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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: White House wins GOP Keystone XL pipeline game - for now; Perry's Texas tough-guy talk on EPA fails; Snowmageddon in Seattle; Snow No-show in California; PLUS: Climate change, now with slightly less apocalypse! ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): TX to unlock secrets of fracking; 'No evidence' that Wind Turbine Syndrome exists; Bush speechwriter slams 'culture war' over climate change; Should we only have rules coal lobbyists agree to?; Bat deaths a catastrophe in the making; New mileage standards save money immediately; Coral reef disease hits Hawaii; Breakthrough material 'eats' CO2 in the air ... PLUS: 5 myths about the Keystone XL pipeline ... and much, MUCH more! ...

The remarkable photo above [hat-tip Mother Jones' Mike Mechanic] was taken yesterday by Randy L. Rasmussen of The Oregonian who reports the incident occurred in Portland, where the "police officer deployed pepper spray at SW Yamhill, between the JP Morgan Chase bank and Pioneer Courthouse Square."

He says "The photo was taken from the southeast corner of the square, looking toward the intersection of 6th and Yamhill after a day of marching through downtown Portland, Ore., by Occupy Portland participants."

Rasmussen goes on to report that "Several people were arrested" during the march to the Wells Fargo downtown branch in recognition of "N17," standing for November 17th, the two-month "anniversary" of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I'm guest hosting the Mike Malloy Show tonight, so haven't had time to confirm for certain, but I suspect one of those "arrested" was not the officer pepper spraying the apparently peaceful demonstrator in the face.

Add this incident to the growing body of apparently unprovoked police abuse of peaceful citizen demonstrators in the Occupy movement, including (but not limited to):

• Two-tour Iraq War vet Scott Olsen whose skull was fractured by a tear gas cannister fired allegedly by a law enforcement official with Oakland PD's multi-agency task force on October 25, despite no evidence of a threat from demonstrators;
• Iraq and Afghanistan vet Kayvan Sabehgi whose spleen was ruptured by Oakland cops who allegedly beat him up, even though he was not even demonstrating that same night;
• citizen journalist Scott Campbell who was shot with a bean-bag round by Oakland PD while simply rolling his camera on November 3;
• the Berkeley CA cops who slammed (I'm sorry, AP, "nudged") batons into the guts of peaceful student demonstrators on the UC Berkeley campus;
• the Dallas cop who pushed a peaceful demonstrator off a 4 foot ledge;
• the Mother Jones journalist Josh Harkinson (who will join us on tonight's Malloy Show) who reports that he was dragged behind a moving truck by an NYPD officer after midnight on Tuesday morning as riot cops were clearing Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan;
• and, of course, 84-year old Dorli Rainey who similarly received a face full of pepper spray from cops at an Occupy Seattle march on Tuesday.

This is not a Police State. It is a fully weaponized Military State, at this point. Just ask the folks at Occupy Tampa if it feels that way to them...

UPDATE 11/19/11: The outrage --- and, yes, torture --- of the fully-weaponized Military State continues, as peaceful student demonstrators are lined up and pepper sprayed by cops at UC Davis on Friday. Details/Video...

Setting aside the unverified (and, in many cases, unverifiable) results of yesterday's elections for the moment, what caught my eye throughout the night were the turnout numbers, Democratic compared to Republican.

While the reported results of the races ran largely counter (surprise!) to the "GOP/TeaParty-fueled Massacre Slated for November!" meme that the corporate beltway media and related villagers have been endlessly re-enforcing with zombie-like precision over the last several weeks and months, the turnout of actual voters in the marquee state-wide primaries (races that we detailed, along with the e-voting systems in use, in our Super-ish Tuesday Backgrounder on Monday) seem to be of note when considering what November might actually look like when all is said and done.

I'd caution not to take too much from these numbers as there are various mitigating factors that could be used to explain them --- or even explain them away --- as noted below, but I think the numbers themselves are very much worth noting here, as I haven't seen much coverage of this over the last 12 hours or so...

Tuesday's election are being called "Super Tuesday" by some in the media hoping to hype the four-state Election Day as a bellwether for the "anti-incumbency fever" predicted by the same media for this November.

But beyond the marquee races in each of the states holding elections tomorrow --- Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Oregon (and Hawaii is currently holding an all-mail special election which ends on Saturday) --- as usual, we'll be keeping our eyes on whether voters are actually able to cast their votes, and whether or not those votes are actually counted and counted accurately.

The mix of states holding elections tomorrow also offer a mix of electoral systems --- from a majority of voters using 100% unverifiable touch-screen machines in use in KY and PA, to a compilation of touch-screen and paper ballot systems run by a company with a disastrous reliability record in AR, to the black hole of all mail-in voting in OR (and in HI).

Remember, whatever happens or gets reported (or doesn't) on Tuesday, it's often the case that concerns about failures in the system don't necessarily become immediately apparent on Election Day itself. Sometimes problems in the system and in the tallies do not begin to emerge until days, weeks, and sometimes even months after Election Day. So whatever we see in the surface reports tomorrow, for good or bad (and, as usual, you can count on various reports of "glitches," "hiccups," "snags," and "snafus" which use those words to marginalize problems, instead of the correct word: "failures") may just be the tip of any electoral icebergs beneath the surface. As usual, eternal vigilance by the citizenry is the hallmark of the ongoing fight for electoral integrity and transparency in these United States.

Here then is a general BRAD BLOG backgrounder on each state heading to the polls, its marquee race or races, the electoral systems used in each, and what you can do to help keep an eye out for any election integrity issues as they could emerge...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

A special hat-tip to citizen journalists K. Shawn Edgar and Shawn Waldow who produced and edited this piece and, of course, to the voters and staff of the Washington County, Oregon elections office.

I'm exhausted, so forgive me if I make this quicker than it deserves. And if I haven't yet been able to jump into a myriad of other elections of serious concern around the country still today.

But just a few quick facts on the Al Franken (D) / Norm Coleman (R) U.S. Senate race in Minnesota, which we noted last night (with some updates today) stands at some 700 votes currently between them. More hopefully after I've figured out how to sneak in some rest.

Here are three quick, bullet-point facts that Franken may want to know, since his was the only show on Air America which never had me on as a guest, as he simply refused to discuss serious issues concerning Election Integrity, now-ironically enough.

(And see below these for some quick skinny on serious concerns about the outstanding Senate races in AK, OR and GA...)

Some 33,500 registered voters in Oregon received two ballots in the mail for this year's primary election in the country's only 100% Vote-by-Mail (VBM) state. Though Secretary of State Bill Bradbury says he's confident the problem will be handled, and that no voter will get to cast two ballots, that snafu is a small concern compared to the larger ones presented by VBM.

Many Oregonians will tell you they believe their system is wonderful, yet many of the Election Integrity advocates on the ground there, including many we've spoke with at the Oregon Voting Rights Coalition, warn that the success of the state's VBM program is largely based on good procedures put in place by Bradbury, and which they fear may disappear, as they are not statutory, when he is someday no longer the state's SoS.

In the meantime, one of the unintended consequences of the success that EI advocates have had in helping to expose the failures of electronic voting systems, is that absentee and/or VBM systems have been growing in popularity.

For the voters, they believe such systems offer a "paper trail" not available to voters using touch-screen systems at the polling place. Many are unaware that their mailed-in ballots will be scanned by the same error-prone, easily manipulated optical-scan machines which handle paper ballots for precinct-based voting. But even worse, ballots mailed in, if they arrive safely, and are counted at all, are usually counted "in the dark," versus ballots scanned either at the polls on Election Day, or at county headquarters after the close of polls when citizens are often there to watch.

It is also much harder to track such ballots. Unlike ballots cast at the polls, where sign-in rosters can be compared to the number of ballots counted, it's far more difficult to match up such numbers after ballots are dropped into the black hole that is the U.S. Postal System.

For both major political parties, particularly the Democrats of late, the control they can have over ensuring voter "turnout" under such systems, and the increased participation that comes with it, is a big plus, and one of the reasons why they've been pushing mail-in elections of late.

But for those of us who prize transparency, security, privacy, and verifiable accuracy over partisan politics, all VBM elections remain a terrible idea. Here's why...

We don't like to make predictions, but something tells us smart money is on Obama in Oregon this week...

More photos --- and now video --- below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon,
Exec. Dir. for VotersUnite.Org & Info. Mgr. for VoteTrustUSA.Org

It is a fact that this primary season is proving to be a disaster.

The locomotives of the voting machine vendors and unwary, naive elections officials are headed down the same tracks, straight towards each other, in many states. The vendors only have the bags of government provided cash in sight and they don't seem to care about anything but putting those bags into their coffers. They don't seem to care about signing contracts that they know they cannot meet. They seem to be under the impression that "act now and apologize later" is good business. They seem to understand that the only criteria for getting paid for contracts with the government is having signed the contract.

As for the elections officials well, they are blinded by the lights of the fast approaching locomotive and many can only apologize and cover for the vendors. They just don't seem to know, or care --- or acknowledge that they either know or care --- that the same story is playing out in the next county over and in the next state over. Ignorance is supposed to be bliss, but it also spells chaos for elections.

But wait, all may not be lost. This past week we have seen a bit of progress toward stopping the chaos of ES&S in Indiana and Oregon, while West Virginia just doesn't seem to know or care what is happening to them. As well, New Jersey may be making headway against their bad acting vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems...

In the latest amongst a spate of lawsuits being filed against Electronic Voting Machine Companies around the country, the Oregon Sec. of State has announced today that they have filed a complaint against Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) for breach of contract in failing to provide the state with disabled-accessible voting machines, as promised, in time to meet the January 1, 2006 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) deadline.

The complaint, filed yesterday on behalf of the state of Oregon in Marion County Circuit Court, is downloadable here in full [PDF, 8 pages].

In a statement just issued by the office of Bill Bradbury, Oregon's Sec. of State, he said, "I'm disappointed in ES&S. They agreed to provide us with voting machines, they didn't follow through on that agreement, and that failure directly punishes people with disabilities."

The press release goes on to explain the history of ES&S's broken commitment to provide disabled-accessible electronic AutoMark voting systems to the state in what seems to echo problems that ES&S and several of the other electronic voting machine vendors are now having in meeting contractual obligations all around the country. The problem in Oregon is just the latest to come to light, as the voting machine vendors have been snatching up any and all available agreements with states, in light of Election Officials' attempts to comply with various mandates set forth, and funded by federal tax dollars, in the disastrous HAVA legislation of 2002. John Gideon, has written several articles on the epidemic recently for BRAD BLOG; two them are here and here.

As the Oregon Secretary of State's release explains:

In addition to failures to meet such obligations as simply providing hardware and software as promised to states and counties, companies such as ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic, have failed across the country to provide hardware and software that actually works and actually counts voters votes accurately as they intended to cast them.

HAVA was passed in 2002 by Congress after efforts led by Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) --- and funded by Diebold lobbyists including Ney's former chief of staff, David DiStefano --- convinced lawmakers that the bill would correct perceived problems revealed with voting systems during the 2000 Florida Election debacle.

The bill, which cleverly includes a provision requiring at least one disabled-accessable voting device in every American polling place as of 2006 --- a provision which has led jurisdictions to believe they must upgrade their voting equipment to use poorly designed, secretive and hackable electronic voting devices --- has been an unmitigated disaster so far.

The Oregon lawsuit is just the latest in a growing array of suits filed by voters and election officials around the country in light of HAVA implementation that has seen officials scrambling, apologizing, making excuses and, in many cases, left to come up with alternate plans to carry out impending primary elections in 2006. Voters, in the meantime, have been largely ignored, left hanging, and crossing their fingers in hoping that somehow their vote might be counted accurately this year --- or even counted at all. Unfortunately, given the way most of the new voting systems work, there is little or no way for those voters to have even the slightest clue whether or not their vote will be counted at all.

Amongst just some of the lawsuits and other legal proceedings now underway in light of HAVA implementation around the country...

In addition to the state and county suits, a class action Securities Fraud complaint has been filed by shareholders against Diebold for, amongst other reasons, failing to disclose known problems with their electronic voting systems. Additional legal proceedings are currently in the works in several other states as well, The BRAD BLOG has learned, and so far we've only had two of 50 state primaries in 2006, the first year that HAVA kicks in in full. Both primaries so far, in Texas and Illinois, revealed massive electile dysfunctions as machines failed, tabulations were found to be inaccurate, and final results were delayed due to numerous equipment problems.

Stay tuned to The BRAD BLOG for (unfortunately) virtually exclusive continuing coverage of America's 2006 E-Voting Meltdown...