During the 2012 presidential election, voters reportedly waited on line for upwards of six hours. That wait alone is enough to deter would-be voters from going to the polls. But now residents in Florida’s most populous county will have another disincentive: they won’t be able to go to the bathroom.

Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade County Elections Department quietly implemented a policy to close the bathrooms at all polling facilities, according to disability rights lawyer Marc Dubin. Dubin said the policy change was in ‘direct response” to an inquiry to the Elections Department about whether they had assessed accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities.

‘I was expecting them to say either yes we have or yes we will,” Dubin said.

Instead, he received a written response announcing that the county would close all restrooms at polling places ‘to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not treated unfairly,” a January email stated. ‘[T]he Department’s policy is not to permit access to restrooms at polling sites on election days,” Assistant County Attorney Shanika Graves said in a Feb. 14 email. Elections Department officials did not immediately respond to ThinkProgress inquiries.

Dubin said he was ‘shocked” at this response, and not just because it […]

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Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.” Teddy Roosevelt

What is the fundamentalist Christian version of the American Taliban up to in these heady days nearing November’s mid-term elections? The answer is a lot, an awful lot (with an emphasis on the word ‘awful”).

The lying, deceitful nature of fundamentalist Christian supremacy truly knows no bounds. This constitutionally derelict cabal isn’t even remotely content with having a massive media empire, a monolithic fundraising base, swelling and dominant hegemony within the ranks of the U.S. Armed Forces, and supreme political sway within civilian legislatures across the United States. These dangerous dominionists have now set themselves towards rewriting American history in a manner that opportunistically advances their anti-Constitutional agenda. For those who’ve been following the advocacy of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), this isn’t necessarily breaking news. It has been the direct mission of MRFF to aggressively fight these fanatical Christian religious zealots and the perverse poison of their theocratic bigotry and prejudice at each and every opportunity provided.

And, my friends, a new one just materialized.

The misleadingly named ‘Restore Military Religious Freedom Coalition (RMRF),” a lie-generating rats’ nest comprised of numerous Christian fundamentalist Taliban-style entities, has sponsored a […]

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A controversial new documentary that argues the earth is the center of the universe is the logical result of reading the Bible as a scientific document-and proves that most evangelical creationists aren’t nearly as consistent as they think.

An astonishing documentary is drawing fire for its attempt to resurrect geocentrism, the ancient/medieval cosmology that placed the Earth at the center of the universe. Featuring commentary by leading secular scientists like Lawrence Krauss and Michio Kaku, and narration by Star Trek’s ‘Captain Janeway” (Kate Mulgrew, when she is not piloting a starship), The Principle boldly goes where no sane person has gone for several centuries.

The Principle is a project of Robert Sungenis, whose denial of the Holocaust and unabashed anti-Semitism has earned him the title ‘one of the most rabid and open anti-Semites in the entire radical traditionalist movement.” Just about everyone else involved in the project is wondering where he got the cleverly-edited footage of them seeming to support the central-and completely refuted-thesis of the film.

The movie is based on Sungenis’s book Geocentrism 101: An Introduction into the Science of Geocentric Cosmology, which has a higher ranking on Amazon right now than most of my books. Geocentrism 101 is a summary […]

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Two researchers from the Department of Psychology and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University demonstrated that the more white Americans know about the changing demographics of the United States, the more likely they are to endorse conservative policy positions.

Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson conducted three studies in which white Americans were presented with information about the racial demographic shifts that have led the U.S. Census Bureau to project that ‘racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called “majority-minority’ nation.”

In the first study, self-identifying political independents were randomly asked to learn about the majority-minority racial shift in California or about how the number of Hispanics in the United States is now roughly equal to the number of African-Americans. They were then asked questions about their political party leanings and ideology.

The result was that, ‘[d]espite being self-identified political independents, respondents who were asked about the [majority-minority] racial shift reported being somewhat more conservative than did respondents” who were asked the less salient question about Hispanics being roughly equally to African-Americans.

In the second study, Craig and Richeson had participants read either about the majority-minority racial shift or a non-racial national shift […]

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I’m sure Jonathan Chait is grateful to the Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint for sharing his wisdom about ‘people of faith” ending slavery, not ‘big government.” It shows the extent to which the mainstream right is still fighting the Civil War. I never bought Chait’s false equivalence between the way the left and right use race in the age of Barack Obama, but DeMint surely didn’t advance Chait’s cause.

It could seem unfair to link DeMint to Chait, just because Chait’s reply to his critics, myself included, came the day DeMint’s ludicrous remarks became public. But Republicans are stepping in it every damn day, so if Chait had published his reply on a day ending in ‘y,” I probably could have found a toxic GOP statement on race. DeMint’s emancipation denialism just shows how thoroughly race is baked into the modern Republican Party, and anyone who’s trying to insist ‘Democrats do it too” has to answer for the former senator from South Carolina’s invidious revisionism.

Here’s exactly what DeMint told a Christian radio show last week, courtesy of Think Progress:

Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American […]

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