Early last week, with little attention in the media, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeal applied the brakes, for now, to one of the newest voter suppression schemes on the bleeding front edge of the GOP's ongoing War on Voting.

The insidious new Republican scheme, if it manages to overcome continuing challenges in court, such as the stay and appeal it now faces in the 10th Circuit, could result in thousands of otherwise eligible voters in Kansas and Arizona (and elsewhere, if the effort is allowed to move forward in KS and AZ) unable to even register to vote, much less cast a ballot on Election Day.

An investigative report by the Arizona Republic last year found the evidence for the purported basis of the new law --- claims by Republicans that non-citizens are casting ballots in the state --- to be "nearly non-existent".

Judith Brown Dianis, a civil rights litigator at The Advancement Project, described the nearly decade-long, coordinated, nationwide GOP voter suppression effort as "the largest legislative effort to roll back voting rights since the post-Reconstruction era". While appearing before a U.S. Senate Subcommittee in 2011, she described the effort as one designed to make "it harder to register to vote, harder to cast a ballot and harder to have a vote counted."

One of the primary GOP efforts to make it "harder to cast a ballot" can be found in the spate of polling place Photo ID laws that Republicans have sought to justify on the basis of what amounts to a phantom menace. Cases of in-person voter impersonation --- the only type of voter fraud that can be prevented by Photo ID --- are about as scarce as hen's teeth.

The same can be said about baseless GOP claims of an epidemic of voter fraud in the form of votes cast by non-citizens --- an allegation that is now being used as part of the new Republican ploy to prevent perfectly lawful citizens from even registering to vote...

It's that time of year again. Memorial Day weekend. When politicians of all parties love to pretend they care about the men and women they send away to fight and die for wars of political expediency, only to pretty much completely ignore them for the rest of their lives once they come back home.

The latest "outrage" about the various failings of the Veterans Administration is just more evidence of that. The Obama administration has known about many of the problems for years, but hasn't done nearly enough to fix them. Now that the issues have found their way into the media again, the Republicans, who've spent years denying veterans benefits and refusing to fund the VA at levels adequate to support their much-beloved wars-without-end, are pretending to be upset about it all --- now that they believe they can use it to hurt their real enemy, this particular President of the United States.

And that's where The Daily Show's Jon Stewart jumped back in to the matter last week, pointing out that the latest hypocrisy is, in fact, not particularly new for the U.S., not by a long shot.

Our friend Tom Courbat of Riverside, CA (decidedly not to be confused with Pennsylvania's democracy and freedom hating Gov. Tom Corbett) --- a Vietnam-era Agent Orange and Multiple Myeloma Surviving veteran, as well as great homefront hero of Democracy for many, many years --- requested we post Stewart's latest take over this Memorial Day weekend. We are all too happy to do so. It is, quite literally, the very least we can do to say thanks to Tom and all the others vets who have given far more for their country than it will ever be able to return in kind.

As Courbat writes us about Stewart's take (posted below): "Nothing, nothing I have EVER seen summarized as well how our country has managed to screw over our vets, going all the way back to our war for independence from England! You will be blown away by what you learn --- and this MUST be shown for the Memorial Day."

And so it shall be. Both parts of Stewart's epic takedown from Thursday night's show follow below. If you only have time for one of the two parts, let it be PART 2...

Isn't it time that the suckers dumb enough to have given money to Rightwing con-man and federal criminal James O'Keefe's ironically-named "non-profit" Project Veritas started demanding their money back from this clown? Or are they simply too stupid to care about being played for complete stooges as Fox "News" and, apparently, Megyn Kelly still appear to be?

Here's O'Keefe's latest really huge fail, as revealed fail after "sting victim", Academy Award-nominated Gasland documentarian Josh Fox, turns out to have recorded the entire conversation deceptively edited and featured in pretend "journalist" O'Keefe's new video...

What O'Keefe got busted doing there, as seen in the Chris Hayes MSNBC segment above, is exactly what he does in every one of his pretend "investigations", as we've demonstrated here for years. This time, at least, one of the victims happened to have had the foresight to have recorded it all independently on his own. It's remarkable that even the wingnut dupes at Fox "News" are still falling for this tired con, frankly, much less people stupid enough to send actual money to support Jimmy's scam.

For specific details on just some of the deceptively edited bullshit in his latest con, see this at Media Matters. For the entirety of the recording that documentarian Fox made of the encounter deceptively pimped in the scam video premiered recently by O'Keefe at Cannes, see this at The Daily Beast. For more on how despicable O'Keefe's latest scam actually was, see this from one of Josh Fox' business associates.

For the early history of the great James O'Keefe/Andrew Breitbart con that put both on these grifters on the map --- before we subsequently revealed them to be top-to-bottom two-bit con-artists by debunking the entirety of their infamous ACORN 'Pimp' Hoax bullshit and more --- see The BRAD BLOG's Special Coverage page on them here.

Finally, if you're tired of grifting, and would like to support actual investigative blogging and journalism that doesn't just make shit up --- but helps bust those who do --- please consider donating to The BRAD BLOG, since we don't actually receive hundreds of thousands of dollars (or any, in fact) from partisan operatives, and rely on only you to help us keep going...

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Over the weekend, fading Republican superstar, weapons-grade professional troll and GOP voter fraud queen Ann Coulter decided to join other Rightwingers in mocking the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag --- currently being used on Twitter to help raise awareness to the plight of hundreds of young school girls recently kidnapped by the Boko Haram terrorist group in Nigeria --- for her own obnoxious, partisan purposes.

Because, ya know, making fun of concern about kidnapped children who may be sold into slavery is always high-larious and a great way to exploit a partisan advantage before the U.S. mid-term elections!

Coulter's scheme, however, may have "backfired", as Caitlin Macneal explains at TPM, once Twitter got a hold of Coulter's tweeted photo and decided to use it against her.

Here was her original photo Tweet:

My hashtag contribution to world affairs ... pic.twitter.com/Wkb8ozYZFC

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) May 12, 2014

Well, we thought we'd join the "fun" as well. So this morning we Tweeted our own modified version of Coulter's photo, and that new photo immediately began receiving dozens of Re-Tweets. So, perhaps it's also worth noting here for history...especially since it happens to be true...

[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

Just over a week ago, The BRAD BLOG's legal analyst Ernie Canning posited that the decision by a federal court in Wisconsin to strike down that state's polling place Photo ID law could signal "the beginning of the end" for such disenfranchising, Republican-enacted laws around the nation.

Since that landmark ruling in the Badger State, new signs from top elected Republican officials in Pennsylvania and Iowa, and even in Wisconsin, suggest that the (at least) decade-long GOP "voter fraud" fraud may have finally peaked, and will now begin the inevitably long slide into abandoned, historical shame.

We don't want to be too quick to declare the demise of this insidious attempt at reviving Jim Crow with a sophisticated and nefariously misleading legal patina, but after covering this beat for a decade --- long before much of the general public, much less the Democratic Party itself, seemed to notice --- it seems that the recent landmark court ruling in WI, followed by last week's towel toss in Pennsylvania and embarrassing revelations in Iowa, may be seen in the not-too-distant future as the moment that the GOP "voter fraud" fraud finally began to permanently unravel...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is running for President. There's little question of that. But he's got a lot to get ahead of if he hopes to have a prayer of doing so successfully.

Namely, as even the Rightwing HotAir site observes, he's got some race issues to deal with, such as "his old comments on the Civil Rights Act, his father's newsletters, having the 'Southern Avenger' on staff, even agreeing with Cliven Bundy about federal land-use practices before quickly denouncing him after his comments about blacks went viral."

So Paul has been spending the last year or so on an occasional outreach tour to African-American communities, trying to smooth things over. His latest stop was in Memphis on Friday, where he met with black pastors and, afterward, very softly --- though in terms that will reverberate in a 2016 GOP Presidential primary nonetheless --- broke with his party's orthodoxy on discriminatory polling place Photo ID restriction laws. Sort of...

From Digby...

Lord knows Digby's far smarter than me about such things, and her point is certainly an interesting one. Though it assumes the morally bankrupt --- not "obtuse", bankrupt --- people in question have any sense of self-awareness whatsoever.

To date, I've seen no evidence of that.

UPDATE: Case in point...

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Near the end of his joint press conference at the White House on Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a question was asked about whether "personal trust [has] been rebuilt" between the two otherwise allied countries, following last year's disclosure by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the U.S. had been spying directly on Merkel's personal cell phone.

President Obama included this in his response [emphasis added]:

Got that? It was the "Snowden disclosures," apparently, not the actual U.S. policy of spying on her personal calls, that has "created strains in the relationship".

So he's not sorry we spied on her, he's simply "pained" that we got caught.

This week's federal court decision to strike down Wisconsin's polling place Photo ID law has national significance and does not bode well for Republicans who have been attempting to advance such electoral schemes in recent years, as based on misleading "facts", wild claims and dishonest interpretations of case law and court precedent.

The court's landmark decision in the Wisconsin case contains a methodology for testing the law's constitutionality that, if applied by other courts in similar federal challenges to similar laws in other states, would likely mark the beginning of the end for Republican-enacted, polling place Photo ID restrictions. We describe that possibility as "likely", given that a careful reading of prior case law suggests that six of the Supreme Court's nine Justices have already subscribed to legal opinions that are consistent with the methodology used by the federal court in Wisconsin.

In late 2011, shortly after the filing of the first of the two federal cases that resulted in this week's ruling finding that Wisconsin's polling place Photo ID law (Act 23) violated both the U.S. Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), The BRAD BLOG explained why the issues before the federal bench in Wisconsin "could reverse similar laws nationwide."

The 90-page decision and order [PDF] that U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman meticulously crafted, not only after a full trial on the merits, but over a span of more than 3 1/2 months following it, suggests that our earlier prediction may have been an understatement.

In declaring Wisconsin's Republican-enacted Photo ID law unconstitutional and a violation of federal law, Judge Adelman applied a very specific test for the law, one called for by the U.S. Supreme Court back in 2008. That same test, measuring the potential benefits of such laws against their possible harm to voters' rights, if similarly applied elsewhere, would likely invalidate most, if not all of the similar restrictions which have been rammed through numerous GOP-majority state legislatures over the past six years.

While stopping short of describing Republican "justifications" for such laws as a mere pretext for voter suppression, Judge Adelman's decision persuasively finds that the core GOP claims about the supposed need for polling place Photo ID restrictions cannot withstand judicial scrutiny when tested against a fact-based reality in a court of law. The judge found, in no uncertain terms, that such laws are constitutionally infirm because, without legitimate state interests for such restrictions, they serve only to disproportionately disenfranchise the poor, the elderly and minority voters...