On his radio show today, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh toed the McCain campaign line and lashed out at the Fox All-Stars panel for their criticisms of McCain. He noted that during their post-debate analysis, the All-Stars — including Bill Kristol, Nina Easton, Mort Kondrake, and Juan Williams — were somewhat critical of McCain’s performance. “The Fox All-Stars, they’re not America,” Limbaugh concluded. “They have become elites”:

LIMBAUGH: You don’t know how hard this is for me to say folks, Roger Ailes is one of my closest friends. … Saw him this weekend, I spend a lot of social time with him. It is really hard for me to tell you what I really think about the Fox All stars reaction to this debate was last night. … The Fox All-Stars have become elites too.

Watch it:

Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee released a report concluding that the White House “used the political affairs office to orchestrate an aggressive strategy to use taxpayer-funded trips to help elect Republican candidates for public office.” One of the appointees aiding in this effort, according to the report, was then-General Services Administration (GSA) chief Lurita Doan.

Doan first gained notoriety for using a January 2007 government teleconference to “ask senior GSA officials to help ‘our candidates’ in the next elections.” In May 2007, the White House Office of Special Counsel (OSC) found that she had violated the Hatch Act. In June, both the OSC and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) called on Doan to resign. In April, the White House finally forced her to step down.

Doan is back now. Furious at the House committee’s new report, Doan fired off an angry letter to Waxman yesterday, accusing him of “vicious, partisan politics.” She challenged him to let her come back to Congress to testify and clear her name:

Once again, you have falsely asserted that, as the administrator of GSA, I improperly attempted to use government resources or my office to influence an election. This assertion, masquerading as an official committee report, is especially reprehensible because you, more than anyone else, know that it is utterly false. [...]

I now understand you and your ubiquitous hypocrisy. I know how your witch hunts and kangaroo courts work. So please, invite me to testify. I can’t wait.

It’s surprising that Doan remembers so much about Waxman’s previous allegations and that she’s so eager to return to Congress. After all, last time she testified before his committee in March 2007, she embarrassingly couldn’t remember anything except that “there were cookies on the table” at one of her meetings. Watch a montage:

If she testifies, it’s unclear whether she will reiterate her belief that government employees who criticize her are the equivalent of “terrorists.”

In an interview to be published in Sunday’s New York Times, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who is openly gay, reveals that the only time Fox News tried to bring her on a show was to comment on Madonna and Britney Spears’ infamous kiss:

Favorite Fox News put-down: “I don’t talk much about Fox. That’s more Keith Olbermann, but the only time Fox tried to book me on a show—ever—was for me to comment on Madonna and Britney Spears having kissed at an awards ceremony. I declined.”

In the debate last night, moderator Bob Schieffer asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) if he could “ever nominate someone to the Supreme Court who disagrees” with him on Roe v. Wade. McCain replied that he had never “imposed a litmus test on any nominee to the court.” “That’s not appropriate to do,” said McCain. Watch it:

But, as Ezra Klein points out, it has been previously reported that McCain assured conservative activist Gary Bauer in 2000 that he “would appoint pro-life judges“:

Somewhat surprisingly, McCain had the support of Gary Bauer, the social conservative, who had dropped out of the race by that time. “I wanted a commitment from either George Bush or John McCain that if elected he would appoint pro-life judges to the Supreme Court,” Bauer told me. “Bush said he had no litmus test, and his judges would be strict constructionists. But McCain, in private, assured me he would appoint pro-life judges.”

Klein writes that if Bauer’s claim is true, “it seems to me like a fairly big deal that McCain is publicly forswearing litmus tests but privately assuring leaders of the Christian Right that he’ll have them.”

Since yesterday’s debate, Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher has been warmly embraced by the right wing. Likewise, Wurzelbacher has adopted several of the movement’s talking points. However, Wurzelbacher may soon fall victim to one of the right wing’s favorite crusades — against so-called voter fraud.

On Tuesday, a federal court ruled in favor of the Ohio Republican Party, allowing Ohio poll observers to force all voters whose registrations don’t match other state databases to fill out provisional ballots, which are “used to record a vote if a voter’s eligibility is in question and the voter would otherwise not be permitted to vote at his or her polling place.” As a result, “more than 200,000 registered Ohio voters may be blocked from casting regular ballots on Election Day.”

Because Wurzelbacher is misregistered as “Worzelbacher,” he may be one of the voters caught up in the misguided system. As the Toledo Blade reports:

Linda Howe, executive director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, said a Samuel Joseph Worzelbacher, whose address and age match Joe the Plumber’s, registered in Lucas County on Sept. 10, 1992. He voted in his first primary on March 4, 2008, registering as a Republican.

Ms. Howe said that the name may be misspelled in the database.

Provisional ballots greatly increase the chance a voter’s ballot will not be counted. In Ohio’s March primary, the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that 20 percent of the provisional ballots — approximately 20,000 ballots — were rejected, even though “many people shouldn’t have lost their votes.”

Widespread voter fraud is a Karl Rove myth; voter disenfranchisement, however, is a real nationwide problem. The Sixth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals’s verdict chose to give weight to the Ohio Republican Party’s specious argument that voter fraud “drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government.” But as Michael Waldman, the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, Joe the Plumber is a “perfect example” of why these voter fraud laws are more harmful than helpful:

Purging voters or blocking their registration because of data errors is disenfranchisement by typo. Joe is a perfect example. If he were a new voter, he would be being challenged right now as not eligible to vote. … Joe the Plumber is not committing voter fraud by having his name spelled differently on two different lists.

Michael Calderone reports that right-wing talker Glenn Beck is leaving CNN and joining Fox News. “Beginning next spring, Beck will host FOX News Channel’s (FNC) 5 PM/ET weekday program as well as a weekend show on the network,” a Fox News statement says. Fox News’s Roger Ailes remarked, “As we embark on a new political landscape, Glenn’s thought provoking commentary will complement an already stellar line-up of stars at FOX News.” Check out some of Beck’s worst moments here.

International Oil Trading Company, which ships oil into Iraq for use by U.S. forces, “appears to have engaged in a reprehensible form of war profiteering,” according to the House Oversight Committee. The company is run by Florida businessman Harry Sargeant, who has raised at least $500,000 for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). From Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates:

[T]he prices IOTC has charged the government are not “fair and reasonable.” A “price negotiation memorandum” assessing the company’s June 2004 contract concluded that the price charged by IOTC, $2.10 per gallon of jet fuel, was at least 36 cents per gallon too high. … Of the $210 million in profits received by the company, at least one third — $70 million — appears to have benefited a single individual: Mr. Sargeant.

Waxman said the company offered the highest price of six bidders, but won the contract “because it was the only one with the blessing of the Jordanian royal family to deliver fuel over Jordanian land.” He added that if the oil contracts that went to Sargeant’s company had been awarded to the lowest bidders, taxpayers could have saved over $180 million.