Republicans have stopped registering voters in five states, following new allegations of voter registration fraud by a controversial company hired and paid for by the Republican National Convention.
 
The RNC shouldn’t be surprised, either. The firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, was formed in June by Nathan Sproul at their request, after they suggested Sproul form a new company to better distance himself from previous allegations of registration irregularities that Sproul’s outfits had incurred in previous elections.
 
“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul told the Los Angeles Times.
 
The publicity they speak of? Allegations that Sproul's firm illegally destroyed Democratic voter registrations in the 2004 and 2008 elections. That's illegal, though no charges were filed in either year.

It's worth being clear: Voter registration fraud isn't voter fraud. When someone writes "Mickey Mouse" on a registration form, the Disney character doesn't show up at the polls. But in those cases, it was alleged that Sproul's group deliberately discarded forms filled out by Democrats, meaning that when those would-be voters showed up at the polls on Election Day, they wouldn't be registered. That's less about fraud, and more about suppressing the vote.

Now, Sproul’s new group is accused of falsifying registrations in Florida. And as a result the RNC has fired the group, meaning it'll end its voter registration efforts in five states, just a week before most state's registration periods end.

“You wonder what priority they were giving voter registration ... if they were giving it all to this one company,” The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne told The Rachel Maddow Show host Rachel Maddow.
 
“I don’t remember anything like this—except for ACORN,” Dionne added. But he suggested this is worse.

“ACORN themselves had called attention to the voter registrations and they disciplined themselves, and yet this was a big scandal and they lost a whole lot of money and they had to go out of business," Dionne said. "Why isn’t this the same thing for conservatives?”

On Fox News Sunday, Vice Presidential Nominee Paul Ryan said he didn’t have time to explain his vague—and by many accounts mathematically impossible—tax plan.
 
Ryan insisted to host Chris Wallace that the GOP plan is "revenue neutral." But Wallace persisted, saying he was asking only about the tax cuts, not about the unspecified tax deductions and loopholes that Romney-Ryan have said they want to eliminate.

Ultimately, Ryan threw up his hands. “I don’t have the time. It would take me too long to go through all of the math,” he said.

“This isn’t a pop quiz, this is a presidential election,” Politics Nation host Rev. Al Sharpton said.

Today, Ryan radio host Charlie Sykes he thought Americans didn't want to hear the details. ”I didn’t want to get into all the math of this because everybody would start changing the channel.”  

Here's a portion of the transcript from Wallace's interview.

WALLACE: So how much would it cost?

RYAN: It’s revenue neutral…

WALLACE: No no, I’m just talking about cuts. We’ll get to the deductions, but the cut in tax rates.

RYAN: The cut in tax rates is lowering all Americans’ tax rates by 20 percent.

WALLACE: Right, how much does that cost

RYAN: It’s revenue neutral.

[...]

WALLACE: But I have to point out, you haven’t given me the math.

RYAN: No, but you…well, I don’t have the time. It would take me too long to go through all of the math. But let me say it this way: you can lower tax rates by 20 percent across the board by closing loopholes and still have preferences for the middle class. For things like charitable deductions, for home purchases, for health care. So what we’re saying is, people are going to get lower tax rates.

There are an estimated 50.5 million Latinos living in the country, and an estimated 20 million of them eligible voters. Such a large swath of the electorate can’t be ignored, said Telemundo anchor Joe Diaz-Balart on Tuesday's The Rachel Maddow Show, just days after he interviewed both President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney.

“50,000 Latino kids turn 18 every month,” Diaz-Balart said. “18 equals potential voters! And you know what, they’re watching and they’re listening to what political leaders are saying, and doing, and not doing.”

President Obama leads Gov. Mitt Romney 69-24 in the latest poll by Latino Decisions.

“They better realize, both political parties, that this is a force that’s not going to go away and it’s only going to get bigger,” said Diaz-Balart. He added that Latinos have already shown their might as a political force in recent elections.

“Ask Sharron Angle why she’s not a senator in Nevada,” he said, referring to Sen. Harry Reid's unsuccessful opponent in the 2010 Senate race in Nevada. Angle ran an ad vilifying Latinos, and immigration was a major topic conversation in the election.

Diaz-Balart isn’t sure Latino voters will turn out in huge numbers for the national election, but he said President Obama scored a major win with Latinos with the DREAM Act. “Those kids, for example, are now being able to come out from under the shadows of fear in darkness in this country, even if it’s just for a two year period,” he said. “That helps.” 

Ralph Reed—the evangelical activist and politician with ties to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal—has been enlisted by the Romney campaign to court evangelical voters. 

Reed, who Romney once celebrated as a "real champion in fighting for the fundamental values that has made this country what it is," sent out mailers to evangelicals, suggesting President Obama's policies are as much of a "threat to freedom" as Nazi Germany or the Civil War.

As MSNBC's Al Sharpton reported on Tuesday's PoliticsNation, evangelicals make up 26 percent of the electorate. 73 percent of them voted for McCain in 2008, but evangelical and author Frank Schaeffer told Sharpton he doubts evangelicals will respond well to Reed's tactics.

"I don't think a lot of them will go for this. They know Ralph," he said, adding it's a last-ditch effort by the increasingly desperate Romney campaign.  "Do they release Bernie Maddoff next to help raise money?"

Reed's attempts are quite similar to the rest of the GOP's get out the vote efforts, MSNBC commentator Richard Wolffe said. 

"What he's trying to do—if this mailer is any indication of his tactics—is to drive up not a reason to vote for Mitt Romney, but a reason to vote against President Obama," Wolffe said. "That's an interesting dynamic that I think the whole Republican get out the vote operation really hinges on."

The Mitt Romney of Interviews Past has struck again, this time on the issue of healthcare.

In an interview with 60 Minutes that aired last night, Romney talked up emergency room care, as part of his case that even if we repeal Obamacare, the uninsured will still have access to healthcare.

"If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and—and die," Romney said. "We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care."

But in an interview on Morning Joe in 2010, Romney defended his own universal health care bill in Massachusetts and spoke against emergency room care, saying “it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

And in 2007, Romney went further, calling emergency room care “socialism,” because taxpayers end up paying for it.

“Romney now is turning himself into a pretzel because he can’t admit that that’s what he did in Massachusetts and that’s what he used to think was a perfectly good idea,” The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn said.

Mitt Romney bused in audience members for a taping of an appearance on a Spanish-language network last week, muscling organizers at the last minute to ensure a supportive crowd.

 
The Univision candidate forums held were intended to have audiences of students. But when the Romney campaign couldn’t find enough Republican University of Miami students, the GOP nominee threatened to reschedule the event if he wasn’t allowed to bus in activists from south Florida, Buzzfeed reported.
 
Filled with Republican activists, Romney’s audience chanted ‘Romney! Romney! Romney!’ when the governor took the stage. The audience for President Obama, which stuck with the original agreement and was comprised of mostly students, was far quieter, prompting the Romney campaign to brag about Mitt's rousing reception.

This isn’t the first time Romney’s bused in racially-appropriate supporters: In July, the candidate bussed in black conservatives for an NAACP speech, Lean Forward reported at the time.
 
"We were a little bit thrown because it was supposed to be a TV show, it wasn't a rally," event co-moderator Maria Elena Salinas said of the outspoken Romney supporters. "It was a little bit of disrespect for us."

"I'm surprised he didn't come out with a sombrero on his head because he was doing everything he could to pretend to love Hispanics," Miami-Dade Democrat Annette Taddeo said on The Ed Show Monday.

In video footage from a private fundraiser in May, posted online last week, Romney joked that winning the 2012 election would be easier if his father, who was born in Mexico, was actually Mexican. "Had he been born of Mexican parents,” Romney said, “I’d have a better shot of winning this.” He added, “I say that jokingly, but it would be helpful to be Latino.”

In a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Gala on Saturday, Michelle Obama spoke out against efforts to make voting harder, and called the push to protect voting rights "the movement of our era."

Said the First Lady:

It cannot just be "we the people" who had time to spare on Election Day. Can't just be "we the people" who really care about politics, or "we the people" who happened to drive by a polling place on the way home from work. It must be all of us. That is our birthright -- as citizens of this great nation. That fundamental promise that we all get a say in our democracy, no matter who we are, or where we’re from, or what we look like -- yeah, or who we love.” 

She continued:

"So we cannot let anyone discourage us from casting our ballots.  We cannot let anyone make us feel unwelcome in the voting booth.  It is up to us to make sure that in every election, every voice is heard and every vote is counted. And that means making sure our laws preserve that right."

Lately, Republicans in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, and numerous other states have all attempted to make it more difficult to vote, disproportionately affecting racial minorities and the poor.

The First Lady's speech was highlighted by Rev. Al Sharpton on PoliticsNation Monday. Read her full remarks here.

Last month, Michelle Obama wowed the Democratic National Convention with her speech. 

Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick speaks at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 4, 2012 on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.

Mitt Romney is “turning his back on half the country” said Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick on Sunday's Meet the Press. Patrick, who succeeded Romney as governor, was referring to the Republican candidate's now famous remarks about the “47 percent” of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax.
 
Patrick said his mother had relied on food stamps and that she worked “to get to a better place, to get her GED, to get a job, to stand on her own two feet. The notion that she, or we, or people like us would be belittled while we needed some help to be able to stand on our own two feet is exactly what Governor Romney is conveying.”

Ayotte blamed Obama for the sluggish economy, pointing to the recent surge in the number of Americans on food stamps. (Though on Up with Chris Hayes this Sunday, Hayes pointed out that the most recent expansion of food stamps eligibility was under the Bush administration, and the recent surge is because more people are poorer following the financial crisis.)
 
Ayotte wasn’t the only Romney surrogate to stand by Romney’s “47 percent” remarks this morning; Romney economic adviser Emil Henry decided to “triple down” on the remarks on Sunday's Up with Chris Hayes.

John Raoux / AP

Former President Bill Clinton greets supporters after speaking at a campaign event, Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2012, in Orlando, Fla., as he campaigns for President Barack Obama.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is qualified to run for President, said former President Bill Clinton on Sunday's Face the Nation, but he’s not sure if she will.

“I’ve never met anybody who I thought was better at this,” he said, calling her the best civil servant he knows. “She’s an extraordinarily able person.”

Hillary Clinton, who will retire at the end of the current term, plans to take some time off and may write a book, the former President said. Ultimately, however, he has “no earthly idea what she’ll decide to do,” he added, grinning.

Former President Clinton, speaking to Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer from the Clinton Global Initiative Summit in New York, also spoke out against what he said were Republican attempts to prevent traditionally Democratic constituencies like minorities, students and young people from voting.

The president is winning in key swing states, said Clinton, but it is still impossible to know the outcome of the election "because of the enormous financial advantage that Citizens United gave to these Republican super PACs and because of the work they have done and will do on Election Day to try to reduce the number of young people, first generation immigrants, and minorities voting."

The Former President has been particularly vocal about voter suppression laws in Florida, likening the Republican crackdown on voting to the Jim Crow laws.

Clinton also defended Barack Obama's economic record, noting that full employment could not have occurred within four years of the financial crisis. “I don’t know a single serious economist who believes as much damage as we had could have been healed in four years,” he said. “We lost jobs for the first year [of President Obama's term] while his programs were kicking in. Since then, his jobs record is actually better than in the previous eight years under the Bush administration.”

An essential part of America's eventual recovery from the “debt hole," Clinton said, would have to be raising revenue through taxes.

“If they cut 5 trillion in taxes, we’ll never get of this debt hole,” he said. Referencing Mitt Romney’s tax return release this week, he added, “I don’t think we can get out of this hole if people at that income level are only paying 13-14 percent.”

The recent protests across the Arab world in response to an anti-Muslim film are yet another product of the “outrage industry,” author Salman Rushdie said in an exclusive interview with Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday's The Last Word.

“There are people in Islamic world whose job it is literally to find a flashpoint and use them to launch a larger attack against American values,” Rushdie said.

This latest outrage is not dissimilar to the fatwa that was declared on Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses 23 years ago. Rushdie's new book, the memoir Joseph Anton, documents the decade he spent in hiding after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini declared the fatwa.

Often, people in this so-called “outrage industry” don’t read or view the media they condemn, Rushdie said. In the case of the video that sparked the recent protests, “it got translated into Arabic and sent to these people. It just played into their hands and they used it.”

Regarding the controversy that surrounded The Satanic Verses, “it’s quite clear that the Ayatolla Khomeni didn’t read a 600-page book in English on his deathbed,” before issuing the fatwa, Rushdie said.

Indeed, on Monday's The Last Word, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—author of a recent controversial Newsweek piece—discussed the rage that lead her to burn that same book without having ever read it.

“I understood one thing, and that was anyone who offended or said anything insulting about the Prophet Mohammed should die," she said. "I did that unthinkingly, and I think the huge mobs we’re seeing are doing that unthinkingly, but that does not excuse the individual responsibilities once they leave the company of the crowd.”

The person who recorded that now-infamous tape of Romney speaking at a private fundraiser is still anonymous, but the name of the middleman who distributed it is now public: James Carter IV, former President Jimmy Carter’s grandson.

The younger Carter found part of the video on YouTube and was intrigued, he told Chris Matthews on Tuesday's Hardball. He contacted the anonymous uploader and, through a long online exchange, eventually convinced the mystery individual to turn the video over to David Corn, a journalist at Mother Jones.

Both Carter and his anonymous videographer agreed that the public deserved to hear what Romney was saying behind closed doors. “They thought that some of the things Romney was saying needed to be heard by a wider audience,” said Carter.

Carter, who refers to himself as an “opposition researcher,” isn't a professional politician or journalist. Instead, he advocates for Democrats on his own time. “I’m a partisan Democrat and my goal is to get Democrats elected," he said. "Not just at the presidential level, but to all offices."

The younger Carter evidently made his grandfather proud. "James: This is extraordinary. Congratulations! Papa," the former president wrote his grandson Tuesday morning in an email obtained by the AP.

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali was 19, she “piously, even gleefully” participated in a rally in Kenya to burn Salman Rushdie’s book—despite having never read it.

Ali, whose cover story was published today in Newsweek, uses her own personal experiences of what she calls "Muslim Rage" and unquestioning fanaticism as a lens to view the protests in the Middle East.

Her own blind rage is not unique, too: The brother of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, had not seen the internet video that sparked many of these protests, despite condemning and calling his supporters to act out against it, she said.

“I was taught to be loyal and fanatically loyal to the Qaran and the Prophet Mohammed,” Ali exclusively told The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell. “I understood one thing and that was anyone offended or said anything insulting about the Prophet Mohammed should die. I did that unthinkingly and I think the huge mobs we’re seeing are doing that unthinkingly but that does not excuse the individual responsibilities once they leave the company of the crowd.”

That responsibility is to value human life above religious outrage, Ali said. “The vast majority of Muslims, even though they may condemn violence, they may condemn murder, they haven’t found a way to bring themselves to understand that they may be offended but human life is more valuable than the offense taking in the name of human icons,” she added.