The whole “voter fraud” canard is code for voter suppression. The intent is to make sure that certain people are intimidated away from the polls and thus cannot cast ballots against GOP candidates.

I would track some of this all the way back to Florida in 2000, when Fox prematurely called the state and the election for Bush. I went to sleep at 130am thinking that Bush had been elected, and woke up at 5am to see that it was back in limbo.

There was plenty of evidence of voter suppression in Florida in 2000, as has been documented. The attempted recounts and the circus surrounding them only exacerbated the situation there. I remember at the time the GOP was making noises about recounting other states, like New Mexico, if they didn’t get their way in Florida. When the Supreme Court cancelled the recount and gave the election to Bush, the GOP magically dropped their concern for the voters of New Mexico, since they no longer needed them.

The wildest part of what happened in Florida is that in the only statewide recount ever done, Al Gore was shown to have won the state by some 72 votes. Gore would not have won a recount of just the 4 counties he cherry-picked, but he did win the full recount. But by the time this count was done, 9/11 had already happened and the Dems did not want to make any more hay out of it.

I also remember hearing about voter suppression in Ohio in 2004 – about people waiting for hours in the rain to vote, or being sent away from the polls. But in 2004, Bush had enough votes in Ohio to convincinly take it – which of course gave him the election. It wasn’t a landslide by any means (certainly not the landslide the GOP was predicting) but the swing votes gave Bush just enough to stay in office another 4 years. Which unfortunately resulted in the things he did then…

This was one of the times where Williams actually stood up for himself, correcting Hannity repeatedly on the outright falsehoods that were being presented.

Hannity and Malkin did everything they could to pump up the current non-scandal while dismissing the very real Wilson/Plame scandal, and Williams corrected them at each turn.

When Malkin couldn’t handle it, she resorted to childish name-calling and sing-song remarks. Williams responded by reminding her that real journalists behave differently, which of course sent her to Mars.

Hannity in his own turn was reduced to repeatedly shouting that “Holder’s gone! He’ll be fired before November!” And Williams again got the last word on that one, pointing out that just because Hannity wants that to happen doesn’t mean it will.

This bit of cheerleading followed enthusiastic fist bumps last night from O’Reilly, Hannity and Van Susteren. All three shows happily showed the clip of Cornyn getting on his high horse, while editing out as much of Holder’s response as possible.

The actual full statements by both indicate that Cornyn was trying to get as many nasty attacks at Holder as he could while he had the mike. Holder began to respond and Cornyn shouted him down. When Cornyn finished his tantrum, Holder responded with what I view as a tremendous amount of self control, pointing out that the tantrum was full of a “breathtaking” number of untrue statements.

The O’Reilly debate between Colmes and Crowley that followed was instructive. Crowley actually admitted that she didn’t see Holder being forced from office. (And she’s right. He won’t be.) Colmes made the points both that the Fast & Furious witch hunt is just that, and that the current scandal is intended as revenge for the Wilson/Plame scandal rather than being motivated by any real basis. O’Reilly still headlined his segment that Holder was being pushed to resign, which belied the point that the suggestion was coming from the usual GOP suspects that have been harrassing Holder since day one. As a special touch, O’Reilly tried to catch Colmes off guard by asking about the Marc Rich pardon of 2000 under Bill Clinton. Colmes wasn’t on his game fast enough to note that Scooter Libby was Rich’s lawyer for almost the wholee time.

I hear you Joseph. But Romney is still in a pretty tough position.

If Romney stays all the way over to the right, the way he’s been hunkering down through much of the primary season, then he has no hope of picking up the independent or moderate votes. The whole model of all the undecided votes going to him doesn’t work if his positions only appeal to the people on the far right. And he knows he won’t be getting the Ron Paul contingent, as they’re either going to vote for Gary Johnson as a protest vote, or they’re not going to vote for the top of the ticket.

If Romney moves back toward the center to try to pick up the independents and moderates and a few of the undecideds, then he alienates the hard right GOP voters who haven’t trusted or liked him from the beginning. Those are the voters who regularly refused to support him to the tune of 75% for most of the primaries. Those are the voters who were split by the various candidates and wound up split between Santorum and Gingrich, who each thought they were going to pick up those voters and instead cancelled each other out. The Etch-a-Sketch comment is still smarting in those voters’ ears. If Romney pulls that move, then he loses a percentage of voters that could be larger than the independents he’d gain.

In the meantime, Obama will have the support of Dems, even if it’s reluctant on some parts. The farther over to the right Romney stays, the more independents and undecideds will either go with Obama, make a protest vote, or simply not vote. Much of this election is already decided. The party-line voters for Dems and GOP have already chosen. The voters up for grabs are the independents and moderates in the middle, who are more likely to swing to the center than the far right. But Romney can’t get those voters without sacrificing his base, who will not be pleased at that move.

Romney is aware of these numbers, which is why he’s working very hard not to say anything until the convention. This is a good strategy for him, and it should result in his numbers remaining steady up to then. It’s in September when he has to come out and say something about what policies he will pursue, and when he will have to debate Obama face to face. Romney’s campaigning history back to his Senate run in the 1990s indicates that unless he’s suddenly become a brand new person in the last three months, that will be an unfortunate time for him.

Now, if the economy suddenly nose-dives over the summer, then yes, Romney has a better chance. But that’s not likely. The more likely scenario is the economy continuing to stammer and stutter along, creating jobs but at the same anemic pace due to all the uncertainty, the businesses refusing to put their money into the economy, and the GOP refusing to approve any measures to make anything better before the election. Which means that Romney will only be able to say that Obama hasn’t improved the economy enough – an argument that falls flat right away.

Knowing this, the Fox News bunch is choosing to find every phantom scandal and distraction they can. The Supreme Court rulings this summer will be huge news for that reason. Anything they can smear the president with will be fair game to them – the same strategy they’ve been using for his entire presidency. And it’s a sign of their desperation. Since they don’t have an alternative, they can only trumpet the old slogans and throw rocks.

Beck has no credibility even on Fox anymore. I was shocked to see a radio company give him money to spew hatred, and even more shocked to see O’Reilly give him a platform to discuss his biased opinions about race. The one thing Beck should have been given is a long rest to think about the impact of his words and public proclamations. And then maybe an opportunity to apologize.

Interesting thoughts, Bea.

You don’t think that SEAL Team 6 Members don’t face danger every day of their deployments? The President thanking a military team for their action is not only appropriate, but necessary. Had he not thanked them, the GOP and Fox News would have been even nastier toward him in terms of saying he was taking the credit that should have gone to that team.

We’ll see whether Donilon has to deal with any of this. You’re assuming that the Fox News assumptions are facts, and that’s an unfortunate road to go down.

As for the Valerie Plame matter, it was very much not a sham. It was an unintended consequence of the CIA’s overreaction to the books of John Stockwell and Philip Agee in the 1970s, where those guys named names and made public confessions of their activities in intelligence. Afterward, doing such a thing – leaking deliberately – was classified as a crime.

Flash forward to the GW Bush Admin, where the guys on top became very displeased with Joe Wilson publicly challenging their assertions. As punishment, they orchestrated a leak to multiple papers, deliberately exposing Plame, who was not publicly known to be a NOC. The result was that any work she was doing had to be stopped and her CIA career was effectively ended. That’s not to count the number of her associates whose lives were endangered because of this. The reason Armitage wasn’t prosecuted was because he wasn’t the one who obstructed the investigation. According to all sources, Armitage cooperated with Patrick Fitzgerald at every turn. Scooter Libby, on the other hand, committed perjury in an attempt to keep Fitzgerald from getting any higher in the food chain. Had Libby not lied, the trail was clearly headed toward Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Libby was a good soldier, and has been rewarded with plenty of conservative support ever since he was essentially bailed out of jail by GW Bush on his way out of office.

The Plame matter was not the same thing as this one. The Plame matter was an issue of deliberately endangering people in retaliation for saying the wrong thing in public. The current matter is just a question of finding out who’s sharing too much information about operations – not about who’s trying to get a specific operative outed. And there is no indication of a motive here, whereas with the Bush Admin, there was a big and obvious one.

Kurtz is known for his book on President Obama “Radical in Chief”. He is very much a biased writer with an agenda to attack the current president. His new “evidence” consists of minutes from old New Party meetings where the Party guy writing things up insists that Obama joined their party while running for local office. Except that Obama was running as a Democrat, and that he was openly courting the endorsement of many people in Chicago, a lot of whom he had been working with as a community organizer. Not that hard to understand why the minutes would show something like this – Obama certainly met with them and was happy to have their endorsement, just as he was happy to have the endorsement of the business community. But it doesn’t mean that he actually joined their party and left the Democrat Party.

This is just another frantic attempt to smear Obama with stuff that was previously discussed four years ago. As though John McCain didn’t bring these ideas up in the public debates that he lost. (Nobody today seems to remember McCain trying to smear Obama with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers references during a debate only to watch Obama easily bat them aside.)

The public heard all of this in 2008, and they elected Obama. This wasn’t a disputed election like 2000, where it was clear something reallly nasty had happened in Florida. This was a clear victory for Obama and a loss for the GOP on top of the beating they received in 2006. Clearly this has never sat well with the GOP. They have spent the last 3+ years doing anything they could to obstruct and hound this president with an almost unending stream of nonsense and personal attacks. For many of these people, their extreme personal dislike for this president has led them to hold a grudge that’s finding a new voice for this election.
(In fairness, there were plenty of people on the left who had an extreme personal dislike of GW Bush and his cronies, but the difference was that the Dems mostly rolled over and allowed Bush to do what he wanted, where the GOP has opposed everything done by Obama in lockstep.)

Lynn, do you not have a reasonable answer to any of the questions I posed to you? I must assume you are conceding all the points made. If that’s the case, I appreciate your openness of mind and your willingness to think about these things more deeply than whatever talking points are announced by Fox News.

Michelle Malkin’s only means of “debate” is to act nasty and dismissive while trying to score cheap points. I wouldn’t call it good humor. It’s openly angry material. Not sure what put her into this state of mind, but one has to wonder what it’s like to live at that level of constant negativity.

Interesting, Rick.

Divider – you mean the way that the GOP made a point of voting against anything he proposed and anything the Dems in Congress tried to pass, even if they had previously passed similar material?

Polarizer – you mean the way that Mitch McConnell publicly stated that his top priority was not to do anything about the economy but instead to try to keep Obama from being able to be reelected? Or maybe the way that Rush Limbaugh hatefully announced “I hope he fails!” at the beginning of the Obama presidency?

Insulter – you mean the way that GOP cranks have regularly made comments about the President somehow not being born here? Or how those same cranks have tried to say that the President is some kind of secret Muslim? Or how the same people have tried to keep the lie going that the President “went on an apology tour”?

The conduct of the GOP over the past three years will be judged harshly by history. It is a display of partisan obstinance that goes far beyond just having principled differences. This was deliberate obstruction with the stated goal of undermining anything the Obama Administration was doing. When GW Bush was president, the Dems in Congress actually gave him a lot of leeway, voting for his various policies much of the time and approving his appointments except in a very few extreme cases. They rolled over most of the time and let him and the GOP do the things they wanted to do. Contrast that with what the GOP has done since 2008, and you have a picture both of sore losers and of deep hatred.

This latest hate book about President Obama is just another wing of attack. It’s interesting that you have David Limbaugh painting him as a deliberate master of destruction, where a week ago, Hannity was enjoying Ed Klein’s attack book painting him as “The Amateur.” Hateful and Bitter much?

Henry should have known better than to go for the obvious talking point. Jay Carney is smart enough to have prepared for that one with multiple answers, most of which he used, leaving Henry with very little to do but look embarassed.

Essentially, what happened here is threefold.

Walker’s supporters, most of whom were not Wisconsin voters, flooded his state with more than 3 times the amount of money that his opponents could raise. In short, they swamped the opposition.

Second, the opposition itself would have prevailed in this effort had the recall happened a year ago, when tempers were fresh after Walker’s behavior that triggered this whole mess. But after over a year of additional recalls coupled with a desire to do this in advance of the presidential election, the fatigue set in. As a result, all four of the GOP state senators were able to keep their jobs for now as well, meaning that they will continue to be able to do damage for another 2 years.

Finally, many people expressed their disappointment in the idea of having to deal with a recall of a politician over a disagreement rather than a criminal act. (This may apply in a minute if Walker is indicted, as is expected within the next few weeks.) Now, as I stated before, this belies the GOP’s glee over recalling Governor Gray Davis in California over policy differences, but one presumes that they’ve now turned over a new leaf. But as far as Wisconsin voters go, many simply weren’t willing to vote the man out over this mess. That does not mean that they will vote him back in when his term expires in 2 years.

That next campaign will not see him getting this kind of foxhole support from people around the nation. More likely, he will face a stronger opponent who has more time and a bigger support base to contest him. And the people who have tired of his behavior will take that opportunity to try a new idea.

Either way, Walker’s intentions toward a great national career have been dashed. He won’t be running for President any time soon, and after the inevitable defeat in 2 years, he’ll have to turn to Fox News or talk radio to keep his name in the public eye. What he thought was a very clever strategy to disembowel the unions in his state has instead enraged them against him and woken many people up to the real problems collective bargaining faces.

And we shouldn’t forget the polling showing that Obama continues to lead Romney in Wisconsin – and we haven’t had a single convention or debate yet. If Karl Rove is calling Wisconsin for Romney now, that’s more than premature – it’s practically in Dick Morris fantasyland. (The same fantasyland where Morris imagines Bill Clinton desperately wanting Obama defeated at the same time that the real Clinton is wittily destroying Romney and multiple GOP all-stars in front of crowds on the east coast…)

Walker was clearly lying at several points during this interview, in addition to having the completely unfortunate posture of sounding smug rather than contrite toward his constituents. Should he survive the recall, he will still likely face being thrown from office during the next regular election by the number of people who simply don’t like recalls.

I find it interesting that GOP talking points about this recall mention that recalls shouldn’t happen unless someone has broken a law or “done something wrong.” Walker did do something wrong – he openly attacked union workers in his state. But none of these people are talking about how much they were crowing about Governor Gray Davis getting recalled in California in 2003 after a big effort by Darrel Issa, who had clearly thought this would be his big chance to get the big seat and wound up dropping out in tears when it became clear that Arnold Schwarzenegger had much more support.

The Frank Luntz focus group on the prior hour on Hannity was really, really scary. The level of anger and sheer hatred on the part of the Walker supporters in that room (and they easily outnumbered the small handful of opponents) was palpable. When the opponents got a moment to say something, they were usually shouted down fairly quickly or interrupted by Luntz so he could show another campaign ad to throw off their answers. It was frustrating to see the two women getting thrown so easilly, but it was easy to see why it was happening. I wanted to ask some of the Walker supporters if they just wanted the teachers to get paid minimum wage with no benefits, and hope that their kids got good educations that way. Because that’s what this comes down to – do you want to support the people in local and state government who do the jobs that take care of everyone (teachers, public hospital nurses and staff, firemen, police) or do you not want to pay for these services for anyone? In that case, we can all just home school our kids, hope that we never need to go to the hospital, and hope that we never need to call a cop or a fireman to help us. Because they won’t be there when we need them.

If we were to listen only to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, we’d have to think that Obama’s people were panicking. But that would completely bely the truth.

The truth is that the Obama people aren’t taking anything for granted, but they’re in a good position to defend their record and to answer Romney’s attempts to challenge them. Because it means that Romney has to stand up and say something rather than wait for his opponents to fall away.

If anyone is becoming desperate, it’s the Romney campaign. They have a candidate that most of the Republicans did not want to support, trying to fight an uphill battle against a president who is still popular with the voters. If the economy were in free-fall, as it was in 2008, or in just a steady decline, as it was in 1980, Obama would be in a hard position. But having a jobs report that just doesn’t show enough jobs gained this month? If that’s all Romney has, it’s not going to be the catalyst to put him in the Oval Office, and he knows it.

The GOP has been desperate to remove Obama since before he even took the oath of office in 2009. Every single action or statement he has made has been challenged at one level or another. If the unemployment rate rises a tenth, they say it’s because of his bad policies. If the rate drops, they say it’s because people aren’t looking for work. No matter what he does, they throw bricks. And even if he’s doing his job and getting things done, they make things up – like the “apology tour”.

Over the next five months, the desperation will grow in the GOP ranks, until things completely come to a head in October. One has to wonder what Dick Morris will be predicting by that point…

I believe that Goldberg goes back and forth. Sometimes he says something that makes sense – such as when he correctly pointed out last year that Laura Ingraham baited Charlie Rangel into the insult he threw at her year. But on other days, he throws the venom around, such as when Andy Rooney passed, and this case where he could take cheap shots at Dan Rather.

O’Reilly is clearly trying to prepare a narrative in advance for the election aftermath. In the event that Romney somehow squeaks through, O’Reilly will say that this was the choice of “the folks” and that his own advice of telling Romney to be angry and aggressive (meaning: like O’Reilly) was a big success. In the event that Obama holds his own and gets his 2nd term, O’Reilly will say it was all due to the media being in the tank for Obama, rather than arising from any issues with Romney.

Wait a second. Isn’t this the same guy who made a fool out of himself in a coffee shop town hall last year where he had to apologize for yelling at his constituents? The thing where he used the excuse that he’d had too much coffee before blowing up at the people who were there to ask him policy questions? (Kind of like his version of the Twinkie Defense)

Walsh’s comments here were not only a matter of barely cloaked racism – they were deliberately nasty in terms of partisanship and personal attacks. He’s a pretty unfortunate piece of work and one can only hope that his constituents will send him home to think about what’s wrong with his conduct before he can do any further damage.

The bill was an obvious attempt at a “gotcha” vote to smear Democrats by painting them as voting against a moral issue. The fact that they couldn’t get the GOP votes to put it through speaks volumes to the failure of this idea.

Fox has fired producers for far less than this when they actually disagreed with the work. In this case, it’s clear that this is work they completely agree with.

Ellen, hope I didn’t step on anyone’s toes. I’m probably just surprised that Schoen actually stuck up for her – given his behavior over the last year I would have expected him to side with Hannity. And it’s probably also due to me finding all of Trump’s statements so ridiculous that I don’t know how to address them.

Lila Rose’s attempts at gotcha videos suffer from the same problem as James O’Keefe’s pranks – they are built from the assumption of the problem and then designed to fulfill their own hypothesis.

O’Reilly was told repeatedly last night that the employee on the tape had been fired, and that one person saying something out of line should not be used to impugn an entire organization.

O’Reilly’s worst part of this was when he was politely told by two female guests that this is a bogus issue – and that there are real healthcare issues that women have concerns about which people like Lila Rose always ignore. O’Reilly became visibly frustrated with his guests and began waving his arms to dismiss their statements. His clear idea was to pigeonhole the women into saying yes to his thesis that “this conduct in the video by Planned Parenthood is bad, and shows a problem happening there” – which would of course allow him to then say that his guests had endorsed the GOP attack to defund PP. His guests were smart enough to avoid making such a statement, instead putting the emphasis back where it should be – womens’ health.

O’Reilly ended the segment, after telling one of the guests he would give her the last word, by cutting the women off and repeating his own thesis since he couldn’t get the women to do it. All in all, this was a pretty shocking display by O’Reilly of, well, misogyny…