Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson has become the fourth leading GOP presidential candidate to shun the PBS debate this month at a historically black college in Baltimore, the Huffington Post has learned.

The debates, moderated by Tavis Smiley, will go on as planned, despite the absence of Thompson, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, former governor Mitt Romney, and Sen. John McCain.

The Republicans treat Morgan State University like it is Bob Jones University. Actually, they treat it worse. It's okay to appear at a college that bans interracial dating, but they can't show up to debate at a largely black university. They claim they have scheduling problems, but...

The Republican frontrunners' snubbing of Smiley and PBS comes on the heels of their rejection of a debate sponsored by the Spanish-language network Univision (McCain was the only GOP candidate to accept that invitation). This past June, only one Republican presidential candidate, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, showed up at the convention of the National Association of Latino Elected & Appointed Officials.

"It's not just that they are not coming. It's that some of them are visibly insulting us," Cecilia Munoz, vice president of NCLR, told the Politico.

The Republican Party is now officially a racist party. When you add tacit racism to an assault on civil liberties, an anti-gay agenda, and an expansionist, unilateral, foreign policy, what do you get?

You don't have to put people in ovens to be a fascist. Generalissimo Franco didn't put people in ovens. Mussolini didn't put people in ovens.

Here in America, we still feel pretty good about ourselves...but we shouldn't get complacent:

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent...

...These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century -- the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

Anyone wonder why I dedicate my life to documenting and protesting this? Consider:

Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.

Are we one Reichstag fire away from becoming a banana republic? Here's an exercise. Find me any element of the Nazi Party's early 1930's platform that doesn't have some corollary in the modern Republican Party.

Yes, there are important differences. America is not Nazi Germany...not even close. But the modern Republican Party is a party that has fully invested in bashing Hispanics and homosexuals, is wholly committed to treating women as little more than breeders, has taken a domestic attack as an excuse to strip us of our rights and organize the state around an overhyped threat, constantly warns of the enemy within, fully supports an unprovoked and expansionist invasion of another country, and is in the pockets of corporatist interests.

As a result, America's international image has reached unmatched lows.

Global distrust of American leadership is reflected in increasing disapproval of the cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy. Not only is there worldwide support for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, but there also is considerable opposition to U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan. Western European publics are at best divided about keeping troops there. In nearly every predominantly Muslim country, overwhelming majorities want U.S. and NATO troops withdrawn from Afghanistan as soon as possible. In addition, global support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism ebbs ever lower.

You might wonder why I would take such a harsh line over the fact that the Republicans refuse to debate in front of a black audience. Taken alone, this would be unjustified. But I can find no element of early onset fascism that the Republican Party is not currently pimping.

I'm not saying that we're on the road to death camps. I'm saying that the GOP, as currently constituted, is a dire threat to liberty and must be crushed...utterly crushed.

Our Democratic leadership thinks they can be reasoned with. They cannot.