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Michelle Malkin and her Fox News Friends demonstrated a stunning hostility to democracy as they didn't just whine about legally-mandated voter registration opportunities in Obamacare applications but thought there should be a lawsuit to prevent them.

Malkin and her Fox Friends joined in Republican outrage over a provision in Obamacare application that allows an applicant to register to vote. There is nothing in the application that suggests people should register as Democrats or vote Democratically and a similar provision has existed for years on federal Medicare applications. In fact, it’s part of the so-called “Motor Voter Law” which requires public agencies that provide public assistance to offer voter registration opportunities.

But to Malkin and her like-minded Fox friends this is an effort to buy or coerce votes.

STEVE DOOCY: You think, “OK, If I want Obamacare, I’m going to have to register to vote,” right?

MICHELLE MALKIN: The new Hippocratic oath is no longer “First do no harm,” it’s “First get them registered to vote.” …We all knew that it was transparent that Obamacare was just another vehicle to recruit the next generation of Democrats. Now that has been confirmed.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Is that legal for them to put it in there?

MALKIN: It sounds like a potential lawsuit or certainly a question that should be raised by some public interest law firm.

BRIAN KILMEADE: If Punxsutawney Phil can get sued for not having spring start on time, why not sue them for putting this voting thing in there?

For most people, passing legislation designed to be popular with the electorate and then encouraging them to vote would be considered the American way of governing. Laudable even. Only on Fox News – which embraces GOP voter suppression efforts - would such activity be presented as something evil that must be prevented.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks, and you can't expect corrupt, powerhungry people to change their cheating ways. As I said on Wednesday, Republicans are back to their usual game-playing with voter registrations, using their favorite likely fraudster Nathan Sproul. But since that report, the playing field has expanded significantly.

Lee Fang reports for The Nation:

I found a few more payments, like this one from the Colorado Republican Committee: $140,000 to the Sproul-connected firm on July 6, 2012. (UPDATE: I also found the California Republican Party making $430,840 in payments to "Grassroots Outreach, LLC" this cycle for voter registration. According to this disclosure, Grassroots Outreach shares the same address as Sproul's office in Tempe, Arizona. Craigslist job postings in California andColorado use identical language as Strategic Alled Consulting's listings in North Carolina.)

Those ads look like the one at the top of the page. They also look just like the ads run in 2008, and again in 2010, by the same firm. Here's Keith Olbermann reporting on them on October 21, 2008:

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[h/t Kecko on Twitter]

Now, the true silly season begins. Here is a video shot by someone who saw a voter registration worker in front of her local supermarket. When she walked up the worker said she was "polling" for Obama or Romney, but admitted she asked the question because "[she] is only registering Romney voters." She also claimed to work for the County Clerk's office.

Brad Friedman did some digging:

As it turns out, the registration worker was not working for the El Paso County Clerk's office, according to responses sent to The BRAD BLOG by the CO Secretary of State's office as well as the El Paso County Clerk. Instead, she was a paid employee of the state Republican Committee, as confirmed by the local GOP Chairman. And, incredibly enough, both the Sec. of State and County Clerk, both Republicans, assert that what the registration worker is seen doing in the video, screening out potential voters based on who they might vote for, is absolutely legal in the state of Colorado...

All things that are legal are not necessarily ethical. When it comes to Republicans and voter registrations, ethics usually have very little to do with it.

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The voter roll purges continue. But when one is a voting rights activist who votes in every election, it's pretty shocking to find out your own name has been purged from the rolls!

Via ProgressNowNM:

Wood received a notice in the mail at her Santa Fe home on Tuesday. The notice directs Wood to verify her voting status with the Secretary of State's own database, "Voter View" .

However, when Wood checked her voting status there, she found that her status had been changed to "INACTIVE" in this mail purge alongside a list all of the elections she has voted in since 1992, a total of 44. Wood's most recent vote was just 88 days before she received the notice sent to alleged non-voters.

Wood moved from Albuquerque to her current address in Santa Fe more than 5 years ago and has voted absentee from there at least 4 times during elections when she was working in other parts of the state protecting others' right to vote.

"I'm just shocked that I took my job to fight for other people's job to get their vote counted, and now I'm having to fight for my own," Wood told ProgressNow New Mexico in a recorded interview.

The secretary of state's voter purge began just weeks after Secretary Duran stopped printing new voter registration cards, leaving at least six New Mexico counties without registration forms. Now we learn that during that same time Duran was not printing new voter cards she was instead able to print more than 177,000 voter registration cards to target to those she deemed non-voters.

New Mexico has an estimated 250,000 - 600,000 eligible but unregistered voters.

"This is exactly what we have all been afraid of when the secretary of state acts unilaterally to terminate the right to vote for voters only she can identify," says Pat Davis of ProgressNow NM. "Diane is just the first of the more than 177,000 legal voters to get this notice and it shows the incompetence of the secretary in administering our elections. How many more active voters were included in her massive purge of voters?"

It's bad enough that they're purging active voters from the rolls, but how do they explain the failure to print sufficient numbers of voter registration cards, causing voters to be unable to register?

In the coming weeks, voter registration is going to be the single biggest issue around this election. Groups like the Voter Participation Center are gearing up for a registration drive in 28 states. Now that the right wing doesn't have ACORN to push around, they're targeting any group which is actively involved in getting unregistered voters registered. It's going to be ugly and we're going to be successful, which will cause right wing heads to explode nationwide, no doubt.

Just remember this: If the right wing can't count on your vote, they don't want your vote to count.

Remember October, 2008? Remember how McCain and Palin went all shrilly over ACORN allegedly fraudulently registering voters before they didn't? The only thing that stopped them (not that it stopped the shrilly teabaggers and Republicans later) was the arrest of Mark Jacoby on October 20, 2008. He was arrested for fraud and perjury, pled guilty on June 16, 2009 to voter-registration fraud and is now serving 3 years probation. Sort of. Actually, not so much.

Keith Olbermann's report in the video above and Nicole Belle's post on Mr. Jacoby and his connections to the John McCain campaign, Steve Poizner, and Nathan Sproul are worth reviewing for some background on how the Republicans turned up the noise on ACORN while actually engaging in voter fraud here in California. For all the heat Republicans put on ACORN, the only actual voter fraud conviction was Mark Jacoby's. He was sentenced to 30 days of Cal-Trans work and 3 years probation.

While detangling the finances of the California Republican Party I ran into Jacoby again, apparently doing business as Star Petition Services.

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A federal judge has reaffirmed her earlier ruling blocking the congressional effort to defund the anti-poverty group ACORN. On Wednesday, Judge Nina Gershon cemented a decision from last year that such action amounted to an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.” Judge Gershon told all federal agencies to allow ACORN funding without delay:

JOHN ATLAS: I’m going to talk about that in a minute, but the first thing I want to say, that needs to be said over and over again, is that the act of defunding ACORN by Congress is a national disgrace. We should all be outraged about that. Basically what happened is Congress bowed to Fox News, Glenn Beck, the rest of the right-wing echo chamber—we’re talking about the United States Congress—and then scapegoated the most effective anti-poverty organization in the country. That’s a scandal of enormous proportions.

ACORN has a record of helping poor people in these hard times. They help them get homes. They help them stop foreclosures. They help them fight predatory lending. They help them register voters. I’m talking about minority voters, people who ordinarily don’t vote. Very hard to get that kind of voter registration work done. And in short, all other studies, including mine, have documented how effective ACORN has been and how important it’s been to low-income people, especially the working poor.

OK, now, with the significance of the decision, first people have to understand the context. This was a case in which the Congress defunded ACORN, and they claimed they had to defund ACORN to protect the taxpayers. ACORN brought a lawsuit. They brought it against the United States government, the Office of Management and Budget, the Secretary of HUD, and the Secretary of Treasury. They had to bring a lawsuit against them because these were the people who issued orders, pursuant to the vote by Congress, to not allow ACORN to get any funding that it was entitled to, but didn’t get, and they could not, in the future, apply for federal funding.

AMY GOODMAN: And remind us why they were defunded. I mean, what was the incident that precipitated this?

JOHN ATLAS: Well, as your opening said, which we can emphasize again, the immediate trigger—I’m talking about the immediate trigger—was the release of videos that appeared to show that ACORN staffers were giving advice to right-wing activists who looked like a pimp and a prostitute. And they were giving advice to them which was outrageous, which we should go into, after we talk about this case, because it turned out that that was completely misleading, that in fact he never—the guy who was posing as a pimp never showed up in this outlandish pimp outfit that we all associate with those videotapes. You know, the guy in the top hat, the cape around his shoulders, with his cane, the dark glasses, you know, he looked like a 1970s African American—you know, stereotype African American pimp. He went on TV. He said, “This is what I looked like when I was in the office.” Turned out, not true. And we should go into that, because—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain. How, then?

JOHN ATLAS: Well, it’s not true, because he edited—they took those pictures of him dressed that way, and they edited him into the tapes.

Now, before we get back into the decision, let me say this, that this reporting was done by not just the right-wing press, but every one of the mainstream press, and I’m talking about the Washington Post, the New York Times. Before I came here, I actually put together a list—I can—of times that the New York Times reported that fact, that this man was dressed like that when he was sitting in the office. And the New York Times has refused to retract this. And there’s a whole movement out there now trying to get the public editor to go on record saying the Times botched the story.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Despite the judge—

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Thank God for Joe Conason, who's a consistent champion of the poor and working class. He writes about the trumped-up hysteria about ACORN - and says Republicans who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones:

[...] ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished. No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a "pimp and ho," but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). And while the idea of getting housing assistance for a brothel was clever, what ACORN really does, every day, is help those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Perhaps the congressional investigation now demanded by some Republican politicians would be a useful exercise, if conducted impartially. A fair investigation might begin to dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by right-wing media outlets.

Among the most popular canards on the right, repeated constantly by conservative pundits and politicians, is that ACORN has been found guilty of engaging in deliberate voter fraud, using federal funds. In reality, ACORN has registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the country over the past five years -- a laudable record with a very low incidence of fraud of any kind.

Over the past several years, a handful of ACORN employees have admitted falsifying names and signatures on registration cards, in order to boost the pay they received. When ACORN officials discovered those cases, they informed the state authorities and turned in the miscreants. (That was why the Bush Justice Department's blatant attempt to smear ACORN with rushed, election-timed indictments became a national scandal for Republicans rather than Democrats.) The proportion of fraud is infinitesimal. For example, a half-dozen ACORN workers were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election. They had completed fewer than two dozen false registrations -- out of more than a million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. The mythology that suggests that thousands or even millions of illegal registrants voted is itself a fraud.

If only the Republicans who have worked up a frenzy over ACORN's alleged crimes were so indignant about real and damaging voter fraud -- such as the amazing case of Young Political Majors, the firm that ran GOP registration efforts in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere before the authorities in Orange County, Calif., busted its president, Mark Anthony Jacoby, and sent him to jail last year. He had built a lucrative partisan career by teaching his minions to deceive thousands of voters into registering as Republicans rather than Democrats, among other scams. Of course, the only on-air mention of the Young Political Majors scandal on Fox News was made by blogger Brad Friedman -- and the national media, mainstream and conservative, generally ignored it. They were too busy generating "controversy" over ACORN.

So now the overhyped voting registration tales are metastasizing into wild accusations about ACORN's finances and programs, including claims that the group will receive billions in federal bailout funding and that it is a hotbed of corruption, perhaps even murder. In fact, ACORN affiliates -- those not involved with voter registration -- have received a few million dollars annually in federal funding. The group is not scheduled to receive any bailout money (although working people would probably benefit more from subsidizing ACORN than greasing AIG and Goldman Sachs).

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It's actually quite rare for Glenn Beck to invite onto his Fox News show a guest he disagrees with. Most often he's playing fanboy to the likes of Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg, which means that the show is usually an hourlong right-wing mutual-admiration society. This means the Glenn Beck show largely is a big Snoozarama, livened up only by Beck's weepy wingnuttery.

But yesterday he invited on Scott Levinson of ACORN, which Beck has been chasing after and demonizing since last summer's campaign. As you can see, the entire exchange turns into a fiasco when Beck refuses to respond to Levinson's points and begins instead showing videos of a Burger King worker bathing in a sink.

At one point, Beck even orders Levinson's mike turned off.

Even more remarkably, after Levinson was off camera, Beck continued to attack him on the camera -- relaying to the audience the argument that ensued afterward (Levinson accused Beck, evidently, of being afraid of black people), calling him a "dirtbag," and then later telling his audience that Levinson had hit up on one of his female assistants in the green room.

Wow.

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By now most of you know that Al Gore was a mere poseur, and that David Plouffe actually invented the internet. Naturally, as such, he has access via his 3 billion gig I-phone, to the email address of every single liberal blog reader on the planet. But if you have somehow eluded the Obama Campaign Manager's technological omniscience, you can click in the blue box shown and Mr. Plouffe will personally pick you up at your cave entrance (in his Prius, natch) and take you to the polls on November 4. Well, not really, but close.

(Needless to say, voter registration is critical to helping the Democratic nominee win this election.)

Open thread below...

Officials in charge of voter registration in Virginia seem to be asking for Federal investigation... According to this press release from this extremely important battleground state, students are being told that they risk losing their scholarship and tax dependency status if they register to vote in their college, as opposed to home, state. And surprise, it appears all these warnings are bogus and have one impact and one impact only: to suppress voter turnout among college-aged people, who are overwhelmingly supporting Obama this year. Memo to Virginia: that's illegal.

InsideHigherEd:

Last week, Virginia’s Montgomery County, home to Virginia Tech, issued a press release regarding proper protocol for college students registering to vote. In interviews with Inside Higher Ed Tuesday, it was described by turns as “unsubstantiated,” “chilling,” and (more generously) as not “incredibly encouraging or friendly.” Read more...

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