On the road and short on time, so forgive the lack of background... Politico tells the story --- though they fail to use the word "caging" because, well, it doesn't make the GOP look so great, and that's what the main interest of Politico seems to be in just about everything they do. They do, however, liberally use the Orwellian phrase "ballot security" instead, as the GOP no doubt appreciates.

These grafs from Politico, summarizing the RNC's rejected argument for moving to throw away the national consent decree they were forced to sign in the 80's, after getting busted caging minority voters from the voter rolls (illegally suppressing their vote) are rather amusing...

[Updated several times at bottom of article...]

Rightwing con man, ACORN conspiracy monger, Drudge protégé, and, naturally, Fox "News" perennial, Andrew Breitbart tweeted in favor of the murder of a climate scientist yesterday...

...as part of a Twittered string of his usual lies about global warming, ACORN, and whatever other stuff he feels like making up, as he and his desperately shameless ilk of pretend "conservatives" are wont to do.

But Hansen's murder wasn't the only one Breitbart subsequently called for to his flock of gullibles...

Guest blogged by Frank Schaeffer

Op-Ed Columnist Thomas Friedman's editorial in today's New York Times , "America vs. The Narrative", sparked this thought:

If the Islamic world has a fantasy "narrative" about America and our intentions, don't we ourselves --- those within the American religious right --- have a similarly misinformed "narrative"?

Here's my thought experiment: Read Friedman's original, posted below for your convenience, then read my Americanized version which follows. All I've done is change a few names and issues and you'll get the point.

We have our own religious/political myths and they are no less dangerous...

Sarah Palin's tea baggers are ready to give the Presidency to her, even as they don't seem to have a clue what her policies actually are. Go figure. Kudos to Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll of New Left Media for telling the story of these folks --- as we strongly encouraged others to do in our own not-dissimilar film, Rise of the Tea Bags --- at a Going Rogue book signing event recently in Columbus, OH, even if they're a bit less "confrontational" than we were...

And, again, if you missed it previously, here's our own Rise of the Tea Bags...

Keep telling the stories, folks!

Remember when the wingnuts were so concerned (and therefore, naturally, the media were as well) about Barack Obama becoming "overexposed"? Why no such concern about that happening to Sarah Palin? I guess they just care about Obama more than her.

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

California, a state which, at $1.8 trillion, has the world's eighth largest economy, now finds itself at the edge of an economic abyss.

Despite Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Draconian cuts to health care and education of more than $15 billion, purportedly to close a $26.3 billion gap in the state's finances, despite a pending 32% increase in student tuition at all University of California campuses and three "furlough" days per month in which state employees are forced to stay home without pay, California now faces a 2010 budget deficit estimated to range from $21 billion to $25 billion.

As shocking as it may seem, this looming fiscal catastrophe did not arrive by accident. It is, according to a number of progressive policy experts, the intended product of a Republican-led privatization scheme...

NY-23's failed Conservative Party Congressional candidate, Doug Hoffman, now says he was "forced to concede" (though it's not clear who forced him, and the concession, as BRAD BLOG readers know, has no legal standing in any case, and, as we noted last week, neither do the voters of New York for the most part, at this point).

But now, as it turns out, Hoffman has also discovered that ACORN stole the election! Not a surprise, given that a new public opinion poll finds that a majority of Republicans think ACORN stole the Presidential election, too! [Hat-tip Digby]:

But NY-23 and the 2008 Presidential election is not all that ACORN did! You can learn more about their stunning crimes (e.g., "ACORN is behind the Eggo Waffle shortage!!!") via #AcornFacts, the new topic that's taking Twitter by storm today...

The wingnuttery continues to devolve. Last night, Rachel Maddow covered, among other recently related points, the new Rightwing "Pray for Obama" movement supporting, and selling merchandise in support of, Psalms 109:8 which begins this way: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office," and continues with "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

Frank Schaeffer, repentant former rightwing fundamentalist evangelical, and now a contributor here at The BRAD BLOG, was on her show last night to discuss that point, and where it seems to signal that things may be frighteningly headed.

He also raised another point, in condemnation of critics on the Left, with which I'll offer a slight quibble. The video of the full Maddow interview follows, along with a crucial excerpt from the text transcript, and my thoughts on where I disagree with one of Frank's now-repeated assertions...

Guest blogged by Frank Schaeffer

Sarah Palin's memoir is a perfect metaphor for what ails America and the Republican Party. Her book is published by the Zondervan publishing house, formerly an evangelical family-run religious publishing powerhouse now owned by Rupert Murdoch. (Back in the day my family's and many evangelical leader friend's books helped put Zondervan on the map, this was when I was a young religious nut activist in the 70s). Palin's book was ghostwritten by the editor of the far, far loony right fundamentalist World magazine founded by Marvin Olasky (of which more in a moment). The book will get a big boost from ratings-seeking Oprah. Murdoch... Oprah... far right politics... The advance was paid out of the huge profits Murdoch made off Rick-stop-gays-prop-8-Warren's Purpose Driven Life.

The chief characteristic of Palin's book is her trashing of the old cautious and respectable William F. Buckley-style Republican Party in general and John McCain and his campaign in particular, an act of backstabbing right up there with the "Et tu Brute" assassination of Caesar. I should say it is actually the second characteristic, that comes a distant second to the building of a Sarah Palin cult of personality, wherein Jesus and Sarah will "take America back for God."

As a former Republican, religious right activist who saw the light, re-registered as an independent voter and then, in the last election cycle, worked hard to get then Senator Obama elected, and having been one of the instigators of what is now becoming the bomb-throwing wing of the former Republican Party --- now a far right fundamentalist cult --- I understand better than most that Palin's book is her bid to take over the Republican Party, something like Oprah's positioning herself as the doyen of publishing.

It's personality cult time, personality cult with an agenda. The agenda isn't about politics at all. This is about naked power. Welcome to the world of our home grown very own Evita Perón. Welcome to Act II of the American "Reconstructionist" movement to establish a theocracy. The theocrats now have their Joan of Arc...

With the U.S. House having passed its version of a health care insurance bill (H.R. 3962 [PDF]) last night by a vote of 220 to 215, it may be instructive to take a very quick look at a couple of the outlier votes from each party.

The bill passed with just two votes to spare, leading one to wonder if Republicans are having any regrets about having hosed their own party's candidate in the NY-23 special election last Tuesday when the two Congressional seats up for election --- the one in NY and another in CA --- both went to Democrats, but that's another issue entirely.

Let's take a look at the reasons offered by two candidates who bucked their own party's in the historic House vote last night, as each seem quite instructive on a number of levels...

Former, now-repentant rightwing fundamentalist leader, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and recent BRAD BLOG contributor Frank Schaeffer appeared on Laura Flanders' GRITtv on Friday to discuss his new book, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism), the "lies" and "incipient fascism" of the "lunatic fringe" Right, and his belief that atheists such as Richard Dawkins and others are "proselytizing" their own non-belief.

I'm sure he'll appreciate your thoughts, good, bad, or otherwise, in comments below. Here's the interview [appx. 18 mins]...

Recently from Frank Schaeffer at The BRAD BLOG:

• 11/4/09: "I'm Now a 'Liberal' Because I'm a Conservative"
• 11/2/09: "The Loony Right Eats Its Own"
• 10/23/09: Brad Interviews Schaeffer on Green960
• 10/22/09: "A Letter to Rupert Murdoch"

In 2008, election integrity advocates in Tennessee won a hard and long-fought victory as the state legislature finally passed, on a bi-partisan basis, the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA) requiring the state's wholly unverifiable touch-screen voting machines to be replaced with precinct-based optical-scan paper balloting in time for the crucial 2010 general election.

But in November of 2008, as the state was still using its completely faith-based electronic voting systems, it somehow managed to buck the national trend as the only state in the nation to see legislative gains for the Republican Party which managed to win a majority in the statehouse in the bargain. Ever since, the GOP majority, along with the Republican Secretary of State and Election Director, have been fighting against implementation of that paper ballot law.

A move in the legislature to delay the law until 2012 was narrowly defeated --- by a single vote --- earlier this year, but the state's Republican apparatchiks have continued attempts to forestall following the rule of law.

Late this week, however, a Nashville judge issued a ruling in a case brought by Common Cause seeking to force Secretary of State Tre Hargett to immediately implement the law he's so far refused to act on...

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called in the tea baggers to the Capitol in D.C. today for an "emergency house call" (that's great video!) in hopes of killing health care reform legislation. She was joined by dozens of fellow wingnut lawmakers who spoke to the disinformed crowd, promising "not a single Republican vote" for the bill before things turned strange later on.

There, in the crowd as the lawmakers spoke, among the baggers, was the following sign which, as Richard Blair notes, "not one of them denounced"...

Here's the close-up view...

Guest Blogged by Frank Schaeffer

I grew up in a fundamentalist missionary family that in the 1970s and 80s morphed into my father's activity as one of the founders of the Religious Right. We would hobnob with Republican leaders from Ronald Reagan to Gerald Ford and the Bush family, Jack Kemp and many others. One day it dawned on me that the far right of the Republican Party --- in other words its base --- actually hates America.

The Religious Right reveled in rising crime statistics, "family breakdown" statistics, failing public schools and so forth. As I explain in my book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism), if crime started going down, or public school test results started going up --- without the country "turning back to Jesus" --- then that would prove that somehow "we" were wrong.

We wanted our country to fail because it had "turned away" from what we believed to be true.

Combined with the fact that we began to lose parts of the culture war, when it came to other Americans beginning to recognize gay rights, expanding women's rights, abortion rights and such, the Religious Right and the Republican Party infected gun-toting America with a chip on its shoulder about a mile wide. This led to the myth that "they" (fill in the blank, gays, Jews, blacks, liberals --- whatever) are "taking away our country from 'us'"...

Guest Blogged by Frank Schaeffer

What a weird life! In the 1970s and 80s I helped my late Evangelical-leader, Religious Right founder father as his nepotistic sidekick. We helped establish the Religious Right and send it on its merry way to doom. Now I --- a backslider former Evangelical, former Republican --- watch in amazed fascination as once again the Right I helped launch like a nasty little torpedo into the guts of the Republican Party once again explodes.

Frank Rich explains...