My personal theory about the GOP nomination has always been that Republican voters, after considering a long series of deeply flawed presidential candidates, would eventually decide (with more than a little exasperation and resignation) that the colloquial "devil they know" is better than the ones that they don't.

It still could turn out that way.

This heated exchange from last night's Republican debate in SC is getting a lot of commentary in the blogosphere today:

Although he clearly sends many conservative talking heads (read: apologists for Bush) into paroxysms, it's interesting to note that Paul is the only Republican candidate in MSNBC's rate the candidates poll who has moved forward significantly in approval after Republican voters have watched the last two debates. Every other candidate for the Republican nomination has either fallen significantly in approval or, at best, advanced one or two points, while Paul's approval has surged at least twenty points after voters have watched him, despite the hostile incredulity of the FOX News anchors and his fellow candidates.

It's not a scientific poll, to be sure, but anecdotally it confirms that the Republican Party has a problem, and that problem isn't Ron Paul.

(And though it should go without saying, let me reiterate that this is not an endorsement of anything any of the Republican candidates said last night, but simply my own personal observation of a trend within the MSNBC online opinion poll following the last two Republican debates.)

Josh Marshall has been reporting today on the NRCC's apparent effort to suppress Democratic turnout and negatively influence undecided voters through harassing robocalls. The calls are designed to appear to be coming from Democratic candidates and seem to be targeted at Democratic and independent households across the nation:

We're getting reports from a number of congressional districts that one or another of the GOP committees is sponsoring robocalls that begin with "I'm calling with information about [fill in name of Democratic candidate]." Apparently, many voters, irate with the flood of calls, assume that the Democrat is the one sponsoring the call.

In addition to the New Hampshire 2nd and New York 19th, which we covered below, TPM readers report such calls in the Illinos 6th (Roskam v. Duckworth), Illinois 8th (McSweeney v. Bean), and California 4th (Doolittle v. Brown).

A reader explains how the calls work:

Apparently the call starts with something along the lines of "Diane Farrell has some information for you," then pauses, waiting for annoyed people to hang up, and then delivers a negative message about Farrell. The canvassers say the call has hit some people as much as 6 times, and at 5 - 6am as well. Presumably, the intent is to annoy people and stick Farrell with the negative name ID as somebody who keeps robo-calling them.

If the recipient hangs up, the call is automatically redialed 7 or 8 times.

Josh suggests writing "down as much information about it as you can (time, phone number, etc.) and call[ing] the 'metro desk' of your local paper. They're looking for political stories in the final days. And this is a good one."

Even better is to record these calls on answering machines or through other devices, if possible. A recording can really lift these stories from the anecdotal to the factual for reporters, and also makes it far easier for TV and radio news to report on the Republicans' dirty-tricks tactics.

This comment at MyDD suggests one method of recording and saving harassing robocalls when they end up in your voicemail, through a free service called GotVoice, which retrieves your voice messages from home and mobile phones and delivers them directly to your email inbox (from whence they can fly easily through the blogosphere, or better yet, be forwarded on to reporters). And this diary has some eye-opening numbers about how much the Republicans rely upon robocalls for voter suppression.

The New Hampshire Attorney General has already warned that such calls are illegal, but as Josh points out, "the folks placing the calls [simply] factor in the price of whatever fines might be meted out after the election when the damage is already done."

The real challenge in the next 48 hours is for someone to capture these calls on tape -- that to me seems to be the only way to move the story to the cable networks.

FOX News:

WASHINGTON — House Republican candidates will suffer massive losses if House Speaker Dennis Hastert remains speaker until Election Day, according to internal polling data from a prominent GOP pollster, FOX News has learned.

"The data suggests Americans have bailed on the speaker," a Republican source briefed on the polling data told FOX News. "And the difference could be between a 20-seat loss and 50-seat loss."

AP:

A senior congressional aide said Wednesday that he alerted House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office two years ago about worrisome conduct by former Rep. Mark Foley with teenage pages.

Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley's inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene."

The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.

Repetition does not make it so. Repetition does not make it so:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — As the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I Day might be only months away.

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

As revealed by George Allen:

But those who are familiar with Allen campaigns of the past, such as Virginia Tech's Denton, say things feel different. For one thing, this is the first time that Allen has run statewide for reelection; his 1993 campaign for governor and his 2000 campaign against Sen. Charles S. Robb (D) were the kind of underdog campaigns he prefers. He has always liked to call his supporters "insurgents" and laments that the Iraq war has ruined the word for him.

One seat easier today.

Digby quotes Rush Limbaugh, who said recently:

Until civilians -- frankly, I'm not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men, but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it's not going to end, folks.

Digby observes:

This blatant genocidal bloodlust has become de rigeur on the right now. It's on talk radio, TV and in the columns of respectable newspapers. They don't even pretend to be civilized anymore....I've got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don't ever remember this kind of stuff being openly bandied about like it's normal. And those who did, like Curtis LeMay, didn't have audiences of 25 million listeners to spew their bilge to.

But hey,what do we expect? Once you explode the taboo against torture, can genocide be far behind?

Atrios points out that "it wasn't even like this right after 9/11. There's a growing sickness."

It's a sickness, alright. But who among our political or media (or religious) leaders will call it out? When will those in the press understand that calling for the mass murder of civilians has no place in the American public discourse, and join together in concerted action to repudiate it?

Oh, never mind. Ha ha. It's all just a funny to sell more books and radio ads.

Right.