Republicans Face Obstacles

Election Day is five weeks from tomorrow, and the Republicans are growing more and more desperate. From ridiculous statements to voter registration fraud, the GOP leaders are making fools of themselves.

The latest loopy Republican is Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu. In an interview with the New York Times, he claimed President Obama didn’t deserve credit for killing Osama bin Laden because he could have done it sooner.

Paul Ryan has also been infected by the mania to hide facts. In assuring Chris Wallace (Fox News) during an interview yesterday that Romney’s tax plan would give tax cuts to everyone, he said it would take too long to explain. “But let me say it this way, you can lower tax rates 20 percent across the board by closing loopholes and still have preferences for the middle class for things like charitable deductions, home purchases, for health care,” he explained. Ryan stuck to his classic “trust me” approach today when he said that he just didn’t want people “change the channel.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has been a member of both major political parties as well as an independent in the last decade, has a reason for racial prejudice. When the NAACP filed a complaint about the racial bias against blacks and Hispanics in the admissions test for entering the city’s top public high schools, Bloomberg had an answer. “Life isn’t always fair,” he said.

If anything on Fox News can be believed, the big money donors are switching their cash from Mitt Romney to Republican Congressional candidates.

Since even the Fox polls shows that President Obama is polling ahead of Romney, the Republicans have this theory that all the polls are rigged—except the Rasmussen poll that shows the two men almost equal. First, Nate Silver, who predicted the electoral results for president in 49 out of the 50 states, has said that the polls are probably close to accurate. But second, the methodology for the Rasmussen polls lead to skewed results. They employ Pulse Opinion Research, a pay-to-poll agency which uses automated polling, a process that calls up a land line and allows anyone who answers to provide the answers despite age or eligibility.

The New York Times has published an article, buried on the bottom of page 13 last Friday, stating that Romney’s national security team recommends that he should rescind President Obama’s executive order barring torture. In all likelihood, he would do this because he is on record as saying that waterboarding is not torture. He has also said that he would approve “techniques” not allowed by the Army manual.

Fox News has trained one Millennial very well. In an interview with Fox, Steven Crowder said that he’s against “free” healthcare and “free” Social Security unlike other Millennials who just want “free” stuff. The interview doesn’t mention that Crowder grew up in Canada where he received “free” healthcare until he moved to Los Angeles. He did, however, use the typical Republican catchphrases such as “free birth control” and “Obama phones,” a program that started under Ronald Reagan.

More and more cases of Republican voter registration frauds are appearing across the country after Strategic Allied Consulting, an RNC-employed company, turned in registration forms to at least ten Florida counties with names of people who had died.

A complaint in California occurred after a surge of 35,000 registered Republicans in Riverside, a notorious blue area. Democrats presented affidavits from 133 Democratic voters who said that they had been re-registered as Republicans without their consent after signing petitions, including one that purported to lower the price of gasoline.  Others said they were offered free cigarettes or a “job at the polls” if they signed some paperwork. Re-registering Democrats as Republicans interferes with Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts because the party won’t contact a voter who is listed as a Republican. Petition voters said they were being paid $7 per signature.

In Colorado, the same company, paid $466,643 or half its total budget by the Colorado Republican Party, was fired at the recommendation of the Republican National Committee but not soon enough. On video, a young woman told someone that she was working for the county clerk’s office. She said, “I’m actually trying to register people for a particular party because we’re out here in support of Romney, actually.” No one knows how many people the company registered for the Democratic party and then discarded.  Colorado is one of five swing states that have stopped voter registration efforts because they had all employed the fraudulent company.

Also in Clay County (FL), a female volunteer calling for the Republican Party said that President Obama is a socialist and Muslim and that he’s going to take away Medicare. In addition, she gave instructions to watch Fox News and the propaganda “documentary” 2016: Obama’s America. None of these things is true—including the information in the film. There’s proof that the volunteer said these things because she left a message on an answering machine.

The icing on the cake for today, however, is last Friday’s ruling from Judge Carol Jackson, a George H.W. Bush appointee to a federal court in Missouri, that rejected a Catholic business owner’s challenge to the Obama Administration’s rules requiring employer health plans to cover birth control. The decision stated that salaries and health insurance can be used to buy birth control, so if religious employers really object to enabling their employees to buy birth control, they would have to not pay them money in addition to denying them comprehensive health insurance.

According to the ruling, an employer cannot assert a religious objection to how their employees choose to use their own benefits or their own money because religious freedom is not a license to “force one’s religious practices upon others.” Jackson not only rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that the birth control rules violate the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause but also rejected the plaintiffs’ much stronger claim that the rules violate a federal law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). RFRA gives religious objectors significant, although not entirely insurmountable, rights against laws they do not wish to follow for religious reasons. So Jackson’s opinion rejects the strongest possible legal argument against the Obama Administration’s contraception rules.

As shown below, the Romney campaign can’t even find enough women to get out and support Mitt Romney in Missouri.