Pennsylvania

With Election Day fast approaching, tens of millions of dollars from corporations flooding the airwaves each week and seemingly endless news stories about apathy in the Democratic base, right-wing candidates are getting more brazen -- advancing ever more extreme positions and spreading outright lies.

Sharron Angle, the Republican running to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada, told a crowd that Dearborn, Michigan and a town named Frankford, Texas are under Islamic Sharia Law. Utter nonsense. The statement earned her a strong rebuke from the Mayor of Dearborn and it turns out that Frankford, TX doesn't even exist!

Rand Paul, running for Senate in Kentucky, now supports ending the income tax in favor of a more regressive national sales tax that would hit the poor and middle class far more harshly than the income tax. After saying a few months back that he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and making controversial statements about mining and the BP oil spill, Paul's handlers have tried hard to keep his extremism under wraps. But for someone as "out there" as Rand Paul, that's hard to do for very long.

In a debate on Wednesday night, Tea Party favorite and Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, Christine O'Donnell, perpetuating an attack that has been thoroughly discredited, accused her Democratic opponent Chris Coons of being a Marxist, based on Coons' tongue-in-cheek comment in an article he wrote as a student. On a roll, O'Donnell launched into a rant that included attacks on Coons for things he never said and completely fabricated declarations about the "tenets" of Marxism.

These are just some of this week's salvos from the right-wing Rogue's Gallery of Senate candidates -- let's not forget some of the past gems from Tea Party candidates. Sen. Russ Feingold's opponent in Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, is such an extreme pro-corporate ideologue that he tries to push the notion that global warming is caused by sunspots in order to cover for corporate polluters... he also wants to drill for oil in the Great Lakes and even fought against protections for victims of child abuse on the grounds that it would be bad for business.

But the worst of the bunch has to be Colorado's GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck. When he was a county D.A., he refused to prosecute a rape that the accused essentially admitted he had committed. Instead, Buck chose to blame the victim, calling her charges a case of "buyer's remorse." Perhaps most disturbingly, it appears his statement and inaction might have been retribution for what some claimed was an abortion the victim had a year before (despite the victim's claim that she had a miscarriage). Keep in mind this is a man who is against legal abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, and apparently agrees with Sharron Angle that rape victims who become pregnant as a result of their assault should make "lemonade" out of "what was really a lemon situation."

If this weren't enough, this week an interview from March reemerged in which the "get rid of government no matter what the cost" Buck actually came out in favor of privatizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention! Imagine the CDC privatized -- the profit motive being the sole determination for whether the Center might act to save millions of lives... or let millions suffer or even die.

This is what extremism looks like. These could be the new people making our laws.

But it's not too late. We can Stamp Out Extremism. Please, this election, dig deep, speak out and get involved.

The latest poll numbers have progressive Democrat Joe Sestak ahead of pro-corporate extremist Pat Toomey in the Pennsylvania Senate race for the first time... Colorado is a very tight race and our endorsed candidate Michael Bennet is in position to defeat Buck with enough of our help... the progressive Senate candidate in Kentucky, Jack Conway, is running very close and could actually beat Republican Rand Paul because of his extremism... and we are fighting tooth-and-nail to keep Russ Feingold in the Senate and stop the radically right-wing Ron Johnson. We are in the process right now of producing ads for all of these states and more, and finalizing our field plan to get out the vote.

Please stay tuned for more on those products and activities, and, in the meantime, help spread around our resources, like our "Rogues Gallery" report, which calls out the GOP's extremist Senate candidates, and our "After Citizens United" report, which exposes the corporate front groups that are trying to buy this election for the Republicans.

UPDATE: Jed Lewison at Kos highlights right-wing candidates attacks on the miminum wage:

As Joan McCarter (here, here, and here) and DemFromCT (here) have documented, in the past few weeks leading Republican candidates have come out against the minimum wage, either calling for it to be lowered or for eliminating it altogether because they think it's unconstitutional. And now West Virginia GOP Senate nominee Joe Raese is once again vowing to repeal the Fair Labor Standards Act which established the minimum wage.

The key thing about the GOP position is that it's not just the minimum wage that they want to get rid of. They want to nuke virtually every law and regulation that protects workers. And that includes another provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act: overtime pay.

UPDATE 2: Tea Party House candidate in California's 11th Congressional District, David Harmer, wants to abolish public schools. Sharron Angle and others want to do away with the Department of Education, but Harmer's position could be an even more extreme attack on public education. Harmer is leading progressive incumbent Rep. Jerry McNerney in the polls...

American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the sister conservative organizations that hope to raise $52 million in order to defeat Democratic candidates in 2010, is already close to spending a combined $20 million in ads. After spending an initial $14 million in ads to boost the GOP’s chances at taking control of the Senate, Crossroads is ready to spend an additional $4.2 million for ads in Senate races in Colorado, Nevada, Washington, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Florida. Now, Mike Allen of Politico reports that the two groups will begin running ads in competitive House races shortly.

Crossroads GPS, the leading outside group airing ads in Senate races, does not have to disclose its donors since it is a 501(c)4 “social welfare” organization. But as a 501(c)4, it is supposed to focus on “issue advocacy” rather than deliberately urge voters to support or oppose specific candidates for office. Now, the heads of Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center have asked the IRS to look into the group’s status, maintaining that Crossroads GPS “was organized to participate and intervene in the 2010 congressional races while providing donors to the organization with a safe haven for hiding their role.” J. Gerald Hebert of the Campaign Legal Center explains:

While the abuses of 501(c)(4) tax designation for no-fingerprint political attack ads seems rampant in this election cycle, the most blatant certainly appears to be Crossroads GPS. The group makes almost no effort at all to hide the fact that it was created principally to impact the 2010 elections, and to take money from those interested in contributing to their efforts but doing so anonymously. The IRS has a duty to ensure that groups are not violating their tax status in this election cycle, and Crossroads GPS certainly seems like a logical place to start.

Hazleton, Pennsylvania in many ways pioneered the trend of sweeping, discriminatory, and impractical state and local immigration enforcement laws.

And, like the recent Arizona law that followed in its ideological footsteps, Hazleton’s law requiring businesses and landlords to act as immigration enforcement officials hasn’t been too popular with the courts.

Today, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the large part of a lower court ruling that struck down the law, holding that Hazleton was interfering with the federal government’s exclusive responsibility to enforce immigration laws.

In July, a federal judge blocked portions of Arizona’s new draconian anti-immigrant law from taking effect because of similar concerns about the state government trying to take on the federal government’s role.

The question of whose jurisdiction immigration enforcement practices fall under isn’t purely technical. The 3rd Circuit decision offered up the example [PDF] of Hazleton’s requirement that landlords check the immigration status of tenants before renting to them:

Although the federal government does not intend for aliens here unlawfully to be harbored, it has never evidenced an intent for them to go homeless…Common sense, of course, suggests that Hazleton has absolutely no interest in reducing aliens without legal status to homelessness either. No municipality would benefit from forcing any group of residents (“legal” or “illegal”) onto its streets. Rather, it appears plain that the purpose of these housing provisions is to ensure that aliens lacking legal immigration status reside somewhere other than Hazleton. It is this power to effectively prohibit residency based on immigration status that is so clearly within the exclusive domain of the federal government.

Laws like Hazleton’s and Arizona’s make those places as hostile as possible to immigrants both legal and illegal—their ultimate goal isn’t to solve the nation’s immigration challenge, but to be able to ignore
 

If Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and Florida go decisively for Obama, those of us on the east coast may have a pretty good idea of who the next president will be and still get a good night’s sleep.

But there’s at least one contest that’s certainly worth waiting up for – the fight to defeat Prop 8 in California, which would amend the state constitution to prohibit same-sex couples from getting married. The polls don’t close until 11 p.m. eastern time, and the results probably won’t be known until well after that.

While you’re waiting up, you can use the time to read Andrew Sullivan’s short, lovely piece on his own nuptials and what they say about the institution of marriage in America.

The wedding occurred last August in Massachusetts in front of a small group of family and close friends. And in that group, I suddenly realized, it was the heterosexuals who knew what to do, who guided the gay couple and our friends into the rituals and rites of family. Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.