Teabaggers Accused Of Rigging "Dancing" Vote To Favor Bristol Palin

Flaws Exposed In ABC Network's Email Voting System; GOP Extremists Provide Preview Of 2012

Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol dances with "Mama Grizzly" (artist's concept)

John Leyden reports in The Register:
Flaws in the email voting system deployed by ABC for the talent show Dancing With the Stars are being credited with allowing Tea Party supporters to stuff the ballot in favour of Bristol Palin.

Palin junior and partner Mark Ballas qualified for Monday's final of the show despite consistently mediocre marks from expert judges that have been overturned by public support. Conservative Tea Party activists are apparently using a loophole in ABC's email voting system to submit multiple votes for Bristol, daughter of former Alaskan governor and possible Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

MSNBC reports that activists are using sites such as the HillBuzz blog to co-ordinate a campaign that relies on a failure in ABC's systems to validate whether an email address submitting a vote is real or not. Activists reckon keeping Bristol on the show helps to promote the Tea Party, or at least keep it in the public eye with free exposure on national TV.

Dancing With the Stars executive producer, Conrad Green, told the New York Daily News that multiple email votes from the same IP address would be annulled. Whether this and the use of cookies is enough to prevent election fraud seems questionable. ABC is reportedly considering changing the voting system, placing more weight on the opinion of the judges, for Monday's final.

Texas Teabagger Apparatchik Rick Perry Gung-Ho To Invade Mexico

Hey, we're totally into sending the state militia on a cross-border raid into Mexico -- and watching them being slaughtered and beheaded by the Zetas! Yeeee-hahhh!

Peggy Fikac reports in the San Antonio Express-News:
AUSTIN — GOP Gov. Rick Perry, who continues to insist he's not interested in the presidency, is nevertheless always ready to tell the federal government how to do a better job on such matters as border security — including indicating the U.S. should be open to sending military into Mexico to help fight the drug war.

Appearing on MSNBC on Thursday, Perry was asked, “Would you advocate military involvement in Mexico on the Mexico side of the border to help Mexico in this drug war?”

Perry answered: “I think we have to use every aspect of law enforcement that we have, including the military. I think you have the same situation as you had in Colombia. Obviously, Mexico has to approve any type of assistance that we can give them.

“But the fact of the matter is, these are people who are highly motivated with money. They are vicious. They are armed to the teeth. I want to see them defeated. And any means that we can to run these people off our border and to save Americans' lives we need to be engaged in.”

Perry has long called for more federally paid National Guard troops on the border and has cited the state's efforts to try to fill the void caused by what he describes as the failed federal effort on border security.

Thursday's answer reflected a difference in tone, though not in substance, from one he gave in an interview this summer with the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle, when he was asked whether the U.S. should consider sending the military into Mexico as it did in 1916 after border violence... >more

James "Pimp" O'Keefe Hurting People Again...

...and the Governor of New Jersey loves it

(at left: Passaic, NJ Special Ed teacher Alissa Ploshnick, James O'Keefe's latest target for personal destruction.)

Daryle Jenkins writes at One People's Project:

Okay, it's official. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is an utter and complete fool. We thought that when seasoned conservative propagandists like L. Brent Bozell started to kick amateur conservative propagandist James O'Keefe to the curb after his discredited stunts, a standing governor would be that last person to heap praise on him for one of them. And we most certainly would not expect the subject of such stunts to end up being punished for them. But here we are again. A few weeks ago, O'Keefe, still smarting from the failed stunt to smear a CNN reporter, went to a convention for the New Jeresy Education Association, the teacher's union that has been at war with Gov. Christie after he declared it on them. One of his underlings talked up (or rather hit on) a teacher there named Alissa Ploshnick to get her to open up enough to say something that they could use later in the latest of O'Keefe's doctored videos. Now at the time, NJEA officials said they weren't going to do anything because O'Keefe had no credibility to be concerned about, but Ms. Ploshnick, a special education teacher in Passaic, NJ, was suspended for nine days and will be docked a pay raise because of what he and his boy produced. But once again, O'Keefe might be in hot water. See, not only is Ms. Ploshnick considering a lawsuit against O'Keefe and his crew for their stunts, but apparently he has been caught hanging out around her house as well. Now if he gets in trouble for harassing this teacher, that's a probation violation, and he won't be videotaping anyone for awhile. The thing is, that should not be the only thing that makes him go away. Truth of the matter is no one should have any dealings with him, and definitely don't take actions based on his videos. ...>more

Pimp Hard, Libertard, Pimp Hard!

In which Reason editor Matt Welch grabs an anti-Koch conspiracy theory in his teeth and runs with it like a big dog

Matt Welch writes at Reason:

Back in 2008, if you pressed a libertarian planning to vote for Barack Obama, chances are he’d yelp out the name Austan Goolsbee. The Libertarians for Obama website (which, appropriately, shut down after November 2008), claimed “Obama’s chief economic adviser—a friend from the University of Chicago, where they both taught—sounds an awful lot like a libertarian.” The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle repeatedly pinned her preference for the Democrat on his closeness with Goolsbee, “one of my favorite professors, and a hell of an economist.” The libertarian economist David Friedman cited Goolsbee when musing to the San Francisco Chronicle that Obama might end up emulating the liberals who launched New Zealand’s wildly successful deregulation project in the 1980s.

Two years later there probably isn’t a libertarian-leaning person on earth who still thinks Obama has it in him to pull a Nixon-goes-to-China when it comes to downsizing government. The president has followed up George W. Bush’s big-government disaster with a big-government catastrophe, setting consecutive annual records for spending, deficits, and debt while extending the pernicious too-big-to-fail doctrine all the way to the auto parts business. And every day on the hustings in advance of the Democrats’ midterm drubbing, Obama campaigned against a wholly fictional Bush record of deregulation and spending cuts.

“Between 2001 and 2009,” the president falsely claimed in September, “a very specific philosophy reigned in Washington: You cut taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires; you cut regulations for special interests; you cut back on investments in education and clean energy, in research and technology. The idea was if we put blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everybody to fend for themselves, America would grow and America would prosper.” As any good 2008 libertarian for Obama could tell you, that description does not square with Bush’s record of jacking up federal education spending by 58 percent in real terms, increasing significant regulations and regulatory spending at rates not seen since Richard Nixon, and boosting discretionary spending more than any president since Lyndon Johnson.

And what about our University of Chicago hero Austan Goolsbee? In September he became chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Just before the appointment, Goolsbee gave a background briefing to reporters on behalf of the administration in which he trashed the most influential donors the libertarian universe has ever seen: Charles and David Koch, funders of the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, and much more. (David Koch sits on the Reason Foundation’s Board of Trustees.)...

...>more (if you can stand it)