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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.

NSFW, turn the volume down.

Probably observing Black History Month in their own special way, Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade, Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer mocked a 102-year-old black woman who stood in line for three hours and made two trips to the polls in order to vote last November.

Centanarian Desiline Victor was honored by President Obama during his State of the Union address Tuesday night not just for her indomitable efforts to vote, but for inspiring others to do the same.

But awesome feats of citizenship take a far back seat to partisan politics on Fox. So does good taste and racial sensitivity. On Fox News Radio’s Kilmeade & Friends yesterday, Hemmer and MacCallum suggested that Victor had either faked her wait or exaggerated the difficulties.

Hemmer asked skeptically, “How long was she on line?”

MacCallum asked, “What’s the big deal? She was happy she waited on line. She voted, she was happy that she was there to vote. …I mean, this is such a non-issue.”

Hemmer said, “They held her up as a victim. What is she a victim of?”

Hmm. What other famous sociopaths do Fox yakkers remind us of?

This was while they all yukked it up at Victor’s expense with such jokes as, “Can you hear (the other people on line) whispering, ‘Did she try to hit you with, ‘I’m 102, I’ve been on line five hours?’ Did she try to give you that one again?’”

Media Matters, which recorded this gem, also noted that earlier on their own show, America’s Newsroom, Hemmer and MacCallum had glossed over Republicans’ role in exacerbating long lines to vote.

If anyone is wondering why Fox’s already minuscule African American audience has been shrinking, you can point to this jaw-dropping conversation as a case in point.

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Colin Powell is not a perfect man, nor was he a perfect public servant. But as Republicans go, he is at least one of the more intellectually honest of the bunch, even when faced with Bill O'Reilly's bluster and nonsense. Billo has suddenly come down with a case of concern for African-Americans after Ailes sent the memo that they should pretend like they care (after spending four years spouting racist memes about vote-stealing).

Colin Powell was having none of it. He first called Bill O'Reilly out for presuming that his vote was race-based instead of decent judgment, asking simply, "Why do you think of me as only African-American? I'm American."

Try as he might, O'Reilly could not get Powell to play to his script, where Powell only voted for Obama based on his race.

O'Reilly's concern-trolling is nearly unbearable, given that he and his network did their level best to block all aspects of Obama's agenda that might actually have helped minorities and working people, black or otherwise, and Powell reminds him that in President Obama's first four years, many policies were put in place that will actually really help them, assuming Republican governors and representatives don't get too much in the way.

My favorite moment comes when Billo tries to snark Powell about voting for hope when things haven't improved all that much, and Powell takes him on point by point. Billo's memory must be failing him if he thinks things haven't improved since 2008. We haven't completely recovered, but there's no way we're anywhere near as desperate as we were four years ago.

After all the concern trolling, Billo's most cynical moment comes when he goes after the children of those same people he's so concerned about by bashing their school performance, and the money spent on their education. You see, Fox viewers, it's not at all about what poverty can do to crush a child's ability to learn, or what dangers they might face in their neighborhood. No, it's their moocher parents who can't stay married and have no family values and of course it's only minorities who fall under this judgment.

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Via the Grio, this interesting observation from Colin Powell on Morning Joe. Absolutely! What kind of future does a party have when the only way they win is to lie, trick and steal their way into power?

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe yesterday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says that the Republican Party needs to be more inclusive when it comes to voting at the polls. He criticized the GOP’s push for stricter voter ID laws which he says, tend to target minorities.

“Should we really have gone after reducing the turnout of voters in those places where we thought it would make a difference?” he asked. “The Republican Party should be a party that says, ‘We want everybody to vote,’ and make it easier for people to vote and give them a reason to vote for the party, and not to find ways to keep them from voting at all.”

Powell, who has twice endorsed President Barack Obama, mentioned in the Morning Joe interview that the Republican Party attempted to reduce voter turnout in the 2012 Presidential election.

Seventeen states, the majority of them with Republican-controlled state legislatures, have instituted photo ID requirements at voting polls, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Democrats have argued that these voter ID laws may prevent certain groups from voting such as poor, older and minority voters.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) seems to think that Republicans in the House of Representatives were given a “mandate” by voters allowing them to prevent tax cuts for the rich from expiring, despite exit polls showing voters overwhelmingly support tax hikes. “[T]he fact is, in Congress, the American people have returned a Republican House of Representatives. So we also have, if you want to call it, a mandate.”

Except that’s not quite true, Mr King, and you know it. The American people didn’t vote for a Republican House, the Republicans didn’t actually win the House, and therefore there is no mandate. 53,952,240 votes were cast for a Democratic House candidate compared to 53,402,643 cast for a Republican; in other words, over half a million more Americans voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republican candidates. Republicans received less than half of the vote for members of the House of Representatives, and even lost seats in the House this election. Yet Republicans still took 55 percent of the seats in the House. In effect, they had to steal the House. Here’s how:

In 2010, Republicans won a substantial majority of state governments. Once they were in power, they then deliberately redrew congressional district lines in order to manipulate the 2012 House election for a Republican victory. It’s called gerrymandering, a very old, very nasty technique that has long been successful in affecting the outcome of elections, for both sides. And it’s getting worse now that computer modelling can precisely calculate districts to maximize political advantages. Citizens, advocates and political parties have filed 194 lawsuits challenging congressional or state district maps in 41 states. Lawsuits are still pending in eight states.

Gerrymandering is the process of manipulating geographic borders to create a political advantage for a particular party, obstructing the ability of voters who oppose a state’s ruling party to influence future elections. It works on the principle of “wasted voting” – a numbers game where opposition voters are shifted, or “packed” into districts where their party would win anyway even without their vote, then “cracking” any remaining opposition voters by moving them into districts where they are a significant minority, rendering their vote futile. Voters, of course, aren’t physically moved, just the lines on a map where they officially live, which end up bizarrely twisted and distorted out of any natural proportions. And it’s technically legal.

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Well lookit you, progressives. Ain't you just absolutely the shit?

What a week, what a time to be on the planet. I won't inundate you with all the many, many ways to experience inspiration and schadenfreude there are right now...there are just too many to count.

But buried in President Obama's victory speech was an important detail and a challenge:

I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time. By the way, we have to fix that.

Um, yup. Let us be clear: the most vile elements of the GOP didn't steal this election, but it wasn't for lack of trying. We went to Ohio to see for ourselves what was going on in that crucible of democracy--and what we found was disturbing, galling, and surprisingly inspiring.

And there was dancing! Jon Husted ain't messing with my Dougie.

The lower the turnout tomorrow, the better Mitt Romney will do. It’s always been this way for Republicans. Anyone who doubts that needs to watch the video below. 

A New York Times editorial puts the spotlight exactly where it belongs: on Republican voter suppression:

This year, voting is more than just the core responsibility of citizenship; it is an act of defiance against malicious political forces determined to reduce access to democracy. Millions of ballots on Tuesday — along with those already turned in — will be cast despite the best efforts of Republican officials around the country to prevent them from playing a role in the 2012 election.

Even now, many Republicans are assembling teams to intimidate voters at polling places, to demand photo ID where none is required, and to cast doubt on voting machines or counting systems whose results do not go their way. The good news is that the assault on voting will not affect the election nearly as much as some had hoped. Courts have either rejected or postponed many of the worst laws. Predictions that up to five million people might be disenfranchised turned out to be unfounded.

But a great deal of damage has already been done, and the clearest example is that on Sunday in Florida, people will not be allowed to vote early. Four years ago, on the Sunday before Election Day, tens of thousands of Floridians cast their ballots, many of them black churchgoers who traveled directly from services to their polling places. Because most of them voted for Barack Obama, helping him win the state, Republicans eliminated early voting on that day. No legitimate reason was given; the action was entirely partisan in nature.

The author of that law, as The Palm Beach Post revealed last week, was Emmett Mitchell IV, the general counsel for the state Republican Party. Under his guidance, party officials in Florida got thousands of perfectly eligible black voters purged from the rolls in 2000, and got a law passed last year that limited registration drives and early voting days. A federal judge struck down the registration limits, but not before they drove down the numbers of new registrants.

The law cutting back nearly half the number of early-voting days in Florida remains in place, a reaction to the Obama campaign’s successful use of the system. Early voting is wildly popular, freeing people from having to cast a ballot within a few hours on a workday, and all but 15 states allow it in some form. (When will New York get the message?) But even after long lines formed last week at early-voting stations in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott refused to extend the period an extra day. In Ohio, a judge had to restore early-voting days that Republicans had tried to cut.

[...] Public outcry, with support from the courts, may eventually remove these threats to democracy. For now, those who contribute to a heavy turnout on Tuesday will send a message that Americans reject any underhanded effort to place political gain above a franchise for which people have given their lives.

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Houston based "True the Vote", a fake "anti-voter fraud" group run by Catherine Engelbrecht, the head of a Texas-based Tea Party Organization that has publicly declared its opposition to President Obama, and has taken it upon themselves to "protect" the country from the nonexistent scourge of "voter fraud", was caught sending letters to minority voters in Ohio challenging their right to vote.

ABC News' Dan Harris investigated recent claims of "voter harassment" among poor blacks in Ohio by the Tea Party-backed group, speaking to Teressa Sharp, a low-income African-American grandmother that says she has voted in every election since she was 18, yet received a letter in the mail from TTV saying her "right to vote has been challenged by a qualified electorate" (FYI: an "electorate" is a population, not a person). The justification for this challenge? The report never says.

When Harris tells Engelbrecht that cases of "Voter Fraud" are more rare than prosecutions of "migratory bird violations" and "virtually nonexistent", Engelbrecht responds that that means "there's room for improvement."

Actual cases of "in-person voter fraud" in Ohio is 0.00004% [ibid]. That means that for every four people that these groups might actually stop from voting illegally, TEN MILLION "legal" voters are potentially disenfranchised. The very idea that stopping ONE person from fraudulently voting... which would have NO discernible effect on the outcome of an election, justifies potentially disenfranchising 2,500,000 legitimate voters... which WOULD unquestionably have a catastrophic impact on our elections... is an absolute farce, and should be prosecuted proportionately.

Racist far-right partisan Republicans think they have found a cloak of respectability in challenging the rights of the poor and minorities, who typically vote Democratic, on the grounds of "protecting our elections from voter fraud". What justification is there to believe the poor and minorities are any more likely to commit "voter fraud" than rich white suburbanites that typically vote Republican? None. Yet for some odd coinky-dink, those just always seems to be groups they focus on.

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Remember how, last week, we reported that Maricopa County, Arizona, had handed out voter ID cards in Spanish with the wrong date on them -- but were assured that the problem was limited to only fifty or so people.

Now a second incident makes clear that the problem may be more widespread than at first glance:

Last week, the department made the same mistake on a Spanish-language voter registration card it issued to a Hispanic woman. Yesterday it was on a bookmark the department distributed to Spanish-speaking voters.

Maricopa County’s latest error angered many leaders from various Latino organizations across the state, including members from two large organizations that have registered thousands of Latinos to vote.

As Stephen Lemons notes, the elections office, led by a Republican named Helen Purcell, has come under siege for these and other misinformation problems, which included a false media report by a local CBS station that may well have harmed the work of local GOTV volunteers.

In response, Purcell has promised a public-relations campaign to try to dispel any misinformation that it may have inadvertently issued.

An investigation, frankly, would be more reassuring.