United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Photo: Flickr/World Economic Forum)

The Tea Party has added another item to its list of reasons to fear the United Nations: Some in the movement say the U.N. is planning to intervene in the United States’ upcoming elections.

This week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his speech on voting rights, the Texas group True the Vote called for a protest of the event because “Holder is for NAACP Plans to involve the United Nations in US Elections.” [Their emphasis.]

True the Vote, a voter integrity initiative launched by the Houston Tea Party group King Street Patriots, held a national summit this year featuring some of the right’s most incendiary speakers, such as Andrew Breitbart, The Texas Independent reported. According to the Independent, “representatives from more than 25 states attended the two-day national summit in Houston to receive training and information about the conservative organization’s efforts to combat voter fraud.”

The Independent reported back in March that the group was a 501(c)4 nonprofit and had applied for 501(c)3 nonprofit status.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of King Street Patriots, said during the group’s summit that she was hoping to mobilize teams of three people to oversee each voting precinct in the country. That would add up to roughly 1 million right-wing tea party volunteers nationwide by the 2012 general election, the Independent reported.

Tea Party Manatee, based in Southwest Florida, sent out an email newsletter this week, echoing the King Street Patriots’ latest fight and warning that the U.N. is “trying to Intervene in 2012 Elections.”

According to group’s email:

• In November 2012 Foreign bureaucrats will appear at your polling station to ensure you adhere to their vision of a ‘fair’ election.
• Local polling officials who dare to enforce state clean election laws will be subject to lawsuits and arrest.
• Conservative political speech will be deemed hateful and be suppressed.
• Just enough voter fraud will be allowed to ensure a second term for Barack Hussein Obama.

This is not a fantasy – next week it will start to become reality when a delegation of leftist Obama supporters will meet with the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. And there they will lay the groundwork to ensure the United Nations takes action in time to save Barack Obama.

You see, the Democratic Left is terrified of the new clean election laws being passed across America. These laws have cleared our voter lists of the dead and the ineligible, require voter identification for everyone and insist that our military be allowed to vote.

And clean elections are the single greatest weapon we have to ensure an honest vote in 2012 and a single term for Barack Obama. And the Left can’t allow that to happen.

So they will make their case for action to the UN Human Rights Council – an international government origination so biased that even Hillary Clinton has denounced it.

Council members like Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Mexico and China will review your election laws and judge if you measure up to their idea of democracy. How can we accomplish any of our goals, like repealing health care rationing, securing the borders and balancing our budget if we can’t even control our own elections?

That’s why we need to send a clear message to the UN – stay out of America’s elections and abandon Barack Obama to the judgment of the American people. I need you to tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to send that very message to the United Nations – by any means necessary.

It’s difficult to trace the exact origin of this particular hysteria, but one of the earliest mentions of the NAACP’s plan to involve the U.N. came in a report by Fox News.

According to Fox:

The NAACP is calling on the United Nations to intervene as it claims state governments are colluding to “block the vote” for minority communities ahead of the 2012 election — a charge those governments vehemently deny.

The nation’s biggest civil rights organization this week released a report that claimed a raft of new voting laws at the state level would disenfranchise minority voters. The report said 14 states passed 25 measures “designed to restrict or limit the ballot access of voters of color.”

…

Supporters of the laws describe them as common-sense measures meant to ensure the integrity of elections. In Tennessee, which is implementing a new photo ID law, elections coordinator Mark Goins dismissed the criticism and questioned why the NAACP would flag the United Nations over its concerns, calling that effort “a bit extreme.”

“I don’t know what the benefit of going to the U.N. would be,” he said. “I can’t imagine any authority whatsoever that they would have here in Tennessee.”

But the NAACP described the new measures as part of a “concerted” effort to drive down minority turnout and is planning a multi-stage campaign to attract international attention.

To start, the group is planning a “Stand 4 Freedom” rally this Saturday across from the U.N. headquarters. Supporters are being asked to sign an online pledge which, among other demands, calls on the United Nations to “investigate and condemn voter suppression tactics in the United States.”

Copies of the latest report are being sent to the United Nations, as well as attorneys general across the country and the Department of Justice. According to one newspaper report, the NAACP will follow up in March when it sends a delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to present its case before the U.N. Human Rights Council — a group known more for its sustained criticism of Israel than its attention to voting rights.

An NAACP spokesman says the organization is just doing its duty as one of the 3,500 groups that “has consulting status” with the U.N. The group simply works with the international organization to make sure the United States is “living up to its commitment” to an initiative to eliminate discrimination, the spokesperson says.

He also says that the U.N. does not have the power to actually intervene in state matters, and can only interview people and create reports through the Human Rights Council.

“We are just working to make sure the U.S. remains a beacon of democracy,” the NAACP spokesperson says.

The NAACP will be giving a presentation in Geneva to the Human Rights Council in March 2012 as part of its consulting status.

Gingrich, however, is the latest in a revolving list of candidates who have floated to the top of the party’s primary contest as an alternative to effective frontrunner Mitt Romney. PPP recently reported Gingrich leading Romney among Colorado Republicans 37-18, partly due to the fact that Gingrich is drawing the lion’s share of Herman Cain supporters left in the lurch when their man dropped out of the race in the wake of horrifically managed spiraling sex scandals.

That Newt is leading here is an obvious problem for the state GOP. Unaffiliated voters make up roughly a third of the Colorado electorate and Obama is polling way out in front of Gingrich in that demographic. PPP surveyed roughly 800 voters this week in Colorado and found Obama leading among independents by a 56 to 32 point spread.

PPP reported a plus/minus 3.5 percent margin of error in the week’s survey. Director Tom Jensen seemed to be having fun writing up the polling results.

Our new Colorado poll is more evidence that the Newt surge could be disastrous for GOP hopes of beating Barack Obama next year….

As weak as Obama is in Colorado, if the Republicans nominate Newt Gingrich it doesn’t look like it matters. Obama leads Gingrich 50-42 in the state, including a whooping 56-32 advantage with independents. Gingrich is a reviled figure with only 32 percent of voters seeing him favorably to 55 percent with a negative opinion, including a 25/59 spread with independents…

The GOP’s move toward supporting Gingrich is seriously endangering its chances of winning in the fall.

Jensen writes that Romney is running roughly neck and neck with Obama and that, if Republican primary voters can hold their noses and vote to nominate him as their general election candidate, Colorado could “go back into the swing state category.”

“Or it could be another easy Obama win as it was in 2008.”

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Brewer, acting in response to Tea Party agitation and on behalf of Republican lawmakers dissatisfied with the redistricting plan drawn up by the commission, removed Matthis, claiming she had demonstrated “substantial neglect of duty, gross misconduct in office or inability to discharge the duties of office.”

Twenty-one Senate Republicans backed Brewer to provide the two-thirds senate vote she needed to remake the five-member commission, which was created by voters to take the highly partisan, once-a-decade work of redistricting out of the hands of lawmakers. The commission consists of two Democrats, two Republicans and one independent. Matthis is the independent. According to the Arizona Republic, Brewer had targeted the two Democrats as well but could not secure the votes to remove them.

Similar wrangling in states over redistricting and voting laws has been a top political story this year.

After the midterm elections of 2010 swept Republican majorities into state houses across the country, decades of legislation meant to expand the franchise by flattening barriers to participation in elections ground to a halt. Laws raising hurdles to voter registration and ballot casting cropped up in states across the country, pushed by Republicans arguing the need to protect against voter fraud. The roughly 20 laws passed in state capitols this year would make it more difficult for more than 5 million eligible citizens to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

In Colorado, the election of 2010 delivered a split legislature, with Democrats running the Senate and Republicans running the House. To almost no one’s surprise, legislative redistricting efforts broke down among partisan bickering during last spring’s session. Republicans are now appealing a congressional redistricting map presented by a court. A judge also recently turned back as unacceptable state district reapportionment maps.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a longtime Republican partisan campaign finance and election law attorney who won office last year, has made national news by seeking the power to throw suspected undocumented citizens off the voter rolls and for attempting to prevent county clerks from mailing ballots to legally registered inactive voters.

He cited the need to combat fraud in both cases without ever presenting credible evidence that there was any fraud occurring in the state.

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“Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheeleaders,” writes Campaign chief and right-wing politics public relations consultant Joe Wierzbicki in a release announcing a new campaign ad.

Wierzbicki points readers to poll data from Quinnipiac suggesting Americans now view the Occupy movement unfavorably.

The new poll finds that support for the violent Occupy Wall Street mobs has fallen further, and since Barack Obama has been one of the protest mobs’ biggest cheerleaders, it spells trouble for him as well….

The mainstream media hasn’t spent much time highlighting this vulnerability for Obama, but that is where you come in.  We urgently need your help to raise the money to launch our new TV ad campaign that shows how Democrat leaders shamelessly have championed the Occupy Wall Street mobs that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars and created considerable damage in cities across America.

Look at this picture below and see what the scene was like this week in Oakland, California.  Are we going to let these mobs and their Democrat champions do this to America, or are we going to fight back?

The language in the ads and the release is exaggerated and the facts are cherry-picked. The larger narrative strategy of the campaign also comes with some risk.

Voters may not love recent more-aggressive Occupy tactics, but they still sympathize to a significant degree with the main message of the movement, which centers on the need to address the inarguable fact of expanding inequality in the country tied to the finance industry and corporate America and the way the two dominate Washington DC.

Although it’s true recent polls report dipping popularity for the Occupy movement, they also report greater sympathy for the movement than for the Tea Party and much greater sympathy for the movement than for Wall Street and large corporations.

Wierzbicki, however, isn’t looking to provide that kind of context. He’s a longtime pitchman for Republican Party-associated firm Russo Marsh & Rogers. He helped sell George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq and wrote the memo that led conservative establishment figures to backdoor-finance the national Tea Party bus tour during the 2010 campaign season.

Wierzbicki’s 2011 Campaign to Defeat Obama PAC shares a Willows, California, PO Box address with his Our Country Deserves Better PAC and with TeaPartyExpress.org. All three organizations reportedly share the same treasurer as well, a Kelly Lawler, who was a former staff member at the National Republican Campaign Committee.

Still, as political analysts of all stripes will tell anyone who will listen, broader contexts can matter not at all in the world of campaign strategy, which is partly tied to the fact that the public doesn’t always overly concern itself with the work histories of the partisans behind most political media campaigns.

As the “OWS as Democratic Party-backed public menace” ads hit the airwaves, a blogger for the Economist underlines exactly why bad-acting Occupiers might pose a major political problem for Democrats.

“As long as the Occupy movement remains without acknowledged leaders who can credibly distance it from the worst behaviour of its least reasonable affiliates, the movement will increasingly come to be defined by its most egregious episodes.”

The blogger points to CBS coverage from clashes in Oakland.

“You see the problem? Who watches CBS News? Older people. Older people who don’t cotton to this sort of shenanigans and who vote in droves.”

The Massachusetts Republican Party recently launched a nearly identical campaign targeting Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren as the “matriarch of mayhem.”

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“The Occupy Wall Street, much of the calls have been coming for more government spending and more government involvement in people’s lives,” Bachmann said in a video posted by the Bay Citizen.”The Tea Party movement, in high contrast, is calling for less government and less spending.”

Bachmann defined the Occupy movement’s approach as ”government-directed solutions based on temporary gimmicks,” while she said the tea party pushes “permanent solutions driven from the private sector,” according to the Oakland Tribune.

She also said there’s a difference in the cleanliness of the two movements: “The Tea Party picks up its trash after it has a demonstration.”

“I haven’t been here a long time and I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about how the place works,” Bennet said, pacing at the podium, his voice rising, his hands at times folded in front of him modeling a posture of frustrated restraint. “I implore the senator from Kentucky to reconsider his objection [to continued debate]… Finally, after two and a half years, there’s a bipartisan piece of legislation in front of the committee and we’re told that meeting for two hours is too long…

“You know why people are fed up this place? It’s because they don’t think the debate we’re having is about them. They think the debate we’re having is about us. And they’re right about that.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act would remove the yearly progress reports mandated by the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act. It would also lift penalties imposed on schools that fail to meet annual standards set by No Child Left Behind, focusing accountability on only the lowest performing schools.

Indeed, the bill seeks in general to lower federal involvement in education, a proposal normally likely to draw the support of small-government lawmakers like Paul.

“The teachers all across this state want us to lift this burden from them, in my view the biggest federal overreach ever in domestic policy,” Bennet said. “That’s what this bill does, not for ideological reasons, but to respond to the voices of our teachers, respond to the voices of our superintendents.

“[The bill] responds to the voices of our parents who are sick and tired of the almost comical but to them painful measures of annual progress, the idea that we’re going to label all of our schools failing by 2014 because we have a completely made up accountability system in Washington DC. This bill does away with that!”

The remarks came during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee markup session, a session where committee members amend and rewrite legislation. Bennet was superintendent of the Denver public school system before being appointed to the senate in 2009 and he seems to prize his work for the HELP committee and his work on this bill in particular.

Senator Paul, who won his seat in the Tea Party wave election last November, expressed frustration that he didn’t have time enough to fully consider the roughly 800-page bill. He derided the process as unrealistic and said the public had been locked out of the debate.

Committee Chairman Tom Harkin from Iowa pointed out in response that the committee held ten public hearings on the legislation in 2010 and that the bill had been in the works for years. As a HELP committee member, Paul could have taken time since assuming office to familiarize himself with the legislation, he said.

Bennet told Paul that while they were dithering over politicized chamber rules, teachers were at work in Colorado, at 11:15 pm, preparing for classes.

“When people see the political games that are being played here, when they see people who are unwilling to work together and they are killing themselves to deliver for our kids, I’m not sure there’s anything more backhanded we could do.”

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Paul said he does not want to remove all 11 million undocumented immigrants, but insisted “we must have secure borders and we must not reward people for breaking the law.”

“I don’t think people should come here and esaily become citizens who can vote and receive social benefits,” Paul said, but he added there must be a program to allow “people who want to work to come.”

Paul said there should an assimilation program, but borders remain important and that citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants should not automatic.

Asked if the tea party is an anti-immigrant party Paul said, “I can’t tell you a thing about it because it is sort of all over the place.”

Diario Las Americas, a Miami-based Spanish-language news outlet, wrote late last week that George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and Ronald Reagan’s “pragmatism” in immigration have been “buried by the new Republican militancy,” due to tea party pressure. The outlet says Republicans are “risking a defeat in 2012″ over the issue.

Las Americas also said that Republican presidential debates have become a competition for who is the strongest or the weakest candidate on illegal immigration. Immigration enforcement activists have said GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s distant second-place in the recent Florida straw poll was due to his “weak” statements on immigration.

According to Las Americas, the Republican presidential candidate will need “at least 40 percent of the Hispanic vote to win the general elections.”

GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, who has steadily become a central figure in today’s Republican Party, spoke in August at the Ronald Reagan Library. His message: Americans want the nation to be free and prosperous, but also compassionate.

New York Daily News columnist Albor Ruiz wrote Sunday that “Rubio supports mandatory E-Verify, has adopted the vacuous GOP mantra ‘border security first,’ and despite past support for a Florida in-state tuition bill, now opposes the federal DREAM Act.”

“But no matter how far right he goes, Rubio will never be American enough for some crazies in the birthers movement,” Ruiz wrote.

He added:

The GOP’s Great Latino Hope could turn out not to be such a good idea after all.

A poll conducted by Latino Decisions on the eve of last November’s election found 78% of Cuban-Americans would vote for Rubio, but only 40% of non-Cuban Latinos would do the same. And this was during his moderate phase.

That in-state tuition law that sailed through the Texas Legislature and across the governor’s desk 10 years ago continues haunting Rick Perry’s presidential campaign in strange new ways, most recently with a hardline anti-illegal immigration group protesting outside a Perry fundraiser, and new complaints about social media censorship from the governor’s supporters.

In Charlotte, N.C., right now, outside a Perry fundraiser at San Antonio’s Modern Mexican restaurant, the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is mounting an afternoon protest “designed to forewarn the 81% of Americans found in numerous polls to oppose in-state tuition for illegal aliens about Rick Perry’s unpopular support for illegal immigrants.”

The group announced Thursday that the protest was just one in a nationwide series, designed to tell the world that Perry, in the words of ALIPAC President William Gheen, supports the “illegal immigration invasion of America.”

“Close examination of Rick Perry shows a man that wants to appear to be tough on illegal immigration while in truth he is supporting the illegal immigration invasion of America,” said William Gheen. “Our protest today and the coming protests across the nation are designed to warn voters about Rick Perry’s real positions on illegal immigration before it is too late.”

The group got even more publicity than it bargained for earlier this week, when Americans for Rick Perry’s social media director Clint Cox flagged a Facebook post on the ALIPAC protest to have it removed, the latest awkward attempt from the governor’s camp to avoid negative social media mentions. ALIPAC seized on the mini-scandal.

This flap over the 2001 law granting in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants has also offered a taller soapbox to tea party groups in Texas that have been asking Perry to bring the Texas Legislature back to harshen up the state’s immigration laws.

It’s a drumbeat they’ve kept up since just after the last legislative session ended, but on Thursday Politico’s Reid Epstein called it “a new front” for Perry’s immigration defense, with the groups’ plans to offer yet another call for a special immigration session of the Legislature. As Dallas-area tea party leader Katrina Pierson suggested to Politico, it’d be a chance for Perry to “clarify his position on illegal immigration.”

“If he can’t get the job done in Texas with a supermajority, with something that he says is a priority, how is he going to get that done in D.C.?” Pierson said. “You have control of everything in Texas, and you still can’t it done. He doesn’t want to get it done.