A new video from Brave New Films makes the case that recent fear-mongering claims of “voter fraud” are part of a long-running right-wing campaign to suppress the vote. As evidence, the video documents this statement made in 1980 by conservative activist Paul Weyrich:

They want everybody to vote! I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people – they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Watch it:

As ThinkProgress has noted, despite the recent economic downturn and $700 bailout, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his advisers still pledged that McCain will balance the budget by the end of his first term. “I believe we can still balance the budget,” McCain said last month when asked if he could “achieve your goal of balancing the budget in your first term.”

Yesterday, however, in a debate with Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee at Columbia University, McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin significantly lowered the bar for McCain. Holtz-Eakin admitted that the economic crisis makes McCain’s balanced budget promise “harder,” thus it will take “longer” to implement:

“The events of the past few months have completely thrown a wrench into that, there’s no way round it. He would still like to balance it. It’s going to be harder, take longer,” said Holtz-Eakin at a debate with his Democratic counterpart at Columbia University in New York.

Holtz-Eakin is finally admitting the obvious: that it is impossible for McCain to fulfill his balanced budget pledge. The Wonk Room has noted that McCain’s proposals would result in the largest deficit in 25 years. Combined with the economic crisis and the $700 billion bailout, balancing the budget through massive spending cuts is neither prudent nor plausible. Next year’s deficit is predicted to start at roughly $550 billion and go as high as $1 trillion.

It’s unclear, however, what the campaign’s real policy on the budget is. Yesterday, Gov. Sarah Palin said that McCain would still balance the budget by the end of his first term.

Furthermore, in the third presidential debate, McCain promised an “across-the-board spending freeze” in order to reduce the deficit, while still sticking to his radical tax plan.

Today, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) sat down with CNN for the first time. During the interview, CNN reporter Drew Griffin noted that “socialism” has “come up on the campaign trail.” But when Griffin asked, “is Barack Obama a socialist,” Palin dodged and deferred to “Joe the plumber“:

PALIN: I’m not going to call him a socialist but as Joe the plumber has suggested, in fact, he came right out and said it, it sounds like socialism to him and he speaks for so many Americans who are quite concerned now after hearing finally what Barack Obama’s true intentions are with his tax and economic plan.

Watch it:

Palin is trying to have it both ways — trying to take the high road in saying she won’t call Obama a “socialist” and at the same time, calling his policies “socialism,” all while hiding behind “Joe the plumber.” Indeed, just hours before her CNN interview, Palin told Glenn Beck, referring to Obama’s tax policy, “We cannot flirt with this and now is not the time to experiment with, as Joe the plumber calls it, socialism.”

In fact, by definition, a “socialist” is “one who advocates or practices socialism,” which is exactly what Palin has been accusing Obama of for the last week:

– October 17: “Sen. Obama said that he wants to spread the wealth and he wants government to take your money and decide how to best to redistribute it according to his priorities…Joe [the plumber] suggested that sounded a little bit like socialism.”

– October 19: “Friends, now is no time to experiment with socialism. To me our opponent’s plan sounds more like big government, which is the problem.”

– October 20: “There are socialist principles to [Obama's tax plan], yes.”

Perhaps Palin is also trying to distance herself from the right wing’s common talking point that Obama is a Marxist. But it seems that she has at least one mainstream media figure fooled. Time’s Mark Halperin said of Palin’s CNN interview: “Palin declines to call Obama ‘socialist.’”