Right Wing Freaks Out Over 20-Year Old "Motor Voter" Law

REMINGTON SHEPARD/Media Matters For America

Right-wing media fabricated a conspiracy that "pro-Obama groups" will be able to steer health care reform insurance applicants to register to vote as Democrats, ignoring a 1993 law that requires programs offering public assistance to include questions about voter registration.

Right-wing media outlets like The Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller and The Washington Timesreported that a draft application for health insurance through the health care reform law twice asked if an applicant wished to register to vote. They claimed that organizations who may register Americans for health insurance through health care reform may steer applicants "to register with the Democratic Party."

On Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson similarly fearmongered over "the bigger concern" for health care reform insurance applicants that "pro-Obama groups...would steer them to register as Democrats":

In fact, such voter registration questions on the draft application are required under law. A portion of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, otherwise known as the "Motor Voter Act," requires that programs that offer public assistance benefits, like the Medicaid benefits and tax credits contained in the draft health care reform insurance application, must offer voter registration:

Section 7 of the Act requires states to offer voter registration opportunities at all offices that provide public assistance and all offices that provide state-funded programs primarily engaged in providing services to persons with disabilities. Each applicant for any of these services, renewal of services, or address changes must be provided with a voter registration form of a declination form as well as assistance in completing the form and forwarding the completed application to the appropriate state or local election official.

Five Overreactions To Obama’s Fiscal Cliff Proposal

By Scott Keyes/Think Progress

Yesterday, the Obama administration unveiled its proposal to avert the looming fiscal showdown. The plan included $1.6 trillion in increased taxes on the rich over the next decade, $400 billion in savings to be found in Medicare and other social programs, $50 billion in stimulus spending to begin next year, and an end to current debt ceiling rules.

This proposal is not new. It reflects the very policies Obama not only put forth in 2011, as Kevin Drum noted, but also campaigned on extensively this year. They are the very policies that the American public voted for in November when they granted Obama another four years. Exit polling also showed that 60 percent of voters wanted to see income taxes increased for wealthy Americans.

However, these facts didn’t stop conservatives from acting as though Obama had proposed the “Kill All The Puppies Act of 2012″. Here are five overreactions to Obama’s plan:

• Worse than surrender in the Civil War: Leading conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer likened Obama’s proposal to the terms of surrender offered to Confederates in the Civil War, only the president’s deal was worse. “It’s not just a bad deal, this is really an insulting deal… Robert E. Lee was offered easier terms at Appomattox and he lost the Civil War,” said Krauthammer.
• Out of a fairytale: Writing in her Wall Street Journal column, Kimberley Strassellambasted the plan as “something out of Wonderland and Oz combined.” She went on to argue that Obama wasn’t negotiating in good faith. “The most frightening aspect of the White House proposal is that it wasn’t an error.”
• “Nothing good can come of negotiating further”: RedState editor Erick Erickson, whosecounsel congressional Republicans regularly seek, advised the GOP to pack up, go home, and take the country over the cliff. “Nothing good can come of negotiating further,” Erickson wrote. “The GOP should pass what they want and promptly go home. Let the Democrats stay and sort things out. Dive.”
• “I’d walk out”: MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, said that his Party ought to walk out of negotiations, saying Obama’s proposal was solely meant to “provoke” House Republicans. Speaking on his morning show, Scarborough detailed what his reaction would have been had he been in negotiations: “I would have said, ‘We’re all busy people, this is a critical time, if you’re going to come over here and insult us and intentionally try to provoke us, you can do that but I’m going back to work now.’ And I’d walk out.”
• “Congress should dive headlong off fiscal cliff”: After a lengthy column detailing how going over the fiscal cliff “would shock the economy,” Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson advised GOPers to “dive headlong off fiscal cliff” following Obama’s proposal. “Republicans don’t have a lot of good choices right now,” Tucker wrote. “They might as well try it.”

Jobs, Polls And Another Right-Wing Nervous Breakdown

ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters for America

Last week it was reported that the television networks and the Associated press this year will skip exit polling in 19 states. Picking states whose outcome are already considered predetermined, and therefore where polling isn't as important, the media consortium cited cost cutting as one of the key reasons behind the move. With more and more people voting early by mail (and from home), the exit pollsters have to shift their focus and spend more time and money contacting voters by phone, which is more expensive

Pretty straightforward, right?

Not this election season. Not when nearly every news cycle brings with it a new sinister conspiracy launched by the far right press, which remains desperate to explain why Obama's campaign hasn't yet completely collapsed under the weight of what they claim to be his historic domestic and international failures.

So on the same day the exit polling story was reported in the Washington Post, Breitbart.com's Big Journalismposted an item announcing that the elimination of the 19 exit polling states represented an obvious media-driven conspiracy (an "insidious plan") concocted by the "goose-stepping" networks and AP to help re-elect President Obama.

What was so evil about the cost-cutting move? Of the 19 states, 15 are red ones where Romney will win easily.

Therefore:

The real reason the consortium has cut these states is that they know that if they report fifteen states coming in for Romney early, independent voters in other states will take notice and be swayed his way.

The networks and the AP just knew that for independent voters who still hadn't voted at night on November 6, if early returns showed Romney had won Louisiana, Kentucky and Georgia, for example, that would prompt undecided voters all over the country to flock to the polls to vote for the Republican, because he'd won states he was supposed to win. (Just like they did with McCain in 2008?) Therefore, the networks and AP had to step in and cut off exit polling in key Romney states.

That's the basis for the Breitbart.com fantasy (announced as fact, of course) about how the media were conspiring yet again to aide Obama's reelection.

What's so remarkable is that that wasn't even the most delusional theory that was launched last week by the far-right press, which has transformed itself during the closing weeks of the campaign into a full-time, partisan fun house.  

As imaginative as Breitbart's exit poll scheme was, there's no way it could compete with last Friday's epic job truthers push by Fox News and the rest of the off-kilter far-right media. Without the slightest bit of evidence, Obama's media detractors suggested a truly vast conspiracy had taken hold inside the federal government in an effort to doctor the unemployment numbers and boost Obama's re-election run.

Why Obama allowed the supposedly malleable economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to run up the unemployment rate to 10 percent in 2009 when all he had to do, apparently, was demand that they fudge the books, we may never know. But the far-fetched nonsense was thoroughly embraced by Fox News andthroughout the fevered swamps.  

Last week also featured the right-wing spectacle of a media movement throwing itself into a mini convulsion because the Drudge Report and The Daily Caller and Fox News decided to randomly hype a five-year-old speech Obama gave; a speech that was widely reported on at the time. Stepping hard on the race-baiting pedal ("Barack Obama Plays Race Card Against Whitey"), the GOP Noise Machine reveled, however briefly, in the fantasy that millions of voters would finally view Obama the way they have for four years, as a vengeful race hustler.

All of this comes in the immediate wake of the skewed polling nonsense, in which Obama's foes convinced themselves that basically all election polls were deliberately and improperly weighted in order to boost Obama's chances by projecting the false perception he was pulling ahead of Romney. In fact, they claimed, pollsters, like BLS economists, were purposefully skewing the numbers in order to suppress Romney's chances. Theory: If enough phony, skewed polls showed Romney trailing, fewer Republicans would bother to vote on Election Day.

For a movement that has spent four years sporadically clinging to the completely discredit claim that Obama wasn't born in America, this type of farcical behavior probably should not come as a surprise. And yet, lots of jaws dropped late last week when supposedly serious people (or at least people who take themselves seriously on TV), claimed an insidious plot of collusion had driven the unemployment rate down. ("Madness" was how New York Times columnist Paul Krugman described it.) This, just weeks after announcing all polls that showed Romney trailing the president were bogus and needed to be ignored.

I mean, who does that?

The bigger question is why is there a need for such elaborate schemes and conspiracies. Every four years a losing side emerges in the president campaign, but that losing side has never taken it upon itself to just make stuff up, connect invisible dots, and in general act like paranoid maniacs in effort to explain away their frustration.

The right-wing press, locked inside its airtight bubble, remains incapable of introspection or self-doubt. Instead,denial reigns.

That's because many of the media players who insist pollsters are working in tandem with the White House to juice Obama's numbers, or that the nation's unemployment rate is now fabricated, are the same ones who have spent the last four years deriding Obama's presidency as an unmitigated disaster. But if Obama remains in good position to win re-election, what does that tell us about the hysterical anti-Obama cries that have filled the air since 2009?

Unwilling to face those uncomfortable truths, the Fox-led brigade just keeps manufacturing one truly unbelievable explanation after another. (Pollsters are preemptively suppressing the vote!) Who knows what kind of absurd claims will be made during next four weeks of the campaign.

One thing is for sure though, this is what a collective nervous breakdown looks like.