In "High Cost of Willfully Misinterpreting the 2nd Amendment" we touched upon the price the American people have paid in lives, injuries and grief, as measured against the extraordinary profits of U.S. small arms manufacturers whose domestic sales of increasingly sophisticated weapons, including the AR-15 and AK-47 styled assault rifles, similar to the one used in the mass shooting in Newton, CT last Friday, climbed to 14 million guns in 2009 alone --- greater than the total number possessed by 21 of the world's standing armies combined.

As the nation reels in the wake of the latest horror at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, it seems a worthwhile task to take a quick look at a partial history of mass shooting events in the U.S., starting with the 1966 University of Texas massacre so that we can take stock of what our nation's strange fascination with guns and ammo has truly wrought --- with increasing frequency since the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004...

 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Massive pipeline explosion melts WV highway; More bad news for wolves, this time courtesy of MI Republicans; Judge lifts Keystone XL pipeline restraining order; PLUS: There they go again: House GOP threatens to hold Hurricane Sandy recovery funds hostage ... 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): No 'Get-Out-of-Jail-Free' Card on Sea Level; Colorado River water supply to fall short of demand: study; Hundreds rally against PacNW coal trains; Interior Dept. delays fracking rules; UK lifts ban on fracking; Feds open CA lands to fracking development; Is A123 battery sale to China a threat to US security? PLUS: Question posed at AGU: “Is Earth F**ked?”... and much, MUCH more! ...

There is a little known ritual that occurs in the election years when Democrats prevail: Big "Conservative" Media starts to pull progressive talk radio off the air.

I documented this in my 2009 documentary film, Broadcast Blues: after Democratic candidates made big gains in 2006, Clear Channel and other public airwaves radio licensees pulled several well performing progressive talk radio stations off the air, and replaced them with sports and other programming. It would be easier to understand if the new programs got big ratings bumps, but that didn't happen. The new shows' ratings are typically only half those of Progressive Talkers.

True to form, Clear Channel Communications, which owns about 850 radio stations nationwide, took the Progressive voices off of the public airwaves in Portland, Oregon just days after Democrats won big nationwide. When devoted listeners tuned in to Portland's 620 AM, they expected to hear Thom Hartmann, Mike Malloy and other Progressives waxing exuberant in the wake of this year's election results and looking forward to new possibilities in the new session of Congress under a wildly popular re-elected President. Instead, they heard fans exuberant over some football game or other. FoxSports620 now broadcasts over that 25,000 watt frequency on our public airwaves.

Bye bye lefty talk, hello left-handed quarterbacks.

It isn't like Portland needs another sports radio station; there are already two in that very same market. But the community does need to hear an alternative to the "conservative" talk which is broadcast on eight, count them, eight separate frequencies on Portland's radio dials.

But as of November 9th, as reported here on The BRAD BLOG, Portland joined the ranks of the other 95% of the country which can hear many stations spewing Right Wing propaganda [PDF], but not a single one broadcasting progressive points of view. A few days later, we learned that the CBS-owned Progressive station in Seattle --- also in one of the most progressive cities in the nation --- is scheduled to disappear, most likely on the first of the year. It's KPTK caller letters have already been changed to KFNQ (Fan Q) in preparation for the all sports station it is scheduled to soon become, unless something changes.

Take a look at these maps from Broadcast Blues, graphically representing the number of Rightwing vs. Progressive radio stations as of 2009....

On Friday, as the news was breaking, and even as the unannounced flip was occurring before it had otherwise been planned, I detailed the outrage of Bain Capital-owned Clear Channel killing KPOJ, the only commercial Progressive talk radio station in Portland, one of the nation's most progressive cities, while leaving their two "competing" Clear Channel-owned Rightwing stations in the same market intact.

They flipped the station, one of the first and most successful Progressive talk stations in the nation, over to the Fox Sports format, which, I have since learned, is also syndicated by Clear Channel-owned Premiere Radio, further underscoring the unenforced anti-trust issues that seem to be in violation of, among other things, the 1948 U.S. v. Paramount Supreme Court decision I also briefly discussed in my Friday night coverage.

In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court found that Paramount Pictures was in violation of anti-trust laws because it was unfairly leveraging its chain of movie theaters around the country to keep films made by competing movie studios from being exhibited. The vertical integration, controlling both the production and means of distribution, was the very definition of a monopoly. In this case, as I've argued, Clear Channel is using the very limited public airwaves broadcast licenses that it receives for free from the government --- in exchange, supposedly, for serving in the public interest --- in order to push its own Premiere syndicated programming, even when other, non-Clear Channel owned shows and formats both garner higher ratings and, arguable, are far more in the public's interest than a third sports talk station in the very same market.

That's exactly what Clear Channel did when they replaced the popular Stephanie Miller Show with the rightwing Glenn Beck program on San Francisco's progressive Green 960 earlier this year, despite his much lower ratings in the same time slot, on the same station, ever since.

More to the point, as I have noted many times in the past, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed companies like Clear Channel and a handful of other mega-corporations to buy up control of licensing rights to theoretically "competing" stations in the same market --- Clear Channel, for example, owns both the Rightwing and Progressive talk radio stations in many major markets --- assures that there is no real free-market competition in the Talk Radio business. While Rightwing talk radio is allowed to propagandize over our public airwaves in favor of supposed "free-market" competition, there is no such free-market competition in the talk radio business itself. The game is as rigged as it would be if Coca-Cola had the sole distribution rights to both Coke and Pepsi in the same major market.

Shortly after running my piece on Friday, I was informed by someone inside the business, in a very good position to know, that "the Seattle station is next." They were referring to Seattle, Washington's KPTK am1090 Progressive Talk station, owned by CBS-Viacom. On Monday morning, Stephanie Miller, whose very successful show is heard on that station, and many others, along with appearing on Current TV, told listeners the same thing, that the progressive Seattle talk station, in another very progressive market (in a state that just approved the recreational use of marijuana, for chrissakes) was expected to flip to the newly introduces CBS Sports format on January 1...

[UPDATE: As of 6:00pm PT, the KPOJ website has now flipped to "Fox Sports AM 620 Portland".]

This is horrible. Tonight, without warning, Clear Channel Communications-owned 620 AM KPOJ in Portland, Oregon, one of the most progressive cities in one of the nation's most progressive states, has flipped from its years-long progressive news and talk format over to Fox Sports as of 5:30pm local time.

KPOJ was the only commercial progressive talk radio station in Portland. The city will still have several other Rightwing talk radio stations, including one owned by Clear Channel, and they already have two sports stations, but the Bain Capital-owned media conglomerate is now killing yet another progressive voice from our publicly-owned airwaves.

An earlier piece today in The Oregonian had reported that the station would be flipping as of Monday. An UPDATE in the Willamette Weekly, however, reports that the station, which had long featured Ed Schultz, Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, Thom Hartmann (who had broadcast for years out of KPOJ until moving his show to Washington D.C.) and other progressive talkers, will change to its Fox Sports format as of this evening.

The BRAD BLOG can now confirm that KPOJ has flipped its programming format and website to Fox Sports as of 6:00pm PT tonight.

When one company owns "competing" talk radio stations in the same town, and gets to decide which one enjoys a stronger signal and which one receives promotional dollars (and which one doesn't), "competition" in the market place is a mirage. It's the equivalent of a Coca-Cola distributor owning the sole rights to distribute both Coke and Pepsi in the same town. Which one do you think is going to sell better there? That's precisely what talk radio is like in almost every major market in the country now. One company, usually Clear Channel, generally owns both the "Right" and "Left" talk stations. (In Portland, Clear Channel owns Rightwing talk outlet KEX as well as KPOJ.) Promoting one station would likely decrease listeners and ratings --- and, thus, ad dollars --- for the other. Thus, there is no "free market" competition in talk radio.

This is hardly the first time that Clear Channel has done the same thing, in very progressive cities, underscoring yet again that there is no real, "free market" competition in talk radio over our publicly-owned airwaves. The market place is decidedly rigged...

Hey, look! We may have an actual case of voter fraud at the polling place! An attempted case anyway...

While NV election officials are crowing about safeguards in their system which they say worked to stop Rubin from being able to vote twice, in fairness, we'll note that she deserves a trial before anyone decides for certain that she, indeed, carried out the crime she is accused of. It could very well turn out to be true that she didn't try to vote twice, that somehow, someone else voted under her name in the first instance. But we'll see.

In either case, this points up once again just how rare it is that folks commit actual voter fraud at the polls. (Doing so via absentee ballot is far more common, and another reason why systems like Oregon's all Vote-by-Mail system --- where state officials are now investigating ballot tampering by a GOP election official after she allegedly filled in unvoted ballots with Republican candidates --- remains a terrible idea for democracy.)

Neither voting twice, as alleged in Nevada above, nor crimes via absentee ballot fraud, are deterred in any way by the disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restrictions enacted by Republicans in a dozen states recently, despite their wholly unsupported claims that such laws are needed to stop "voter fraud". The only type of voter fraud that can possibly be deterred by those kinds of laws --- which study after study has found to disproportionately disenfranchise elderly, minority, student and poor (read: Democratic-leaning) voters --- is the incredibly rare crime of in person impersonation fraud.

A recent exhaustive study of all election fraud crimes in all 50 states since 2000, carried out by the investigative news consortium News21, found just ten (10) cases of in-person impersonation fraud out of hundreds of millions of votes cast across the nation during the same period.

Concerns about insider election fraud, however --- such as the gaming of voter registration rolls, or the ability of a single election insider to flip the results of an entire election with a few keystrokes in a matter of seconds, with little possibility of detection --- remain a very serious concern, as hundreds of computer scientists and security experts (as well as The BRAD BLOG) have been warning about now for years to little notice.

The Oregon Department of Justice is confirming today that it is investigating a case of ballot tampering by an elections official in Clackamas County, OR after it was discovered that she was allegedly filling in unvoted ballots for Republican candidates.

According to Willamette Week today...

The Oregonian reports, that the state Department of Justice spokesperson Jeff Manning says: "We can confirm we are currently investigating criminal felony violations of Oregon's elections laws, which allegedly took place in Clackamas County and allegedly involved a temporary county elections employee tampering with cast ballots."

Manning says it is currently unknown how many ballots may have been affected. "One of the primary goals of the investigation is to determine that," he said.

Oregon uses a state-wide Vote-by-Mail system which, as we hear every time we write about it, its voters seem to love a great deal. We don't, and, back in 2008, described just some of our reasons for that here: "Why 'Vote-by-Mail' Elections are a Terrible Idea for Democracy".

This case points to one of the reasons why we've long argued that voting by mail, either via Absentee ballot, or a full Vote-by-Mail system like Oregon's, is a bad idea. There are simply too many people in the chain of custody between your casting of the ballot (usually by dropping it into the ultimate "black box": a mail box) and the time that it is hopefully tabulated, usually on oft-failed, easily-manipulated, unoverseeable optical-scan computer systems which either count it accurately or inaccurately, there is no way to know.

When a hand-marked paper ballot is cast at the precinct --- at least where there are precinct-based optical-scanners or, better yet, public hand-counting --- the odds of someone being able to tamper with your ballot before it's actually tabulated, as has allegedly occurred in Clackamas County, OR, are greatly decreased.

From Palm Beach to Richmond, from Las Vegas to Portland, it's not a coincidence, it's a coordinated GOP scheme intended to keep Obama supporters from signing up to vote.

While a major element of the Republican National Committee's strategy to game the 2012 elections by affecting who gets to vote and who does not has been cut off at the knees in the wake of a criminal election fraud complaint and other late developments in the still-widening GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, a disturbing and abhorrent nationwide GOP voter registration strategy may have also been revealed by it.

The coordinated strategy, as evidenced by recent video documentation emerging from a number of key states, includes registration workers screening out Democratic-leaning voters from registration drives in order to keep them from registering. The way it's done: lying to potential registrants about a "voter survey," rather than disclosing that workers are actually there to register voters --- but only Republican-leaning ones. The deceptive tactic has so far been seen this year in several of the five battleground states where the RNC's controversial, and potentially criminal, $3 million registration program was scuttled late last week after fraudulent registration forms were discovered to have been turned in by a shady firm hired by the RNC to sign up Republican voters in Florida and four other states.

The BRAD BLOG has also collected evidence suggesting that the dishonest registration tactic also appears to be in use in states where the RNC's firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, is not said to be operating, suggesting that the practice is not just one used by the discredited firm, but, rather, a nationwide voter scheme by the GOP.

Questions about the legality of the tactic are emerging as well, though the deplorable ethics of the practice, legal or otherwise, would seem to be beyond dispute.

Election officials in the five states where Strategic was paid some $3 million by the RNC to do voter registration, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada, are now said to be in the process of scrambling to review tens of thousands of new and updated voter registration forms submitted by state Republican Parties, as collected by the firm owned by Nathan Sproul, a long-time, notorious GOP operative and paid political consultant of Mitt Romney's campaign. But the disturbing, and seemingly coordinated, tactic of registration workers instructed to misrepresent themselves in order to screen out potential Democratic voters is coming to light as a separate element of the GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal.

To date, The BRAD BLOG has documented instances of the phony "polling" tactic being used by Republican voter registration workers in Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Oregon, and, in years past, Tennessee and Minnesota. Our suspicion at the moment: What we have been able to discover to date is just the tip of the iceberg...

Last Thursday, in Cudahy, CA, a small city near Los Angeles, top city officials, including former Mayor David Silva and former City Manager and Code Enforcement Director Angel Perales, agree to plead guilty to federal charges of bribery and extortion.

But as Kevin Roderick of "LA Observed" notes, the filing also includes details on "tampering with city elections" which he describes as "really chilling".

How did the Cudahy officials tamper with the elections? Via absentee ballots, according to the explanation of the plea agreement offered by federal officials:

We've said it before, we'll say it again: Voting by mail is a terrible idea. Political parties love it, for a whole bunch of reasons (this story underscores just one of those reasons), but we're not concerned with political parties. We're concerned with democracy and whether your vote will be counted and counted accurately, no matter which party you may happen to associate with (or not.)

(Note to Oregon voters who love their all Vote-by-Mail system: Yes, we're familiar with what happens in your state, and we still stand by our long-held assessment of the perils of Absentee/Vote-by-Mail. Please read this article and, as importantly, the link in the paragraph just above, before sending us your hate mail. Thanks!)

Unless you have no other reasonable option --- eg. you're going to be out of town on Election Day and can't vote on a paper ballot during Early Voting, or you live in one of the few places in the nation where you are otherwise forced to vote on 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems on Election Day --- voting on hand-marked paper ballots, at the polling place on Election Day, increases exponentially the chance of your ballot actually being counted, and counted accurately.

We've also discussed, many times, the rarity of voter fraud --- that is, fraud by individual voters, versus the concerns of systematic election fraud perpetrated, most frequently, by election insiders who have easy access to flip results of entire elections with little possibility of detection, via manipulation of results on electronic tabulators or by gaming the voting rolls themselves.

While voter fraud is exceedingly rare --- and virtually non-existent at the polling place, particularly by those impersonating other voters (the only type of fraud which can even possibly be deterred by the polling place Photo ID restrictions Republicans are cynically attempting to put in place across the country, solely in hopes of suppressing the Democratic-leaning vote) --- where actual voter fraud does occur, it's almost always via absentee balloting.

In this latest case in Cudahy, however, though the stolen elections involved absentee ballots, it was still accomplished by election fraud, not voter fraud, since the voters themselves appear to have done nothing wrong. Rather, as is almost always the case when it comes to fraudulent elections in this country, it was a matter of insider officials gaming the system.

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: It's WAR!; New rules on fracking to protect drinking water --- same old objections from Republicans; The state's rights versus federal regulations canard; UK: Climate protesters clash with police; Smoke-bomb dropped on French nuke plant; PLUS: Connecting the Dots: Blocking Warren Buffet's coal trains on 5/5... 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): Environmental group sues to halt killing practices of federal wildlife agency; Court Urged to Order Decision on Nuclear Waste Site; Dept. Of Energy Investigating Harvesting Energy From Methane Hydrates; Pollution from Pavement Sealers?; Rising Coal Exports Have Montana Rail Communities Braced for Worst; AEI& Brookings Must-Read: 'The Republicans Are The Problem'... PLUS: Plant Study Flags Dangers Of Warming World ... and much, MUCH more! ...

Guest Editorial Series by Ernest A. Canning

This is the second of our three-part series advancing the hypothesis that one must turn to economics to make sense of the so-called 'War on Drugs' and the U.S. government's seemingly irrational obsession with shutting down something as innocuous as medicinal marijuana dispensaries.

PART 1 examined both historical and recent links between the CIA and the illicit drug trade. It explored the extent to which the so-called 'War on Drugs' has been used as cover for the CIA's covert import of narcotics, both into the U.S. and other nations, in order to fund the mischief the Agency engages in on behalf of U.S. Empire. It postulated that the government’s opposition to controlled legalization, taxation and medical, educational and psychological assistance in avoiding substance abuse is the product of an illicit supplier shutting down the competition.

Here, we will examine the profitability of the Prison Industrial Complex in the U.S. and the extent to which the world's largest prison population provides a ready source of slave labor for some of the world's largest corporations…

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: 'Better living through chemistry'? Obama's EPA approves Agent Orange herbicide, his FDA refuses to ban antibiotics in animal feed; Debunking the GOP: Gas prices were higher under Bush; Total Oil totally can't stop massive off-shore leak; PLUS: Even Lloyd's of London warns against Arctic drilling... 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): GOP’s worst nightmare: Green Muslims; Ocean acidification from CO2 causing oyster die-offs; Worst. Farm bill. Ever.; NYT magical thinking on natural gas boom; Bringing back the American Chestnut; Activists succeed in cancelling proposed GA coal plant; TN passes anti-science, anti-evolution, anti-climate education law ... PLUS: Actually, not that many fish in the sea ... and much, MUCH more! ...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: EXPOSED: Right-wing Heartland Institute's plot to undermine US science education; REVEALED: Climate change deniers recommend super-rich sugar daddies to buy the media; BUSTED: Monsanto convicted of poisoning; FIGHTING BACK: 'Pitchfork Rebellion' in OR; PLUS: Mysterious exploding pig foam --- No, it's not 'santorum', but it's close! ... 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): 166 wolves killed as hunting season ends; State Dept. agreement on short-term climate pollutants; Arctic drilling blowout on Alaska's North Slope; Federal funds flow to clean-energy firms with administration ties; Sierra Club backlash on taking industry cash; Climate change to increased risk of storm surges ... PLUS: Air pollution linked to heart disease: Five deadly air pollutants on five continents ... and much, MUCH more! ...

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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!

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): 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...