Voter Fraud! – II

February 15, 2012, 9:49 am
All Quiet on the Voter Fraud Front

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

The Minnesota ACLU has offered a $1000 reward for an example of voter impersonation, which a proposed amendment requiring photo ID at the Minnesota polls would have prevented. Anyone looking to compete for the cash should know the following restriction: the case must have been prosecuted in Minnesota within the last 10 years.

I’m eager to see if the ACLU will have to start issuing checks. My guess is they won’t.

The proposed Minnesota amendment, and the ACLU challenge, is part of a larger story, which I’ve written about many times Let’s review this history so far.

There is a campaign around the country to impose ID requirements on voters. Opponents of these measures, including me, say they are onerous and unconstitutional since they discriminate against the elderly, minorities, rural populations and poorer, less educated voters. It just so happens that many of these groups vote Democratic.

Supporters of the ID rules, who just so happen to be mostly Republicans, say that the requirements are necessary to combat the scourge of voter fraud. Some argue that there’s no difference between requiring an ID to get on a plane, gamble, drink or buy cigarettes, and requiring one to vote. I disagree.

There is no problem with voter fraud. By “voter fraud,” I mean people who go to polling places pretending to be someone they’re not, or pretending to be eligible when they’re not. (I don’t mean public officials monkeying with ballots, which photo ID rules would do nothing to prevent.) By “problem” I mean fraud on a large enough scale to warrant hindering particular groups from exercising their right to vote.

Every once in a while a story surfaces about apparent wide-scale fraud, which inevitably turns out to be false. In South Carolina, state authorities have been investigating allegations that more than 900 dead people voted in recent elections.

But last week, a spokesman for the South Carolina State Election Commission, which is spending taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars on this nonsense, said a name-by-name review was about a quarter done and had turned up no evidence that “something funny was going on.” So far, officials have found clerical errors and one example of a voter who cast a valid absentee ballot and then died before election day.

On the one hand we have alleged dead-man-voting funny business that’s looking less funny by the day. On the other hand, we have a long history of voter suppression, and continued efforts in that direction in the form of needless voter ID laws.

This solution-in-search-of-a-problem approach is not new. It reminds me of when Senator Hillary Clinton co-sponsored a bill to criminalize flag burning in 2005. We asked her aides to come up with a single post-Vietnam example. They could not.

“Where are the women?”

From http://emilyslist.org/

Rep. Carolyn Maloney said it best: “Where are the women?”

This morning, an all-male panel of religious leaders testified in front of a Congressional committee about birth control coverage. That’s right, only men — who are not doctors, by the way — were allowed to testify by the GOP leadership about critical women’s health coverage. No women.

It’s absolutely outrageous. The all-male GOP leadership is calling on all-male religious leaders to decide whether birth control should be fully covered by insurance plans.

After pleading with the committee chairman to hear from a female witness, the Democratic women on the committee literally stood up for us and walked out.

Birth Control

Just about had it with the constant whining from so called christians about the “liberal assault on religion”. How ’bout this:

“This contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s so inexpensive. Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”

Foster Friess — a prominent Santorum supporter and one of the chief benefactors of a pro-Santorum Super PAC — today made a statement on contraception. Friess told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on “Andrea Mitchell Reports”

Keep voting for these whack jobs and see who gets whose beliefs “crammed down their throats”….. They are just about to outlaw almost all common forms of birth control in the Commonwealth of Virginia when their religious whack job Governor, Bob McDonnell (law Degree from Pat Robertson’s Regents University), signs a “Personhood” bill passed by their Republican religious whack jobs legislature. (They’ve tried it unsuccessfully in Mississippi, Colorado and 3 or 4 other states.) If you’re middle class, or gay, or poor, or a minority, or a woman, or a union member, or a government employee (of any kind) or have an IQ above a turnip…. and you vote Republican then you’re not in that last category mentioned….

Moyers on “Citizen’s United”

As always, a good read from Bill Moyers. Two minutes of your time (from Democrats) (40 minutes and three trips to the dictionary for Republicans… never mind, just get back to reading your bible looking for where birth control is a mortal sin)

Moyers: Meet the Shameless Plutocrats Choking What’s Left of Our Democracy

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship www.BillMoyers.com

The race for the White House may cost more than two billion dollars. What’s getting trampled into dust are the voices of people who aren’t rich.

February 14, 2012

Watching what’s happening to our democracy is like watching the cruise ship Costa Concordia founder and sink slowly into the sea off the coast of Italy, as the passengers, shorn of life vests, scramble for safety as best they can, while the captain trips and falls conveniently into a waiting life boat.

We are drowning here, with gaping holes torn into the hull of the ship of state from charges detonated by the owners and manipulators of capital. Their wealth has become a demonic force in politics. Nothing can stop them. Not the law, which has been written to accommodate them. Not scrutiny — they have no shame. Not a decent respect for the welfare of others — the people without means, their safety net shredded, left helpless before events beyond their control.

The obstacles facing the millennial generation didn’t just happen. Take an economy skewed to the top, low wages and missing jobs, predatory interest rates on college loans: these are politically engineered consequences of government of, by, and for the one percent. So, too, is our tax code the product of money and politics, influence and favoritism, lobbyists and the laws they draft for rented politicians to enact.

Here’s what we’re up against. Read it and weep: “America’s Plutocrats Play the Political Ponies.” That’s a headline in “Too Much,” an Internet publication from the Institute for Policy Studies that describes itself as “an online weekly on excess and inequality.”

Yes, the results are in and our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of kings. Only these kings aren’t your everyday poobahs and potentates. These kings are multi-billionaire, corporate moguls who by the divine right, not of God, but the United States Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, are now buying politicians like so much pricey horseflesh. All that money pouring into super PACs, much of it from secret sources: merely an investment, should their horse pay off in November, in the best government money can buy.

They’re shelling out fortunes’ worth of contributions. Look at just a few of them: Mitt Romney’s hedge fund pals Robert Mercer, John Paulson, Julian Robertson and Paul Singer – each of whom has ponied up a million or more for the super PAC called “Restore Our Future” — as in, “Give us back the go-go days, when predators ruled Wall Street like it was Jurassic Park.”

Then there’s casino boss Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, fiercely pro-Israel and anti-President Obama’s Mideast policy. Initially, they placed their bets on Newt Gingrich, who says on his first day in office he’d move the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a decision that would thrill the Adelsons but infuriate Palestinians and the rest of the Muslim world. Together, the Adelsons have contributed ten million to Newt’s “Winning Our Future” super PAC.

Cowboy billionaire Foster Friess, a born-again Christian who made his fortune herding mutual funds instead of cattle, has been bankrolling the “Red White and Blue Fund” super PAC of Rick Santorum, with whom he shares a social right-wing agenda. Dark horse Ron Paul has relied on the kindness of PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a like-minded libertarian in favor of the smallest government possible, who gave $900,000 to Paul’s “Endorse Liberty” super PAC. Hollywood’s Jeffrey Katzenberg has so far emptied his wallet to the tune of a cool two million for the pro-Obama super PAC, “Priorities USA Action.”

President Obama — who kept his distance from Priorities USA Action and used to call the money unleashed by Citizens United a “threat to democracy” — has declared if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. He urges his wealthy supporters to please go ahead and back the super PAC. “Our campaign has to face the reality of the law as it stands,” his campaign manager Jim Messina said. To do otherwise, he added, would be to “unilaterally disarm” in the face of all those Republican super PAC millions. So much for Obama’s stand on campaign finance reform – everybody else is doing it, he seems to say, so why don’t you show me the money, too?

When all is said and done, this race for the White House may cost more than two billion dollars. What’s getting trampled into dust are the voices of people who aren’t rich, not to mention what’s left of our democracy. As Democratic pollster Peter Hart told The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer, “It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together.”

These gargantuan super PAC contributions are not an end in themselves. They are the means to gain control of government – and the nation state — for a reason. The French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat said it plainly: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” That’s what the super PACs are bidding on. For the rest of us, the ship may already have sailed.

Veteran journalist Bill Moyers is the host of the upcoming show “Moyers & Company,” premiering January 2012. More at www.BillMoyers.com

Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America, East, is senior writer of the new public television series “Moyers & Company,” premiering in January 2012.