TV News LIES

Florida Gov. Rick Scott's chief elections official issued an order Monday to all 67 elections supervisors that imposes new restrictions on how and where voters can return completed absentee ballots.

Secretary of State Ken Detzner said people who vote by mail should return ballots to elections offices only, calling for an end to remote dropoff sites used as a convenience for voters. He said his directive is necessary to maintain uniformity in how election laws are carried out.

"Supervisors should not solicit return of absentee ballots at any place other than a supervisor's office, except for the purpose of having the absentee ballot canceled if the voter wants to vote in person," Detzner wrote.

The power of prayer has failed to save The Christmas Candle, the new release from Rick Santorum's faith based film studio,

EchoLight. The Christmas Candle, set in the fictional English village of Gladbury and billed as "a timeless holiday film for the entire family", attracted widespread critical scorn as well as dismal box-office results, having grossed just over $1.6m (£988,000) after two weeks on release.

Kshama Sawant, Seattle's new socialist City Council member, bears little resemblance to the conventional image of a modern U.S. politician whose appearance — and policies — are often burnished by legions of advisers and focus groups.

A small, whip-smart Indian-American woman in faded jeans with a makeup-free face, she holds a Ph.D. in economics and was an early participant in the Occupy protest movement.

Sawant is not shy about her left-wing party affiliation — despite America’s modern habit of reacting with extreme hostility to the word "socialism," which is freely demonized on the right and treated with extreme caution even in progressive circles.

On its 2012 tax return, GOP strategist Karl Rove's dark money behemoth Crossroads GPS justified its status as a tax-exempt social welfare group in part by citing its grants of $35 million to other similarly aligned nonprofits. (Here's the tax return itself, which we detailed last week.)

The return, signed under penalty of perjury, specified that the grants would be used for social welfare purposes, "and not for political expenditures, consistent with the organization's tax-exempt mission."

But that's not what happened.

In July, the neoconservative website Washington Free Beacon published an article with the headline “Rebel Yell: Rand Paul aide has history of neo-Confederate sympathies, inflammatory statements.” The subject was a peculiar one—a staffer for Sen. Paul (R-Ky.) who had worked as a radio shock jock with the nickname “Southern Avenger” while wearing a Confederate-flag wrestling mask.

The Southern Avenger had said some pretty atrocious things. He toasted John Wilkes Booth’s birthday each year and believed that Lincoln “would have had a romantic relationship with Adolf Hitler if the two met.” He worried about “racial double standards for white people” and that “a non-white majority America would simply cease to be America.”

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing a new "Obamacare kill bill" to thwart implementation of the Affordable Care Act on the state level, but the bill is based on a thin legal argument, and even some ALEC legislators are calling it "the nuclear option."

The "Healthcare Freedom Act," developed by Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute and adopted by ALEC as a "model" in August, is a risky maneuver. The legislation threatens to suspend the licenses of health insurers that accept subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, which Cannon and ALEC claim would effectively thwart the "employer mandate."