Here's the trailer from the documentary Running on the Sun (2000) about Badwater:

I have long wondered why the Democrats haven't seemed to take this seriously. It's been happening in slow motion, but it's been happening in plain sight. [...]

It's not that I care so much that the Democrats win. But I really care that Americans are allowed to vote and have their votes counted and I expect that most people care about that too. In this regard there is a big difference between the two parties: the Republicans have organized around suppressing the vote while the Democrats have organized around expanding it. The problem, as usual, is that the Democrats haven't been nearly as good at it. [...]

One would have thought the 2000 election would have been enough to energize them to protect the franchise, but it clearly wasn't. Let's hope it doesn't take another stolen election to convince them.

You can photo-shop a Hitler mustache on Obama, and pretend that you're fighting totalitarianism, if you want. But here's what a real live Nazi looks like; and he's an elected Republican official:

You know, we've had to listen to a lot of nonsense about President Obama and Dems being Nazis, for quite a while now. Granted, many of Obama's critics call him a Muslim, Socialist and Communist, all seemingly without the vaguest notion of what those terms mean. But I've often thought there was something extra buried in the Nazi accusation; and it's called 'projection.'

Projection is the act of attributing feelings or beliefs you possess, but cannot admit to, onto others. It's usually known as an unconscious action, but if engaged purposely in a political climate, it can be a very effective tool.

Steve Smith: Republican Tool.

...namely, striking the ground with the fore foot, not the heel. Watch a video of a toddler running and you'll see they do this naturally. It's only when we start wearing thick-soled, heavier shoes that we re-program ourselves to run differently; heel striking has been linked to knee, hip, and lower back pain.

A commenter wrote that kids should play barefoot to prevent flat feet, mentioning the study "The Influence of Footwear on the Prevalence of Flat Feet" (PDF) from the British Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery:

The distinctly higher incidence [of flat feet] in children who used footwear suggests that shoe-wearing predisposes to flat foot.

Our cross-sectional study suggests that shoe-wearing in early childhood is detrimental to the development of a normal or a high medial longitudinal arch. [...] We suggest that children should be encouraged to play unshod and that slippers and sandals are less harmful than closed-toed shoes.

When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can't or won't. By all means, let's balance our budget once the economy has recovered -- but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.

He notes that "the austerity drive in Britain isn't really about debt and deficits at all; it's about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs:"

And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.

In fairness to Britain's conservatives, they aren't quite as crude as their American counterparts. They don't rail against the evils of deficits in one breath, then demand huge tax cuts for the wealthy in the next (although the Cameron government has, in fact, significantly cut the top tax rate). And, in general, they seem less determined than America's right to aid the rich and punish the poor. Still, the direction of policy is the same -- and so is the fundamental insincerity of the calls for austerity.

The big question here is whether the evident failure of austerity to produce an economic recovery will lead to a "Plan B." Maybe. But my guess is that even if such a plan is announced, it won't amount to much. For economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it. And it still is.

It is, largely because it fires up conservatives and diminishes the punch of legitimate investigative or narrative journalism. But it also is because it often rings true, even to people who don't listen to Rush Limbaugh...

Not that it is true, mind you--just that it supports their persecution complex. At American Prospect, Paul Waldman points out that working the refs continues to work for the Right:

VandeHei and Allen's article is a masterpiece of unsupported claims, false equivalences, speculations about what news stories "imply," and Republican complaints taken not as complaints but as truths. [...]

Let's examine this, shall we? The bias charge, they say, "often rings true." But is it true? Well, that's a complex question, so why bother trying to answer it at all? It feels true, so that's good enough. The "imbalance" in coverage, which has been alleged by Republicans but we don't know is actually true, is nevertheless doing "unmistakable damage to Romney." Really? Any evidence for that? Nah, but it sure feels true.

Media Matters explains what 'liberal bias' claims are really about, snarking "Republicans? Alleging liberal media bias? Pardon me while I find some pearls to clutch:"

The conceit behind this whole affair is that Haley Barbour and Ari Fleischer told Allen and VandeHei that "liberal bias" is real and it's devastating, and Allen and Vandehei believe them...

People who level the "bias" charge aren't looking for balance. They're not interested in journalistic good practices and they certainly don't give a damn where a story appears in the Washington Post. They're looking to game the refs.

It's all about discouraging journalists from turning a critical eye on Republicans and conservatives, lest they be tarred with the "liberal bias" epithet.

Salon calls the Politico article a "deeply stupid piece" that "could be the latest installment of Breitbart's whiny, posthumous 'Nobody Vetted Obama So We Have to Do It, By Printing Stuff We Know is False!' investigative series." It's useful to remind ourselves that these same "liberal media" outlets haven't given Obama a week of positive coverage in almost a year (h/t: Eric Boehlert), as the conservative "cottage industry" of media grievance "that pays the bills for talk radio, fills endless hours of commentary on Fox News, and produces content for right-wing authors" remains dominant. Pew studied the media from January to early April this year, concluding the following:

Of all the presidential candidates studied in this report, only one figure did not have a single week in 2012 when positive coverage exceeded negative coverage--the incumbent, Democrat Barack Obama. [...]

While Republicans have jockeyed for their party's nomination for the last year, the Democratic president has been hammered with negative press coverage. And it's coverage whose harsh tone has been matched only by its week-in and week-out consistency.

Behold the liberal media.

update (6/1):
James Fallows examines Pew's research into press coverage of Obama and Romney, noting that "At no time in the past year has coverage of President Obama been as positive as that of Governor Romney:"

Indeed, at no time in the past year has it been on-balance positive at all.

You can argue that negative coverage of the administration is justified. You can argue that incumbents are -- and should be -- held to a tougher standard, since they have a record to defend. But you can't sanely argue that the press is in the tank for Obama, notwithstanding recent "false equivalence" attempts to do so.

In trying only to achieve a free and open civilization based on facts and on reason, as reward for our efforts we are attacked by those on both the left and the right and smeared with the label "intolerant" or told that sharing our ideas amounts to nothing more than "proselytizing." [...]

Atheist opposition to religion doesn't stem from some deep-seated bias or unconsidered opinion. It's not derived from some ancient book immune to rational criticism. Modern atheism is built upon critical thinking and knowledge of objective scientific facts about the workings of the universe coupled with an unblinking awareness of the countless, clearly documented instances--both in the news and throughout history--in which religious believers have repeatedly sought to impose their own narrow ideology in ways that restrict other people's rights and limit their freedoms. [...]

When you think about it, this charge of intolerance against atheists is itself a form of intolerance, for if atheists are not allowed to expressly dispute the claims made by religion--if we are required to just sit there politely with our mouths shut while twiddling our thumbs--then essentially we are not allowed to exist.

Just like in previous eras--the ones about which they reminisce so longingly.

This issue goes to the heart of fairness in our country. There has been much discussion recently about economic inequality, but almost no conversation about the way the spread of markets nurtures a broader, systemic inequality.

Market fundamentalism, Kristof observes, "is gaining ground:"

It's related to the glorification of wealth over the last couple of decades, to the celebration of opulence, and to the emergence of a new aristocracy. Market fundamentalists assume a measure of social Darwinism and accept that laissez-faire is always optimal.

That's the dogma that helped lead to bank deregulation and the current economic mess. And anyone who honestly believes that low taxes and unfettered free markets are always best should consider moving to Pakistan's tribal areas. They are a triumph of limited government, negligible taxes, no "burdensome regulation" and free markets for everything from drugs to AK-47s.

If you're infatuated with unfettered free markets, just visit Waziristan.

Paul Waldman brings the sarcasm in it's hard out there for a billionaire,

America's barons feel assaulted, victimized, wounded in ways that not even a bracing ride to your Hamptons estate in your new Porsche 911 can salve. And now that the presidential campaign is in full swing, their tender feelings are being hurt left and right.

Pyramid-scheme tycoon Frank Vandersloot is the national finance co-chair of Romney's campaign (to which he donated $1 million), but he whines that the Obama campaign's mention of this fact is equivalent to being placed on an "enemies list:"

What VanderSloot obviously wants is a situation in which he can put millions of dollars into influencing the course of elections and policy debates, but nobody ever criticizes him for it. Well, that's just not how things work in a democracy.

The Dartmouth study analyzed multiple works by 537 authors who wrote English language texts published since 1550. Comparing them to each other, they found, not surprisingly, that authors from a given historical period have more in common with each other stylistically than they do with authors from the past (or future). They also found that the more recent a work is, the more "localized" its stylistic brethren are in time. [...]

Where the Dartmouth article makes a big leap, however, is in claiming that contemporary authors are less "influenced" by authors of the past than they are by those of their own time. Furthermore, they propose a reason: The explosion in the number of published books in the past century or so. Titles by contemporary authors are in the (vast) majority. By this logic, with "even more authors to choose from and selection dominated by contemporaneous authors," writers, like everyone else, are less likely to read the classics.

Then the author moves in for the kill:

There are so many wobbly assumptions built into these interpretations that they could be used as an illustration of the dangers of empirical hubris: Having a lot of numbers and equations is not the same as knowing what they mean, especially in such a complex and meaning-rich field as literature.

He is appalled that despite ample evidence of disastrous decisions and large-scale lawbreaking, much of it outlined in his film and his book, not a single person has gone to jail for a fiasco that has wiped out a good deal of the hard-working American middle-class' resources.

And he holds Barack Obama responsible, considering him a huge disappointment in his first term.

Funded by the GOP's 'geezer empire' of billionaires, the far right is using the lackluster economic recovery to justify a great leap backward:

Beyond the usual GOP jeremiads--cutting taxes and government spending, shredding safety nets, eviscerating federal regulation and privatizing whatever remains--many of the GOP's biggest moneymen have specific issues and goals, often business-related, and would expect a Romney presidency to advance those agendas.

Among the goals of "this posse of unbelievably wealthy white men who have written million-dollar checks to GOP super PACs and non-profits in 2012" are pushing fracking, promoting unconstrained financial speculation, repealing Dodd-Frank, weakening Sarbanes-Oxley, eviscerating consumer protections, and supporting Israeli extremists:

The GOP's billionaire donors--all white, wealthy men and patriarchs heading their own empires--have a lot in common. They know no rules other than doing whatever it takes to win. They don't take no for an answer. They keep at it until they get what they want. And they see Mitt Romney as a kindred spirit who shares their values and will get the federal government to step in, or step aside, to help them secure their next fortune.

Democrats shouldn't continue compromising with them.