In the wake of the Mark Sanford revelations, Chris Matthews gets Ken Blackwell to concede that the Republican Party is not morally superior to the Democratic Party. It's nice to see the hypocrisy of the "family values" party being called out for once.

From Hardball April 8, 2009. Ken Blackwell tries to make up for being clueless by not shutting up when he has no idea what he's talking about. He's so outgunned by Hitchens that this is hardly a fair fight. I'm surprised Blackwell even agreed to this debate at all.

Blackwell said he'd gladly come back and debate Hitchens again with some facts to back up his talking points. Anyone want to take odds on whether that will ever happen?

Blackwell's tactics in this segment are typical for Republicans. When someone tries to stop you from lying, get snitty and accuse them of trying to "Bogart" your time if they interrupt you, as he did here. Then talk and talk to run out the clock in these ridiculous debate boxes the MSM thinks passes for some sort of "balance". Once you've run out as much of the time for the segment as you can get away with, the other person has thirty seconds to try to debunk the last few minutes of B.S. you just spewed. Which of course they can't do. And then...oh so sorry we're out of time from the host. Come back later and we'll do it again.

D.L. Hughley talks to Peter Beinart and Bay Buchanan about Bush's exit speech, the future of the Republican party and the spinelessness of Harry Reid. Bay Buchanan as usual has about as little introspection as George Bush. I commend Hughley for managing to get through a segment with her and not allowing her to talk over everyone the entire time. Hughley is spot on with what's wrong with Harry Reid and the Democratic establishment. I think Hughley is also right about Obama in the sense that he's already showing himself to be more of a leader than Bush ever was, but that's a pretty low bar to hurdle. It goes without saying that the higher bar will be whether he can clean up the mess he's inherited.

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From Grover Norquist's RNC Chairman debate. I swear watching this thing was like being able to watch a car wreck in slow motion. You know you shouldn't look but somehow you just can't take your eyes off of it. During one of Grover's "lightening rounds" the group of potential heads of the RNC are asked who their favorite and least favorite Republican Presidents are. They all of course pounce on Reagan as their favorite...lol. They'd have raised his dead corpse up this last election to run if they'd thought the voters would have gone for it. But when asked who was the worst Republican President most of them had a bit more trouble answering the question.

Hey here's one for you.....GEORGE BUSH. Blackwell actually gets some applause for this statement:

Hoover because he opened the door to big government and activism and I think that unfortunately President Bush in the last few months has opened up the door to Mr. Obama's big government...activism.

So what Hoover did wrong was to open the door for FDR to come in behind him and have the public support for the ability to try to clean up his mess? I see Hooverism is still alive and well in the Republican Party.

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In his opening statement at Grover Norquist's RNC Chairman debate, Ken Blackwell proclaims that he "knows how to win elections". I would digress Mr. Blackwell and say that you've instead shown a willingness to help steal them. And what is one of his solutions for future Republican victories? Redistricting. Good old Republicans. If you can't win fairly win by hook or by crook.

I've got to wonder how Blackwell and Steele felt sitting there with Chip Saltsman during this event especially given that Steele slammed Saltsman for his Barack the Magic Negro stunt.

(Warning, large files.)

From Democracy Now Dec. 22, 2008.

AMY GOODMAN: A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Mike Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. He also set up the official Ohio state election website reporting the 2004 presidential election returns.

Connell was reportedly an experienced pilot. He died instantly Friday night when his private plane crashed in a residential neighborhood near Akron, Ohio.

Michael Connell was deposed one day before the election this year by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count and his access to Karl Rove’s email files and how they went missing.

Velvet Revolution, a non-profit investigating Connell’s activities, revealed this weekend that Connell had recently said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.” Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to “take the fall.”

Well, Mark Crispin Miller joins us now, a professor of media culture and communication at New York University, the author of several books, including Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too. Mark Crispin Miller joins us now in our firehouse studio.

Transcript to follow.

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I don't like some of this ACORN stuff either, but it's small potatoes compared to what Republicans have been doing for decades and to try and link it to Obama is nuts. Registering and voting are two different things. Republicans use the Ken Blackwell method of purging the voting rolls every chance they get. Sometimes they can count on the Supreme Court to do their bidding. Case in point The Indiana Voter ID law....You can hear my Rachel Maddow interview on it here. And what I find really insulting is the idea that Ken Blackwell himself is actually trying to make a case involving Voter fraud. Now that is laughable..

And yes, in case you were curious, that's the same Ken Blackwell who was Ohio's secretary of state in 2004. The same Ken Blackwell who worked himself into infamy by actually directing his office to reject voter registrations based on the weight of the paper used. And yes, the same Ken Blackwell who was embarrassed in 2006, when he lost the race to be his state's governor by 23 percentage points -- but only after his supporters challenged the eligibility of Blackwell's opponent

Steven Rosenfeld writes: California GOP had Same Voter Registration Problems as ACORN in 2006

Faked names on voter registration forms. Error rates as high as 60 percent. Firing the people responsible for these errors. Investigations launched by local and state police. Sound familiar? This is not ACORN in the 2008 election's final days.
This is the California Republican Party and its contractors in 2006, when the same problems that are now dogging ACORN and providing political fodder for GOP attacks plagued an effort by California Republicans to register 750,000 people.
The details were all spelled out in a series of Los Angeles Times stories, which quoted former California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres saying these kinds of errors are inevitable "when you use private vendors." Even the state's top election official in 2006, Republican Bruce McPherson, was forced to investigate his own party's actions...read on

And Editor & Publisher has a great piece about it and asks: why does it seem to be a greater sin to be suspected of voter registration mistakes than to publicly engage in voter suppression efforts?