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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Breaking: More aid to Africa for drought/famine relief; Good year-end news for anyone who breathes: new rules to clean up toxic mercury and arsenic from coal plants; 30k Chinese 'occupy' to protest coal plants; Meet today's World's Newest Oil Spill, now in Nigeria; PLUS: Um... "explosive" trends in a melting Arctic ... 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): House GOP earns ‘Worst Environmental Record Of Any Congress’; Record TX drought kills 500m trees; Genetic mutations in farm-raised salmon; New material breakthrough could double solar efficiency - with cheap plastic; Seattle bans plastic bags; Keystone XL would ship oil to China; USDA deregulates Monsanto GMO seed; Top clean energy stories of 2011 ... PLUS: Don't paint it black: US researchers invent paint-on solar cells ... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: The sun also rises --- two days earlier?!?! (in Greenland); Carbon capture project may be failing in Canada; Obama orders overhaul of regulations to help U.S. businesses ... PLUS: Eisenhower's other prescient warning, 50 years ago this week ... 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): Scientists warn of a future "superstorm" in CA; Obama to discuss clean energy with Chinese premier's visit?; "Managed retreat" for California coastal town; ABC Reports On Fossil-Fueled Climate Catastrophes; Arch Coal refused plan to reduce mining impact; Canada bans toxic BPA in kids' toys; Experts warn of looming global food crisis; Toxic parking lots! ... PLUS: Surprise! Opponents of 'fracking' disclosure take big money from industry ....

Think Progress has a great report today on the billionaire industry titans, U.S. Supreme Court Justices (including Scalia and Thomas), infamous front-group astroturfers and Rightwing media scammers who meet in secret twice a year --- as they did last year in Aspen and will again this January in Palm Springs --- to plot how they will spend their billions to keep "liberty" and "freedom" available to all (of them) and to plot the 2010 and 2012 elections for Republicans.

The story includes the actual invitation letter [PDF] to the upcoming Palm Springs event, from Vast Rightwing Conspiracy funder, billionaire Charles G. Koch of Koch Industries Inc., along with the agenda and participants of last year's Aspen meeting attached to it.

The letter begins creepily enough: "If not us, who? If not now, when?", but my favorite part is this part from the reprint of the agenda of last year's meeting...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

The Nation magazine headline was sensational: Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder. The article, written by Jeremy Scahill, an investigative journalist and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, exploded on screen during a must see Aug. 4, 2009 segment of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann (video posted below). It was summarized by Amy Goodman on Aug. 5 when Scahill appeared on Democracy Now!:

The significance was underscored in Scahill's Aug. 4 remarks on MSNBC's Countdown:

While the allegations are extremely disturbing, they are apparently not disturbing enough to warrant coverage in almost all of the nation's leading newspapers. That, even though, as reported in Scahill's book, amongst the first to arrive in the aftermath of Katrina --- before the U.S. government and most aid organizations --- were a contingent of 150 Blackwater mercenaries, "some with M-4 automatic weapons, capable of firing nine hundred rounds per minute"....

Following up on Saturday's NEWSWEEK scoop that Attorney General Holder "may be on the verge of" appointing a prosecutor to investigate Bush/Cheney-era torture, Digby notes how the chuckling dinosaurs of ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday snickered their way through a discussion of prosecution for torture by the Bush/Cheney regime (in our name!) as if they were wise-cracking about any old political brouhaha from inside the Beltway. (Video/transcript here, courtesy of C&L.)

Note to Stephanopoulos: How about featuring some actual journalists and bloggers who've actually been covering this issue for months (years?) before you eventually come to wonder why your show has gone the way of all the dead trees in the newspaper publishing business. Greenwald, Scahill, Wheeler, Horton all come to mind. It might bring your show up to date...or at least, up to 2006 or so.

The serious folks out there, several mentioned above, took a look at Saturday's NEWSWEEK report with the grim sobriety and analytical acumen that it deserves, while in largely shabby followups Washington Post, New York Times, and Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal all seem to float anonymously sourced trial balloons, averring the notion that only low-level rogue interrogators who exceeded the boundaries of the DoJ's illegal torture justification memos would be targeted by such an investigation.

On that point, while Glenn Greenwald charges such an approach would be arguably "worse than doing nothing," as it would "actually further subvert the rule of law rather than strengthen it," he also notes:

Scott Horton's reporting counters the indications from anonymous sources in the increasingly obsolete WaPo, Times, and WSJ coverage which suggests focus on only low-level agents and contractors, rather than policy makers, by reporting that his sources at DoJ indicate just the opposite [emphasis ours]...

In an unbylined Wall Street Journal editorial (why a liar and sore-loser like WSJ/GOP operative John Fund is so ashamed to put his name on his own writing we'll never know...okay, maybe we do), the once-respectable paper shamelessly asserts: "Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election."

In response, we'll associate ourselves with TPM's Eric Kleefeld's take on it, calling it "an essay that is so full of factual errors and distortions about what happened, it can drive you nuts if you'd spent countless hours following all the gritty details like I did."

It's all par for the cowardly John Fund course, of course.

But since the sore-losing, sour-grapes, tin-foil hatted conspiracy theorists of the Wall Street Journal have taken the opportunity to propagandize the transparent Franken/Coleman election results by comparing them to the 2004 Washington state Gubernatorial race, where the Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi during a long, sloppy post-election contest and court case, let's remind folks for the record, here in the reality-based community, what the judges in each case found in regard to the keyboard wingnut claims of "fraud"...

After all the stuff, nonsense, bullshit, lies, hoaxes, WSJ "editorials", Fox "News" Alerts, Presidential candidate lies, phony "conspiracy" claims, and-wall-to-wall cable and radio garbage that we had to endlessly suffer through, for months on end, leading up to last year's election, about supposed, massive "voter fraud" being committed --- by Democrats, naturally --- it turns out that in one of OH's largest counties, an exhaustive investigation by a Republican Special Prosecutor, appointed by his former GOP prosecutor partner (the Hamilton County Prosecutor who was also a state co-chair for the McCain/Palin campaign), looked into hundreds of "serious" allegations of such "fraud" and found exactly one such case.

One case.

No, it wasn't Ann Coulter. She commits her voter fraud in FL and in CT instead. But it was someone who had already turned himself in. His vote was never counted.

That's it. One case. Out of nearly half a million votes cast in Hamilton County, just one fraudulent vote was found. The Special Prosecutor's report is here [PDF].

After an entire season, using facts and reality-based information to fend off the insidious, America-hating forces of the evil Republican War on Democracy and their attempts to undermine the very core, the very heartbeat of our democracy, of our nation, for little more than attempted, pathetic --- and ultimately futile --- political gain, is anybody gonna apologize here? Anybody?

Rush? Sean? O'Reilly? John Fund? John McCain? John Danforth? Karl Rove? Tom Feeney? "Thor" Hearne? Todd Rokita? Jackasess at Powerline? Jackasses at Redstate? The entirety of the shameful, unpatriotic Fox "News" Channel? Anybody? Any of you liars and cowards and thieves and democracy-hating, facist-loving, Stalinesque, Saddamites have the guts, the courage, the sense of decency --- the love for your country --- to stand up and say you were wrong? That you are sorry?

Anyone? Anywhere?

Of course not. Especially not in Minnesota where not only have they found no such "voter fraud" epidemic --- as committed by Democrats or ACORN or anybody else --- but the Republicans are now trying to include actual fraudulent ballots in the results of the U.S. Senate race. Now that they need them in hopes of "winning".

No apologies, of course, because they'll all be back in two years and the same horseshit will be flowing loud and clear, once again from their democracy-hating souls, out to millions of Americans who are ready to believe --- listening over the corporately-run, though publicly-owned airwaves --- all over again and again and again. And again.

Not that they'll wait that long. Measures claimed to supposedly prevent (non-existent) "voter fraud" --- little more than measures meant to rob minorities, the elderly, students, and anyone else who tends to not vote Republican, of their Constitutional rights --- are moving forward, as John Gideon noted last night, and even as we speak, in TX, in UT, in MS and wherever else you can find depraved, soulless, Republican cretins who despise America, its history, and all that it pretends, and tries desperately, to stand for.

I am ashamed to call you people my fellow citizens.

For those following the nonsense being put forward by the GOP conspiracy theorists (such as Sean Hannity, Norm Coleman, RedState blog, PowerLine blog, and all their fact-free friends), David Brauer at MinnPost.com does a terrific job of debunking the whole "32 ballots driven around in an election director's car for days" nonsense.

They weren't driven around in her car, they weren't all votes for Franken, they weren't "lost" for days, and the claim, which is being used by the national GOP at their conspiracy theory "Minnesota Recount" site to prop up their unsubstantiated claims of a "stolen election," turns out (surprise surprise) to be entirely false...

John Fund is an evil, unrepentant liar who despises democracy and the very American values that it represents. Other than that, he's swell.

At left is the Wall Street Journal's editorialist/propagandist, lying to America on Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher. Actor and well-informed progressive Bradley Whitford deserves credit for attempting to call "bullshit" (literally) on Fund's garbage, but it sure would be nice if Maher had someone on who could really speak to the insidious (and successful) GOP "voter fraud" scam meant for nothing more nor less than to keep legitimate voters from being able to cast a vote, as revealed more clearly than ever by the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal. Fund is one of the original architects, or at least a ponyboy for that despicable scam.

(Hint: I live about 7 minutes from where Real Time tapes each week, and would be happy to counter the previously-debunked horse manure that Fund was allowed to spread, virtually unchecked, last night.)

Important Note: Before you view the video, I should point out that Fund's reference to the Baker/Carter Commission's recommendation for Photo ID restrictions at the polls should be taken in context with the fact that that privately-empaneled commission was created by the same fraudsters who created the GOP's American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) scam as we originally broke here and followed up here, and which RAW STORY subsequently busted wide open here.

As we all reported at the time, that Baker/Carter scam was meant to do little more than give "respectable and official blue-ribbon" credence to the Photo ID scam they were beginning to perpetrate back in its nascent stages. The scam was perpetrated by the same operatives who secretly created and ran the commission in the first place, in order that folks like Fund (who, naturally, was called to give testimony to this phony commission) could later cite some sort of official elder-statesmen blessing of their disenfranchising Photo ID conspiracy which they've been using to con an otherwise gullible media/electorate.

Here's what a fuming John Conyers had to say about Fund's Baker/Carter commission testimony as we reported it in April of 2005, not long after live-blogging the entire hearing:

(Thanks to BRAD BLOG's video ace, Alan Breslauer for the stomach churning video clip!)

When even the Wall Street Journal leaves the reservation to call out one of its own, you know there is trouble afoot...

Jesse at Stakeholder has more...

Heard Franken mention this morning that the only problem with DeLay's potentially upcoming fall from his many self-inflicted wounds, is that he'll be removed too quickly to take down the entire Republican leadership with him! Oh, well. There's always more Republican Tom's where that one came from.