Ohio Secretary of State Appeal denied -- Early Voting Remains

Maybe it is because I grew up in Ohio where I cut my teeth on politics with my Uncle who was very active in Republican politics not only local and statewide but also nationwide, because I have been more livid then normal at what I have seen out of the Ohio Secretary of State  John Husted.  Doesn't take a genius to figure out that he is trying to do voter suppression in Ohio to give Ohio to Romney.  It is not working and now with this ruling all Ohioans not just Republicans will be able to vote the weekend before the election.

BREAKING: Supreme Court Leaves Early Voting In Place In Ohio | 

Earlier this month, a unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down an Ohio law cutting back early voting for most Ohio voters. Today, the Supreme Court rejected a request by the state to stay this decision. The Court’s denial of the stay did not explain the justices’ reasoning and did not include a dissent. Moreover, because their order only concerned the request for a stay, it is possible — if unlikely — that the justices will still decide to hear this case at a later date. Nevertheless, today’s order means that the new restrictions on early voting almost certainly will not be in effect during next month’s election.

Couldn't believed he appealed the unanimous ruling by the panel of Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.  Read that -- UNANIMOUS ruling and yet Husted cost the state even more money appealing to the SCOTUS.  So happy to see that the SCOTUS rejected the appeal.  For two elections Ohio has had extended early voting but along comes Romney running for President against President Obama and Husted has put up a roadblock every step of the way.  One of the most obvious ones was when he was going to allow Republican counties to have more hours to vote then Democrat ones.

Secretary of State in Ohio needs to be ousted in 2014 but frankly with his dirty tactics and then he falsely accuses democrats for being the problem should oust him from office early.  He is sworn to uphold the laws of the State of Ohio not the Romney campaign.  He fired to long time County Board of Election people in Montgomery County because the lawyers told them there was nothing to prevent them from having longer hours in what they read of the SoS ruling, but when they wouldn't back down, he fired two of them.  Know that area well.  Husted just messed with a County that is pretty heavy Democrat, and IMHO they will prove it on November 6th when the numbers come in.

I have found the voter suppression in Ohio to be an insult to the people who have worked their whole lives to make the Ohio Republican Party vibrant again after years of losing Senate elections.  Now with one partisan Secretary of State, he has wiped years of good will away.  I think Sherrod Brown is going to clean the ultra-conservative Josh Mandel's clock on November 6th.  Mandel is an Aiken/Ryan clone IMHO.  I cannot believe I am saying this but if I still lived in Ohio, I would not only vote for Sherrod Brown but I would be out working for his election.  Brown is leading a crusade to get Citizens United overturned to take the huge amount of wealthy donor money out of trying to buy elections.

Romney has taken it to a new low level of dishonesty with his big donors who are routinely breaking the law but they will send in amended returns AFTER the election.  Anyone with a brain can see the Romney reports for his campaign are including money meant for the RNC.  Also never saw a campaign with so little data on donors -- far outside the norm.  This is part of what Sherrod Brown wants stopped along with identifying all major donors so no one can hide behind a group where they don't have to reveal donors.

Republicans are proving that when there are no campaign finance rules in place, they take full advantage including groups who hide donors.  Rules no longer apply if you are a Republican.  I hope the voters of Ohio have the final say in sending Romney to defeat along with Josh Mandel showing that all the ads being bought in Ohio by the Super PACs mean zero, zip, nada.  Voters need to show the GOP that their votes are not for sale to all the negative Super PAC ads and vote their conscience by voting for the campaigns who tell the truth not lies which means their votes would go to President Obama and Senator Sherrod Brown.

Think Progress: RNC Anti-Obama Video Offers Master Class in Out-of-Contest Editing

Over the years there have been some really inept RNC Chairs but the current one Priebus takes the cake for abject stupidity and lack of honesty.  In 2000 a friend and I decided that the RNC Chair needed to go because he was so partisan for McCain so we sent out emails to the National Committee asking that they remove him -- our former National Committeeman still laughs about it when I see him.  It was surprising the ones who wrote back who agreed with the email.  It was disgusting when then President GW Bush gave him an ambassadorship to the Vatican but when he made him Secretary the Veterans Administration he used the same echniques to oversee the VA that he did the RNC and it soon turned into a disaster at the VA.  Jim Nicholson was the wrong person to head the VA just like he was the wrong person to head the RNC, but he looks good compared to the RNC Liar in Chief Preibus who will do and say anything to support Mitt Romney IMHO!

First it was the lie about Welfare they kept touting when a Republican Governor actually asked for some leeway on the jobs requirement which Priebus and Romney turned into Obama wanted to do away with the work requirement of the Welfare Bill.  Both men are dishonest to the core even when confronted with Fact Check.

As Republicans during the primary, we knew that Priebus would do anything to get Romney the nomination against the wishes of 66% of Republicans as we didn't matter as only the wealthy Romney mattered in the primaries.  Romney and Priebus if they took their blinders off, would discover that a lot of Republicans after the Convention with the new rules, refusing to seat duly elected delegates and then sitting some delegations in the nosebleed section while seating delegations who cannot vote for President near the stage is going to backfire.  Those delegations had Paul supporters along with other conservatives who are going to vote for Third Party candidates after the way they were treated by Romney/Priebus/State Chairs and their people.  They are joining a lot of the rest of us who never supported Romney and said we would never vote for him.  Last night on Lawrence O'Donnell, even former Bush advisor Mark McKinnon said he was looking to Johnson the Libertarian after he could no longer defend Romney after the 47%.

My bet is if the pollsters would including the Libertarian Party Gary Johnson and Constiutional Party Virgil Goode who are candidates for President from the Third Parties, Romney's numbers would go down.  Johnson the former popular Republican Governor of New Mexico and Goode the former Republican Representative from VA are both conservatives and would appeal to those Republicans who cannot vote for Obama after all the lies told by the leaders of the Republican Party.

Now today, after the true Romney came out with his 47%, we find out once again how dishonest the RNC has become in taking Obama's words out of context for a campaign ad from earlier distortions of what Obama said and added a clip from 1998 when Obama was a State Senator speaking at Loyola University in Chicago.  The video of Romney was at a fundraising in May of 2012.  Do you see a huge difference?  Republicans have little so they go back to 1998 and were the same ones yelling when they showed the debate of Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney for the MA Senate in 1994 only four years before the new Obama video.  Dishonest to the core at the RNC because the Kennedy/Romney video of the debate was not heavily edited like they have done to Obama.

RNC used to have some of the best and brightest for their research team but those people don't exist as today's RNC doesn't care about facts or truth -- only want to do what it takes to win as they have proven they will lie (over and over), cheat (in the primaries and debates by changing rules), and steal (missing ballot boxes, voter suppression, and dead people voting in the primaries).  RNC fully supports the states who are today doing voter suppression like PA, OH, FL, and now TX for starters.

In PA, the Supreme Court has ordered the state has to show what is the hurry and if the new law was going to disenfranchise any voter.  Ohio Secretary of State wanted one set of rules for GOP Counties on voting hours and another for Dem counties which he pulled back when he had to go see a judge after a lawsuit was filed. TX wants voter rolls purged of dead voters less than two months before the election and already have purged a several live people.  Now the court has stepped in to stop the TX Purge.  Then there is Florida, where the FL Governor Scott ordered the purge in violation of federal law and a group of county election boards who refused to purge.  The old political saying about accusing your opponent of what you are doing fits today's Presidential nominee Romney and his sidekick Ryan along with the RNC Chair Priebus.

Voter suppression is just one more example of the dishonesty emanating from the RNC.  Guess the RNC is not concerned about absentee ballots where the real voter fraud can occur after that happened in the GOP primary in FL.  NY voters once again believe they can vote absentee in two states but since they were supporting Romney in the primary, it was okay.  Now the RNC is doing what they have accused Obama of doing when he had zero to do with 47% video by taking his words out of context -- the RNC has become experts at that:

RNC Anti-Obama Video Offers Master Class dditIn Out-Of-Context Editing
Benjy Sarlin & Evan McMorris-Santoro 

September 20, 2012, 10:30 

Amid complaints on the right about missing context in the leaked video of a Mitt Romney fundraiser, the RNC released a new video containing three deceptively edited clips of President Obama. 

The new video, “Redistribution II,” focuses on the party’s recent message that the president believes “redistributing wealth creates prosperity.” 

Obama’s first appearance in the video is an egregiously chopped-up portion of the president’s weekly address from March 31, 2012. 

“Anyone who does well for themselves, should do their fair share in return,” Obama says in the RNC version of the sentence. “Now some people call this class warfare.” 

Obama was referring to the so-called Buffet Rule, an Obama proposal that would change the tax code so the super rich don’t pay a lower tax rate than the middle class, but the RNC video removes that context. Polling from around the time showed the public overwhelmingly supported the idea. 

Here’s the section from Obama’s March address, with the RNC edits highlighted: 

Now, some people call this class warfare. But I think asking a billionaire to pay at least the same tax rate as his secretary is just common sense. We don’t envy success in this country. We aspire to it. But we also believe that anyone who does well for themselves should do their fair share in return, so that more people have the opportunity to get ahead — not just a few. 

The video ends the quote at “some people call this class warfare” — but Obama expressly denounces that label in the very next sentence.

The next quote, now familiar from dozens of similar ads and videos, is Obama saying, “If you got a business, you didn’t build that” during a Virginia speech. While the clip is an improvement on previous Republican ads that deliberately spliced together multiple lines from Obama’s remarks to radically distort his meaning, it still leaves out key context. Mainly, the sentence before and afterward — missing from the RNC video — show Obama wasn’t talking about building a business, he was talking about infrastructure like roads, bridges and the Internet that help businesses flourish. 

Finally, the RNC uses a 1998 clip of Obama at a Loyola University conference discussing his belief in “redistribution” via government programs. “I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution because I actually believe in redistribution,” the clip says.  

While this is already a fairly unremarkable point (Obama’s entire campaign is premised on asking the rich to pay more to invest in the middle class), it cuts off key parts of Obama’s actual remarks. NBC unearthed a fuller video of the event on Wednesday in which Obama details on how “redistribution” worked in the context of expanding opportunity within the free market.  

The video was released amid the Romney campaign’s protestations that a portion of a leaked Romney fundraiser tape was deceptively edited. In the passage angering Republicans, Romney sounded a pessimistic note on a two-state solution initially left out a later passage in which he expressed at least mild hopes that it might one day by achieved. Conservative commentators also have complained about a one- to two-minute gap in the middle of the 48-minute video of the entire fundraiser, which is divided into two parts. Mother Jones, which published the video, says that the person who filmed it had to restart the camera at one point and that nothing was left out due to editing. 

(snip) 

Excerpt:  Read More at Talking Points Memo

Note:  Those are my bold and red highlights in the article from TPM