(MSNBC) As libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul looks for a state he can win, some of his supporters have turned to a new theme: voting fraud.

A Super PAC supporting Paul has pledged to monitor the vote in all the remaining states, using an army of exit pollsters to fight what it calls results that are “outrageous, unacceptable and patently un-American.” The group, called Revolution PAC, has spent half a million dollars supporting Paul with videos, webcasts, online ads, direct mail, billboards and radio ads in primary and caucus states.

The leader of the group, its founder, chairman and treasurer, is Gary Franchi, a promoter of conspiracy theories and sophisticated social-media entrepreneur in the resurgent movement known as the Patriots.

Some of what MSNBC writes about is

Franchi has supported the 9/11 Truth Movement, which supports the idea that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, werean inside job to create a pretext for a reduction in American liberty, or at least involved a cover-up, with the World Trade Center brought down by a planned U.S. demolition, instead of terrorist-controlled airplanes. Franchi founded the Lone Lantern Society (a reference to Paul Revere indicating that foreign enemies are on American soil). The group supports “the birth of freedom and the death of the New World Order,” a secretive elite that is supposedly trying to set up a world government. Lone Lantern has held street demonstrations on the 11th of every month in Chicago and elsewhere, demanding an investigation of 9/11. In New Hampshire in 2008, a video shows Franchi asking Tom Ridge, the former secretary of Homeland Security, who was campaigning for Sen. John McCain, whether Ridge would support an investigation of the “controlled demolition” of the World Trade Center. Ridge was having none of it, saying, “I just don’t buy into that. That’s a conspiracy theory that has no basis in fact. It’s almost out of the Twilight Zone.”

Obviously, Revolution PAC is an outside group which can support who they want. But, Paul could finally come out and say “I do not support the 9/11 Truth movement, they’re out of their minds. He won’t. He seems to enjoy hanging with Truthers/conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, and going on their radio programs.

Like Ron Paul, Franchi has a few good ideas, then turns them up to Ludicrous Speed, perhaps even going plaid. Ron Paul has won none of the beauty contests, er, primaries/caucuses, and will, mostly likely, win none in the future. He has a great core group, but no broader appeal, especially when people find out about his background.

(LA Times) A federal judge appeared dubious Monday about a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that seeks the release of orcas from SeaWorld on anti-slavery grounds.

PETA attorney Jeffrey Kerr told U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller that invoking the anti-slavery 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in hopes of freeing the orcas is “the next frontier of civil rights.”

But Miller told Kerr that he cannot find a legal precedent for allowing a lawsuit to be filed on behalf of the orcas under the 13th Amendment. The orcas, he noted, are animals, not people.

Judge Miller said he will consider the request by Sea World to dismiss this absurd and frivilous lawsuit, but gave no timeline for his decision. Over to the BBC

Five killer whales have been named as plaintiffs in a lawsuit which argues they deserve the same constitutional protection from slavery as humans.

Jeffrey Kerr, the lawyer representing the five whales, said: “For the first time in our nation’s history, a federal court heard arguments as to whether living, breathing, feeling beings have rights and can be enslaved simply because they happen to not have been born human.

“By any definition these orcas have been enslaved here.”

No mention as to whether Judge Miller took frequent breaks to go back in his chambers and laugh his head off.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Washington Times) Fighting to curry favor with Florida’s large pool of Hispanic voters, Newt Gingrich on Wednesday called for a guest-worker program for most illegal immigrants, but his campaign could not say whether those people would be on a path to citizenship – the key question in the immigration debate.

Under close questioning by Univision’s political host, Jorge Ramos, Mr. Gingrich said he would grant quick citizenship rights to illegal immigrants who join the military or to those who have been in the U.S. between 20 and 25 years. He said the rest of the estimated 11 million should be given access to a guest-worker program.

“With most of them? I would urge them to get a guest-worker permit,” he said, calling for a substantial rewrite of immigration laws that would cancel existing penalties and instead let illegal immigrants stay.

But his campaign said it was unclear whether at the end of that guest-worker period the immigrants would be allowed to stay and gain citizenship, essentially jumping the legal immigration line, or whether they would be required to return home.

On one hand, Gingrich is correct in that he previously said that it is unrealistic to deport every illegal, nor stop them fully from coming, and, yes, we could show some compassion to those who came to this country and attempted to be a part of America and do things like joining the military. It’s not like people didn’t just come to America in the past, without any sort of immigration programs and such. If someone is putting their life on the line to join the military to protect America, perhaps some accommodations could be made.

On the other hand, why pander to Hispanics who can’t vote because they are here illegally? Why pander to Hispanics who are here legally, but still can’t vote because they aren’t citizens? And a good chunk of Hispanics who are legal citizens tend to get a little ticked off when politicians want to give illegals who did it wrong a pathway to citizenship when they themselves followed the onerous and burdensome rules.

Do we want guest workers? Yes, we do. But it is a bad idea to suddenly give people who came to this country illegally guest worker visas after doing the illegal thing with no penalties. Let them leave the country and apply for a worker program that should be expanded. What Gingrich is doing is telling people who are thinking of coming to America illegally to just come on in, no problem, we’ll take care of you. He might want to rethink this line of thought.

“We’re not going to do repeal. You’re not going to repeal Obamacare… It’s not a total repeal… You will not repeal the act in its entirety, but you will see major changes, particularly if there is a Republican president… You can’t whole-cloth throw it out. But you can substantially change what’s been done.”

Erick Erickson:

If a Republican gets into the White House and does not sweat blood trying to repeal Obamacare in its entirety, I predict the end of the Republican Party legitimately. It won’t be worth fighting for if the party itself does not think it worth fighting for its voters.

Ed Morrissey:

I’d call this bad messaging, and Romney should address it sooner rather than later if he wants to defuse it before Thursday’s debate.

If this is the route Romney wants to take then he might want to say it more quietly because it will go over like a led balloon to the general public whose votes he needs. Erick also notes that his advisors are suggesting Romney support a $2 gas tax, a VAT, and open talks with the Taliban. None of these ideas will be very popular ones. Open talks with the Taliban, however, will probably get the support of Ron Paul and his followers.

And Romney goes the smart route and distances himself from the statement.

Meanwhile, Romney wishes he knew what Nancy Pelosi supposedly has on Newt. Of course.

(Green Answers) Cambodia, an exotic land filled with bright colors, city lights and ancient temples is a popular vacation spot. A remarkable country with exquisite culture holds one of the darkest secrets alive today. Very much a real and disturbing reality; we come to unfold this problem and discuss the problems of the sex trade in this area. In fact, children as young as 5 are being sold as slaves in exchange for sex. A problem that has been around for a while is being made worse by the problems caused by climate change.

Sexual slavery/trade has been around for pretty much all of human history. It is a serious concern, I don’t think there is a need to explain why. Yet, rather than taking on the problem, Warmists subsume it into their cult’s beliefs, and you know you just rolled your eyes and head and said “give me a break” when you read the last line of that excerpt, which takes away for dire need to do something about this serious issue, something the liberal extremists just don’t get.

The sex trade in Cambodia has been around since 1999. The sex trade is happening due to thousands of victims in need of natural resources like food, water and trees. Human trafficking affects 2-3 thousand children and young teens each year. Families are deceived by con artists telling them that their daughters will work for hotels, restaurants, hair salons or complete clerical work in order for them to bring money for their families. Truth is, con artists actually take their daughters into sex industries and force them to have intercourse with older men.

The climate has always changed, and can always cause problems. Does anyone think life would be better during a cool period such as the Little Ice Age? Life on Earth has to take the good with the bad as climate changes according to the whims of the natural world, but, then, if Warmists fessed up and said a changing climate was primarily natural, as history and science shows, they wouldn’t be able to push their far left redistributionist and fascist agendas. They believe that if YOU (not themselves, though, they need their Suburbans to get the kids to soccer practice, drive to work, and pick up wine and cheese for their Organizing for America parties) can be made to drive a Chevy Volt and use CFLs, the Cambodian sex trade would simply disappear. So, they waste time and other people’s money instead of dealing with the actual issue, because the actual issue won’t give lefties the control over people and economies they want.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

I have to say, I am getting a bit sick and tired of this nonsensical lament about how rotten it is that those running for president are “rich” people. Stop it right now, America. The fact is that we’ve never really had a poor man as president so talking about it as if it is news that rich people often seek the presidency is stupid. Not only that, but today it is impossible for a poor or even middle class man to run for president anyway, so get this populist silliness out of your minds right this instant.

The latest in this onslaught of populist foolishness is the New York Times (unsurprisingly) with an article full of serious tones on how hard it is going to be for two Harvard educated, Richie-Riches like Obama and Romney to win over those “blue collar Americans.”

“Both are Harvard-educated millionaires,” The Times begins sonorously. “Both have been criticized as elitist and technocratic. Both have struggled to handle the populist anger coursing through politics.”

Of course, much of that anger is fostered by the Old Media constantly harping on that “anger” by writing daily stories indulging themes of class warfare as if it is some sort of legitimate political discussion in this, a capitalist-based society.

The worst part about this line of discussion is that it seems to suppose that it is all somehow “news” that rich people run for president. Not only have rich people always been the most common candidates for the White House, but the simple fact of the matter is we’ve never had a dirt poor president. Further, it is virtually impossible that we could — especially today.

So, let’s just get over this silly discussion, shall we?

Now, we have had several presidents that weren’t in the upper quintile of America’s rich, to be sure. But we’ve never had a president that could be classified as without financial support when he took office. We also haven’t even had a president who could have been considered lower class or even middle class when he started his campaign.

Certainly not every president was a millionaire (even adjusted for the economics of his day), but the largest portion were very rich. And those that weren’t extremely rich in their day (like Lincoln, for instance) were still far richer than the average American (like Lincoln, for instance). Additionally, those that weren’t themselves rich had the sort of lives that running for office did not negatively impinge on their own personal livelihood.

Let’s take Woodrow Wilson, for instance. He was not wealthy, mind you, but he also had few living expenses to worry about. As president of Princeton and Governor of New Jersey he was given a place to live. When he became president he then had the White House to live in. He had a series of books from which he made not inconsiderable sums and he was paid in a higher income bracket for his work than the average American of his day. The lowest one could consider Wilson is upper middle class, but his support system of colleges and government positions often removed from him the need to pay mortgages and other living expenses.

Calvin Coolidge was also not a rich man. But his father was and this helped Calvin early in life go to college and become an attorney. He made a nice living from his writing and owned some nice real estate free and clear of debt. He was also at the least upper middle class if not well off.

You see, even our poorest presidents still owned land and businesses and were far from penury while in office The worst of the lot seems to have been McKinley and Grant. McKinley once went bankrupt during the depression of 1893 and Grant’s finances were in bad shape until, at the end of his life, he wrote the well-received autobiography that made he and his family a tidy sum.

But let’s ask how a poor or even middle class person could run for president?

How many of you can afford to drop whatever it is you do for a living to go traipsing about the country for two or three years or more in order to run a nation-wide campaign for the White House? How many middle class (or poor) people can afford to stop making a living to campaign and can afford to stop worrying about their mortgage, their school loans, their water bill, their car insurance — in short how many middle class folks can afford to run for office and forget about their own personal and family expenses back home so that they can spend enough time on the campaign trail to build a voter base big enough to allow them to win both the primaries and a general election?

Let’s also not forget that if someone else come in to help the candidate’s family and pay their expenses while he runs for office, everyone would be crying about how that candidate was bought by whom ever it was that paid his bills while he ran. Plus, it’s illegal anyway!

We need to remember that our presidents have usually been leading national figures, anyway. Rarely do people become leading national figures from the depths of the poor house! Usually they are people that have attained some high station in life and America’s presidents have nearly all been someone of national renown. Our presidents were not notorious, but notable and success breeds riches in most cases. Let’s face it, people that rise to the heights of national prominence usually have more than a few shekels to rub together! They can afford to run for president and nearly all of our presidents were in that fortunate situation.

And today? Today it takes even more money to run for president because campaign finance laws are so Byzantine that self-funders are the first ones that have the capability to step up to the plate. And thanks to whiners like John McCain, we’ve set up a system where rich people are nearly the only ones that can afford to run for president!

Also consider this: do we want a person that couldn’t even make enough money for his family to be secure while he runs for office to become our president? Do we want a guy that can’t even succeed at that minimum rate of success living in the White House and guiding our nation?

Here is another thing to consider. Our founders meant the world of politics to be one of public service. To do that one must have already made his nut in life and had found himself with enough time on his hands and money in the bank to serve the country instead of serving himself.

Do we want people that need to grub for money to be president? Wouldn’t we be just as afraid that such a person would scramble to enrich himself while in office so that once out of office he had enough to live on? Wouldn’t this invite corruption?

Lastly, why is it so bad to want the best, brightest and most successful people to be our leaders? There was a day when being successful was something people admired. But that was before the media decided that capitalism was evil and rich people had to be both pilloried and plundered at the same time (and the logical end game of that meme is personified in the anti-capitalist, anti-success, anti-American Barack Obama).

The whole point here is to ask only this question: if you don’t want evil rich people to run for president, who can run for president and how do you expect them to do it?

So, come on, people. Stop this incessant whining about rich people running for office. It really is a stupid thing to focus on.

(Think Progress Green) Currently, fossil fuel industry lobbyists, flacks, allied pundits, and government officials are far too comfortable dismissing concerns about what their pollution does to other people. What if we had a system that required those who are advocating, defending or producing large sources of pollution to be one of the other people? What if they had to drink the dirty water, breathe the polluted air, and have their livelihoods compromised by (their) status quo industries. It wouldn’t be fun for them. But they’d be accountable, deeply accountable, for what they are doing.

I think it’s time to explore what Deep Accountability would look like. I’ll start here, with this Modest Proposal for University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Karl Smith. He’s the newest addition to the crowd that believes global climate disruption isn’t a problem because we can all move to the top of the world.

Mike, who represents Tigercomm as president, a company involved with the failed and wasteful use of stimulus money to “weatherize” homes, writes a letter to Alexander Konovalov, Minister of Justice of Russia, and comes up with

With that in mind, I’d like to raise with you an idea I’ve had for a while, one that I call “Deep Accountability.” Under this concept, the foolish and the reckless in American punditry – and they seem to increasing, even as the climate science gets more damning – would be forced to actually sample the realities they advocate for others.

Therefore, I am trying to confirm the viability of an unusual proposal. Would it be possible for my company to pay for the rental of unoccupied space in any of the estimated 476 former Soviet prison facilities, particularly those in northern Siberia? If such space is available, we would like to pay to house Professor Smith for a year or more as a guest of your great country. We are seeking to provide him with a direct experience of the vigorous Siberian climate firsthand, and see for himself what the future home of tens or hundreds of millions of global climate disruption refugees would be like.

Got that? If you don’t believe in the climate change hoax, to be specific, that Mankind is the major or sole cause of hot/cold/wet/dry (and snow, no snow, earthquakes, tsunamis, basically, everything that happens), you should be put in an old Soviet gulag. Nice of the Lefties to show yet again their fascist and dictatorial predilections.

And, yeah, I have the post saved as a text file, in case it disappears into the memory hole, as these types of posts tend to do.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Washington Times) People monitoring the Occupy D.C. movement tell Inside the Ring that the two encampments are fast becoming health hazards. Numerous protesters also recently were sickened with unusual respiratory illnesses.

The major emerging problem for the leftists camped out in tents at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza is rats. The rodents appear to be moving into the area by the hundreds, and their numbers are increasing daily.

The McPherson camp appears be where more radical leftists are based. An observer familiar with the McPherson camp said one distinctive smell coming from the park area is that of methamphetamine being smoked.

Among the flags being flown by some protesters are those from the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and al Qaeda.

Such lovely people, aren’t they? Has anyone ever noticed that, despite deeming themselves smarter than everyone else, oh so enlightened, liberals seem to love living in squalid conditions? Come on, a rat infestation? Then there’s the Meth.

Oh, and flying the flags of terrorist organizations is oh so diverse of you, Occupiers. Why not go and try to live with those groups, see what happens.

President Obama and his various quislings and underlings still cannot bring themselves to say that the USA is under attack by radical Islamists. This is the self-destructive garbage that comes from the Obama administration every day. This is the kind of stuff that makes of us the “weak horse” that Islamists use to justify their attacks on the US.

We have two examples of this today, one from a representative of the Department of Homeland Security and one from Gaffemaster Joe Biden.

First up, our erstwhile VP. Ol’ Slow Joe Biden told Newsweek’s Leslie Gelb that the Taliban isn’t our enemy, either. You know, despite that we invaded Afghanistan to oust them from power, and all.

Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.

Next we have assistant defense secretary for homeland defense Paul Stockton refusing to agree with Rep. Dan Lungren’s (R.-Calif.) characterization of al Qaeda as “radical Islamists.”

YouTube Caption:

Wednesday Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) opened a hearing to examine the emerging threat to the military from homegrown terrorists within the U.S. and named the armed services as the “most sought-after” target for radical Islamist extremist groups.

Rep. Dan Lungren (R.-Calif.) asked Paul Stockton, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, whether “we are at war with violent Islamist extremism.

The idiocy from the Obama administration is startling. They won’t even deign to identify the enemy and the enemy IS radical, terrorists driven by a fanatical devotion to Islam. But we can’t even get Obama and his comrades to identify our enemy, an enemy that has no problem announcing their own animus toward the USA.

Did you know that the only reason those famed “Reagan Democrats” voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 was because they were… uh… racists? Well on the little watched Ed Show on MSNBC, Salon’s Joan Walsh assured the nation — or at least the 20 people watching — that this was the truth.

Sometimes a talking head on TV will say something so stupid that jaws drop nationwide as a result. Often that stupidity becomes the talk of the news cycle, too. But usually that only happens when there are actually viewers for the show upon which the stupidity is uttered. In this case, Joan Walsh of Salon uttered the stupidity, but since no one watches MSNBC — most especially the Ed Show — I thought I’d help pass around her comments to make her stupidity the talk of the day. It’s just a service from us here to you in the Internet tubes.

The rotund Ed Schultz was disparaging the Reagan Democrats as “dead” (both figuratively and literally) and was saying that Reagan Democrats could not possibly be a factor in 2012. Whatever merits of that claim, when Schultz turned to Salon’s Joan Walsh he got one of the most absurd comments about Reagan Democrats evah!

Walsh said:

You and I both know that a segment of the white working class did go over to Ronald Reagan, did abandon the Democratic party. Some of it was race, and some it was just believing that government was out of control and some people were getting something for nothing.

What, you may gasp? Reagan Democrats were all racists and that is why they voted Republican in the millions?

You may be confused by the comment. What was the big racial issue of 1980? Was Jimmy Carter really an African American and only the Reagan Democrats knew it? Was Reagan running on a repeal the Civil Rights bill platform and we just didn’t know it? I know, maybe Carter’s VP candidate, Walter Mondale, was the African American… hmmm, no he’s as white-bread as one can humanly get. Couldn’t have been MonDull!

Yes, you got it. There was no racial component to either the 1980 or 1984 elections. The fact is Joan Walsh is simply — and clumsily at that — trying to warp the past with her racebaiting as a way to win for Obama in the present. If Democrats crossed over in 1980 to vote Reagan, Walsh is saying, then they were raaaacists just like they will be if they do so today. THAT is her message. This is nothing more than Walsh’s attempt to throw the race card at anyone that is sick and tired of Obama’s destructive regime.

Walsh revealed a desperate ploy to staunch the bleeding of this destructive and self-destructive president. Nothing more. Nothing less.