Breitbart Still At the Front of the Noise Machine

Via NYMag’s Daily Intel, Gawker does the first round-up of conspiracy theories about his death:

...”They killed Breitbart? Natural causes? What was natural cause? They use cancer to kill a lot of people. Ruby for one, Aaron Russo 4 another”...

“Andrew Breitbart was going to expose Barry’s colledge “issues” and now he’s dead. The Bush/Clinton clan kills again.”...

“Ok, I read Tom Clancy. Breitbart was definitely assassinated.”...

And so Breitbart died the way he lived: surrounded by partisan rancor and conspiracy theories. He would have wanted it this way.

(For the record, I’m sad for his family. And Shirley Sherrod. And the ongoing existence of James O’Keefe.)

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Your Master Class In Mansplaining

Here are the only things you really need to know about last night’s debate.  One, it’s more than likely the last one for the Republicans.  Two, they did this:

On Wednesday, contraception became the latest topic to raise the ire of conservative debate goers.

During a CNN-sponsored Republican presidential debate in Arizona, the crowd booed wildly at the mention of birth control.

Newt Gingrich then lied about President Obama “supporting infanticide”, Mittens then lied about the President’s “assault on religious freedom”, Santorum then lied about the “pill being dangerous”, and Ron Paul noted that as a doctor, if only women had morals, we wouldn’t need contraception at all.

The sound you heard during that roughly 8 minute segment of the debate was every female swing voter laughing and walking away from the Republicans for a very, very long time.

Conservative pundits sympathetic to Romney have been making the case this week that, whatever Santorum’s conservative merits, he drags the whole party down with his extreme rhetoric. They got plenty of evidence for their case on Wednesday after the GOP received a question on whether they support birth control. Gingrich and Romney practically fell over themselves to condemn moderator John King for daring to even bring it up, insisting that it was an irrelevant distraction from the important issues of the day and their only concerns with contraception were really about religious freedom.

Then came Rick Santorum, who completely deflated their case. He enthusiastically responded to a question about contraception with a lengthy (and seemingly unrelated) sermon about the over-sexualization of teenagers.

“What we’re seeing is a problem in our culture with respect the children being raised by children, children being raised out of wedlock, and the impact on society economically, the impact on society with respect to drug use and a host of other things, when children have children,” he said. “And so, yes, I was talking about these very serious issues.”

Pretty soon the entire podium was following his lead, joining in with their own denunciations of teenage pregnancy and calling for more abstinence programs.

These guys are toast.  Their party is toast.  Their ideas are toast.  The fact they spent a good 10+ minutes mansplaining how the spawn of Lilith  should really just epoxy their legs shut in a debate where the word “jobs” was completely absent showed just how out of touch these fools really are.

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Why We Fight

I followed a link from commenter Harlana to Little Green Footballs, where Charles Johnson reads Fox News discussion threads so you don’t have to.

There are almost 5000 comments posted in the thread — these are from the first few pages. Notice that the racist bastards deliberately misspell their slurs or insert random spaces, so they aren’t caught by word filters. And many of the worst comments have numerous “likes” from other commenters.

All grammar and spelling errors are exactly as found…

“not nignogs their death is a plus”...”i don’t even consider them to be included in the human race let alone on a pedistal. the people that do are a bunch of loosers.”...”This is typical of the blk gene pool; it happens all the time”...”Who cares? Black_trash gone is enough”...

It goes on and on and on.  I read about a thousand comments there, give or take, and they break down into hateful shit that frequently makes the above look tame, a very small number complaining about those posts, and a larger number complaining about the liberal conspiracy to make Fox and conservatives look bad.  As has been stated before, the best way to embarrass a conservative is to disseminate his words as widely as possible.

This is Why We Fight.  This is the nature of the opposition.  I live amongst these people here in what they proudly refer to as “the buckle of the bible belt” and I’m here to tell you that John’s post of last week was right on the money.  You need to read their sites—Fox News, Free Republic, Lucianne.com, Michelle Malkin’s site,  and others.  See what they say to each other when they think they aren’t being watched.  The palpable hatred and violent fantasies will make you sick, but you need to know what they want, and you need to keep seeing it in their own words.  It’s one thing to say “we read them so you don’t have to” but it’s entirely another to make you all see that you do, in fact, need to.   In a few days after this thread is dead, some conservatives will post here claiming that it’s all projection and fantasy, just like they did with John’s post last week.  None of that will change a thing.  If you’ve ever wondered why I dump shit all over the sorry-assed conservatrolls we have here, it’s because there is no fundamental difference between them and the people quoted above.  Their world is the world that our little trolls would make, and people such as they deserve only contempt.

Lest you or anyone accuse me of nutpicking, I am specifically calling out the commenters on those sites.   But I’ll note that there’s a reason that racists and bigots frequent sites like Michelle Malkin’s site (which is actually pretty ironic) and Freeperland and Fox.

If you love this country, you need to know and you need to fight for it.  If you want a better future for your children, you need to know and you need to fight for it.

EDIT:  I’ll go even further.  Knowing what you know after reading that swill, it is incumbent upon you to go out into the world and ask of your conservative friends and relatives (because we all have them) an explanation of their associates.  ABL once asked me why I thought it was important to differentiate between the person of George W. Bush and the policies he had which had racist ends.  I replied that I didn’t think he was personally a racist.  Well, you know, I still don’t.  But I understand a little bit better about where she was coming from.  Until and unless they are made to deal with the very real results of their policies and ideas, and are held responsible for the company they keep and the people they promote, they will not change.  The real hard core ones cannot, and will not change.  But others will, and those others must be held responsible in order that they stop supporting the worst of the worst.

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I Can’t Quite Put My Finger On It, But…

MoJo’s Nick Baumann again does us an invaluable service by pointing out the obvious fact that President Obama’s “unprecedented assault on America’s religious freedoms” by requiring church-related hospitals and universities to cover contraception at the federal level has actually been on the books for, oh, about 12 years now.

In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn’t provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today—and because it relies on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it applies to all employers with 15 or more employees. Employers that don’t offer prescription coverage or don’t offer insurance at all are exempt, because they treat men and women equally—but under the EEOC’s interpretation of the law, you can’t offer other preventative care coverage without offering birth control coverage, too.

“It was, we thought at the time, a fairly straightforward application of Title VII principles,” a top former EEOC official who was involved in the decision told Mother Jones. “All of these plans covered Viagra immediately, without thinking, and they were still declining to cover prescription contraceptives. It’s a little bit jaw-dropping to see what is going on now…There was some press at the time but we issued guidances that were far, far more controversial.”

After the EEOC opinion was approved in 2000, reproductive rights groups and employees who wanted birth control access sued employers that refused to comply. The next year, in Erickson v. Bartell Drug Co., a federal court agreed with the EEOC’s reasoning. Reproductive rights groups and others used that decision as leverage to force other companies to settle lawsuits and agree to change their insurance plans to include birth control. Some subsequent court decisions echoed Erickson, and some went the other way, but the rule (absent a Supreme Court decision) remained, and over the following decade, the percentage of employer-based plans offering contraceptive coverage tripled to 90 percent.

This fight has been long settled based on Title VII law.  Clinton put it on the books on the way out without controversy, and it was on the books for every single day of the Bush 43 administration without controversy.  It was on the books for three years under the Obama administration, without controversy.  Nine out of ten businesses in the country, including religiously affiliated hospitals, schools, and charities, provided contraception coverage.  27 states went on to put similar provisions on their books without incident.

It wasn’t an issue at all until an African-American Democrat in the White House decided during an election year that “Hey, this is a good idea, let’s put this on the books for all 50 states” just after getting yet another monthly unemployment report that showed that his policies were starting to bring the jobs numbers back around, and that his prospects for re-election were improving along with that uptick on what basically everyone agreed up until that millisecond was the most important issue of the day, the economy itself.

Then, the existing rules of the game for the last dozen years changed literally overnight to fit the theory that the President was “declaring war on Americans’ religious freedoms.”  Then the rules immediately changed to create “a firestorm of controversy”.  Then the rules changed so that people questioned why Catholics in the Obama administration, including the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense, hadn’t resigned in protest yet.

It wasn’t an issue until the GOP started openly asking if they were going to lose big in November and Newt Gingrich had melted into babbling radioactive slag and Rick Santorum became the latest Anti-Romney, revealing the fatal weakness of “the frontrunner”.

Only now do the god-botherers and the institutional misogynists and the bigots and the pinheads and the weasels have an issue.

Only now.  They are this desperate to defeat President Obama.

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Gap-astrophic Failure

Steve Benen flags down the real story so far in the GOP primary:  it’s not Mitt’s finishing problem, or clods of Santorum gumming up the works, or even Newt’s ego self-immolating like a phosphorus elemental in a gasoline refinery, but the significant turnout deficit compared to just four years ago.

So, what were the totals last night? In Minnesota, with nearly all of the precincts reporting, 47,826 Republicans participated in the caucuses, down about 23% from four years ago.

In Colorado, with all of the precincts reporting, 65,479 GOP voters showed up, a drop of nearly 7% from the 2008 totals.

And in Missouri’s non-binding primary, with all of the precincts reporting, turnout stood at 251,868. That’s quite a few for a primary dismissed as a “beauty pageant,” though as Cohen noted, the comparison is admittedly flawed.

Nevertheless, we can start to take some larger lessons away from the larger trajectory. For one thing, none of this makes Mitt Romney look especially impressive—he’s losing states he won four years ago; he’s struggling to get his supporters to participate; and he’s failing badly to match his 2008 vote totals at this stage in the process. It’s starting to look like Romney only wins when he spends several million dollars on attack ads to destroy his main challenger.

For another, this is part of a pattern. As was reported on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Monday night, if we look just at self-identifying Republicans in the exit polls, turnout dropped 11% in Iowa, 15% in New Hampshire, and 16% in Florida. Though turnout in South Carolina was strong, it’s proving to be the exception, as evidenced by additional weak numbers in Nevada and in yesterday’s contests.

The GOP bet everything on the “Tea Party as the new majority” after 2010, and that assumption is rapidly turning into one of the biggest political meltdowns in a long time.  Awesome.  The further to the right they go, the more they lose from everyone else.  Even their primaries are self destructing.

If you were a woman, a minority, a non-Christian, LGBT, a government or union employee or you make less than six figures a year, why would you care to vote in the GOP primaries since the party already classifies you as the enemy?  I mean what what, literally leaves the 27% if that much?  More like 2.7% at the rate they’re going.  The only state where turnout was up?  South Carolina.  That speaks volumes.

We’ve still got loads of work ahead of us, but damn it feels good to see the sun again.

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High In The Middle And Round At Both Ends

So if you want to know what LEROOOOOOY NNNNNEWTON! was doing while he was drowning in flop sweat and Santorum last night, he was too busy playing for Ohio by attacking the President (and Mitt Romney) here in heavily Catholic Cincinnati yesterday.

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich today brought his talk of family, jobs and God straight to where he hoped it would resonate – Cincinnati’s West Side.

And it did. The popular Price Hill Chili was packed with 200 people who cheered and clapped as Gingrich promised he’d put people on unemployment into job training and cut corporate taxes. “Large-scale” change is needed, he said, and he’s the man to bring it.

“It is fundamentally wrong to give people 99 weeks of money for doing nothing,” he said, prompting the crowd to yell, “Newt! Newt!”

He must hate anyone who’s on Social Security for more than two years then.  Oh wait, he pretty much does.

He drew his biggest cheers when he talked about oil and said, “No American president will ever again bow to a Saudi king.”

He said he doesn’t want to run just a Republican campaign, but one that unleashes “the American people so they can go out and rebuild the America we love.” A woman shouted, “Yes! Yes!”

When someone in the crowd yelled, “Lead us back to the Bible, Newt!” he didn’t miss a beat: “What I want is to lead you back to the Declaration of Independence… The fact is, in America, we believe that power comes from God to each of you personally” and you loan it back to the government.”

Newt went on to attack Obama’s War On People Who Were Never Going To Vote For Him In The First Place, and the crowd ate it up.

Jim Ferneding of Montgomery wanted the chance to shake Gingrich’s hand, and he got it. He told him: “You’re the one with the strength. Just concentrate on condemning Obama and you will win.”

Because in the end, that’s all that matters to a hell of a lot of folks around here.  They don’t want someone to beat Obama, they want him so thoroughly and utterly destroyed that nobody “like him” dares to run for President again in their lifetimes.  He must be broken.

Don’t forget that little goal even for a second.

 

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I Think That’s Some Sort Of Bomb Iranian Mix

Well, since John Yoo is on vacation this week or something waterboarding herds of unicorns and John Bolton’s Mustache is busy with trying to adapt drone controls for use by facial hair (hard to fly straight and hit the red button at the same time when you’re only a mustache) to bomb Syria, it’s up to Niall Ferguson at the Daily Beast to yell LET’S BOMB IRAN as loudly as possible at the Village today.

The single biggest danger in the Middle East today is not the risk of a six-day Israeli war against Iran. It is the risk that Western wishful nonthinking allows the mullahs of Tehran to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Because I am in no doubt that they would take full advantage of such a lethal lever. We would have acquiesced in the creation of an empire of extortion.

War is an evil. But sometimes a preventive war can be a lesser evil than a policy of appeasement. The people who don’t yet know that are the ones still in denial about what a nuclear-armed Iran would end up costing us all.

It feels like the eve of some creative destruction.

And really, Ferguson’s entire argument is “We could so take Iran because our aircraft carriers have more hit points.”   Also, the whole “Oil at $160 a barrel if war breaks out” thing is so 2008 because the Saudis can just make more, or something.  It’s like the last 11 years never happened, and he’s just expecting us to buy the argument and go “LET’S DO IT!” like we’re playing Team Fortress 2.  Our bombs are filled with awesome cartoon sound effects and FREEDOM, so it’s cool anyway because AMERICA!

Meanwhile, the really awesome part is 49% of Americans are already on board with Operation Here We Go Again, so before you have a good laugh at Niall here, understand that the universe has spotted him a hell of a spread.

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Arizona GOP: I Spit On Your Union Grave

If GOP Gov. John Kasich got an ugly bloody nose from public unions last year and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and his GOP pals wanted to leave public unions bleeding in the street (only to now face the wrath of the state’s voters), Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is by comparison sending wreaths and dry cleaning her little black dress for the occasion.

With a sweeping series of bills introduced Monday night in the state Senate, Republicans in Arizona hoped to make Wisconsin’s battle against public unions last year look like a lightweight sparring match.

The bills include a total ban on collective bargaining for Arizona’s public employees, including at the city and county levels. The move would outpace even the tough bargaining restrictions enacted in Wisconsin in 2011 that led to massive union protests and a Democratic effort to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

“At first glance, it looks like an all out assault on the right of workers to organize,” Senate Minority Leader David Schapira (D) told TPM on Tuesday. “And to me, that’s a serious problem.”

Not in Arizona it’s not.  Not yet, anyway.  It gets worse, however.

Beyond a ban on collective bargaining, the bills would also prohibit state and local government workers from deducting money from their paychecks to pay union dues.

They would ban state and local governments from paying anyone to spend time doing union work, a practice known as “release time.”

And in another break from the Wisconsin model, the restrictions would affect every type of public union, including police and firefighters.

Arizona is a right-to-work state, which gives unions a much smaller role there than in states like Wisconsin. But laws still currently give labor groups a place at the bargaining table to negotiate pay and other benefits for their members. All of that would change under the proposed rules.

Schapira, who is also running for Congress this year, said he expects the laws to easily pass unless something major happens. Democrats in the Senate are outnumbered 21-9, so he said there isn’t much they can do to stop the bills on their own.

Right about now I’m thinking Arizona’s various police and firefighter unions are going to have something to say about this.  As are Arizona’s voters.

And I don’t think Gov. Brewer and the GOP are going to like it.  Insert language about awaking a sleeping giant here.

The GOP’s lasting contribution over the last ten years is making us try to hate teachers, firefighters, cops, scientists, actors, journalists (the actual ones), public safety officials, local government employees, and factory workers.  There’s something all of those professions tend to have in common, traditionally.  And it explains Arizona Republicans making this move.

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Simp Phony For The Devil

Having taken over Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog for Steve Benen (now part of the Maddow team at MSNBC, and more power to him there, he’s badly needed), Ed Kilgore is doing a pretty solid job so far.  He flags this article from The Hill written by FOX News punching bag Juan Williams and immediately asks the correct question: How long will Juan Williams now last at FOX after stating the obvious about the network’s racial dog-whistle language?  Williams states:

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

One has to wonder then why Williams is hanging out at FOX News, arguably the number one source for disseminating these code words.  I have zero sympathy for the guy, he made his choices and he has to live with them.  But Kilgore immediately grasps the issue:

When Newt Gingrich turned Juan Williams into the perfect foil during the January 19 Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, ironic symbolism certainly abounded. Aside from the fact that Newt vaulted himself into the lead by beating up on an African-American journalist on MLK Day in the Cradle of the Confederacy, there was the additional fact that Williams is a Fox News panelist who briefly became a conservative celebrity after NPR fired him for on-air remarks deemed insensitive to Muslims. The debate audience didn’t know or care, presumably viewing Williams as just another “race-card” player who needed to be slapped down for suggesting anyone railing against the work ethic of food stamp recipients might be appealing to atavistic motives.

Now, I think Kilgore is on the right track, but my cynical side wants to move the grubby, Cheeto crud-covered GOP chess pieces forward a few moves and says Williams lobbed such a fat, tasty curveball over the plate of Gingrich in South Carolina for a reason, and that is to make a horse race out of the coronation of Marquis du Mittens as long as possible to keep the faithful glued to the primary noise machine.  With Newt down in Florida and big by most accounts, he’s pitched another juicy one right into Gingrich’s ego wheelhouse with the primary just hours away.  I don’t know if it’ll do any good, but the plan seems pretty obvious.

Just the kind of scrum FOX excels at creating and running with.  Williams knows damn well what he’s doing now, just like he damn well knew what he was doing in South Carolina, people.  Weep not for Juan.

Like I said, zero sympathy for this phony simp’s symphony.

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It’s A Bit Too Late For That, Ruben

CNN’s Ruben Navarette is warning that the GOP might not do too well among Latino voters in 2012, which is a bit like, well, like Herman Cain warning that the GOP may not do too well with African-American voters like myself.  But here’s his opening:

On behalf of all those Latino voters who have figured out that the Obama administration is the most hostile to Latino immigrants of any administration in the last half century and who are looking for an alternative, let me say this to the Republican presidential candidates: “Bienvenidos to Florida! Now, behave yourselves.”

The Obama administration is the most hostile to Latino immigrants, and Navarette’s solution is the current Republican Party?  You could power suns on that level of denial and still have enough juice left over for purely recreational use of a couple Large Hadron Colliders.  What does he expect, a comfortable and plush catapult that any of these jokers running for President Obama’s job would use in a heartbeat to fling people back over the border while screaming about tacos?

I mean damn, I thought the Hermanator was deep into self-hatred, but this guy is making my soul hurt.

 

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Birthers Stuck On Endless Loop

Whether you believe that the Republicans will self-destruct in November or not, the Birther component of the anti-Obama campaign will never, never end unless the people who continue to spew this nonsense are actually made to pay a price.

A judge has ordered President Barack Obama to appear in court in Atlanta for a hearing on a complaint that says Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen and can’t be president.

It’s one of many such lawsuits that have been filed across the country, so far without success. A Georgia resident made the complaint, which is intended to keep Obama’s name off the state’s ballot in the March presidential primary.

An Obama campaign aide says any attempt to involve the president personally will fail and such complaints around the country have no merit.

The hearing is set for Thursday before an administrative judge. Deputy Chief Judge Michael Malihi on Friday denied a motion by the president’s lawyer to quash a subpoena that requires Obama to show up.

If the President shows up, every other state GOP machine will file similar complaints with friendly judges and he’ll have to show up there as well.  If the President ignores the complaints, it will “prove he has something to hide” and feed the nasty e-mail whisper campaign that basically hasn’t stopped since early 2008. The sinister point of all this is not to prove or disprove anything, but to so demoralize voters that they’ll entertain the notion that if the Republicans win, all this idiocy will go away and that the GOP will behave themselves again.

It’s complete bullshit, of course.  All of it.  The idiocy was always there and surrender by the electorate is the only way the GOP wins with their current field of cartoon villain mouth-breathing doucheknockers.  But that’s the point:  no matter how many times the President personally staples his birth certificate to people’s foreheads, they’ll never believe him.  Jesus Christ could descend from the sky with John Wayne’s pet T-Rex that’s piloting the Millennium Falcon, during halftime at the Super Bowl, grab the mic while Sam Elliott hands him his own mustache and say “You guys, he was born in Hawaii, knock this crap off already” and they would wonder how POTUS managed to brainwash America and the world into seeing such a perfect simultaneous mass hallucination.  They would in fact blame fluoridated water.  I shit you not.

Almost enough to drive a guy to drink.

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Only the elites insult the working adults who pick up after us

I didn’t watch the debate. I did want to point something out, though, because I think it goes to how conservatives devalue the work that certain adults do:

“New York City pays their janitors an absurd amount of money because of the union. You could take one janitor and hire 30-some kids to work in the school for the price of one janitor, and those 30 kids would be a lot less likely to drop out. They would actually have money in their pocket. They’d learn to show up for work. They could do light janitorial duty. They could work in the cafeteria. They could work in the front office. They could work in the library. They’d be getting money, which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money.”

While it’s certainly interesting that opposing child labor laws is now a mainstream position on the Right and among conservative news personalities, I hear something else entirely in Gingrich’s statement than the pundits and politicians heard. Newt Gingrich told us all last night that nine year olds can replace the grown men and women who currently do these jobs. Newt Gingrich believes janitors and cafeteria workers and people who work in school libraries and offices can and should be replaced by children.

That’s how much respect Gingrich has for the work that these people do.

Third grader = adult working class person. The children are paid less per worker unit, hence it’s thirty kids to one adult, sure, but Gingrich believes children can do these job as well as the adults who currently do them, because that’s what he said.

Personally, I think any random janitor is worth more than Newt Gingrich in terms of adding value to society so I’d like to leave the nine year olds out of it and just do a straight comparison between adults: adult janitor compared with adult conservative blowhard/grifter. Personally, I would bet my mortgage payment that Newt Gingrich would be physically and temperamentally unable to complete one full 8 hour day as a school janitor. But Newt Gingrich believes that janitors are overpaid and that children can replace adult janitors, so let’s conduct one of those thought experiments that conservatives love so much, and see if any other adult workers can and should be replaced by children.

Could nine year olds replace the adults who cleaned up after that gathering of political and media luminaries last night? Working adults did that, after all. After the political and media celebrities left that room, real live adult janitors came in and cleaned up after them. Why didn’t Newt Gingrich suggest that the people who cleaned up after him last night be replaced by children?

What about Gingrich’s staff? How much do they make? Can children do their work as well as they can? Why or why not? Newt Gingrich has been paid an absurd amount of money for lobbying since he left Congress in disgrace. Could a nine year old replace Newt Gingrich? How hard could Newt Gingrich’s “job” be, after all? A lot of lavish meals, ass-kissing, and bloviating, right? We could employ a hell of a lot of nine year olds on the absurd amount of money Gingrich is paid.

Maybe we can discuss that at the next debate. Move off the value of janitors, as measured in so many “child units”, and measure the value of Republican gargoyles. How many nine year olds = Newt Gingrich? 100? One? Will the conservative base applaud that calculation? What about the people in the audience who cheered? Can a third grader replace them at work? Why or why not?

Hey Newt: only the elites like you denigrate and demean the work that (certain) adults do, by claiming that work can and should be done by children.

Oh, and if you’re interested, the working adults Gingrich wants to replace with children make 38,000 dollars a year. Much, much less than any of the conservative leaders on that stage, or the media celebrities who appeared with them.

The Department of Education said the people Gingrich appears to be talking about actually have the title of “cleaners,” and are paid about $38,000 annually after two years on the job.

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All Class, These Guys

More information keeps dribbling forward regarding the voter fraud crimes committed by O’Keefe’s Project Veritas , and it just keeps getting better and better:

A grieving New Hampshire widow said she was stunned to learn her beloved husband’s identity was used for a political gotcha — just 10 days after his death.

“That’s awful,” Rachel Groux said. “Why should they use his name? They shouldn’t use anybody’s name — alive or deceased.”

Activist filmmaker James O’Keefe secretly recorded video showing his operative using Roger Groux’s name and address to obtain a Republican ballot at Manchester polls Tuesday. The U.S. Navy veteran died Dec. 31 at an assisted living home. His family held funeral services Monday, his widow said. “Oh my God, I know what he would say, ‘Call the cops, call the police,’ ” Rachel Groux said.

City officials may have not received notification in time to remove Groux from voter lists, said Manchester City Clerk Matthew Normand.

So what did our intrepid investigators discover with their criminal little sting operation? That it might take ten days to get a deceased Navy veteran off the voting rolls. That’s so inconsequential that it would bore even John Fund, that little worm Hans von Sapovsky, and the other wingnut voter fraud hysterics.

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The Next Birtherism?

Let’s say it’s a tight race between Barack Obama and whoever emerges from the GOP scrum—the Real Clear Politics poll summary currently has Obama leading Romney by less than a point, and though Obama has a much bigger lead over Gingrich, the economy isn’t getting better all that quickly, and it’s impossible to know what could happen in Europe in the next year. So if it’s Obama vs. Gingrich, that could be close, too.

So imagine Obama ekes out a win in November, barely ahead in the popular vote and with one or two tight states separating him from the Republican in the Electoral College. Now, imagine that this comes after Eric Holder has promised an aggressive pushback against Republican laws restricting voter participation:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday entered the turbulent political waters of voting rights, signaling that the Justice Department would be aggressive in reviewing new voting laws that civil rights advocates say will dampen minority participation in next year’s elections….

Do you think the aftermath of such a squeaker victory might be the point at which the demagoguing of the “massive Democratic voter fraud” myth goes utterly mainstream? By which I mean that prominent Republican officeholders and officials may literally not accept the results of the 2012 election, and may work to get them overturned, or at least to make hearings on the subject the main business of Congress (or whatever part of Congress is GOP-controlled)? And isn’t it possible that, if they work this hard enough, it could actually seem credible to parts of the mainstream press, even though the “evidence” will be overwhelmingly anecdotal and mostly irrelevant (e.g., Mickey Mouse’s signature showing up on petitions before being invalidated under the usual perfectly adequate fraud-detection procedures)?

This stuff pumps up the rubes, and Republicans use it as the basis for restrictive laws in the states, but they don’t seem to try to sell the voter fraud myth to the broad general public in a serious way. Under these circumstances, would they make a mainstream move with it? And could they get, say, The Washington Post to bite? Could they effectively nullify Obama’s reelection that way?

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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crybabies

Okay, this first:

A rift in the Ohio Republican Party became public this weekend, raising questions about GOP unity in one of the nation’s most important presidential swing states.
During a speech Friday to the state’s Republican Central Committee, state party Chairman Kevin DeWine accused Gov. John Kasich’s political team of recruiting candidates to oust the party’s central committee members, calling those efforts “the elephant in the room.”

“I’ve spoken with many of you over the last few weeks as the governor’s political team and others have begun aggressively recruiting candidates to challenge those of you in the room. Your emotions range from curiosity to disappointment to annoyance to anger, fear, and disgust,” Mr. DeWine said, according to a transcript of the speech provided by the party. “If we do not address the elephant in the room, then the donkey in the White House will win four more years.”

My emotions range from curiosity to disappointment to annoyance to anger, fear, and disgust when I look at Governor Kasich too, but I’m dealing. I think it’s good Republicans are meeting and talking through feelings, though.

Then this:

In a memo Friday night to the House GOP caucus, Speaker William Batchelder wrote that Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine exhibited “questionable leadership tactics and poor decision making.”
In his memo, Batchelder writes that he had been reluctant to publicly discuss frustrations about state party operations. He concludes that “we cannot have a situation where the state party, and the Governor, and the Speaker of the House do not have a trusting and cooperative partnership.”

And then this response:

In an email response to Batchelder, DeWine wrote that he is troubled that the speaker decided to criticize him and the state GOP “in a very public manner” instead of discussing their problems privately.
DeWine said he was not being critical of the governor in his speech Friday, but rather the people surrounding Ohio’s chief executive. “I referenced Governor Kasich’s team because I worry that are not serving him or our party. Whenever an elected official has people around him who are motivated by ego, power, or profit, friends of that elected official owe him the courtesy of a warning that he deserves better counsel.”

Profit! He just put it right out there.

Hopefully this public dialogue between the two warring factions will continue, and we’ll learn which people “around” Governor Kasich (but NOT Governor Kasich) are motivated by profit.

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