FOR REPUBLICANS, THE (DIRTY) CAMPAIGN DOESN'T END TODAY, OR EVER

What the hell?

Jon Husted doing the cable "full ginsberg" this week.

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) November 6, 2012

Gee, thanks, mainstream media -- Ohio's Republican secretary of state, who's been monomaniacally focused on vote suppression of late, offered himself to every major Sunday morning talk show for next weekend, clearly in order to portray Republicans as the real victims of vote shenanigans (you know, the way many domestic abusers call the cops and say they're being abused) -- and the networks are perfectly happy to grant him the opportunity to do this.

And you thought the campaign would be over today. For Republicans, campaigns are never over. There are no beginnings and ends; there's just a permanent campaign to defeat and demonize Democrats. Democrats may take a breather after the votes are counted. For Republicans, the battle goes on.

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Husted is from Ohio, but it occurs to me that the Romney campaign's recent focus on Pennsylvania may be only partly an attempt to win the state -- it may also be part of the effort to win the post-election period. Right-wingers have been obsessed with Pennsylvania today. You've probably seen the ridiculous video of a supposedly intimidating black man in a beret actually holding open a door for a woman at a Philadelphia polling place:





(Yeah, I guess he is one of the New Black Panthers. I thought maybe he was an actor hired by Team Romney.)

The right is complaining about this and about an Obama mural at a polling place in Philadelphia (yeah, I think it should be covered up, though if you find that so intimidating you can't bring yourself to vote for Romney, it's a wonder you ever have the courage to leave the house). And the right says GOP poll watchers are being kicked out of polling places (there are claims on the Democratic side that GOP poll watchers are targeting black precincts). And on and on.

Was the point of Romney's late foray into Pennsylvania to set up GOP voting-irregularity arguments as much as it was to actually try to win the state? Hard to say. For the GOP, of course, there's no clear point at which an electoral campaign ends and a demonization campaign begins -- or resumes.

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FORGOT TO MENTION THIS: From the Breitbartniks:

The Community Voters Project is a "non-partisan" lefty organization whose mission is to register people to vote, with a particular emphasis on minorities. In the 2008 election, they had offices in 10 states and registered around 300,000 minority voters. So far, so good. This year, however, it seems they aren't registering everyone who wants to vote. Outside a CVP office in Philadelphia, for example, they shredded and threw away numerous registration forms. A number of these were for people trying to register as a Republican.

A citizen-journalist came across a large bag of trash outside the CVP office in Philadelphia. Glancing at it, the citizen saw what looked like shredded registration forms. The pictures in this post are from CVP's trash. The photo above clearly shows that the voter who submitted the shredded registration form was registering as a Republican.

Um, couldn't any idiot who had access to the appropriate voter registration form, or a picture of one off the Internet, just print up a bunch, make them look like GOP registrations, shred them, and photograph them? Sorry, not buying this.