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.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech Tuesday morning at the National Institutes of Health and announcing new U.S. initiatives to address the global pandemic.

Reuters reports:

“Creating an AIDS-free generation has never been a policy priority for the United States government — until today,” Clinton said in a speech at the U.S. National Institutes of Health outside Washington.

“This goal would have been unimaginable just a few years ago,” she said. “While the finish line is not yet in sight, we know we can get there because now we know the route we need to take.”

In her speech, Clinton called for the use of scientific evidence in stopping the spread of the virus. To do that, she laid out three policy objectives based on recent research, according to a press release from the White House:

1) Prevention of mother-to-child transmission: Today, 1 in 7 new infections worldwide occur through mother-to-child transmission. In 2010, PEPFAR helped prevent 114,000 babies from being born with HIV. In June, PEPFAR and UNAIDS launched a global plan for eliminating new infections among children by 2015.

2) Voluntary medical male circumcision: This low-cost procedure reduces the risk of female-to-male transmission by more than 60 percent. It is a one-time intervention with a lifelong benefit. PEPFAR has financed three-fourths of the one million male circumcisions for HIV prevention around the world since 2007.

3) Treatment as prevention: Once people do become HIV-positive, recent science has shown that treatment with anti-retroviral drugs helps prevent the transmission of the virus to others. Effective treatment of a person living with HIV reduces the risk of transmission to a partner by 96%.

In addition to the policy announcements, which also included a call for other countries, particularly those impacted by the pandemic, to contribute funding to the battle against the virus as well as calling for an increase in international funding to the international fund for AIDS, Malaria and TB, Clinton also announced she was appointing talk show host Ellen DeGeneres as Special Envoy for Global AIDS awareness.

“I’m honored to have been chosen by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as Special Envoy for Global AIDS awareness. The fight against AIDS is something that has always been close to my heart. And I’m happy that I can use my platform to educate people and spread hope. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look up what ‘envoy’ means,” said DeGeneres.

Associated Industries of Florida, one of the state’s most influential lobbying groups, submitted 16,024 public comments from Florida residents to the U.S. Department of State yesterday, all of which are in support of the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline expansion, a hotly contested network of pipes that would route crude oil from Canada all the way to Texas.

The comments were gathered in collaboration with a group called the Consumer Energy Alliance, a so-called “grassroots” organization with ties to top lobbyists. The Department of State must issue the final necessary permit to allow the Keystone XL project to proceed.

The influence of lobbyists on the Keystone project has been controversial lately, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who heads the state department, has proved a key figure in the controversy. The tar sands industry has used at least seven former Clinton associates to lobby on behalf of the Keystone XL pipeline system — a 1,700-mile network of pipes that would transport synthetic crude oil from northeastern Canada to refineries along the Gulf Coast in Texas.

Environmentalists and several members of Congress have urged the state department to block the project, arguing that the environmental effects could prove detrimental and that the pipeline would only increase the reliance on oil. Last month, more than 1,200 people were arrested outside of the White House while protesting the pipeline. Members of the state department have defended its review of the pipeline, saying it has opened the door to discussions with both industry and conservation groups.

In June, the Consumer Energy Alliance (which has a Florida affiliate) delivered more than 62,000 public comments supporting the project to the state department, all of which came from people living in the six states through which the proposed pipeline will travel: Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Michael Whatley, the organization’s executive vice president, said that the pipeline will be “the safest pipeline ever built in the United States,” and will generate more than $20 billion in new economic growth for the U.S. economy. How exactly the group’s comments were collected remains to be seen, but some have alleged that the Consumer Energy Alliance gathered them through telephone surveys with leading questions used to sway public opinion.

Though it bills itself as a “nonpartisan, grassroots organization,” the Energy Alliance is linked to the lobbying firm Community Strategies, run by lobbyist Michael Gibson, who purportedly lives in a million-dollar home in Washington, D.C., and has worked on behalf of the NRA, the Republican National Committee and San Diego Gas & Electric.

In a press release sent out yesterday, Associated Industries of Florida Vice President of Governmental Affairs Jose Gonzalez called the Keystone pipeline “a critical component of a national energy strategy that will ensure the U.S. has access to a stable, long-term energy supply through North American sources and will help our nation gain energy independence from uncertain foreign markets.” Associated Industries, which opposes regulations, operates its own political action committee (AIFPAC) in an effort to “to assist in the election of business friendly candidates to the Florida Legislature.”

Judd Saul, of the the Black Hawk County organizers for a recent Waterloo event that featured Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, told Fox News reporter Steve Brown that Bachmann needs to “can the Barack Obama rock star crap” because her behavior at the Waterloo event left folks “kinda pissed.”

A similar sentiment was expressed in The Iowa Independent’s 2012 Presidential Power Rankings on Aug. 15 when some panelists who were in attendance in Black Hawk County described the campaign as “abrupt.”

… “You don’t come to Iowa, like she did last night [in Waterloo], first trying to make certain demands of county parties, then showing up late, then not taking time to meet one-on-one with the Iowans that came to see you,” a panelist said. “That’s not how you play in Iowa — even Barack Obama figured that out in 2007. So she can’t get up on stage talking about how she is one of us, an Iowan, or that she is a ‘real person,’ but then refuse to do retail politics.” …

The frequent references to the Obama campaign aren’t merely conservative Iowans taking advantage of an opportunity to bash the Democratic incumbent. In 2007, Obama announced his candidacy in Illinois and then traveled immediately to Iowa where he held events in Cedar Rapids and Waterloo. Both of those Iowa events, and several throughout the next few weeks, drew massive crowds — effectively preventing Iowans the type of access they’ve come to expect, such as small house parties, county events or meetings at a local business.

The same can be said of Hillary Clinton, who also drew large crowds to her public events, effectively preventing local media and activists the type of one-on-one “kicking of the tires” that comes with retail politics.

But while the Obama campaign adjusted and adapted in ways that ultimately allowed for more intimate settings, Clinton never really did — a situation that was critical to Obama’s ultimate victory on caucus night.

Jeff Jorgenson, chairman of the Pottawattamie County GOP, said that Bachmann “hasn’t been making herself available” and that she has a long way to go “as far as retail politics is concerned.”

In many ways Bachmann, a tea party darling, is a rock star candidate for much of Iowa. As she often points out, she was born here and spent the first decade of her life in Iowa. Since then she has morphed from Democrat to Republican, made a national name for herself and has become a spokeswoman for the party on many issues.

But if the campaign doesn’t work its way through the adaptations and isn’t seen as making a real effort to provide the type of retail politics that Iowa requires, she will continue to see her fortunes wane.

FRC blamed gays for the spread of HIV in Malawi, despite evidence to the contrary.

“African nations are warring to contain homosexuality’s spread because it is morally taboo, and has had a devastating impact upon Africans,” FRC said in its prayer alert on Monday. “Two thirds of all reported AIDS cases world-wide (24 of 36 million) have been in Sub-Saharan Africa. Amid this, the Obama administration is pushing homosexuality, using taxpayer dollars.”

But, according to USAID, the vast majority of HIV infections can be traced to heterosexual activity.

“The primary mode of HIV transmission in Malawi is heterosexual contact. Information about the proportion of infections among men having sex with men (MSM) is limited, as homosexual contact is illegal in the country,” USAID wrote in a recent report on HIV in Malawi. The report went on to say that heterosexual practices involving young women are driving that nation’s epidemic.

“HIV prevalence among young women (15 to 24 years old) in Malawi is 9 percent, more than four times the prevalence among men of a similar age (2 percent). The United Nations Development Assistance Framework reports that the continuing rise in HIV infection rates among young people, particularly girls, is due to several psychosocial and economic factors, including cultural/sexual initiation practices that often expose young girls to HIV.”

FRC is upset that the Obama administration threatened to withhold $350 million in foreign aid if the country did not change its laws that imprison gays and lesbians.

“The U.S. government has become the chief player in efforts to promote homosexuality and homosexual rights overseas,” FRC wrote and then offered this prayer to its followers. “May God restrain the Obama administration from promoting the LGBT agenda at home and abroad. May He give targeted nations courage to withstand U.S. coercion! Forgive us for this evil (Ps 94:16; Is 3:9-15; Jer 7:3-11; Lk 17:2; Rom 1:32; Jas 3:13-18; Jude 7).”

Malawi, like the FRC, is mainly conservative Christian in nature.

Also on Monday, NOM posted a message on its blog critical of the U.S. State Department for hosting a LGBT rights meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan.

NOM asked, “Will Hillary’s Pakistani Gay Rights Meeting Sponsor More Terrorism?”

“Pakistan is not happy about a U.S. embassy-sponsored gay rights meeting, calling it second only to a military drone strike as an attack on Pakistan,” NOM wrote. “We do not concur, but we worry about our embassy’s priorities. Is this worth breaking an alliance or spurring more terrorism? Is Pakistan our business on this issue? America less than 20 years ago decriminalized homosexuality. Can we not allow cultures to evolve?”

The efforts by the Obama administration, in particular Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to encourage nations doing business with the United States to drop laws that imprison or execute gays and lesbians has drawn fire from the religious right in the past.

The conservative Christian-based Institute on Religion and Democracy derided Clinton in January saying that decriminalizing homosexuality is a violation of “religious freedom.”

That’s a charge that’s also being lodged by Catholic groups who worry that decriminalization and acceptance of gays and lesbians abroad could lead to gay marriage and gay adoption.

The department then appeared to withdraw its denial of that request but it has still not done so, prompting the lawsuit to be filed. In a press release the plaintiffs said:

“Why is the State Department refusing to release these communications?,” asked Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. “This calls into question the agency’s decision to rush the review of the Keystone XL pipeline, despite its massive environmental risks and bipartisan opposition to it.”

Before deciding whether to grant a permit, the State Department must analyze the pipeline’s risks and finalize an Environmental Impact Statement. After the EPA told the State Department its draft environmental impact statement was inadequate, Secretary Clinton nonetheless said, last October, that the State Department was “inclined to approve” the permit. Secretary Clinton’s agency has been criticized by farmers and ranchers in the pipeline’s path for rushing the review process and not holding hearings on the department’s latest draft analysis. The State Department plans to make a final decision about the Presidential Permit before the end of 2011.

“Clearly, TransCanada hired Mr. Elliott to take advantage of his previous service to Hillary Clinton,” said Kenny Bruno with Corporate Ethics International. “We think the public has a right to know in what ways TransCanada and Mr. Elliott have attempted to influence Secretary Clinton’s view of this controversial project.”

You can read the legal complaint here.

Speaking at Legend’s Bar & Grill before a dozen students from Iowa State University, largely members of the College Republicans, told them he supported Democrat Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries. Karger said he would support a Democrat if they fell in line with his beliefs, and he supported Barack Obama when he became the eventual nominee. But he also said Obama has been a disappointment to him and the gay community, and that’s what pushed him into the race.

Karger has always been a Republican and worked on the campaigns of former presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Over the past 10 years, Karger — who is openly gay — spent most of his time as an activist for gay rights, especially fighting the Mormon church over Proposition 8.

He said part of the reason he’s running is to try to influence the debate among the Republican party, to get them away from an ideological divide over social issues and become a “big tent party” once again. That’s why he’s trying to visit with college students.

“Reince Priebus is making that a big part of his initiative is to bring in younger people into the Republican party,” Karger said of the new head of the Republican National Committee. “And I’ve heard him say that — and I’ve talked to him about that — and I’m clearly the only Republican running who is actively trying to bring new and younger members into the party.”

Karger won a straw poll at a college campus recently in New Hampshire, beating former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He attributed that to spending a week at a time in the Granite State repeatedly, meeting with voters. He said college students are typically more accepting of his sexuality and are able to get around it to talk about policy and other larger concerns.

Karger admits he’s taking a page out of Obama’s playbook by targeting youth voters, but believes Obama is “vulnerable” in 2012 despite a “bleak field” of GOP candidates emerging.

When students asked him about the size of government, Karger said some social programs will have to stay because some people just can’t take care of themselves. But he said the size of entitlements needs to be on the table.

Photo by Tyler Kingkade/The Iowa Independent

“I’m not making any finite recommendations but … I’m not running from it,” Karger later told The Iowa Independent. “Because of health care [improvements], people are living far longer than they were when Medicare was passed, when Social Security was passed.”

Along with him, Karger brought frisbees that read “Fred Who?” to pass out. He said the frisbees are intentional because it’s part of his initiative to get people healthy. “It may not be throwing frisbess,” he admitted, but he wants to encourage people to take small steps like walking up stairs, going for short runs and making an effort to live healthy. That’s part of why health care costs are so high, he claimed.

Karger said part of his campaign will be focused on listening to ideas from potential voters rather than simply throwing out his policy ideas right away. But he will focus on fiscal issues over social issues, such as gay rights or a woman’s right to choose.

“I want to bring back that entrepreneurial spirit and get people to stop relying on government,” Karger said.

He also declared he would not accept any matching dollars from the federal government for his campaign. He said there has been too much money being raised.

Raising nearly hundreds of millions of dollars just before entering the White House, as Obama did, makes health care reform packages and stimulus programs with price tags near $1 billion seem like no big deal, Karger asserted.

Franken isn’t the only Minnesotan to appear in the book. Mark Hanson, the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is also a contributor.

According to a press release from the ELCA, “Hanson’s essay was selected for inclusion by Dan Savage and Terry Miller, the founders of the project and the editors of the book. The two men launched the “It Gets Better” project when they created a YouTube video that reached out to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth facing harassment and bullying.”

In the U.S. Senate, Franken is the lead author of several pieces of legislation that would beef up national standards around bullying and include LGBT youth in bullying policies at the federal level.

Last week, Savage suggested that Republican politicians, such as former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, should participate.

“Who hasn’t made a video yet that you hope will?” TIME magazine asked Savage.

“Rick Santorum. Tim Pawlenty. Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. The Minister of Britain, who leads the Conservative Party there, made a video, and we haven’t seen one from anyone on the right in the U.S. to even say, You’re 14 and gay. Don’t kill yourself,” Savage said.

Here’s video of Franken’s message to LGBT youth:

Here’s Bishop Hanson’s video:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she is “generally supportive” of increasing American oil imports from Canada, but sidestepped questions Wednesday about whether she backs a controversial new oilsands pipeline from Alberta to Texas.

Clinton, testifying before the Senate appropriations committee, said it would be improper for her to take sides in the debate over Calgary-based TransCanada’s Keystone XL project because her department makes the decision on whether to grant a permit for its construction.

“Since my department bears the ultimate responsibility for making a recommendation on the pipeline, I am not able to express an opinion,” said Clinton.

This is in stark contrast to comments she made last October, when she said that she was “inclined” to support the project and “probably not” willing to reconsider her position.

While an account of the event from anyone in attendance other than McGovern has yet to emerge, video does seem to confirm his version of events, with security grabbing the 71-year-old despite no indication of a disruption from him. In the clip, available below, McGovern yells, “So this is America?” repeatedly, only after officers seize him. Secretary Clinton seems not to notice and continues on with her speech.

McGovern went on in the OpEd News interview to report aggression from the security guards after being led out of the room:

“They grabbed me and the shock wore off. There was a real struggle. I shouted, ‘This is America.’ Then I said, ‘Who are you?’ This is a mystery to me. Who were they? The guy in the suit was the one who did the damage. He was brutal.”

“They took me outside, put two sets of iron handcuffs that pierced my wrists. The bleeding went all over my pants. One guy said, “I pricked my finger” like it was his blood.”

McGovern, an outspoken critic of American foreign policy and war efforts, is a veteran Army officer who subsequently worked for the CIA for 27 years. He now works with Catholic and anti-war organizations in Washington, D.C., and has blogged for AntiWar.com. Prior to Tuesday’s incident, he was perhaps best known for challenging then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a 2006 press briefing (video) on the truth surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In that incident, Rumsfeld had security stand down while he engaged McGovern in conversation.

McGovern could not be reached for comment about what happened Tuesday, but he previously told Ron Kall of OpEd News that, following Tuesday’s incident, security officers handed him over to D.C. police, who arrested him and charged him with disorderly conduct. He says that he was held for three hours and released. The Washington Metropolitan Police Department does not publicly release arrest information.

The U.S. State Department did not return telephone calls seeking comment on the incident.