Even Florida Gov. Rick Scott would veto Arizona's hate bill

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is a right-wing extremist and hyper-partisan Republican, and there are many, many reasons not to like him. But even he objects to Arizona's "religious freedom" hate bill targeting gays and lesbians but essentially legalizing discrimination against anyone for any "religious" reason:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is now saying he would veto a controversial Arizona bill that lets businesses discriminate against LGBT people after dodging the question this morning on MSNBC.

"I don't want to tell Governor Brewer what to do, she can do what's best for her state. From my understanding of that bill, I would veto it in Florida because it seems unnecessary," Scott said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

*****

"In Florida we are focused on economic growth, and not on things that divide us. We are for freedom here in Florida. And we want everyone to come here, create jobs, and live in freedom, and that includes religious liberty," Scott continued in his statement.

"I am very much opposed to forcing anyone to violate their conscience or their religious beliefs, and of course, I'm very much opposed to discrimination. As a society, we need to spend more time learning to love and tolerate each other, and less time trying to win arguments in courts of law," he said.

Well, fine, nicely put, though of course sometimes you have to try to win arguments in court, like when, for example, you're pursuing marriage equality or otherwise trying to roll back generations of bigotry and discrimination.

And of course this is Florida. Fucking Florida. Scott can say he's opposed to discrimination and open to more love and toleration, but this is the man who, for example, sought to make it more difficult to vote and to purge the voter rolls of non-Republican voters, essentially disenfranchising blacks and the poor, among others; the man who required drug tests for those seeking welfare (but not, of course, for those seeking corporate welfare); the man opposed to expanding health insurance to the uninsured; the man who is opposed to marriage equality.

(And while he talks up freedom in Florida, let's not forget that Florida is the state with a rather notorious "Stand Your Ground" law. So let's just say it's freedom for some and not so much for others.)

So great, he's opposed to Arizona's awful bill. That hardly makes him a saint.

In GOP Land, America is 89% white

By Frank Moraes 

Benjy Sarlin has a great article about the New Southern Strategy that I've been writing about, "How the GOP Stopped Worrying About Latinos and Learned to Love the Base." It lays out the best statistical counter argument to Sean Trende that I've read. As you know, I don't think any of this really matters. The Republican Party has no intention of changing. For one thing, they have a long history of getting people to vote against their best interests by voting Republican. That's what the "Reagan Democrats" were: people who resented blacks more than they cared about their own well-being. So it only makes sense that they would continue to think that they can win elections while remaining unpopular. And the recent damage to the Voting Rights Act only makes that opinion all the more compelling to the Republican Party.

And that got me thinking: voter suppression. There is a very old theory about liberals and conservatives. It claims that liberals make policies based upon the way they want people to be, but conservatives base their policies on the way people actual are. I think there actually used to be something to this. A lot of socialist thought assumed that incentives didn't matter whereas conservatives were all about incentives. For the last few decades, though, liberals have been all about incentives. In as much as conservatives think about incentives, they now believe they are the only thing that matters, which is just as big a mistake as thinking that they don't matter at all.

But in a more fundamental way, the Republican Party believes things that are clearly untrue. We saw this most clearly last year where even Mitt Romney went into election day thinking he was going to win despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But more to the point, I have noticed that a lot of conservatives really do think that any time a Republican loses an election it is a sign of voter fraud. I believe this comes from the extremely insular nature of conservative politics. Just look at the Deer Lady: it is clear she never hears anything about politics that is not filtered through a right-wing extremist.

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North Carolina goes south

By Mustang Bobby

(Ed. note: For more on this effort to use "Nullification" to circumvent the separation of church and state, yet another Republican assault on the Constitution, see my post from Wednesday. -- MJWS)

North Carolina won't have a state religion after all. Well, at least not this year. Yet.

North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis's office said Thursday that a resolution asserting North Carolina has the power to set an official state religion is dead, and won't go any further.

The resolution, filed by two Republicans from Rowan County, declared "each state is sovereign and may independently determine how the state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion" – thereby claiming the federal government and courts have no authority to decide what is constitutional.

The bill's primary sponsors were Reps. Harry Warren and Carl Ford, a tea party member. Eleven other legislators signed the resolution. Legislators introduce hundreds or even thousands of resolutions every year, honoring constituents or declaring their stances on issues, but they carry little legal weight.

Warren said in a statement that the bill was only intended to allow Rowan County officials to open their meetings with prayer, not to establish a state religion.

Instead, they've turned their attention to another GOP obsession (no, not gay sex): voter suppression.

Read more »

The sweet smell of desperation

By Mustang Bobby

Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) hears the footfall of doom as he draws ever closer to his bid for re-election next year. Polls are showing that he'd lose to freshly-minted Democrat Charlie Crist, and now he's pandering to voters whom he offended deeply by signing a restrictive early-voting law in 2011 and then running away from it like his, um, hair was on fire. Now he says he's all in favor of expanding early voting... back to where it was.

His latest attempt to suck up to a major constituency is his proposal to give Florida teachers a raise. This comes a year after he stuck public employees with a law that forces them to make a 3 percent contribution to a pension plan that is already solvent:

Scott planned to announce his proposal Wednesday in Ocoee. No details were immediately available.

The Florida Supreme Court last week upheld a Scott-proposed law requiring the pension contribution from teachers, state and county employees and some municipal workers.

The Legislature last year approved Scott’s request to increase public school funding by $1 billion but left it to local school boards to determine how much, if any, would go to pay raises.

That was a turn-around for the Republican governor, who in the previous year persuaded lawmakers to cut school spending.

Nice try, Governor. And while no one would begrudge giving a pay raise to teachers (full disclosure: when teachers get raises, so do some administrators), is there a way you could do it without being so shamelessly ham-handed about it? It makes us feel so used.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Karl Rove and Dick Morris are too toxic even for Fox News

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Daily Intel:

According to multiple Fox sources, [Roger] Ailes has issued a new directive to his staff: He wants the faces associated with the election off the air — for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris — a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox's anti-Obama campaign — Ailes's orders mean new rules. Ailes's deputy, Fox News programming chief Bill Shine, has sent out orders mandating that producers must get permission before booking  Rove or Morris. Both pundits made several appearances in the days after the election, but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly.

Morris is an embarrassing buffoon, and so it's possible that he'll get significantly less airtime on Fox now that he's been exposed (yet again) as a fraudulent hack.

But don't think for a second that Rove, perhaps the leading Republican strategist and fundraiser, and certainly one of the engines that drives the party establishment, is really on the outs at what is clearly a partisan Republican organization. His election predictions and election-night shenanigans were similarly buffoonish, not least when he found himself at odds with the network's number-crunchers, but he can be excused in Republican circles for thinking that Romney's internal polling was accurate (when it was anything but) and perhaps also that Republican voter suppression efforts would ultimately put Romney over the top (an issue he's trying to deflect by turning the accusation on Obama, which is ridiculous).

Mark my words: Rove will be back sooner than you can fart "Turd Blossom" to the tune of "Paradise by the Dashboard Light."

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I'm shocked, shocked, to learn that "voter fraud" was a cover for voter suppression by the GOP

By Comrade Misfit

Big surprise, eh? 

"The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates," [Former FL GOP Chairman Jim] Greer told The Post. "It's done for one reason and one reason only... 'We've got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,'" Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants. "They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue," Greer said. "It's all a marketing ploy."

It was all a cover for the largest voter suppression campaign since the poll tax. But they screamed "Acorn, Fraud" repeatedly on Fox News, Hate Radio, and all of the fellow-traveling blogs and what not.

The smart ones knew what they were doing, but all of the Teabaggers and other Wingnuts, the useful idiots of the corporatists and the plutocrats, swallowed their bullshit hook, line, sinker, and fishing pole. And for most of those clowns, they'll go to their graves believing that in-person voter fraud was a grave threat. 

(Cross-posted at Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I.)

Poor minorities must wait to vote

By Frank Moraes

The following graph comes from Up With Chris Hayes of data from the AFL-CIO. Part of this is just that America is a racist country. But another big part of this is the result of Republican efforts to stop Democratic-leaning voters. It is disgusting.

Karl Rove still wallowing in denial and delusion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The earth is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, and Romney won Ohio.

Politico:

GOP strategist Karl Rove went on Fox News [yesterday] to argue that President Barack Obama "succeeded by suppressing the vote" -- an argument that directly contradicts the conventional wisdom that Romney failed to appeal to non-white and female voters.

Rove argued that Obama won with a smaller popular vote and a smaller margin of victory than in the 2008 election against Sen. John McCain. Instead of expanding voters, Rove argued, Obama "suppressed the vote" by demonizing former Gov. Mitt Romney and encouraging people not to vote.

"President Obama has become the first president in history to win a second term with a smaller percentage of the vote than he did in the first term," Rove said.

That doesn't mean anything. There's a weak (if improving) economy, which depressed his support, and he won by so much in 2008, and won generally red states like Indiana and North Carolina, that he was bound to win re-election by a smaller margin. But it was still a clear and decisive victory.

As I've written, including in our election night live-blogging post, this is nothing but an attempt (or power play, as Ed Schultz called it) on the part of Republicans, and Rove the sore-loser blowhard in particular, to de-legitimize the president, to suggest that he shouldn't really be president, that he only won, if he really "won" at all, through nefarious means. They spent four years (and more) going after him on his birth certificate, etc., but since all that's been thoroughly debunked, they're going after him on other (equally spurious) grounds -- by alleging a Benghazi cover-up, alleging voter fraud, and now alleging vote suppression.

(Seriously, vote suppression? Obama tried to get people not to vote? Ridiculous. But, then, that sort of thing is straight out of the Rove playbook, and of course Republicans were trying to suppress the vote all across the country and particularly in key swing states like Ohio and Florida. I guess it's just easier to accuse your opponent of doing what you do yourself.)

Basically, their intention is to create a narrative for Obama's second term, one they'll try to hammer home again and again over the next four years. 

It's all bullshit, but it's just what we've come to expect from the likes of Karl Rove. And it's not about to stop.

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How the Republicans are trying to steal the election

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Voter suppression efforts by Republicans are in full swing all across the country, but the focus clearly, and as usual, is on key swing states like Ohio and Florida -- where else?

For example, in Florida:

[Saturday] night, voters in Miami-Dade County were forced to wait in line up to six hours to vote. In some precincts voters who arrived at 7PM were not able to cast their ballots until 1AM.

In response, Republican-affiliated election officials in Miami-Dade have effectively extended early voting from 1PM to 5PM today [Sunday] by allowing "in-person" absentee voting. But this accommodation will only be available in a single location in the most Republican area of the county.

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The decision to make the accommodation available was presumably made by Miami-Dade Election Supervisor Penelope Townsley. She is registered with no party affiliation but was appointed to her position by Republican Mayor Carlos Gimenez.

Mayor Gimenez did not request Gov. Rick Scott extend early voting throughout Miami-Dade county. Further, according to Jim DeFede, an investigative reporter for CBS News in Miami, the decision to have in-person absentee balloting was made last night but not announced publicly until 9:30AM this morning. 

And in Ohio:

Ohio GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted has become an infamous figure for aggressively limiting early voting hours and opportunities to cast and count a ballot in the Buckeye State.

Once again Husted is playing the voter suppression card, this time at the eleventh hour, in a controversial new directive concerning provisional ballots. In an order to election officials on Friday night, Husted shifted the burden of correctly filling out a provisional ballot from the poll worker to the voter, specifically pertaining to the recording of a voter's form of ID, which was previously the poll worker's responsibility. Any provisional ballot with incorrect information will not be counted, Husted maintains. This seemingly innocuous change has the potential to impact the counting of thousands of votes in Ohio and could swing the election in this closely contested battleground.

This generally will be one of the key stories to watch tomorrow: Republicans doing their utmost to prevent people in Democratic-leaning areas, and likely Democratic voters generally, from voting.

They'd be up to this anti-democratic malfeasance anyway, but with the presidential race so close and Romney's path to 270 looking bleaker and bleaker they're ramping it up with every last weapon at their disposal.

Romney campaign trying to suppress the vote by lying to voters about their rights

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A glimpse into the Romney-Ryan-Republican playbook:

Mitt Romney's campaign has been training poll watchers in Wisconsin with highly misleading — and sometimes downright false — information about voters' rights.

Documents from a recent Romney poll watcher training obtained by ThinkProgress contain several misleading or untrue claims about the rights of Wisconsin voters. A source passed along the following packet of documents, which was distributed to volunteers at a Romney campaign training in Racine on October 25th. In total, eight such trainings were held across the state in the past two weeks and 17 since late September.

This is what Republicans think of democracy. And it's just one of the many ways they think they can steal the election.

Early voting victory in Ohio

By Mustang Bobby

In case you missed this in all the coverage of the debate, the Supreme Court refused to hear Ohio's appeal of a lower court decision to allow early voting to continue in the Buckeye State:

The Supreme Court delivered a victory to President Obama's reelection campaign Tuesday, saying it would not set aside a lower court's ruling that all Ohio voters be allowed to cast ballots in the three days before the Nov. 6 election.

The Obama campaign had sued the state over its decision to end early voting on the Friday before the election for all but members of the military. The campaign said the decision would disproportionately affect poor, elderly and low-income voters, who are most likely to take advantage of early voting.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit agreed. It said that if Ohio is going to open polls for military voters during the Saturday, Sunday and Monday before the election, it must allow all voters to participate.

"While there is a compelling reason to provide more opportunities for military voters to cast their ballots, there is no corresponding satisfactory reason to prevent nonmilitary voters from casting their ballots as well," the appeals court said.

Without comment, the Supreme Court turned down Ohio's request to revisit the lower court ruling. There were no noted dissents to the decision.

The reason that the Ohio Republicans are against early voting is pretty simple. They know that early voters tend to vote heavily for the Democrats, and, as Greg Sargent notes, the Democrats are very well organized and braced to get out the vote. This, by the way, is the reason why a lot of Republicans in states like Florida are doing everything they can to make voting — not just early voting — more difficult: if you can't sell your candidates on their merits, at least prevent the opposition from voting at all.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

A new poll in Virginia, Obama's advantage, and the three keys to Republican success in 2012

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A new PPP poll has Obama up by five over Romney in Virginia, 51 to 46. (A recent NBC/WSJ/Marist poll has him up by five, 49 to 44, among likely voters, and seven among registered voters.) And things appear to be relatively stable there:

Obama's lead is unchanged from a month ago when we found him leading 50-45 in the state. He may not be seeing a bump from the convention in the state at this point, but he was in a pretty good position to begin with.

Virginia continues to look like it may be something of a firewall state for Obama. PPP has now polled it 9 times this cycle, and President Obama has led by at least 4 points on all 9 of the polls. He's been ahead by 5 points, 5 points, 8 points, and 8 points over the course of the four surveys we've conducted in 2012.

And this is particularly interesting:

One thing playing to Democrats' advantage in Virginia is that their voters are actually more excited than Republicans about the election now, contrary to the conventional wisdom for most of this cycle. 73% of Democrats say they're 'very excited' about voting this fall compared to 63% of GOP voters. Women (64%) are more enthusiastic about voting than men (60%), African Americans (85%) are more excited than white voters (57%), and  young voters (72%) are more excited than seniors (62%).

Behind in the polls, Romney has had a few things in his favor throughout the campaign, namely a) the still-struggling economy; b) voter enthusiasm on the right; and c) voter suppression (with Republicans all across the country trying to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters, or at least trying to make it as difficult for them to vote as possible).

As it stands now, while a) is still a problem for the president, Romney lags behind Obama in terms of who is perceived by voters to be better on the economy, this despite Romney slamming the president on the economy and playing himself up as the sort of business-savvy manager the country apparently needs at this challenging time. Romney just doesn't have all that much credibility on the economy, and voters seems to understand that Bush left Obama with a disaster of economy that takes a lot more than four years to fix.

Meanwhile, b) appears to be reversing, or at least equalizing, particularly in the wake of the extremely successful Democratic convention in Charlotte earlier this month. Democrats are enthused now, and rightly so.

That leaves c), meaning that Romney's best chance to win may rest with ongoing Republican efforts to strip the vote from as many people as possible, claiming that fraud is widespread (it isn't) and that non-citizens are on the rolls (they aren't in significant numbers, and the people being targeted are U.S. citizens). Understandably, Romney has distanced himself from these efforts by not commenting on them -- wink-wink, nudge-nudge -- but of course he stands to benefit immensely from them, as do Republicans generally.

Yes, Republicans, Romney included, seem to think that the best way to win is to thwart democracy. They may very well be right.

Economic forecast

By Mustang Bobby

Mitt Romney and the Republicans thought that if they campaigned on the weak economy and the high unemployment rate, they would win the election. And the odds favor them on that score; it's been a long time since a president got re-elected when the rate was over 7%.

They also thought that by putting Paul Ryan, the hunky guru of the Republican budget, on the ticket they could make the case for their vision of lower taxes for the rich -- who deserve it because they do so much for the rest of us -- and force the middle class to really get to work and earn all those entitlements: no free lunch for you people.

But it was not to be. All the liberal media wants to talk about are the slutty women and their lies about rape or the queers and their ideas of marriage equality so they can do icky things and get a tax deduction for their sweaty perversions. They're the ones who are making the GOP talk about turning a one-celled organism into a person; they're the ones who are making them write the party platform that makes a condom an assault weapon; they're the ones who are turning all of the attention away from how terrible things are in swing states like Florida, and even they are conspiring against them by doing better.

The Republicans have no one to blame but themselves (by which they mean Barack Obama). In 2010, they ran on a platform of jobs-jobs-jobs, and a lot of people voted for them because they thought, "Hey, they got us into this mess; maybe now they're serious about getting us out of it." But when they won, we found out that what they really wanted was to repeal health care, ban abortions, marginalize the gays, deport the immigrants (only the brown ones), and restrict voting to those who only deserved it.

And who can blame the media? What's more fun: listening to economists drone on about interest rates and sequestration, or going after civil rights of people? Hey, come on, that's a trick question. Talking about the economy is the stuff of C-SPAN at 2 a.m. Civil rights brings back images of demonstrations in the street, cops using fire hoses, and speeches on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

This is America, the sex-obsessed land of Jersey Shore and the Kardashians; where you can turn even the most boring topic -- health-care reform -- into something for TMZ if you can get to the sex angle: contraception for single women Georgetown law school students, and gay marriage brings forth visions of cute guys prancing around in their Speedos.

No wonder the economy line isn't selling. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Damn the lies

By Capt. Fogg

(Ed. note: It's not just Shannon Bream spewing this lie, it's Fox News generally. And if it's damned lies you're looking for, you need look no further than Mitt Romney, who once again, with the truth against him one more, is smearing the president with his trademark dishonesty. -- MJWS)

If some day someone erects a cenotaph somewhere in the arid and polluted desert that used to be called the United States of America, some inscription marking two vast and trunkless legs of stone, it should give credit to Fox News. Amongst the other factors that contributed to the fall of "The Greatest Country there Ever Was," Fox must stand out. Fox must at least be in gilded letters or garish neon lights, because no day and few hours have passed since its inception wherein some grotesque lie, libel, or hyperbolic defamation designed to undermine truth, decency, and democracy has failed to appear. 

“If President Obama gets his way, the special voting rights of some of America’s finest will be eliminated,” host Shannon Bream said Friday night. “The campaign is suing to keep members of the military from having extra time to cast their ballots in one key battleground state.” 

No it isn't. The suit does not seek to impair voting rights for anyone but seeks to reinstate rights taken from the general population by the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature, and if there were a God anything like the fire-and-brimstone scourge of iniquity people dream about, the earth would open up and swallow Ms. Bream and Roger Ayres and Rupert Murdoch would become pillars of shit.

The suit by the Ohio Democratic Party and the Obama campaign argues that Ohio's new law creates an unconstitutional tiered voting system, where early voting is only allowed for military personnel. As Jonathan Terbush writes at Raw Story:

The suit would not prevent military members from "having extra time" to vote, as the Fox report insinuated. Rather, it asks that the court, by blocking enactment of the new law, reinstate the extra time all voters used to enjoy for casting their ballots.

You may suspect that I've lost faith in this truth-forsaken land and its lunatic tribes, and you'd be close to the truth. Our once powerful and always dishonest country won't be powerful forever, nor will its self-righteousness last forever. The worms, the maggots chewing on the gangrenous flesh of America are employees of Fox, and Shannon Bream is a liar -- if not damned by God, then at least damned by decency. God damn Fox News. God damn them all to hell.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)

Keepin' it white

By Capt. Fogg

In general, I support the laws allowing most licensed and qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons in most places. Here in Florida, someone who has a permit does nonetheless not have the legal right to carry weapons in many areas, like courthouses, police stations, schools, stadiums, and, of course, bars. A national political convention, however, where emotions run high, where the attitudes resemble the local stop-and-sock tavern, and where people whom other people would like to harm are present, would seem to be another proper exception. 

I'm afraid it's not so in Florida, where during the upcoming RNC in Tampa, squirt guns, pieces of chain, ropes, and other items which might be used to harm or at least get people wet are strictly illegal, Republican Governor Rick Scott seems likely to refuse the City Council's request to keep guns out of the convention. You can bring your Beretta, but leave the Super Soaker at home.

There are other reasons, of course, to wonder how Scott gets away with avoiding the other common nickname for Richard. No, I'm not talking about his rejection of federal funds, because, as he says, hiring people kills jobs, and I'm not talking about the dozen or so felonies his company committed in a billion dollar orgy of Medicare fraud. I'm not even referring to his recent attempt to "purge" the Florida voter rolls of likely Democrats. This time "Rick" deserves a nice cold blast from one of those banned squirt guns for neglecting to tell nearly 18,000 Floridians that their voting rights have been restored and that they can now register. I'm sure he has forgotten how a few hundred votes can put a president whom the majority of voters did not vote for into office. Otherwise, he would be ashamed, right?  

Or maybe he is out of the loop once again. Maybe he just didn't know, the way he didn't know about the 1 billion, 700 million dollar Columbia/HCA Medicare fraud -- in charge but not guilty by virtue of some ineffable virtue and of course well deserving of his severance package of 10 million dollars, 300 million in stock, and a million a year "consulting" fee.

I wonder what he'll make for his part in defrauding America this time, his help in making the White House white again.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)

All's fair in fraud and felony

By Capt. Fogg

Voter suppression -- there's nothing new about it, but when the support for it comes from people who think testing city water for arsenic is "too much government," you have to expect odd, snarling noises from the cynics. Pennsylvania's latest attempt to reserve the right to vote for the landed gentry, posing as a reaction to voter fraud that might possibly occur but actually does not seem to have, has Pandagon snickering and me barking  -- and for good reason. Government intervening in the free exercise of a constitutional right is different I guess, because the goal of keeping Pennsylvania for "real" Americans sanctifies a little bit of  double-think:

[T]he argument seems to be that the state can impair a constitutional right because... well, because they can. It doesn't really matter why, it just makes a kind of instinctual sense, like how vaccines cause autism or how evolution can't exist because I've never seen a thing evolve in front of my eyes despite staring at it and chanting "evolve" for hours on end,

wrote Jesse Taylor yesterday.

Meanwhile, back in Florida, where excluding "undesirables" from the voter rolls is a tradition of long standing, former Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer is suing the "whack-a-do, right-wing crazies" that filed criminal fraud charges against him in 2010 in a plot to force saner Republicans including former Governor Charlie Crist out of the party and suppress the African-American vote by once again purging voter rolls.

Florida, of course, bans ex-felons from voting for life for those without good connections in the GOP, like Governor Scott of the Fourteen Felonies, so if one wrote a bad check in 1956 or was found with an ounce or so of cannabis in 1968, one can go fish forever. In fact, if your name sounds like someone else who did, and you live in Florida, you may have been illegally banned from voting in the 2000 election by a similar voter roll purge that targeted minority voters and probably put George Bush in the White House. You may be banned once again and you won't likely know until you show up at the polls.

It's funny how consistently the voter fraud circus parade neglects to mention the voting machine "problems" in Ohio. Again, I'm a cynic, so I find it easy to believe that GOP tampering is treated differently in the post-Bush, Tea Party era. Remember those "unhackable" Diebold machines that took only minutes to hack, delivering more Republican votes than could be accounted for by registered voters -- and delivering Ohio for Bush, as the CEO openly boasted before being forced to resign over accounting fraud? I wonder if he's still on the voter rolls.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)