-Pilot (who didn't bother to credit anybody for the story) and NBC4-Washington who, in their short piece, did manage to mention and link properly to The BRAD BLOG.

There were a few other mentions (Dave Weigel at Slate, for example) but, far and away, the greatest way our stories are spread are by you guys and others spreading the word yourselves through comments at other sites, email, and via Twitter and Reddit. (The comments on the posting at Reddit --- where a huge number of folks up-voted the story --- were very, um, enlightening, as you'll see if you bother to read them.)

Of course, Fox "News", who mentions, actually highlights, every time an ACORN worker is accused of farting over the years (whether they actually farted or not) has yet to say a word about this story. Wonder why.

Just thought you might be interested in how folks sometimes deal --- or don't --- with original, exclusive stories that we break here. Sometimes they pick them up, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they offer appropriate credit, quite often they don't. That, despite the hundreds of stories we've broken over the years, with an impeccable record for accuracy and independent verifiability in just about every damned one of them.

Had the same thing been carried out by a worker for the now-defunct ACORN, Republicans --- and even Newt Gingrich --- would have called it massive "voter fraud." But the 1,500 acts of fraud, by Gingrich's own admission, were carried out by a worker hired by his campaign, so it seems the media have barely noticed it.

Nonetheless, The BRAD BLOG has received confirmation from two different state agencies that the 1,500 alleged cases of ballot petition fraud said to have been carried out on behalf of the Gingrich campaign, in their unsuccessful attempt to qualify for the Republican primary ballot in Virginia, are now being carried out by the state Attorney General's office.

In late December, after Gingrich had failed to turn in enough valid signatures to qualify for the Virginia primary ballot, he was caught on video tape telling a supporter in Iowa that the reason for the failure was due to a campaign worker who created 1,500 fraudulent signatures.

"We turned in 11,100 --- we needed 10,000 --- 1,500 of them were by one guy who, frankly, committed fraud," Gingrich is seen and heard saying in video originally aired by CNN.

The former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives downplayed the incident, by explaining to the woman that the entire affair was "just a mistake," after they had "hired somebody who turned in false signatures."

Neither he nor his campaign, however, has made the name of the alleged "one guy" public, to our knowledge, despite the extraordinary number of fraudulent signatures created and turned in by that "one guy" in what an official at the Virginia State Board of Elections (SBE) described to us as "definitely an illegal act."

News of the embarrassing criminal investigation is confirmed today, even as voters go to the polls for Florida's 2012 GOP Primary, where Gingrich is facing off against front-runner Mitt Romney who, ironically --- and uncomfortably enough for Republicans --- may also find himself the subject of a criminal voter fraud investigation in the not-too-distant future...

This is just too hilarious!

Over the weekend religious activists met somewhere in Texas to try and agree upon a "conservative" non-Romney to coalesce behind in hopes of stopping the former Massachusetts Governor's "inevitable" GOP nomination. After three ballots, reportedly, the group of some 150 religious activists finally agreed to throw their support behind Rick Santorum.

Or did they?

According to a supposedly "legitimate" rightwing news outlet today, the evangelical protestant backers of Newt Gingrich are now accusing the Catholic supporters of Santorum of election fraud and actual voter fraud!

If they did, it would hardly be the first instance of actual election fraud in the GOP camp to rear its ugly head during the Republican primary process to date...

I've been busy doing a lot of media and a lot of digging today. So until I can get free to follow up here on some Iowa Caucus issues, here's my latest appearance on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, from last night...

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!)...

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...

If the same standards are applied to Newt Gingrich as have, for years, been applied to the now-defunct ACORN organization by both Republicans and their media arm, Fox "News", then it seems Newt Gingrich's campaign has committed thousands of acts of voter fraud.

As CNN and TPM are reporting right now:

Of course, there is no evidence that any vote has ever been fraudulently cast in any election in any state at any time via an improper registration by an ACORN worker. Moreover, virtually every fraudulent registration that came in via an ACORN worker was discovered and reported by ACORN themselves to authorities, since the group had imposed stringent practices to keep workers from defrauding them, which was the case in the few instances where it happened.

Nonetheless, that never stopped the liars and opportunists in the Republican/Fox "News" Party from using such instances to falsely assert that ACORN was committing massive voter fraud.

By those standards then --- and here, the Gingrich campaign didn't even bother to authenticate the signatures, apparently, as ACORN did --- the Gingrich campaign is the first out of the block to commit massive voter fraud in the 2012 election.

We'll hope that the GOP, Fox and their stooges and chumps at places like Andy Brietbart's "Big" websites will call for the Dept. of Justice to investigate, prosecute and defund the Newt Gingrinch campaign immediately in light of this disturbing news that Gingrich himself is heading up a massive voter fraud organization.

UPDATE 12/30/11: The Rachel Maddow Show picks up on the Newt/ACORN hypocrisy as well, describing the news as an item "from the Department of Shameless Schadenfreude". Details/video now here...

Via The News Leader in Virginia...

I called Mark Coakley, General Registrar of Voters in Henrico County to get a few more details about what went wrong there...

I may have more to say on this later, but short on time at the moment, and since it's an older thread you may not be checking it on your own. So, for now, I'll just point you towards his comment (and mine which follows it) in reply to my recent piece on hacking Pac-Man onto a Sequoia/Dominion AVC Edge touch-screen voting machine.

(Note: I'm setting this item to "No Comments", since I'd rather any comments take place on either the initial thread on the Pac-Man Hack article, or on a future one, should I find the time to do a more thorough follow-up of this situation before dropping off the grid entirely to do some camping in the coming week before arriving back in Los Angeles after Labor Day.)

Elections are being held in some 13 states (Arkansas, California, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia) today. Lord help us.

A reminder how helpful screenshots of election results taken from official websites on election night and in the days following, can potentially be, can be found in our recent exclusive on the still unexplained results from the Monroe County, Arkansas, May 18th primary, where thousands of votes "disappeared" in the days after the election.

If you don't know how to take a screenshot, here's the quick primer (at least on a PC): While viewing the page in question, hold the ALT button and hit the PrtScreen button. Then paste the ensuing clipboard graphic into a graphics program, and save with a filename that includes both the date and time the shot was taken. Hopefully someone else can explain how to do that on a Mac in comments.

Of course, as you hear or read of problems at the polls throughout the day, feel free to email us with details and URLs, and we'll do our best to look into it.

On the more-political-less-Election-Integrity side of the equation, The BRAD BLOG's resident attorney/historian-in-chief Ernest Canning has offered a number of recent, noteworthy articles on matters related to the ballot out here in CA, perhaps they're worth re-linking this morning. Of particular interest --- even to readers across the country --- should be the top item below, concerning Prop 16, and the deceptive way in which a huge corporate power is attempting to deceive voters with the use of millions of dollars to support a phony campaign.

For that matter, in reviewing the articles below, they each speak to one common element: the outlandish power that money holds, now more than ever, when it comes to our "democracy"...

5/9/10: Prop 16 'Power Play': A Private Utility's Assault on Publicly-Owned Electricity Providers

4/27/10: Meg Whitman, Wall Street, 'Billionaire Sociopaths' and the Media 'Substance Deficit'
5/31/10: Billionaire vs. Billionaire: Propaganda and Race in CA's GOP Gubernatorial Primary

5/16/10: Winograd Misses 'Debate' Chance to Slam Harman's Dissembling, Conflicts-of-Interest

An argument could be made that the greatest beneficiary of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf has been Massey Energy's CEO Don Blankenship. Until the Gulf Gusher took over the front pages, the serious heat, in both media and Congress, had been on Blankenship and the coal mine explosion which took the lives of 29 miners at Massey's Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. Remember that?

Well, the investigation has very quietly --- and largely behind closed doors, to the chagrin of family members of the victims --- proceeded into that fossil fuel-related disaster, even as Blankenship must be thanking the Oily Gods for taking him momentarily out of the spotlight. So let's put him back in it, shall we?

Given that the mafia-like strongman tactics seen in remarkable video tape revealing Blankenship roughing up an ABC News reporter in 2008 --- which we've only just now seen (it's posted in full below) --- could as well be a scene straight out of Goodfellas or The Sopranos, the news today from the Charleston Gazette seems par for the course.

Ken Ward Jr. is reporting at the paper's "Coal Tattoo" blog today that the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has reportedly told victim's family members that a page is mysteriously missing from the "fireboss book" at Massey's Upper Big Branch Mine...