The first sign that some of the 54 senators who voted against the background check bill were in trouble came from New Hampshire, where first-term Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte’s approval rating fell to 44 percent, a 15 percent drop from a survey last fall by Public Policy Polling. New Hampshire newspapers slammed her vote, with the Concord Monitor calling it “utter nonsense” and an “abomination.”

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These bombing are distinct from the 34 police officers who have been “murdered by domestic right-wing political extremists” since Oklahoma City, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And they do not include the worst gun massacres in the U.S. since then, which include: Littleton, CO in 1999 (15 dead); Blacksburg, VA in 2007 (32 dead); Ft. Hood, TX in 2009 (12 dead); Tuscon, AZ in 2011 (6 dead); Oakland, CA in 2012 (7 dead); Aurora, CO in 2012 (12 dead); and Newtown, CN last December (28 dead).

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State lotteries, which once were illegal, now exist in most states. What many people don’t know about lotteries is that they prey on those who can least afford it; most people never win anything big; and 11 states raise more money from lotteries than from corporate taxes. Beyond the moral, mental health or religious debates over gambling, lotteries are another example of how society preys on the poor and the working-class.

Let’s look at why state lotteries do far more harm than good—especially at the bottom of the economic ladder.

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The National Federation of Teachers and well-known civil rights advocates slammed the report, issued by former GOP congressman and Department of Homeland Security official  Asa Hutchinson. They said militarizing schools with more guns was not the answer to gun violence. Nor was putting more police into schools, particularly in communities of color. That only increases hostilities for students, not safe learning environments.

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There’s no shortage of badly behaving Republicans in Washington. There’s the take-or-leave-it congressional leadership, who constantly show they value rightwing ideology more than its impact on people. There are intransigent obstructionists, like the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, who believes the answer to gun violence is more guns. But Scalia isn’t simply another Republican bully; he may be the most venal and fascist Republican of all.

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Three troubling U.S. Supreme Court cases -- one that has already undermined public participation in elections and two new ones threatening to further tilt the balance toward wealthier and whiter slices of society—have all been brought by Republican activists who want to change the rules to benefit their shrinking political party.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a campaign finance case in which a wealthy Alabama Republican sued because he wanted to give more money than federal law allows in two-year election cycles. Shaun McCutcheon, the businessman-activist, joined by the Republican National Committee, challenged the $46,200 limit on donations to candidates and their committees, and $70,800 donation limit to other political committees. Less than 1 percent of Americans give this much to campaigns.

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1. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” said NRA President Karl T. Frederick, a 1920 Olympic gold-medal winner for marksmanship who became a lawyer, praising state gun control laws in Congress. He testified before the 1938 federal gun control law passed. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

2. “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States,” NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth told Congress, shortly after Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy with an Italian military surplus rifle Oswald bought from a mail-order ad in the NRA’sAmerican Rifleman magazine.

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In the years since, an NRA that once encouraged better markmanship and reasonable gun control laws gave way to an advocacy organization and political force that saw more guns as the answer to society’s worst violence, whether arming commercial airline pilots after 9/11 or teachers after the Newtown, while opposing new restrictions on gun usage.

It is hard to believe that the NRA was committed to gun-control laws for most of the 20th century—helping to write most of the federal laws restricting gun use until the 1980s.

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“Is it not part of the national defense to make sure that your children are safe?” Boxer said at a press conference, where she unveiled the Save Our Schools Act. “The slaughter of the innocents must stop....”

“Of all the bad ideas I've heard in the aftermath of the Newtown murders, the worst comes from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, who wants to provide federal funds for states to send the National Guard into schools,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman:

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Federal law prohibits gun sales to anyone who was declared mentally unfit by a court. In Bill Clinton’s first term, Congress passed a law requiring states to report these mental health records to the FBI. But in 1997, the Supreme Court threw out that requirement, saying states could share whatever information they wanted to—or more likely not share it.

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A handful of recent decisions highlight this less-watched area of corporate clout. In two rulings this year, federal courts have concluded that secular for-profit businesses have First Amendment religious rights. In another ruling, a business that challenged its inclusion in a federal consumer product complaint database won and then successfully sealed federal court records, with the judge saying that protecting the firm’s economic reputation was a higher constitutional priority than keeping court records public.

In other instances, federal courts have upheld arbitration agreements that customers must sign for a range of services that include daily necessities, blocking people from going to court when disputes arise. And in the patent law arena, a range of individuals -- from farmers who want to protect their seed stock to health advocates concerned about privatized cancer research -- have been losing to corporations that have patented seeds and even human genes.

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Whether the fault lies with the White House or with GOP obstructionists -- or both -- the results are the same: federal institutions created to make campaign finances more transparent and ensure that election technology is evolving are paralyzed by empty leadership positions, while the executive branch’s efforts to push ahead on its own have yielded little.

“I’ve felt like Diogenes looking for an intelligent Republican and never found one—I am hoping that will change,” said Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s Capitol Hill lobbyist, who puts the blame on the GOP for blocking Obama’s appointments. “But I’ve also been very critical of Obama for not taking on these fights. I’ve been asking Obama since 2009 to replace these commissioners and take on [GOP Senate leader] Mitch McConnell.”

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The voting rights part of this fact-averse bubble had many dimensions: from who is and isn’t registered to vote, to when and where people wanted to vote, to what a voter must do at the polls to get a ballot, to how voter lists are updated—and who can be trusted to oversee the process.

What follows are 10 lies the Right pedaled during the 2012 campaign. Some GOP partisans, like this Nevada group, are already trying to resurrect some of these fake issues. You can be sure you’ll see more as states and Congress look at 2012’s biggest problems, such as people having to wait hours and hours to vote.

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There have been a rash of recent reports in national magazines like Harpers, websites like FreePress.org and BradBlog.com, articles in The New York Times and activists briefings that suggest a range of scenarios where votes could be cast and disappear—or fabricated to steal the White House. Most of these scenarios are not just far-fetched or worse, but they distract from more visible and widespread issues that could impact the 2012 results. If you're nervous, vote early and help others to vote on Election Day.

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Now is the time to note precisely what’s wrong, what’s gotten worse and what’s completely broken in key corners of the electoral process. That’s because once the dust settles after Election Day, the impetus to fix things will wane among the political victors, media and much of the public, as it does after every big election. The winners will say there is not a problem because they won. The press will start covering the new administration. And weary voters will want to look ahead to solutions, not back to old problems.

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But their game plan is simple. They want to discourage voters by complicating every step for new and existing voters from specific blue cohorts, such as students, poor people and minorities. They’ve adopted new laws or rules that target pathways surrounding polling place voting, while keeping voting by mail—a longtime GOP strategy—free from similar rules. And they are spreading fears that there will be vastly more policing of the process to scare away voters, when in reality that’s not likely to be the case.

While most of the GOP’s voter suppression strategies are designed to erupt in November, it is now possible to identify at least three major areas where hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic votes have already been thwarted—and where steps to reverse that process, if possible, must be taken soon before fall voter registration deadlines kick in.

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It started with the 9/11 attacks. Within a week, Congress, including many liberals, gave the White House blanket authority to wage a war on the terrorists. A month after that, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, authorizing many anti-terrorism measure including expanded surveillance. By mid-November, the White House ordered creation of military tribunals to try terrorists who were not U.S. citizens.

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It is awarding the presidency to the candidate who wins the most votes.

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Across the country, two distinct strategies are converging on Congress. More than a million people have signed online petitions. State legislators, city and township governments, Democratic Party groups and unions have sponsored and passed measures in 23 states demanding that Congress pass a constitutional amendment to reassert and elevate the political speech of individual citizens and roll back the growing legal privileges of corporations.

The two approaches can be seen in the protest signs and sound bites proclaiming, “Money is Not Speech” and “Overturn Corporate Personhood.” But these slogans are not calling for the same remedy, especially when transformed into legal language in 10 proposals that have been introduced in the current Congress.

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