As Brad explains, the “remedies” sought by the GOP, and granted by the judge, will not address the problems posed by those machines.

MCM

Judge Rules in Favor of NC GOP in Touch-screen Vote Flipping Lawsuit
by Brad Friedman

Orders ‘voter alert’ posted at polls, programming materials, records retained…

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8162

As they see it, “election protection” groups are trying to steal elections, while they themselves–the real election thieves–are out there fighting for American democracy.

MCM

Inside the Wisconsin Right’s Voter-Suppression Scheme
Sarah Posner

The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute provided support for this article.

From familiar stories about “illegal” electioneering by ACORN and the Black Panthers [1] to Sharron Angle’s recent claim that Harry Reid is trying to steal the election by offering prospective voters free food-the myth of widespread voter fraud is now commonplace among Republicans. In just one example, an unconfirmed assertion [2] that Nevada voting machines already had Reid’s name checked off became a national story, with Rush Limbaugh claiming that the “New Black Panther Party,” with the “imprimatur of the Justice Department,” was “running fraudulent elections” across the country.

Read more.

The “Voter Fraud” Fraud
by Faiz Shakir, Benjamin Armbruster, George Zornick, Zaid Jilani, Alex Seitz-Wald, and Tanya Somanader

Employing baseless fear mongering about the (no longer existent) ACORN and other liberal groups that are supposedly trying to steal next week’s elections, conservative “anti-voter-fraud campaigns are popping up across the country, but their biggest rollouts have tended to be in lower-income areas with large minority populations.” From the Illinois Republican Party and Tea Party groups to the right-wing astro-turfing group American Majority Action, a startling number of right-wing groups have rolled out aggressive campaigns to “block DemocratsŠerr, voter fraud, at the polls,” as Mother Jones’ Suzy Khimm sarcastically noted. While campaigns and political parties have long dispatched trained poll watchers and election judges to the polls to look for irregularities, this year, conservative groups are turning to grassroots activists with little or no training in thinly-veiled efforts to suppress liberal voter participation. Right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin announced on Fox News that “we are all voter-fraud police now,” while American Majority Action lets anyone with an iPhone become a poll watcher with their Voter Fraud app. While combating fraud is of course important, these supposedly well-meaning efforts have a “chilling effect” on voter participation,
notes Gerry Hebert, executive director of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center. Conservative groups tend to target their efforts at communities with large minority or Democratic populations, claiming that fraud is more prevalent in these neighborhoods, with the effect of suppressing Democratic voters and disenfranchising minorities. Other times, groundless allegations of voter fraud are simply used to rile up the base before Election Day and undermine the credibility of opponents, but have the dangerous effect of also undermining voters’ faith in the electoral process.

Read more.

Here, below, is a dispatch straight from the Bizarro Universe where the “Tea Party movement” does its thing (and always will).

In fact, those Arizona counties have long been the sites of massive disenfranchisement of (would-be) Democratic voters, as a quick look at the evidence will make entirely clear to any rational observer. The fight for a transparent and reliable voting process in those places–Pima and Maricopa Counties in particular–has been going on for years, heroically carried on by activists John Brakey, Jim March, Bill Risner and the others at AUDIT AZ (which, needless to say, is not a “Marxist group” but all- American).

For some truth about the situation in AZ, take a look at Denis Campbell’s Truthout piece at http://www.truth-out.org/cannibalism-or-disinfectant-missing-plot-arizona62616, or AUDIT AZ’s website, at http://auditaz.blogspot.com/, or Dave Griscom’s essay in Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, or the pages on Arizona in my Fooled Again, or do a search on bradblog.com.

And then read what the Tea-Baggers have to say about it all….

MCM

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Breitbart has lied repeatedly, and unapologetically, not just about Shirley Sherrod but also ACORN and a lot of other issues, as Media Matters notes below (and as Brad Feidman has been pointing out for quite a while).

MCM

ABC Taps Andrew Breitbart For Election Night Analysis

Media Matters confirms that ABC News has recruited Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger whose out-of-context video footage of Shirley Sherrod got the Agriculture Department official ,to provide commentary for the network’s election-night newscast.

The news was first reported by Breitbart’s own website, BigJournalism, whose editor Dana Loesch is on tap to provide live analysis in the ABC News studio on Election Night. Breitbart is slated appear live from a town hall meeting anchored by ABC’s David Muir and Facebook consumer marketing head Randi Zuckerberg.

ABC News spokesman David Ford told Media Matters — which, in the wake of Sherrod’s firing, unveiled a video entitled “The End of Andrew Breitbart’s Credibility”, and which maintains detailed files on him — that Breitbart will not have license to lie during the broadcast. “He will be one of many voices on our air, including Bill Adair of Politifact,” Ford said. “If Andrew Breitbart says something that is incorrect, we have other voices to call him on it.”

Read more.

Scary New Wage Data
David Cay Johnston

Now for some really scary breaking news, from the latest payroll tax data.

Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from
the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but
at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.

Not a single news organization reported this data when it was released October 15, searches of Google and the Nexis databases show. Nor did any blog, so the citizen journalists and professional economists did no better than the newsroom pros in reporting this basic information about our economy.

Read more.

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Peddling politics in America
by Danny Schechter

Midterm contributions soar to record levels in 2010, a sign that the US campaign finance system is tainted as ever.

Our country is in economic distress. Millions are out of work, and cutbacks in public services are pervasive at the city and state levels.

The ‘great recession’ is deep and could go deeper. Most families are tightening their belts and in some cases are at breaking point because their benefits have run out.

Read more.

John Boehner to Appear at Rally With Candidate Who Dressed as Nazi

WASHINGTON — House Minority Leader John Boehner will campaign this weekend with Rich Iott, the Ohio Republican congressional candidate who found himself embroiled in controversy several weeks ago when photos surfaced of him dressed in a Nazi SS uniform.

The Iott campaign confirmed to the Huffington Post that the two will appear together at the Lucas County Republican Party headquarters. It is, if nothing else, a risky stop for Boehner to make just days before the election.

Iott’s chances at winning the seat were seemingly downgraded after photos of him dressed in Nazi garb surfaced. But Boehner’s visit suggests that Republicans feel the seat is within their grasp. Iott claimed that he was merely partaking in a historical reenactment and not out of latent sympathies for the Third Reich. Still, his candidacy became somewhat symbolic for the extremities of the GOP.

Read more.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck–duck!

MCM

The F Word
via feminist blogs
by Jeff Fecke on 10/28/10

There are epithets that decent people shy away from using. One obvious example is the use of racist, ethnic, or gender-based slurs. If you’re a decent human being, you don’t use them, because one uses them to hurt, to malign, to defame.

But it is not just slurs on one’s person that we avoid. We also avoid slurs on one’s political philosophy. Describing someone as a Nazi, for example, is rightly seen as beyond the pale. It says a person is a believer in an ideology that led to the slaughter of six million innocent people, and ignited a global war that killed millions more. Unless a person actually is a follower of Hitler’s philosophy, describing them as a Nazi is not only inaccurate, it’s pejorative. And the same is true of other discredited, vile, or simply discarded epithets, like communist1, or Maoist, or totalitarian; unless a person actually is a communist, Maoist, or totalitarian, describing them as such is simply rude, and is designed to create far more heat than light.

But sometimes, the shoe fits. There are still Nazis, after all. There are still segregationists. Still anti-Semites. Still communists. Some of these people wear their positions proudly, like the perky neo-Nazi with the swastika tattoo on her head who frequents my local convenience store.2 Most, however, hold their positions without admitting to the label that defines them – as the label itself describes a belief system that has been rejected by everyone.

Read more.