A volunteer for the Republican Party of Clay County, Florida called President Obama a “Muslim” and said that he would “get rid of your Medicare” while calling voters on behalf of Mitt Romney.

In audio obtained by a Tampa-area radio station, the woman made the remarks directly to senior citizens, but her comments were recorded by an answering machine from a previous number:

Well think really heard, you all sound like senior citizens, no? …. Yea, you don’t want Obama, you don’t want Obama because he’ll get rid of your Medicare. You might as well say goodbye to it. … Yea, and I don’t know if you have done any research on Obama or not, but he is a Muslim. He has got a socialistic view on the government, economy, the whole nine yards. If he had his way, we would be a socialistic country. …. Pay attention to Fox News. If you can get out and watch that movie 2016, do so, it has a lot of really good information. Just really read the newspapers and Fox News will help you.

Listen:

The head of the Clay GOP, Leslie Dougher, said the caller went off script, but “wasn’t sure if the woman was still making calls.” “It was off-script completely. We have everything scripted,” Dougher added. “Those are clearly not the views of the Republican Party of Clay County or the Mitt Romney campaign.”

RNC Chair Reince Priebus (left) and Rep. Todd Akin (right)

After Akin declared last month that women cannot get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” nearly every prominent Republican called on the Missouri Republican to drop out, including RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. When a reporter asked him at the Republican National Convention last month whether the party would support Akin even if he didn’t drop out, Priebus was unequivocal: “no, no, no.”

REPORTER: If he stays in, is y’all’s position eventually going to change and you’re going to have to support him?

PRIEBUS: No, no, no. He can be tied, we’re not gonna send him a penny.

Watch it (beginning at 1:20):

Today, after Akin stayed in the race and polls showing it tied, Priebus took a far different tone:

Asked directly if he considered Akin to be a better option for Missouri voters than McCaskill, Priebus did not hesitate.

“Well, absolutely,” he said in the interview. “That’s a given, and as chairman of the party, I have an obligation to make sure we win as many seats in the Senate as possible.”

Akin again grabbed headlines this week when he told a reporter after a debate that Sen. McCaskill is not as “ladylike” as she was six years ago.

Read the full live blog

On Thursday, the Drudge Report splashed a video of an undentified woman who claims to have recieved a free “Obama Phone.”

The video has captured the attention of the right online, who see it as proof that Obama supporters are dependent on government. On his show today, Rush Limbaugh weighed in:

So these are the people that don’t like Romney because of what he said about 47%? No, these are the 47%!… She knows. She knows how to get this free Obama phone. She knows everything about it. She may not know who George Washington is or Abraham Lincoln, but she knows how to get an Obama phone.

Thousands of conservatives are on Twitter, telling jokes about the #ObamaPhone.

There is one problem with the Obama Phone: It doesn’t exist.

Since 2009, there has been an urban myth that Obama created a program to provide free phones to low-income Americans at taxpayer expense. There is, in fact, a government program that will provide low-income people with a free or low cost cell phone. It was started in 2008 under George W. Bush.

The idea of providing low-income individuals with subsidized phone service was originated in the Reagan administration following the break-up of AT&T in 1984. (It was expanded and formalized by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.) The program is paid for by telecommunications companies through an independent non-profit, not through tax revenue.

Senate candidate Todd Akin (R-MO), who is still trying to make it up to women since he suggested that victims of “legitimate rape” cannot become pregnant, blew another hole in his pro-woman persona on Thursday when he said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is not as “ladylike” as she was in 2006.

In an interview with the Kansas City Star, Akin implied that a woman taking an agressive stance in a competitive election is somehow unpalatable, expressing apparent displeasure not with McCaskill’s politics, but with her personality:

“I think we have a very clear path to victory, and apparently Claire McCaskill thinks we do, too, because she was very aggressive at the debate, which was quite different than it was when she ran against Jim Talent,” Akin said. “She had a confidence and was much more ladylike (in 2006), but in the debate on Friday she came out swinging, and I think that’s because she feels threatened.”

Akin’s been trying to get back on track with his female constituency and Republicans alike since he blew past the September 25 deadline to drop out of the election. He just launched a “Women for Akin” group last week.

As nearly every major public opinion poll puts President Obama ahead of Mitt Romney, conservative pundits’ new favorite accusation is that the polls are biased because the media is oversampling Democrats. On Thursday, Romney’s senior adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, repeated this line on Fox News to explain why the polls couldn’t be trusted:

FEHRNSTROM: Some of these polls have been called into question because they assume a higher Democratic turnout in 2012 than we experienced in 2008. I don’t know of any campaign operative or political scientist in the country who thinks Democrats are going to show up in the same number as they did four years ago.

Watch it:

The oversampling of Democrats has become a common complaint in the past week, particularly in reaction to a CBS/New York Times/Quinnipiac poll that showed Obama leading significantly in many swing states. But this oversampling, as Business Insider argues, can likely be attributed to the fact that there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the country. Republicans also point to independents favoring Romney, which includes the 40 percent of Tea Party members who identify as independent voters. Even adjusting for this disparity and assuming Democrats, Republicans and independents show up in equal numbers, Obama maintains a lead. Not satisfied with these numbers, a new website has popped up to “unskew” polls’ alleged liberal media bias — which puts Romney ahead in every poll.

Though turnout in 2008 was indeed extraordinarily high, the number of minority voters, who historically lean Democratic, has grown to 29 percent of the electorate. Romney would need 61 percent of the white vote to win the election without these minority voters. However, voter suppression efforts that were not a factor in 2008 — in the form of voter ID laws, voter purges, and poll watchers — could hinder many low-income, minority and elderly voters on Election Day this year.

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) denied manmade climate change in a debate this week against his congressional challenger Ami Bera (D).

Responding to a question about global warming, Lungren claimed there’s a “question” on whether climate change is caused by human activity:

LUNGREN: There is no doubt that there is global change, climate change. The question is who causes it and is it caused predominantly by human activity. It seems to me we ought to take reasonable steps but not steps that so put us in a disadvantageous situation economically that we will have less jobs. There’s those that cry about their concern for jobs and then support the very things that would absolutely destroy jobs. We have an example of that in the current administration that I believe is supported by my opponent to try and basically ruin the coal industry in the United States, losing us tens of thousands of jobs instead of pursuing the cleanest technology in the area of coal. [...]

MODERATOR: So you’re suggesting the global warming change may not be caused by manmade sources?

LUNGREN: No, my suggestion is we don’t know to what extent it is and to what extent moves we would take on our own in the United States would have an effect. At the same time I believe it makes good common sense to try and reduce carbon emissions where possible, as I’ve done in the U.S. capitol.

Watch the clip:

Lungren is part of the camp of Republicans with close ties to the oil and coal industries, and attempt to cast doubt on the science. But there is firm scientific consensus that carbon pollution is driving global warming, with 97 percent of published climate scientists in agreement.

The oil and gas industry has donated more than $147,000 to Lungren’s campaign since 2006, including $10,000 contributions from Koch Industries and Chevron PACs, based on Open Secrets data. He’s received thousands more from the coal industry.

While Lungren denied climate change, he promoted coal industry-sponsored myths of a “War on Coal” and “clean coal.”

The congressman has faced heat before on climate change. At a town hall meeting in August, a constituent confronted Lungren, saying “I’m horrified that you would ignore scientific evidence just to appease the moneyed interests of big oil which gives generously to your campaign.” Meanwhile, Lungren’s home state has suffered from damaging wildfires and extreme heat this summer.

With six weeks until Election Day, new polling from Quinnipiac, the New York Times and CBS News shows President Obama leading in crucial swing states including Ohio, Florida and Iowa. As Obama’s lead grows, so does the number of conservatives who claim polls in general are biased and cannot be trusted. Similar to their dismissal of fact-checkers who flagged lies in Romney’s ads and Paul Ryan’s convention speech, conservatives are now claiming the media outlets that conduct the polls are attempting to discourage Republicans from voting by falsely tipping the polls toward Democrats.

Helping this narrative along is a new website, Unskewed Polls, which claims, after liberal media bias is removed, Romney is in fact beating Obama by a wide margin in every poll. Business Insider unpacked how the website is manipulating data to come up with a Romney victory.

Nicknamed “poll sample truthers” by Dave Weigel, the skeptics are falling over each other to explain how the numbers are lying:

Erick Erickson
Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of RedState.com and CNN political contributor, accuses the media of a “confirmation bias” that makes them conform their data to what they want: “The polls are confirming what the press thinks and that they have a larger than 2008 Democratic turnout is of no consequence to them.”

John McLaughlin
The Republican pollster explains the poll conspiracy: “The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want.”

Hugh Hewitt
Radio host Hugh Hewitt thinks the CBS/Quinnipiac/NYT poll is “junk”, choosing instead to focus on Rasmussen and Gallup’s daily polls, which have Obama leading by a smaller margin. These polls, he says, amounts to “lots of evidence this morning that their campaign is in terrific shape.”
Read more

The Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation on Wednesday released a statement condemning the employees of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) after a video surfaced of three campaign staffers mocking Brown’s opponent’s Native American heritage.

“The conduct of these individuals goes far beyond what is appropriate and proper in political discourse,” said Chief Bill John Baker in his statement, “The use of stereotypical ‘war whoop chants’ and ‘tomahawk chops’ are offensive and downright racist.”

Baker called on Brown to “apologize for the offensive actions of his staff and their uneducated, unenlightened and racist portrayal of native peoples,” and said, “A campaign that would allow and condone such offensive and racist behavior must be called to task for their actions.”

Warren’s Cherokee and Delaware Native American ancestry has been a frequent line of attack for Brown, with the campaign even running ads on the topic. The Senator did say Tuesday, however, that he did not “condone” their actions.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) released a statement Tuesday backing Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), a little less than a month after publicly calling for an end to his campaign after Akin’s “legitimate rape” debacle. Akin withstood the clamoring of many Republican lawmakers and fundraisers to stay in the race. But his party seems to be making their peace with him now that the official deadline for his withdrawal has passed. Blunt echoed Newt Gingrich, who exhorted Republicans to overlook Akin’s comments and support him because of a “moral obligation” to win a majority in the Senate.

In August, Blunt told MSNBC he hoped Akin would withdraw:

Todd needs to get out of this race…it’s not helpful. He’s a person who I think will ultimately look at this and try to figure out the greater good. I didn’t say I was confident … I’m hopeful he will and I believe he will. He’s an engineer, he’s a quantitative guy. I think at some point you have to add up the columns here, and my belief is that by anyway you add them up, they don’t add up.

On Tuesday, Blunt embraced Akin in a statement:

Congressman Akin and I don’t agree on everything, but he and I agree the Senate majority must change. From Governor Romney to the county courthouse, I’ll be working for the Republican ticket in Missouri, and that includes Todd Akin.

The Missouri Republican Party has also changed its mind about Akin. After the August deadline to drop out passed, Party Chariman David Cole sent a memo to the Republican State Committee warning that Akin “posed a threat” and reassuring them there was still time to change his mind:

It has become increasingly clear that Congressman Akin’s comments over the weekend are not just a distraction—they pose a threat to our Party’s chances of retaking control of the US Senate and impact other races here in Missouri…This afternoon, Congressman Akin stated that he intends to remain in the race. While one may question the wisdom of this choice, there will still be time for the Congressman to reevaluate his decision in the coming days. Despite today’s widely-reported 5:00 deadline for Congressman Akin to withdraw from the race, Missouri statute allows for candidates to withdraw at a later date, so there will still be time for him to reconsider his current decision to continue his campaign.

Now, it seems, Cole has decided to make the best of Akin’s refusal to drop out:

Just like all of our GOP candidates elected in the August primary, the Missouri Republican Party stands behind Congressman Todd Akin in his race for United State Senate. Claire McCaskill is far too liberal for Missouri—voting with Barack Obama 95% of the time since 2010 and supporting every major piece of his reckless agenda. We are confident that Todd will defeat McCaskill in November, and the Missouri Republican Party will do everything we can to assist in his efforts.

Blunt also serves as a liasion between Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and the Senate Republicans. Romney previously said Akin should drop out of the race, but former rival Gingrich recently predicted Romney would come around and support Akin. Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-SC) super PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, is also preparing to back Akin now that he has agreed to change his position on an earmark ban the Fund supports. Rick Santorum has also announced that he is backing Akin, and may donate to his campaign through the Patriot Voices PAC.

Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have claimed they will not raise money for his campaign.

Mitt Romney told voters in Westerville, Ohio on Wednesday not to expect a “huge cut in taxes” from his economic proposal, noting that he is “also gonna get rid of deductions and exemptions.” The message is at odds with the GOP nominee’s promises to cut taxes for the middle class and small businesses, while maintaining the current tax burden on the rich.

ROMNEY: Number 5, I’m going to champion small business. Small business, where jobs come from. And let me tell you how to do that. One, as Sen. Portman said, we’ve got to reform our tax system. Look, small businesses typically pay tax at the individual tax rate. And so, our individual income taxes are ones I want to reform, make them simpler. I want to bring the rates down. By the way, don’t be expecting a huge cut in taxes, because I’m also going to lower deductions and exemptions. But by bringing rates down, we’ll be able to let small businesses keep more of their money, so they can hire more people.

Watch it:

Romney has been pledging that he will cut taxes for all Americans by 20 percent, while also instituting tax reform that will not add to the nation’s deficit. But numerous analyses of the plan — including a recent study by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center — found that there are not enough loopholes in the tax code to finance the loss in revenue that would result from Romney’s massive cuts by only targeting deductions for the rich, meaning that middle class Americans will experience a net tax increase.

Erick Ericson (L)

The pundit took issue with Obama’s claim that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied.” He argued that criticizing “those who lander the prophet of Islam” is somehow anti-Christian:

The fact is, many religions do not recognize Mohammed as a prophet. In the widest swath of Islam, that denial is, in and of itself, slander. So what exactly are you saying Mr. President? As an exit point, with all of President Obama’s statements on tolerance in his speech, we should remember that tolerance is really not a Christian virtue. As Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia noted, “We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty — these are Christian virtues. And obviously, in a diverse community, tolerance is an important working principle. But it’s never an end itself.” The Archbishop also noted that evil preaches tolerance until it is dominate and then it seeks to silence good. That’s not a statement that the President is evil in any way, shape, or form, but we should be mindful when the secular world demands tolerance for all, tolerance for all means we cannot have standards of faith to live by, because those standards obviously require we be intolerant of sins this world has embraced.

Very prominent Christian theologians have embraced the bedrock Enlightenment principle of religious tolerance, and for good reason — the principle enshrines protections for people with diverse “standards of faith” from being interfered with by state or society. This principle is the same one that undergirds the free speech protections for the anti-Islam video itself; as Obama put it: “We [unconditionally respect free speech] not because we support hateful speech, but because our Founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views, and practice their own faith, may be threatened.” Obama’s criticism of the video is rooted in the idea that people should take into account the way their actions affect people with different belief structures, not a call for exempting purportedly offensive speech and beliefs from First Amendment protections. It is also ironic that Erickson is criticizing the idea of tolerance in a post where he blames Obama for an insufficiently strident condemnation of Muslim intolerance.

Erickson’s specific arguments in favor of his position are no more persuasive than the overarching point. He says that Obama creates a double standard for Christian and Muslim sensibilities, asking “why does Barack Obama’s government continue funding the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA], which funded Christ in piss, the Virgin Mary painted in dung, etc.?” But the two art installations Erickson is referring to were made in the late 80s and 90s (respectively), and the pieces were at-best indirectly funded by the NEA. More to the point, the fact that the NEA may have funded some art offensive to Christians decades ago is not a reason to defund the institution (which costs little and funds valuable work) today.

Erickson claims that Christians tolerate dissent, whereas “if you impugn Mohammed, you get a fatwa on your butt.” But only a tiny fraction of the world’s 1 billion Muslims have participated in riots or committed violence as a consequence of offensive paintings, and polling data suggests most Muslims support free speech rights.

He also argues that Obama justified the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens despite Obama’s eulogy for the Ambassador in his speech, suggesting that Obama called the violence which took Stevens’ life “understandable.” It is unclear what statement of Obama’s Erickson is referring to here. While it is true that the President said ” the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others” that is not remotely the same thing as saying the violence it provoked was “understandable.” “[W]e must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants,” Obama concluded.

As part of his re-election campaign, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) has attacked his opponent for mischaracterizing herself as Native American. Elizabeth Warren does have Cherokee ancestry, but Brown claims she abused that to gain a professional advantage by listing herself as a minority.

Perhaps Brown’s sensitivity to the issue ends there. On Tuesday, a video surfaced of Brown staffers doing a ‘tomahawk chop’ and making ‘war whoop’ sounds at Warren supporters, an apparent allusion to the dust up over Warren’s heritage. The incident occurred outside of a pub in Boston on Friday.

Watch it:

According to News Center 5 in Boston, the video captures three Brown staffers: “Deputy Chief of Staff Greg Casey, Constituent Service Counsel Jack Richard, and GOP operative Brad Garrett.”

Warren’s mother is part Delaware and part Cherokee.

Romney and Reed

A conservative religious group is sending its members a ‘survey’ that compares President Obama’s policies to those of Nazi Germany, and asserts that the President has “communist beliefs.”

The mailer, a product of the Faith and Freedom coalition, is titled the “Voter Registration Confirmation Survey.” But its questions have little to do with registering to vote. Rather, the survey asks a host of leading inquries into how its members view the President’s record.

The options prompt the most extreme answers — with very few moderate or supportive possibilities:

As Mother Jones, who obtained the survey, points out, the Faith and Freedom coalition and particularly its head Ralph Reed are leading the effort to turn out Evangelical voters for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. The group plans to spend over $10 million for this purpose.

Romney has praised Reed for his turnout efforts, saying, “Ralph Reed is doing a great job here with the Faith & Freedom Coalition. This is going to make a big impact across America and I appreciate the work you are doing here.” The Presidential candidate even gave Reed the ultimate honor of sharing a hotel with him during the convention.

You can view the full survey here.

Mitt Romney’s new ad, “War On Coal,” accuses President Obama of “ruining the coal industry” and putting coal miners out of work. It also showcases footage of Romney speaking at a rally at an Ohio coal mine, flanked by solemn-looking miners.

Those miners, however, are not Romney supporters. In fact, they later said they were forced to attend the rally without pay. Now that the footage has been used in a campaign ad, the political advocacy group Progress Ohio has filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission accusing the owner of Murray Energy Corporation of an illegal corporate contribution in the form of his employees.

Watch it:

The ad is running in the coal towns of Steubenville, Ohio and Wheeling and Parkersburg, West Virginia. Progress Ohio’s Brian Rothenberg said he would be “open” to dropping the complaint if the campaign pulls the ad or edits the miners out of it. When asked about the complaint, a Romney campaign spokesman told the Columbus Dispatch:

It remains a widely accepted fact by Democrats and Republicans alike that President Obama has spent the past four years waging a war on coal that has devastated middle class families and coal communities across the Midwest. These gimmicks by Barack Obama’s left-wing allies are nothing more than an ineffective and pathetic attempt to distract voters away from that reality.

Romney’s ads have often raised concerns of dishonesty. In his very first campaign ad against Obama, he attributed the line, “If we talk about the economy, we’re going to lose,” to Obama though he was actually mimicking the McCain campaign in 2008. Romney was also widely condemned for a blatantly false ad about Obama’s welfare reforms.

Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) Senate campaign has struggled to rebound after his claim that women could not get pregnant from “legitimate rape” led to a drop in fundraising and GOP establishment support. A new recording released by his opponent, Democratic incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), won’t do much to help him. In the recording, taken in May, Akin suggests that the best way to get his attention is to make a donation to his campaign.

An unidentified man asks Akin for advice on the best way to get in touch with a congressman, asking “should we write them a letter?” Akin dismissed the idea and suggested cash might be more attention-grabbing:

AKIN: I’m in a three-way primary for the US Senate. I’ve gone to people and asked for their support, their help, or their endorsement, and some people say yes. They write me a decent check. I remember that. The people that I thought were friends that tell me to go away because they are supporting someone else, I remember that. You know, I can remember back to 12 years ago. You remember who’s helping you. That’s one way that people get to know congressmen and senators.

Listen:

The telling exchange was recorded by a member of the Missouri Democratic Party. Akin has been scrambling for “decent checks.” On Friday, he reportedly agreed to support an earmark ban in the Senate favored by the Senate Conservatives Fund in exchange for the super PAC’s fundraising help. Akin’s last chance to drop out of the race will expire Tuesday.

Republican election officials have been unable to find even scant evidence of voter fraud. In voter purges in Colorado and Florida, targeting mostly Democrat and independent registered voters, officials uncovered that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of voters are potentially unqualified to vote. These findings drastically downgrade Republican fears of voter fraud from the tens of thousands of noncitizens officials originally estimated. The Associated Press reports:

Last year, [Colorado Secretary of State Scott] Gessler estimated that 11,805 noncitizens were on the rolls. But the number kept getting smaller.

After his office sent letters to 3,903 registered voters questioning their status, the number of noncitizens now stands at 141, based on checks using a federal immigration database. Of those 141, Gessler said 35 have voted in the past. The 141 are .004 percent of the state’s nearly 3.5 million voters. Even those numbers could be fewer.

Officials in Florida found 207 noncitizens on its voter list, .001 percent of the state’s voters, but they did not necessarily commit fraud. Florida’s purge discovered just one Canadian who illegally voted. In North Carolina, hundreds of voters have received letters requesting proof they were citizens, but an elections board member acknowledged there were just 12 instances of noncitizen voting. Iowa has filed charges against three noncitizen voters.

Unfortunately, voter supression tactics could disenfranchise millions of low-income and minority voters, including 10 million Hispanics.

Fire fighters board Ann Romney's plane

Ann Romney’s plane was grounded Friday after the main cabin filled with smoke. The small electrical fire caused no injuries, but apparently did cause the Presidential candidate to forget the dangers of altitude.

“When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly,” he told the LA Times. “And you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.”

Air crafts do not open windows because the cabins are pressurized to fly safely at an altitude of tens of thousand feet. Opening a window in an airplane would seriously sicken the passengers and crew.