Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

No doubt, the last person eight-term "Blue Dog" Democrat Rep. Jane Harman (CA-36) expected to see when she sat down for a Progressive Caucus panel discussion on April 20 at the California Democratic Convention was the progressive Democratic challenger for her U.S. House seat, Marcy Winograd. In fact, Winograd wasn't even in the room when Harman began to speak.

Winograd explained:

Winograd seized the moment to engage in a debate of sorts (video below), confronting the wealthy eight-term Congresswoman on a range of issues, including Harman's committee vote to significantly extend Big Pharma's patent protection over biomedical drugs. Harman's response was remarkably deceptive; yet, perhaps because this was not a pre-scheduled "debate," Winograd failed to seize a rare face-to-face moment to directly confront Harman's conflicts-of-interest and prevarication...

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

Shortly after she signed SB-1070 into law, Arizona's Republican Governor Jan Brewer sought to deflect criticism of Arizona's "show me your papers law," by claiming that criticism amounted to "hysteria." While acknowledging that racial profiling is "illegal," Brewer dismissed any notion that SB-1070 authorized Arizona police to engage in that illegal activity for the police "must ask that person for identification if there's reasonable suspicion that he or she is in the country illegally."

The temerity of the dissembling and unelected AZ governor, who claimed she did not know what an illegal immigrant looks like, but failed to identify just what factors, other than the color of one's skin, or perhaps the language one is overheard speaking, give rise to a "reasonable suspicion" that a given individual "is in the country illegally;" her enthusiastic embrace of a subsequent anti-ethnic studies law, aptly described by Pima County Legal Defender Isabel Garcia as a form of ”cultural cleansing” should not come as a surprise to long time readers of The BRAD BLOG.

We warned you long ago...

Remember the disingenuous snit fits that Rightwing con-man Andrew Breitbart and his Tea Bag Boyz were on about when the original reports broke of "a plot to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans" by Republican dirty trickster James O'Keefe and his band of co-conspirators?

They were outraged --- outraged --- that the "liberal media" had included the word "wiretap" in their reports about the felony arrests of the operatives, since the FBI's arrest affidavit didn't specifically mention an attempt to wiretap or bug the phones in her office. In a desperate attempt to distract from the actual story and find some way to support their friends' charged with serious federal felonies, the Tea Bag Boyz demanded that a number of media outlets issue immediate retractions for the claim, and, of course, the "liberal media" outlets complied --- as instructed --- as usual.

The notion of calling the federal criminals "TeaBuggers" just drove Andy's boys --- particularly the shamelessly pseudonymous wingnut blogger & L.A. County Dep. District Attorney, Patrick "Patterico" Frey --- to embarrassingly self-righteous (and inaccurate) distraction!

The fact was, of course, that, at the time, we had no idea what O'Keefe and friends were actually trying to do in that office, and O'Keefe --- who already had a well-established, if entirely unreported, record of lying to the media and the public about his phony, highly-doctored and illegally-recorded ACORN videos --- then went on to offer a preposterous public statement to explain his New Orleans scheme.

But now that O'Keefe's superstar GOP attorney was successful in pleading his client's felony charges down to a misdemeanor --- to which he and his conspirators pled guilty yesterday before a federal magistrate --- lo and behold, the FBI has released its own account of the arrest and plea deal.

And whaddaya know? According to the FBI, O'Keefe did plan to secretly wiretap the proceedings by secretly recording the conversations of employees in a U.S. Senator's office...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: So far, so good: the 'Top Kill' said to be working; Federal heads are rolling; the President is speaking (finally), and extending the moratorium on off-shore drilling... PLUS: It's official: the BP Oil Disaster is now the Worst in U.S. History ... 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): Clean Air Act settlement will close Ohio power plant; Climate Scientists Claim 'McCarthy-Like Threats'; Another oil spill in Alaska; Last rites in salmon country?; Nissan's electric car sells out in U.S., and it isn't even available yet; An insider's view of climate change; Corporate $$$ & lies behind 'Citizens' initiatives In Calif. ...PLUS: Economists on 'discounting' the future cost of climate change ...

(Note: See bottom of toon for a quick comment of mine in response. - BF)

As Republican dirty trickster, and now convicted federal criminal, James O'Keefe is neither Middle-Eastern nor a member of the Democratic Party, he was allowed to plead guilty to just a misdemeanor today for leading a conspiracy of criminals --- one of whom happened to be the son of the acting U.S. Attorney in Louisiana --- in an attempt to tamper with the telephone system of a sitting U.S. Senator in her federal office in New Orleans, before being sentenced accordingly this morning by a federal magistrate:

Previous coverage by The BRAD BLOG of this hopefully-now-completed story included:

• O'Keefe's employer, Right-wing con-man/grifter and Republican media mogul Andrew Breitbart's accidental admission that he, himself, is a criminal (if his own logic about ACORN is applied to himself);
• O'Keefe's preposterous explanation for his criminal conspiracy;
• O'Keefe & gang lawyering-up with all-star GOP attorneys who would be successful in pleading the original felony charges down to misdemeanors;
• A federal judge describing the crimes as "extremely serious" and "unconscionable," but allowing O'Keefe to avoid trial anyway.

Of course, as a corollary to O'Keefe's arrest in New Orleans in late January, The BRAD BLOG was compelled to run a long series of investigative reports on how the media (perhaps mostly notably, the New York Times) had irresponsibly misreported on the hoax that had made O'Keefe famous in the first place --- his phony ACORN 'pimp' videos.

UPDATE: Matt Osborne of OsbornInk.com reminds us today of a video that he put together in response to the early weeks of our exposé of the O'Keefe/Breitbart ACORN Pimp Hoax...

I just wanted to pull out and highlight here my closing comments in regard to the BP Oil Disaster, from the end of today's Green News Report, because no matter how often I keep repeating a similar refrain, nobody --- particularly the Democrats in Washington --- seems to be hearing it...

UPDATE 5/27/10 A bit of, perhaps, encouraging news. At today's White House presser, Obama noted that the BP underscores the need to pass clean energy legislation. Details in today's Green News Report...

Guest essay by Ernest A. Canning

It is vital that the American people come to appreciate the danger to liberty as well as community posed by doctrinaire libertarianism.

Despite widespread coverage of Rand Paul's absurd criticism of the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as applied to private businesses, there has been a dearth of analysis as to how this absurdity was brought about by the serious intellectual deficiencies in doctrinaire libertarian philosophy; a philosophy which led to a second astounding Rand Paul remark.

In the face of horrendous safety records on the part of both Massey Energy, which had been found to have violated federal safety regulations thousands of times over the past several years, and BP, which had steadfastly fought off safety measures for deep water oil rigs, Rand summarily dismissed the significance of both the deadly West Virginia mine disaster and the deadly explosion at BP's deep water facility that has produced the worst oil spill in U.S. history with the cavalier, "accidents happen."

What Rand Paul has done is open a window into "libertarianism," which, contrary to the current Wikipedia definition, does not merge into "anarchism." The principle distinction arises because, as explained by Noam Chomsky, anarchism challenges not only authoritarian government but all authoritarian societal structures, including the work place.

Libertarians like Ron and Rand Paul focus exclusively on individual liberty vis-a-vis the government. They fail to appreciate that, especially in the 21st Century, the removal of government as a check against unfettered corporate wealth and power leads to "the tyranny of a corporate controlled economy"...