“Why have you chosen to go down in history as the president who made things up?”

Keith takes George to the woodshed. Again.

Our president does an awful lot of lying. Keith noticed. Hang out long enough to hear what Tommy Franks had to say, just a few years ago.

Our greatest threats remain internal and political, not external and Islamic.

Mr. President, these new lies go to the heart of what it is that you truly wish to preserve.

It is not our freedom, nor our country — your actions against the Constitution give irrefutable proof of that.

You want to preserve a political party’s power. And obviously you’ll sell this country out, to do it.

We don’t know much about football, but this sounds pretty awesome to us

Apparently, the final play of last weekends Jets-Colts game was, um, interesting; as context, the Colts were up 31-28, and the Jets were out of field goal range:

(:08) (Shotgun) 10-C.Pennington pass short middle to 29-L.Washington to NYJ 40 for 8 yards [93-D.Freeney]. Lateral to 16-B.Smith to NYJ 37 for minus-3 yards. Lateral to 87-L.Coles to IND 44 for 19 yards. Lateral to 10-C.Pennington to IND 37 for 7 yards. Lateral to 81-J.McCareins to IND 35 for 2 yards. FUMBLES, recovered by NYJ-16-B.Smith at IND 33. 16-B.Smith to IND 37 for minus -4 yards. FUMBLES, recovered by NYJ-87-L.Coles at IND 40. 87-L.Coles to IND 27 for 13 yards. Lateral to 74-N.Mangold to IND 27 for no gain. FUMBLES, RECOVERED by IND-42- J.David at IND 34. 42-J.David to IND 39 for 5 yards (29-L.Washington).

YouTube has the video, natch. No idea how long that will last, but it’s an amazing thing. Would’ve been better if it had worked, of course.

Dept. of Taunting the Afflicted

The Killers believes it is bringing good music back. Does this sidebar copy bother anyone else?

We know that some collective nouns are treated singularly in American English (as opposed to British English, which would turn our “Enron is a bunch of jackasses” into “Enron are a bunch of jackasses”), but when a band name itself is plural, we’re pretty sure the verb needs to be plural, too. Of course, we’re not professional journalists or anything.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong

When we saw the link, we were sure it was a joke; who in their right mind would make chocolate chip pancake wrapped sausage on a stick?

The answer? Jimmy Dean, of course.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to go eat a 1-pound hamburger with some goats.

George Bush Hates The Rule of Law

From TalkingPointMemo, this excerpt from AP:

President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department’s reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.

In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.

But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency’s 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”

Basically, this means he gets to decide whether to report on DHS’s law-abiding or -breaking behavior. Or so he asserts in his extraconstitutional signing statement. More via Yahoo.

More Military Callups

But this time, The Onion is there:

Retired S1Ws Recalled to Active Duty

STRONG ISLAND, NY — With recruitment down sharply, and the prospect of being held back by the nation of millions appearing once again likely, top-ranking Public Enemy officials issued an order Monday for all retired Security Of The First World personnel to return to active duty.

“In order to come to the aid of the hip-hop nation, we must regrettably ask those men who heroically served the Black Planet to once again don their fatigues and take up their plastic arms,” S1W Chief and Public Enemy Minister Of Information Professor Griff said. “We have no more options. It’s not as though we can simply call 911. That would be a joke.”

Brilliant.

That “No-Fly” list? Still bullshit.

After 9/11, the Feds hastily assembled a “no-fly” list, which seemed like a reasonable thing at the time — but then some idiots got in control of it. Now, 5 years on, it’s clearly a bad joke. Anybody with a name on the list (i.e., who shares a name with someone on the list) is going to get hassled like crazy every single time they fly, and the list contains such unusual names as “Robert Johnson,” “Gary Smith,” and “John Williams.” Also on the list? The president of Bolivia, as well as 14 of the 9/11 hijackers who are, presumably, unlikely to be a problem again.

Guess who’s not on the list? The 11 supposed British terrorists who were under surveillance for months prior to their (impossible, can’t-possibly-work) plot’s disclosure.

The Feds, of course, don’t care:

“Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list,” says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003. She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. “They’re going to be inconvenienced every time . . . because they do have the name of a person who’s a known or suspected terrorist,” says Bucella.

That’s like something out of Brazil, honestly. This Bucella woman clearly needs some time alone with a CIA interrogator and a clue-by-four. Idiot bureaucrats can relate anything to security, so it’s highly unsurprising this dufus mentioned 9/11 in explaining why every Robert Johnson who tries to fly in the U.S. gets the third degree. How, exactly, does this serve security, Bucella? Dollars to donuts you’ve never given it any thought.

There’s more, if you have the stomach for additional evidence of our government’s malignant ignorance, here. We found the story at Metafilter.

And people wonder why we say this country is doomed

Some Bible-thumping jackass out in Conroe is trying to get Fahrenheit 451 banned from his daughter’s high school. The request came during “Banned Books Week,” to add insult to injury.

Update Looks like the Houston Community Newspaper site pulled the story, or at least let the link rot. BoingBoing also covered it, though, and included the money quote:

“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said [complaining father] Alton Verm, adding that he had not read Fahrenheit 451.

GOP flack gets pwned on MSNBC

Well done, Cliff Schecter. Some GOP talking head tried to spin the Foley situation as an isolated incident when compared to the Democrats’ corruption problems, which is just the wrong angle, and gets a serious smackdown for her trouble.

We can’t imagine what she was thinking. The whole trope of “the Dems are just as bad!” just won’t hunt when the GOP is losing seats to indictments and jail terms, with more likely to come as the Abramoff and Foley coverup investigations expand.

You have no idea how smart this motherfucker is

The Daily Show’s John Hodgman, interviewed in RadarOnline. In addition to his TDS gig and being the PC guy in the Apple spots, he’s also the author of a hilarious book, a former literary agent, and a writer for the New York Times magazine. On being a purveyor of both “truth and truthiness:”

Of course, comedy always tells the truth. That is why it’s funny. So in this way the missions are the same. Comedy may be an exaggeration of the truth, but it always resonates, sometimes painfully, in the body’s truth-recognizing mechanism (a small chamber-and-membrane structure in the skull) or else it does not produce laughter. Often, it is a truth that we do not wish to hear, or that we have been trained to be embarrassed by-comedy breaks taboos. What is unique about our life today is that The Daily Show is breaking a taboo simply by making plain, truthful, obvious observations about our existing government, its bankruptcy of competence and vision when faced with the basic jobs with which it is tasked.

Word.

New in the Blogroll

Famous pro Blogger Chris Mohney gots himself a new personal blog to replace his old one, so we’ve updated the link on the sidebar. Astute readers recognize him from his fine work at Gawker, and (long) before that his reign of terror in the electronics department of the Galleria Rich’s in Birmingham, Alabama. Oh, and there’s a funny story you should read about just exactly how he managed to get hired by Gawker Media in the first place.

Also, he’s getting married. Just saying. So if he thinks he has time to blog for money, plan a wedding, AND keep up a personal site, well, we wish him luck.

NYT on the Antiterror bill

From an editorial today:

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.

[…]

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

We are so fucking doomed.

Oh, it gets worse and worse and worse

Congressional Republicans are now pushing through a bill that would legitimize Bush’s extralegal wiretapping behavior, more or less gutting the already meager protections of FISA — which Bush ignored anyway, thereby making him a felon many times over.

As the Jackson office says, “Idiots have stolen my country. I have to go puke now. And move to Sweden.” Right there with you, buddy.

The Senate is killing Habeas Corpus as we speak

Go read. It’s worse than you think.

The Senate just killed an amendment to ensure federal courts could review the legitimacy of individual’s imprisonment on suspicion of involvement in terrorism.

Why do we need an amendment? Because the bill in question is that bad. Not that anyone noticed; it went down on party lines, with even “Maverick” McCain voting against it.

Kerry‘s had something to say about it, too:

We’ve got to tell the truth about what’s happening right now — right now — in our country. We must start treating our moral authority as a national treasure that doesn’t limit our power but magnifies our influence. That seems obvious, but this Administration still doesn’t get it. Still. Right now — today — they are trying to rush a bill through Congress that will fundamentally undermine our moral authority, put our troops at greater risk, and make our country less safe.

Let me be clear about something-something that it seems few people are willing to say. This bill permits torture. It gives the President the discretion to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions. No matter how much well-intended United States Senators would like to believe otherwise, it gives an Administration that lobbied for torture just what it wanted.

The only guarantee we have that these provisions really will prohibit torture is the word of the President. But we have seen in Iraq the consequences of simply accepting the word of this Administration. No, we cannot just accept the word of this Administration that they will not engage in torture given that everything they’ve already done and said on this most basic question has already put our troops at greater risk and undermined the very moral authority needed to win the war on terror.

Oh, and it gets worse. From the LA Times:

BURIED IN THE complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops “during an armed conflict,” it also allows him to seize anybody who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

Glenn Greenwald has more:

There is a profound and fundamental difference between an Executive engaging in shadowy acts of lawlessness and abuses of power on the one hand, and, on the other, having the American people, through their Congress, endorse, embrace and legalize that behavior out in the open, with barely a peep of real protest. Our laws reflect our values and beliefs. And our laws are about to explicitly codify one of the most dangerous and defining powers of tyranny — one of the very powers this country was founded in order to prevent.

[…]

Thomas Jefferson, in his letter to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269, said: “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” And Patrick Henry warned us well in advance about Government officials who would seek to claim the right to imprison people without a trial:

Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings–give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! …Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.

Bush will sign this bill without a thought of what he’s doing, which is, in essence, undoing 800 years of legal tradition.

If you voted for any of these GOP weasels, well, fuck you. If you’re a senator opposed to this and didn’t try to mount a filibuster, fuck you, too. And if you don’t care about this law and its implications, well, fuck you twice. We are now officially a nation of shitheads. It’s Rob’s phrase, but we believe it.

Seriously. How long do you think it’ll be before someone politically inconvenient to the current regime is disappeared? An investigative journalist? A pro-choice activist? An environmentalist? It’ll be legal, under this law — Bush can declare someone an “enemy combatant” and keep them wherever he likes. It’s a complete end run around separation of powers, and that’s precisely what this imperial President wanted.

Does the government EVER do anything useful and logical?

Starting today, Federal law restricts the sale of cold meds containing Pseudoephedrine because, apparently, sometimes people make meth out of it.

The amount of pseudoephedrine that an individual can purchase each month is limited and individuals are required to present photo identification to purchase products containing pseudoephedrine. In addition, stores are required to keep personal information about purchasers for at least two years.

Let’s consider briefly how many people that is (very few) versus how many people need those drugs for allergy season.

Also, we’re completely sure this will solve the meth problem. Not.

Jackasses.

Stewart and Olbermann on the Clinton Rebuttal

The media, of course, missed the entire point of Clinton smacking Wallace around — that being that the historical record makes abundantly clear that his administration did far more in pursuit of Islamic terrorism than Bush would have you believe, or than Bush himself did. This is no surprise.

However, Jon Stewart was paying attention, as was our national treasure Keith Olbermann, who termed his comment “A Textbook Definition of Cowardice.” Crooks and Liars has an easier-to-view video; it’s well worth your time, even if you just read the transcript in the first link. His closure we’ll include here:

The “free pass” has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush.

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us — then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.

And there it is, Mr. Bush:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

Dept. of Marching In

The New Orleans Saints returned to the Superdome tonight for the first time since Katrina with a 23-3 rout of the Atlanta Falcons; they began by going up 7-0 in the first minute and a half — as the kicking team. The Saints are now 3 and 0, and have their first Monday Night Football win since 1998. By the way, at 3-0, they’re one of the top 5 teams in the NFL at this moment (only the Colts, Bengals (!), Seahawks, and Bears can match them; the Chargers are also unbeaten, but have only played twice).

Who Dat? Who Dat?

Well Said

In our suitcase, we found the midsummer New Yorker we’d misplaced on our last trip (July 10 & 17), which kind of makes up for the lightweight nature of the current issue.

Anyhow, there’s a long rumination about the future of liberal internationalism by George Packer in which he discusses the struggle with jihadism as compared (by others) to the Cold War against expanding communism. The final few paragraphs are well worth your time:

The critical view [of l.i.] is not confined to the pacifist and anti-imperialist left. It can count among its most thoughtful and influential adherents the writer David Rieff, who a decade ago in Bosnia was a leading liberal internationalist himself. The interventions of the past ten years, culminating with Iraq, have turned Rieff into a deep skeptic of power used in the name of human rights — a self-proclaimed realist. Writing recently in The Nation, and amplifying his latest book, “At the Point of a Gun,” he suggested that “when you posit the fundamental benevolence of the liberal universalist order and identify the United States as a guarantor of that order . . . you are stuck with the prospect of a virtually untrammeled use of American power.” In other words, there is a straight and not very long line from the Atlantic Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Abu Ghraib and Haditha. Like Kurtz, those who begin as humanitarians have a way of ending as barbarians.

Rieff writes with the bitter scorn of an ex-interventionist, and he forces innocent believers to confront the most painful questions about the motives and consequences of their actions. He dislikes, above all, the moral vanity inherent in American exceptionalism — the idea, as the Bush Administration’s crucial 2002 position paper “National Security Strategy of the United States” put it, of “a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.” For Rieff, there is no union; America is just like any other empire, acting out of selfish concerns, and its moral fantasies make its power only more dangerous. Rieff is in love with disillusionment, and he was resolved the crisis in his own outlook by taking an impossibly pure position. . . For Rieff, the fact that NATO was partly designed to enhance American power means that a benign view of Truman’s foreign policy is childish. Having gazed into the dark heart of liberal internationalism and recoiled, he doesn’t allow the possibility that NATO is both a tool for America to assert its will and an arrangement that has benefitted large numbers of people, most of them non-Americans, for more than half a century.

American power, currently reviled around the world, is an inescapable fact, and when it allows itself to be harnessed to the wishes and interests of other nations, especially democratic ones, it can be a constructive force and win wider acceptance. As the German journalists Josef Joffe writes in his new book “Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America” (Norton; $24.95), “If the United States is an empire, it is a liberal one — a power that seeks not to grab but to co-opt.” This is not a narcissistic fantasy but an accurate description by a European who, unburdened by the torments of exceptionalism as few American writers of any persuasion are, can say matter-of-factly to his American friends, You have made your problems worse, you have acted recklessly and selfishly, but don’t overdo the self-criticism. Other countries naturally resent your power, but most still prefer it to the alternative. The world can’t afford these wild mood swings.

One of the greatest challenges of the new few years will be to rescue democracy, human rights, and national security from the company these words have recently kept. A clear-eyed understanding of our predicament begins with the recognition that American interests and values do not always rhyme; imagining that they do makes it more likely that in the end we’ll compromise both. [Emph. added] How can the U.S. fight jihadism without supporting dictatorships? Regime change by force has proved disastrous; elections have brought to power Islamists whose commitment to democracy is doubtful; ongoing blank checks written to Saudi princes, Pakistani generals, and a decaying dynasty in Cairo are bound to bankrupt sender and receiver alike. It’s ahrd to imagine a waning of the jihadist threat that doesn’t involve some kind of liberalization in the Muslim world, either because Islamism comes to be reformed from within or because it comes to be rejected by subject populations. (Iran, several decades ahead of the Arab countries, is where this struggle can be seen in sharpest relief.) A serious American policy towards Islamism will do well what the Bush Administration has done badly or not at all, and without triumphalist speeches: modest, informed, persistent support for reformers, without grand promises of regime change; concerted efforts at reconstruction and counter-insurgency that bring to bear the full range of government agencies as well as alliances and international institutions. Since these tasks will fall to the United States one way or another, we should learn to do them better rather than vow never to try again. large ideas drawn from historical analogies can help as guiding frameworks, but the glamorous certainties they seem to offer are illusions; we still have to think for ourselves.

TSA: Still a pack of useless morons

They’ve “relaxed” the security guidelines starting tomorrow, but insist this new position will be permanent. Guess what? It still has ZERO to do with security in the real world.

New procedures also were announced for toiletries and products like lip gloss and hand lotion that passengers bring to the airport. Previously, those liquids have been confiscated at security checkpoints. Now, these products will be limited to 3-ounce sizes and must fit in a clear, 1-quart size plastic bag. The bags will be screened and returned if they are cleared.

Does anyone who’s not a braindead government functionary actually believe TSA is an impediment to anything but hassle-free travel? Seriously? And if so, can we have some of what they’re smoking?

Chris Wallace Gets a Smackdown

The idiot son of Mike Wallace tried to ambush former President Clinton on Fox, with predictable results. Transcript, Video.

Wallace asserted they’d asked the same leading questions of Bush Administration figures, but, well, turns out he’s a lying little bitch.

Clinton was by no means perfect — no matter what else he did, for example, he’ll always be remembered for Lewinsky and his poorly considered pardons — but it sure would be nice to have somebody in public life with the ability to fight back against right-wing, neocon bullshit like this.

Update: The Rude Pundit points out an excellent bit we missed:

But let’s not let one quote pass without notice. When Wallace, armless, desperately turning his head to wipe the blood off his mouth, asked Clinton about promoting democracy in the Muslim world, the former President said, “Democracy is about way more than majority rule. Democracy is about minority rights, individual rights, restraints on power.”

Now that’s an undercut to the gut of the Bush administration.

Word.

Remember the (Original) Alamo

We don’t mean Ozzy’s ersatz urinal; we mean the kickass theater in Austin. Rents, taxes, and insurance are eating them alive, but they’ve got a plan we think you’ll like. In short, their scheme is to become a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing the kinds of film and film-related entertainment for which the Alamo Drafthouse has become justifiably famous. Check it out.

(Thanks to Mrs. Heathen for pointing this out.)

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but DAMN if we don’t hate that fish

MediaMatters dismantles Bill O’Reilly’s newest opus, “Culture Warrior.” The summary? He’s a damned liar, a fool or both.

This is just a small sampling of O’Reilly’s falsehoods, distortions, and misrepresentations. Although he has a habit of accusing people of being “cowards” when they decline to appear on The O’Reilly Factor, he refuses to have most of “the S-Ps” on his show — where they might answer some of his charges — because “it is hard to imagine a more loathsome group.” This refusal extends to Media Matters: Despite the fact that he has attacked us on the air numerous times (and in the book calls us “vile”), not only does he refuse to allow a representative from our organization to appear on his show to respond, he has never been able to cite a single instance — not one — in which we have said something about him that wasn’t true.

McCain Sells Out

Not that this is a surprise; the formerly principled Arizona republican — who is sitting in Barry Goldwater’s seat, no less — has his nose so far up GWB’s ass he can tell what he’s having for lunch. As a consequence, his supposed resistance to allowing the Bush administration to detain and torture suspects with no legal recourse or grounds has evaporated like, well, a kidnapped Canadian sent to Syria.

The “compromise” arrived at by the Senate and White House basically allows the executive branch to do as it pleases and disregard Geneva more or less at will. Habeas corpus won’t even enter into it because — you guessed it — Bush’s folks will still get to decide when that applies. We’re now the first nation on earth to legally authorize violations of the Geneva convention. Congratulations.

Coverage and analysis at Eschaton, Digby, This Modern World and American Prospect. In particular, from the latter:

There is nothing in this bill that President Thumbscrews can’t ignore. There is nothing in this bill that reins in his feckless and dangerous reinterpretation of the powers of his office. There is nothing in this bill that requires him to take it — or its congressional authors — seriously. Two weeks ago, John Yoo set down in The New York Times the precise philosophical basis on which the administration will sign this bill and then ignore it. The president will decide what a “lesser breach” of the Geneva Conventions is? How can anyone over the age of five give this president that power?

Also, from the Washington Post, quoted at Whisky Bar (go read his contrasting quote, too):

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation.

Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to U.S. courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated U.S. law against war crimes.

Cite

If you think this is a good idea, just imagine what would happen if you or someone you love ended up on the wrong side of these provisions. It does happen. That’s why we have due process, and why we have a real court system. Bush & co. seem content to dismantle all that in the name of Fightin’ Terra, but those who support him would do well to recall that governments rarely give back power once the people have ceded it. Even if you think this is a good idea now, we can guarantee we’ll see these provisions applied in ways you won’t be so happy about within a very few years.

The GOP’s “Keep In The Vote” Measures

House Republicans passed a bill yesterday that would require voters show photo ID in Federal elections despite objections from Democrats (and despite the fact that a court in Georgia has dismissed such a law as unconstitutional). Leaving aside the “papers please” implications and the fact that it amounts to a poll tax (government photo IDs aren’t free), it imposes another hurdle on a demographic traditionally outside the GOP tent.

It’s hard to escape the notion that a party seemingly bent on preserving a low-turnout electorate must not, at its core, hold truly democratic values. The GOP opposes efforts like Motor Voter, even, precisely because they make it easier for more people to vote.

Food for thought. (Via MeFi.)