Now, can we please get every other Republican to admit this obvious fact, that “voter fraud” – systematic, widespread, or even occasional, for that matter – is a bunch of b.s.? Yeah, I know, let’s not hold our breaths. Still, it’s good to see John McCain’s former senior strategist admit the obvious.

( – promoted by lowkell)

The following guest blog post is by Jessica Arons, the Director of the Women’s Health & Rights program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and a resident of Alexandria, Virginia.

I have lived in many parts of Virginia for most of my life and care deeply about the future of our Commonwealth and of our country. I know plenty of independent-minded Virginians, many who would describe themselves as socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I have heard some of those same people say they believe Mitt Romney would govern as a moderate. That is a high stakes bet that Virginians-especially women-cannot afford to make.

Gov. Romney, his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan, and the party they represent have adopted an extreme, ideological agenda that is neither socially liberal nor fiscally conservative. For instance, under their tax plan, the top donor to Mitt Romney and George Allen would personally receive a $2.3  billion tax cut, while middle class families would be asked to pick up the tab and Virginia would see a $4 billion hit in education, transportation, and other federal investments per year.

And in 2010, Republicans ran for Congress and in the states on a platform of job creation and economic recovery. But once they got into office, they used their power to attack women’s rights.  States passed 92 measures in 2011 that restrict abortion rights-a new record–and they enacted another 40 such measures so far this year. In Congress, House Republicans have taken 55 anti-woman votes in the current session.

We have already experienced a taste of what the Republican agenda looks like here at home with state Republicans trying to impose invasive vaginal ultrasounds on women before they can get an abortion and pushing through unnecessary, burdensome, and costly regulations that will force many abortion clinics to close.

Romney, Ryan, and Allen are now trying to get away with the same bait-and-switch tactics again-running on the economy but governing as zealots.

Studies show politicians tend to keep their campaign promises.  Thus the odds are if Romney is elected president, he will act to fulfill his campaign pledges, especially if George Allen and other Republicans take control of the Senate.  Romney’s pledges include appointing Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade, defunding Planned Parenthood and our nation’s family planning program, and supporting radical “personhood” measures that would outlaw abortion in all circumstances and could potentially ban common forms of birth control and in-vitro fertilization.

Perhaps even more importantly, Gov. Romney promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health reform law, “on day one” of his presidency. This would remove the promise of affordable, quality insurance coverage to the 390,600 women in Virginia who were uninsured in 2010.  It also would allow insurance companies to continue their discriminatory practices of routinely excluding coverage for gender-related pre-existing conditions such as breast cancer, a Cesarean section, domestic violence, or sexual assault; charging women higher premiums than men for the exact same benefits, increasing costs for women by $1 billion a year; and denying coverage for maternity care.  No plans in the individual market in Virginia currently cover maternity care and only 13 percent let women purchase a separate insurance rider for such coverage.

Obamacare also makes health care more affordable by guaranteeing no-cost coverage for recommended preventive services such as mammograms, Pap smears, well-baby care, contraception, gestational diabetes screening, lactation supports, and much more. As plans renew over the next year, approximately 47 million women will have access to women’s preventive services without cost-sharing under the Affordable Care Act, including nearly 1,376,205 women in Virginia.  But Romney supported and Ryan voted for legislation that would overturn this provision and allow employers to deny women coverage for contraception or any other health care need to which the boss objects.

In addition, Romney’s silence in some cases has been as telling as his pledges.  Unlike the previous Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, who has called out the more extreme rhetoric and positions in his party, Romney failed to condemn Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on contraception advocate Sandra Fluke; stood by his endorsement of Richard Mourdock, even after the Senate candidate called pregnancies resulting from rape “a gift from God”; and has refused to take a stand on equal pay for women, despite being asked his position numerous times.

Contrary to the strong evidence in his campaign record that his agenda is extreme, perhaps Romney is lying to us now and will govern as a moderate.  But that is not a gamble I’m willing to take.

The following two screenshots (Obama’s to the right, Romney’s on the “flip”) are from a lookup I did of Romney and Obama grassroots events within 25 miles of Leesburg, Virginia. The disparity in the number events is truly glaring: 79 for Obama, only 1 (one!) for Romney. Personally, I think this says a great deal about priorities: 1) Obama on the grassroots and bottom-up engagement, even in Republican-leaning areas; Romney on coming up with new lies to tell people, attending fundraisers with millionaires and billionaires (where he talks disparagingly about “the 47%” and makes other bizarre, extreme comments), and trotting out economic plans that make no sense whatsoever (hey, that takes effort! LOL).

By the way, as much as Republicans like to mock “community organizing,” the fact is that following a community model has helped the Obama campaign put events right in people’s neighborhoods, in neighbors’ homes, in a way that’s accessible to supporters just about everywhere. In stark contrast, when you look at Team Romney’s events, you see a smattering at best, with many of them having their supporters standing around and listening, rather than acting to reach out to other voters.

Why does the Romney campaign have this top-down, arrogant, controlling attitude towards its supporters? Do they assume their supporters are idiots and/or incompetent? I don’t know, but it’s striking, especially when you see how much confidence and responsibility Team Obama puts in the hands of its supporters. I’d argue this is highly reflective of their attitudes and philosophies in general (e.g., building America from the middle out/bottom up rather than “trickling down”), and yet another illustration of why we should all be voting to reelect President Obama tomorrow.

If Republicans can’t get enough old white dudes to support their extremist policies, they have to cheat by trying to prevent young & brown people from voting – and even that doesn’t work anymore.

That’s what I’ll remember most about the 2012 election. Yes, I’ll remember Mitt Romney making class warfare explicit with his 47% comment, Paul Ryan making generational warfare explicit in the vice presidential debate, Rick Santorum explaining that he’s against welfare for blah people, George Allen running a campaign that made Fred Thompson look passionate & energetic, and Scott Brown begging Elizabeth Warren to stop bringing his party into their campaign. Oh, and Mitt wanting to fire Big Bird.

But I’ll most remember how far the GOP has narrowed its field of play, as Buzzfeed visually explained. The 2012 elections have revealed just how much the GOP’s exclusionary extremism – against brown people, against women’s rights, against LGBT equal rights, against young people, against low-income families, against conservation, against cities – have narrowed Republican path to victory.  

When you hear that Mitt Romney barely scraped out a win in North Carolina while losing Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire, Iowa and likely Florida … and that a Senate that was supposed to be primed for GOP takeover is now a Democratic gain … if I was a Republican, I’d be wondering how Karl Rove’s plan for a permanent conservative majority has suddenly flipped into a minimum of eight years of playing defense.

As Duncan Black put it at Atrios, “For awhile it was ‘the heartland’ and ‘the South’ and now it’s simply ‘white dudes in the heartland and the South.'” And with that core constituency, the plan still worked! They not only won big percentages of white men, they turned them out in high numbers. The GOP’s percentage of the white vote was the highest it’s been since George H.W. Bush clobbered Mike Dukakis in 1988.

But in 2012, that’s not enough to win a national election – or even a statewide election in much of America. Look at Jon Tester pulling out a surprise win in Montana, or Bill Nelson destroying Connie Mack in Florida.

I wish I could say that I was confident today that Republicans across America are blinking their eyes, wondering how they could’ve fallen under the spell of Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh  & David Koch as they lined their own pockets and marginalized the entire party. In an ideal world, a Republican Party interested in broadening its base could return to that pragmatic past and play a critical role in hammering out solutions to some of our biggest problems – from immigration reform to climate action to easing skyrocketing student loan debt burden.

I grew up in a New England that was filled with reasonable Republicans, people like Lincoln Chafee, Bill Weld and Jim Jeffords. Having strong, sensible Republican candidates on the ballot kept Democrats honest & on their toes. (And unlike Christine O’Donnell, Richard Mourdock & Todd Akin, they actually won statewide elections.) But you know how this story ends: Chafee, Weld & Jeffords were all subsequently cast out of the GOP.

But today those same hucksters are telling Republicans that they didn’t go far right enough. It was Sandy! And the media! And the blahs! And Mitt was never one of us in the first place! And if you’ll just write a check to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or Karl Rove’s Super PAC, next time it’ll all be different. They promise.

During the current election cycle, indeed just in the last 30 weeks, there have been hundreds of Mitt Romney lies. By now, the lie count is at least in the 600s. There are so many in fact that it is difficult to argue which is the “worst lie.” Probably the meanest and dirtiest is the fraudulent claim that President Obama was responsible for Jeep shipping jobs to China. Jeep isn’t doing that. But what’s a big lie when there’s a Romney conscience involved?

One of the most clearly and demonstrably false lies in Romney’s closing argument is this: That he’ll usher in a new era of bipartisanship. Mitt likes to tell tall tales about what a great bipartisan governor he was. In fact, with no sense of irony or shame, he uses the obstructionism and extortion of the GOP members of Congress to argue that we should elect him!  Trouble is, it just isn’t so. The record shows this is not only Machiavellian, but also just plain bull.

Joshua Holland quotes one of mittt’s grandiose statements,

“And that meant I figured out from day one I had to get along and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done.”

 But as governor, Mitt Romney vetoed the Democratic legislature’s bills more than 800 times.

That is hardly the record of bipartisanship. Indeed, Mitt did not run for re-election as governor of Massachusetts because he couldn’t have won. And today the state that knows him best, and once voted him into the governor’s mansion, will not vote for him for president.

Great news from Public Policy Polling.

“Our final Virginia poll finds Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney 51-47”

“Our final Virginia Senate poll finds Tim Kaine leading George Allen 52-46”

Now, let’s finish this thing off – GOTV!

Just subsititute “Hurricane Sandy” for “the rain,” and you’ve pretty much got the GOP all-purpose excuse for why they’re going to lose on Tuesday. Anything but looking in the mirror and blaming themselves…

Gotta blame it on something

Gotta blame it on something

Blame it on the rain (rain)

Blame it on the stars (stars)

Whatever you do don’t put the blame on you

Blame it on the rain yeah yeah

You can blame it on the rain

Get

Also seems appropriate coming from Milli Vanilli, who went down in flames because of their dishonesty. Sound familiar?

From the John Douglass for Congress campaign: