The Democrats have a plan to get reelected despite sinking poll numbers. It is called universal voter registration.
Have you been wondering why they are pushing so many unpopular bills all at once, as though they didn’t care what the voters wanted? Ruining our health care system, sacrificing our national sovereignty, pandering to terrorists, increasing our energy costs, plunging the nation into hopeless debt, and trampling on individual rights? Have you been wondering why the Democrats are so unconcerned that they lost two governorships in landslide votes in Virginia and New Jersey?
They plan to change the electoral landscape before voters can retaliate. Here’s how, as described by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, speaking at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend this past November:
Transcript:
Democrats were very rattled by the November 3rd election results. What do liberals do when they lose elections? They change the rules. In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration.
What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states, “Take everyone on every list of welfare recipients you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders, and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be.”
By the way, there’ll be felon reinfranchisement too. At that point, you have destroyed the integrity of the registration process.
Now they will sell this very cleverly. They will say, “Well, OK, ACORN did have some problems with voter registration. We shouldn’t have these third party rogue groups out there. So let’s put ACORN out of business. Let’s register everybody.”
Now the problem, of course, is there are a lot of duplicates. And there are a lot of people on those rolls who are illegal aliens. It’s not a clean list. They don’t care. So, this is the issue you haven’t heard about. There’s a reason you haven’t heard about it. They don’t want you to hear about it.
The path between the day this bill is introduced and the day it hits the House floor will probably be less than two weeks. Get ready for it. You can stop it. Don’t get me wrong. But this is their stealth bill that is even more sneaky than the health care bill.
Much has been made about how Democrats are committing political suicide with the healthcare bill and all the other onerous legislation they have proposed and/or passed this year. There is no mistaking that these actions are extremely unpopular….
But those who believe in this “Democrat suicide” model implicitly assume next November’s elections will be free and fair….
Can falsified registrations become votes? If the feds push universal voter registration by overriding state elections procedures, you bet, says John Fund of the WSJ….
If you think ACORN voter registration and fraud threaten the integrity of the American electoral process, just wait until Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank get their way.
For many years, John Fund has been warning about Democrat efforts to redesign the electoral process. These ‘reforms’ are sold as ways of improving the process. Fund insists they are designed to manage favorable outcomes for Democrats, going so far as to say last November that the Democrats are working to subvert and corrupt the voter registration process….
We have always held to the tradition that individuals register themselves. This is a built-in system to maintain integrity. Allowing the federal government to jam universal voter registration opens the process to corruption, but that is the purpose.
Democrats know full well they’ll reap millions of votes in the process, once the process is corrupted in this way.
Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats while seemingly unconcerned by their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago: “what do they know that we don’t?”
We may have found out. It’s called universal voter registration….
The problems with universal voter registration are numerous and obvious. Many state lists include vast numbers of illegals, including some states which allow illegals to obtain driver’s licenses; because many homeowners have more than one home there will be duplicates; because so many people are on so many separate federal and state government agency lists, there will be duplicates, and because so many lists exist with little or no cross-checking capability these duplicates are likely to go uncorrected. Add to this the fact that Dems hope to extend voting rights to felons and the whole thing begins to look like a nationwide Democrat voter registration drive facilitated by taxpayers….
UPDATE, January 21, 2010: Jim Simpson reports a correction to the remarks made by John Fund last year:
The issue was John Fund’s naming of Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) as pushing universal voter registration legislation along with point man, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Fund said this in a recorded panel discussion at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend last November. I cited Fund’s remarks in an article published in early January. Now there is no dispute that universal voter registration legislation is being contemplated and that Chuck Schumer has been its main instigator, but when Frank subsequently objected to being identified with it, Fund corrected himself that he had meant to say “John Conyers.”
UPDATE, February 3, 2010: U.S. Rep. Barney Frank has posted a press release on his government website specifically denying this story:
…John Fund, a writer for the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, claimed that Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chuck Schumer had hatched a plan to game the election system by registering felons, illegal aliens and others to vote…. Congressman Frank has never worked on any such legislation and in fact heard about it for the first time after the story was launched in the conservative media….
Here is video of Barney Frank speaking about this subject on the floor of the House of Representatives:
A handful of state and local elections will provide our first public rating of Democratic socialism in a few days. Within months of sweeping into power in both House and Senate, as well as the presidency, the Dems have evoked the largest citizen protest movement in our country’s history. Soon we’ll see how that translates into political capital at the polls.
Two states are holding gubernatorial elections — New Jersey and Virginia. Both races are a study in how a political party can shoot itself in the foot.
The race for governor of New Jersey has been particularly tacky, thanks to Democratic candidate and incumbent governor Jon Corzine, who is running for a second term. Instead of campaigning on issues, he has denigrated his Republican opponent for being overweight. Television ads show footage of the portly Chris Christie struggling to get out of a car, while the narration accuses him of “throwing his weight around.” Since our country is considered to be the most obese in the world, this tactic may backfire.
Earlier this week, the Rasmussen poll showed challenger Christie leading Corzine 41% to 39%. But in New Jersey, Democrats have a history of coming from behind. Public sentiment is against Corzine by much greater margins, and that should afford an overwhelming victory for Republicans. But another Republican, Chris Daggett, is running as an independent, and siphoning off 11% of the vote, according to the poll. So in a totally favorable political environment, Republicans may still manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The situation in Virginia is much better for Republicans. The Democratic primary yielded the party’s worst possible candidate as the nominee. In the first contested Democratic primary in twenty years, state senator Creigh Deeds defeated the personable former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and former state delegate Brian Moran. Subsequently, Deeds has made every mistake in the public relations manual. No one has a clue what he stands for, because his ads are all negatives about his opponent. He is paying big bucks to provide name recognition for the other team.So in Virginia the Republican, former state attorney general Bob McDonnell, will likely sweep to victory. The most recent Rasmussen poll shows McDonnell holding a seven point lead, with McDonnell at 50% versus Deeds at 43%. But here’s the interesting part — poll respondents rate Obama as a negative for Deeds:
McDonnell also has been trying to link Deeds’ fortunes to those of President Obama. Deeds last month seemed to distance himself somewhat from the president but now says he hopes Obama will come to the state to campaign for him.
Fifty-five percent (55%) of Virginia voters say Obama’s performance is at least somewhat important in determining how they will vote, with 36% who say it is very important.
The bad news for Deeds is that just 23% say they are more likely to vote for the Democrat if Obama campaigns for him in Virginia. Forty-three percent (43%) say it would make them less likely to vote for Deeds….
Even as Obama joins Deeds for a final campaign swing in Hampton Roads, the Obama team is spouting negatives about their candidate, in hopes of minimizing the appearance that the upcoming loss reflects negatively on Obama:
Sensing that victory in the race for Virginia governor is slipping away, Democrats at the national level are laying the groundwork to blame a loss in a key swing state on a weak candidate who ran a poor campaign that failed to fully embrace President Obama until days before the election….
A loss for Deeds in Virginia — which for the first time in decades supported the Democratic presidential candidate in last year’s race — would likely be seen as a sign that Obama’s popularity is weakening in critical areas of the country. But the unusual preelection criticism could be an attempt to shield Obama from that narrative by ensuring that Deeds is blamed personally for the loss….
Then there’s the race in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. The seat was just vacated by John McHugh, a moderate Republican who left to become President Obama’s Army Secretary. The special election to fill the vacancy pits so-called “moderate Republican” Dede Scozzafava against Democrat Bill Owens, in a race that Scozzafava was favored to win. But in New York there are robust minor parties that can make a big difference. You may recall that Jim Buckley was elected to the US Senate in 1970 running on the Conservative Party line only in a three-way race. And this year’s conservative candidate in the 23rd, Doug Hoffman, is rising in the polls, pulling support from Scozzafava. Not only that, Hoffman has picked up some serious Republican endorsements, including former senator Fred Thompson and former House majority leader Dick Armey. And this morning’s bombshell — Sarah Palin endorsed him.What is nationally interesting about this localized race is the forecast of change in the traditional political landscape. In a terrain dominated by two parties, Republican and Democrat, political professionals must now account for a groundswell of independents loyal to neither. There has always been concern about the “independent vote,” but the tea party movement has brought it to prominence as never before. And Doug Hoffman is regarded as the “tea party candidate.”
More than that, like Buckley before him, Hoffman has a shot at winning as a third party candidate. Registration in the district gives Republicans a slight edge over Democrats, but it swings. The district went for George Bush, but then went for Obama.
At first glance, this looks like a race where the Democrats are united, and Hoffman is splitting off the conservative segment of the Republican vote. But looks can be deceiving. New York has long had four viable parties — Republican, Democrat, Liberal, and Conservative. And New Yorkers tend to divide along liberal/conservative lines. Seen this way, the race can be viewed as splitting the liberal vote between Owens and Scozzafava, with Hoffman getting the other half. All that is needed for Hoffman is enough money and name recognition to pull him into the mainstream. And the “tea party” movement has come on strong to give him that, with donations pouring in from the whole country.
The obvious path to a Republican win in New Jersey would be for Chris Daggett to drop out. That won’t happen, and we can only hope that Christie can hold his slim lead and win anyway. But yesterday, Michelle Malkin proposed an interesting solution to the split vote in New York’s 23rd. She suggested that the Republican should withdraw.
It’s time for the GOP to cut bait on radical leftist Dede Scozzafava. Dump Dede and quick. I repeat: Can the Republican establishment hear conservatives now?
Michelle follows this with a list of links to other publications calling for Scozzafava’s withdrawal. Quite a chorus! And a first election time look at “tea party power.”
Afghans are turning out to vote in their presidential election, despite Taliban killings. It’s a story of courage in the face of terror, and a celebration of new technologies.
Short Message Service (SMS) is a communication service standardized in the GSM mobile communication system, using standardized communications protocols allowing the interchange of short text messages between mobile telephone devices. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones.
FrontlineSMS is free open source software that turns a mobile phone into a central communications hub. Once installed, the program enables users to send and receive text messages with large groups of people through mobile phones.
Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) is open source software that allows anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone and visualize it on a map or timeline. It is being developed by programmers from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, the Netherlands and the USA.
Brian Conley is an independent video journalist. (You may recall he was arrested for filming pro-Tibet protests in China last year.) Using open source software from Frontlines and Ushahidi, he created the website Alive in Afghanistan to aggregate incident reports during the election. From the website:
Alive in Afghanistan has no political interest other than to promote transparency. We’re an independent, unaffiliated, non-partisan, all-volunteer project ….the result of the hard work and collaboration of many partners and individuals. Alive in Afghanistan empowers Afghan citizens to participate in society by reporting on their political process. Alive in Afghanistan is launching in time for the August 20th presidential elections so that people across Afghanistan can report fairly on the elections and related events through SMS, email, and the web.
So you, dear readers, can sit in front of your computer and learn about the events unfolding half a world away as if you were there. Take some time to do that. We may be faced with a few ACORN thugs deployed by the Obama forces when we go to vote or attend town hall meetings, but these people are facing lethal danger.
The world watches as Iranians risk their lives to demonstrate for freedom. Internal politics in Iran have always been turbulent and involve a plethora of competing political factions. In addition to the fractured political landscape, the balance of power has long been complicated by meddling from other nations competing for access to the Persian Gulf oil reserves with money, influence, bribes and promises. So to assign “white hats” and “black hats” in the present upheaval would be overly simplistic. Notwithstanding, the future of Iran hangs in the balance this week. Will they remain a repressive and isolated theocracy, or will they take their place among the modern nations of the world?
Timeline of events
Friday, June 12 — Iranian presidential elections were held. Candidates included
Saturday, June 13 — Early in the morning Ahmadinejad was declared the winner in a landslide victory. Immediately suspecting fraud, Mousavi supporters demonstrated in the streets of Tehran and set fire to a bus. Here is the crowd on June 13 in Tehran:
Sunday, June 14 — Mousavi called on Iran’s Guardian Council to cancel the election results and to hold new elections. Mousavi supporters continued to demonstrate in Tehran and set fires. Below is a picture of ten Basiji militiamen ganging up on a lone woman protester in Tehran on Sunday.
Monday, June 15 — Mousavi supporters marched in central Tehran. Seven of the demonstrators were killed, according to reports. Demonstrations were also held in the Iranian cities of Orumiyeh, Rasht, Tabriz, and Zahedan. Mousavi supporter Saeed Hajjarian, who formally appealed the result of the election to the Guardian Council, was arrested at his home.
Tuesday, June 16 — Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former vice president who backed Mehdi Karoubi in the election, was arrested in the morning. Tens of thousands of Mousavi supporters marched in northern Tehran, despite a government ban. The Iranian government bussed thousands of Ahmadinejad supporters in from the countryside to stage a counter-demonstration in central Tehran. Below is a picture of the Mousavi rally.
Wednesday, June 17 — Thousands of Mousavi supporters continued to march in central Tehran, and in the cities of Mashhad, Orumiyeh, Rasht, Tabriz, Zahedan, and Zanjan. Riot police attacked the university students — you can hear their batons breaking bones in this video:
Thursday, June 18 — Now wearing black and carrying candles in tribute to those who had already died in the protests, Mousavi supporters silently marched to Imam Khomenei Square in Tehran, where they held vigil and lit their candles as night fell.
Friday, June 19 — Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was the speaker at Friday prayers in the large gathering hall of Tehran University, an open-sided shed with a corrugated metal roof. But his lengthy speech was not religious. It was a detailed political statement about the week long demonstrations, and a firm threat that such demonstrations would no longer be tolerated.
Press TV, an English language channel funded by the Iranian government, reported the government approved vote totals from the 28 provinces of Iran and from the diaspora.
Upon learning that the election results were controversial, researchers in the outside world began statistical analyses to apply established models for human voting behavior to the results. Two circumstances supported these endeavors:
Farsi language websites published vote totals further broken down into 366 voting districts
The results from the 2005 Iranian presidential election were available for the 366 districts, with one of the candidates, Ahmadinejad, being the same, thereby providing baseline data for comparison
Most external observers suspect weighting of some of the totals. See, for example:
Professor Mebane’s cautious preliminary conclusion:
In general, combining the first-stage 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that while natural political processes significantly contributed to the election outcome, outcomes in many towns were produced by very different processes…. …in more than half of the towns where comparisons to the first-stage 2005 results are feasible, Ahmadinejad’s vote counts are not at all or only poorly described by the naturalistic model. Much more often than not, these poorly modeled observations have vote counts for Ahmadinejad that are greater than the naturalistic model would imply.
The results from the diaspora are questionable on the face of it. There are over one million expatriate Iranians living in the Los Angeles area. Totals for American and European Iranians are estimated at about two million. By their very nature, one would not expect that these populations would yield much support for Ahmadinejad. And they were fired up for this election, with several polling places available to them, six in California alone.
Regime efforts to control information and tech savvy countermeasures
Early on, the regime banned foreign journalists from leaving their offices or hotel rooms, and limited their reports to the outside world to one per day. Into this vacuum of professional coverage, the citizen journalists of Iran exploded via the Internet.
The Iranian government jammed the signal of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Farsi language programming. The BBC reassigned two additional satellites to extend the coverage beyond what could be jammed.
The BBC said it was making its Farsi-language service available on satellite Eutelsat W2M, which it said Iranians could tune into by making a small adjustment to their satellite dishes. The BBC also said the service would soon be available on Egyptian satellite Nilesat….
Likewise, Voice of America has added three more satellite paths to Iran, for a total of five, and keeps transmitting through intermittent jamming. Radio Free Europe is ramping up its satellite program, and using a variety of technical tricks to stream content into Iran, including short wave.
When the Iranian regime began arresting bloggers and shutting down their weblogs, the tech savvy younger generation turned to social networking programs to get their content to the outside world — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.
StumbleUpon reported that Tweets about the Iranian elections were coming in at over 221 thousand per hour for the tag #iranelection alone. Iranians were using the short tweet messages to plan protests and rallies, to keep in touch with each other and the outside world when all other communication failed.
What is clear is that the people of our little planet will organise and demonstrate and stand in solidarity together no matter the government of the day. We have seen world leaders buckle for fear of poking Iran the semi sleeping tiger meanwhile the free peoples of the world send millions of messages of support to the Iranian people.
Our world has changed, power in many ways now lies with the people not the governments. Freedom of information and freedom of the message will break down even the thickest walls.
The Iranian government started looking for Twitter accounts based in Tehran to shut down. Bloggers througout the rest of the world reset their place/date stamps on Twitter to Tehran GMT+3:30 so it would look like the whole world was tweeting from Iran.
As the protesters were using their cell phones to plan and coordinate their rallies through text messaging, the government tried to use the cell phone signals to track down and arrest individuals. This tech savvy generation was one step ahead of the regime, however. They were removing the Subscriber Identity Modules, or SIM cards, from their cell phones after each call.
So the Iranian government interrupted the country’s cell phone network to prevent the citizens from getting information to the outside world through that medium. Protesters responded by setting up fax networks with trusted friends in other countries — The Iran Fax Project. A movement to put pressure on the mobile phone providers by not paying phone bills has sprung up — Don’t pay your mobile bill, Just got this message from Iran.
Protesters have published a list of government websites and are inviting people around the world to leave them open in their browsers. With enough traffic overload from the resulting refresh pings, they hope to tie up the government websites and prevent Ahmadinejad and Khamenei from giving information out that way.
Disinformation
The official story from the regime was that Mousavi’s support was mostly among the students in Tehran, and that there was little upheaval in the rest of the country. This picture of Mousavi supporters in Naghshe Jahan Square in Esfehan, one of the biggest city squares in the world, disputes that propaganda.
And it gets better. One astute blogger discovered that the official Iranian news coverage of the Ahmadinejad rally used a picture that had been Photoshopped to fill in the empty places in the crowd. What sharp eyes that fellow has — see below. You can click on the image to open a large copy for closer inspection.
Practical and moral support from the outside world
Official and unofficial support is coming from outside Iran in many ways. Twitter had scheduled routine maintenance during the height of the protests. But at the request of the US State Department, they postponed their scheduled downtime to keep the platform open for the Iranian tweeters.
(1) expresses its support for all Iranian citizens who embrace the values of freedom, human rights, civil liberties, and rule of law;
(2) condemns the ongoing violence against demonstrators by the government of Iran and pro-government militias, as well as the ongoing government suppression of independent electronic communication through interference with the Internet and cell phones; and
(3) affirms the universality of individual rights and the importance of democratic and fair elections.
Within hours, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) introduced a similar bill in the US Senate, which passed at 4:12PM ET Friday afternoon. Not to be outdone by the House, they also passed another resolution introduced by Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) condemning restrictions on the media in Iran.
One woman has started a new weblog urging bloggers around the world to flood the Internet with quotations about peace from the Quran — A New Way to Help Iran. There’s a good idea.
“A Kingdom may survive with infidelity but will not last with injustice.”
We take God as our witness, that those who believe the National Guard is the leader’s Javidan Guard [reference to Shah’s royal guard] are mistaken. We take God as our witness, that we will not let the blood of the martyrs of the revolution and the imposed war, spilled on the streets and the pastures of this homeland for protecting our freedom, independence and the Islamic republic, be trampled upon by some power hungry exclusionists.
We take God as our witness, in spite of the great danger threatening our lives, that we stand firm against the traitors. Having performed our ablution for martyrdom, we will not let some corrupt and rentier commanders who are wearing the holy Guards’ uniform, slaughter people in a massacre.
We also strongly warn our Basiji brothers to either withdraw from disturbances or hand over their weapons and join the people.
Did you see how the unjustly spilled blood of the butterfly did not let the candle see the dawn?
“We are from God and to God we will return.”
On Friday, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gambled all his chips on professing support for Ahmadinejad during Friday prayers at Tehran University. That may be his undoing.
There are reports that some influential clerics and some members of the revolutionary guard are going to the other side, put off by his suggestion that the government would turn against its own citizens. Said one man:
Never have I heard a leader of Islam warn he will kill muslims in his care.
Despite Khamenei’s Friday threat that the demonstrations must end, opposition leaders are said to be planning another demonstration for Saturday (today). Word is being passed around that Mousavi, Khatami and Karoubi will lead a march at 4PM from Enghelab Square to Azadi Square in Tehran for a crucial green protest.
Also despite the Supreme Leader’s warnings, reports coming out of Iran tell of citizens standing on their rooftops and balconies throughout the night shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and “Death to the dictator,” reminiscent of the tactics used in the 1979 revolution that overthrew Shah Reza Pahlavi thirty years ago.
What comes next?
On Friday night, on the eve of the coming green revolution, a young girl made this video against the night backdrop of people shouting from their rooftops, but only her own countrymen could know what she said. The folk at Freedom for My Iran thought the whole world should be able to hear her powerful message, so they translated the audio and provided English subtitles. Watch Where is “here” (Inja Kojast?)
What will this Saturday bring? Will a ruthless crackdown by the government of Iran plunge the country deeper into its isolationist and limiting theocracy, or will the blood of martyrs water the seeds of liberty? As one young man posted on Twitter:
“I have one vote. I gave it to Moussavi. I have one life. I will give it for Freedom.”
By Joe Ramen | Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 4:18 am
As so often happens we write a post that lends itself to an update. Well, last week I wrote the following:
The Obama campaign is driven by being an antidote to the Bush administration which, like it or not and for many different reasons (partly George’s own fault, partly through media projection), is a laughing stock not only in NZ, but around the world. Anything but Bush. Mark my words: The Obama camp is going to drive that point hard over the next two months, that McCain will be “four more years of failed Bush policies,” and the McCain camp would be wise to do as much as they can to distance themselves from the Bush administration.
OK, so that may not be the most prophetic statement ever made and may be quite obvious to anybody with a pulse who has been paying attention to the campaign with only one eye half-open — but it is nevertheless true. And here is a perfect example of the left doing just as I predicted:
…The point is that Palin, and the circus she’s brought to town, are simply a bountiful collection of small lies deliberately designed to distract the country from one big truth: the havoc that George Bush and the Republican Party have wrought, and that John McCain is committed to continuing.Every second of this campaign not spent talking about the Republican Party’s record, and John McCain’s role in that record, is a victory for John McCain.
Her critics like to say that Palin hasn’t accomplished anything. I disagree: in the space of ten days she’s succeeded in distracting the entire country from the horrific Bush record — and McCain’s complicity in it. My friends, that’s accomplishment we can believe in.
Just look at the problem John McCain faced. George Bush has a disastrous record, and the country knows it. John McCain — the current one, not the one who vanished eight years ago — has no major disagreements with George Bush (and I’m sorry, wanting to fire Donald Rumsfeld a bit sooner doesn’t qualify) and wants to continue his incredibly unpopular policies for another four years. The solution? Enter Sarah Palin, a Trojan Moose carrying four more years of disaster.
So there it is: Voting for McCain is four more years of Bush according Arianna Huffington, a very popular and influential blogger on the left. It’s all on.
But let me point out a few things. Whatever were the reasons that McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, it wasn’t them or the GOP who started sounding any horns about it. They put her out there, and the MEDIA created the firestorm — not the GOP. We can sit around and discuss all day long the idea that this is just what McCain and the GOP hoped for, and that is probably a valid topic for discussion. My view is that the media, like most of the rest of the population, has a short attention span. We have collectively short memories, and the media is no different. Nobdy had heard of Sarah Palin until she was announced as McCain’s VP running mate, and the media scrambled for stories to report on. Then they became a dog with a bone: They will chew it for all it’s worth, and when the bone is pulp and has lost its flavor, the media will be onto the next bone. Just keep that metaphor in mind.
There were some other points made in Arianna’s article that need to be addressed to keep matters in perspective. Huffington continues:
And the plan has worked beautifully. Just look at what’s being discussed just 57 days before the election. Is it the highest unemployment rate in five years? The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? The suicide bombing yesterday in Iraq that killed six people and wounded 54 — in the same market where last month a bomb killed 28 people and wounded 72? That the political reconciliation that was supposedly the point of “the surge” is nowhere near happening? That Iraq’s Shiite government is now rounding up the American-backed Sunni leaders of the Awakening? That the reason 8,000 soldiers may be leaving Iraq soon is so more can be deployed to Afghanistan where the Taliban is steadily retaking the country?
First she cites the “highest unemployment rate in five years” which is true, but it’s only slightly higher than where it had been hovering until now; a rate of umemployment equal to that which existed during the Clinton administration when that was considered OK. A pending recession in the balance, the Fannie/Freddie bailout, and the slumping housing market is not solely germaine to the United States. This is global. Here in New Zealand we’re already in recession, and the housing market has declined severely. Property values are low; nobody in their right mind is selling; it’s a buyer’s market. In a country of only 4.1 million people 39 finance companies have gone belly-up since May 2006, leaving many investors with virtually nothing. The whole world is feeling the pinch.
Regarding the Iraq situation, all I can say is that war and conflict is fluid; the dynamics change every day, sometimes every hour. It’s not a scripted one hour TV drama. And whatever happens overseas, the war will ALWAYS be a drum the left can beat like a life insurance policy that guarantees them a certain return on the investement.
The funny thing is that most people who have an interest, I believe, already have their minds made up regarding for whom they will vote. All this back-and-forth slinging of mud by sycophants on both sides is just media fodder. It’s nothing more than a really bad bloody soap opera, reminding me of this line from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Or the lyrics to the song, “Limelight“, from drummer/lyricist, Neil Peart (a big Ayn Rand fan, BTW), of the musical band Rush, paraphrasing Shakespeare in the last stanza:
Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage.
Cast in this unlikely role,
Ill-equipped to act
With insufficient tact
One must put up barriers
To keep oneself intact.
Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme.
Living in a fisheye lens
Caught in the camera eye
I have no heart to lie
I can’t pretend a stranger
Is a long-awaited friend.
All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage
The election of 2008 promises to be an all-out battle throughout the country for the soul of America. Will we continue to be a nation of individuals who pride themselves on personal responsibility? Or will we keep sliding deeper into increasing government entitlement programs (and meddling) on the path to socialism?
The answer will largely be determined by the outcomes of the 435 hard-fought Congressional races throughout the United States. And in many of those races, the margin of victory or loss on average may be less than three percent. Which is to say that illegal aliens may decide the future of our democracy.
Our voting processes are deeply flawed. For quite some time the problem of voter fraud has been discussed, but tolerated. The website Illegal Aliens UScomments:
Those ‘undocumented’ are actually ‘highly documented’ with fraudulent documents our government readily accepts.
Because of virtually no vote fraud enforcement, motor voter registration, driver’s licenses for illegal aliens, amnesties and other factors, American’s most precious liberty, voting, is being rapidly undermined by illegal aliens.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reports:
In 1996, Congress enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, making it a federal crime for non-citizens to vote in any federal election (or state election, unless authorized by state law). As a penalty, ineligible non-citizens who knowingly vote may be deported. Additionally, a non-citizen who falsely claims to be a United States citizen is in violation of this law.
However, there are many documented reports of non-citizen voting, and there is no evidence of prosecution of the aliens for their action. With nearly 19 million foreign-born residents who are not U.S. citizens in the country in the 2000 Census and an estimated 9-11 million illegal residents (many of them not also counted in the Census), the potential is enormous for non-citizens to affect the outcome of elections.
A recent study released by the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation provides proof that illegal aliens and immigrants with green cards are committing rampant voter fraud in the United States.
300 busted in San Antonio — Illegal Immigrants have been voting in US Elections for decades. California most especially has been plagued by hundreds of thousands of illegals voting in elections. Republicans have alledged for years that Democrats have undertaken massive voter registration drives of Illegals in heavily Mexican neighborhoods around Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego County and other Border regions. Even Mid-Western States such as Ohio and Missouri have also seen problems with Illegal Immigrant voting. Now, Texas has been hit….
Specific Components of the Problem
1) By all estimates, the 1993 federal Motor Voter law is the biggest concern. It mandates that states allow people to register to vote when they get a driver’s license. And 47 states don’t require any proof of U.S. residence for enrollment.
2) For states that require some form of identification at the polling place, driver’s licenses are always accepted. And up to the present time, those can easily be finessed, obtained through bribery or forged. You will recall that seven of the 9-11 hijackers used fake driver’s licenses to board the planes. One of the terrorists used a bypass code to get a California license without a social security number.
Nawaf Alhazmi …. used a loophole, since closed, in California law that allowed hundreds of thousands of foreign drivers without Social Security numbers to use a generic number in its place…. Although the process changed a year ago, some of the drivers still have their original licenses… …a 1994 court decision required the state to also give driver’s licenses to qualified applicants, such as foreign students, who had no Social Security number…. 184,000 such licenses were issued between 12/2000 and 2/2002.
Police have arrested Luis Alberto Montana, 44, and charged him with renting a room in a Watsonville, California home and running a document factory there, producing a variety of ID cards…. Evidence seized included sheets of blank social security cards, immigration cards, driver’s licenses, W-2 forms as well as completed cards, including driver’s licenses from California, Arizona, Oregon and California license plate stickers, Matriculas and resident alien cards, according to police.
So much for authentic identification.
3) Many jurisdictions allow people to vote based on property deeds, rent receipts or utility bills. That may be a fair indication that those folk live in the voting district, but says nothing about their eligibility to vote! The Northwest Indiana Timeslists some of the documents that will work:
…the state-required residency documents, such as a child support check, current utility bill, property deed….
4) In a Wall Street Journal article, John Fund notes:
The Justice Department has often blocked states from weeding out people who have died or changed addresses. That’s important because in most states you don’t have to show photo identification to vote, making it quite easy for someone to vote in someone else’s name.
Even when big government does not interfere, precincts are notoriously lax in updating their rolls.
5) The manipulation of absentee ballots is another source of voter fraud. In 2005, the Detroit Newscited:
The national average for voting by absentee ballots is 14 percent, according to the United States Election Assistance Commission…
On a nationwide scale, that’s a lot of room to move! Twenty-six states permit any registered voter to vote by absentee ballot. In these states voters are not even required to state a reason for voting by absentee ballot. It’s “convenience voting.” Oregon has taken it to the limit. Oregon conducts all elections solely by mail ballot, and has eliminated the expense and manpower requirements of maintaining polling places.
Four Duval County residents have been indicted by a Brooks County grand jury and charged with illegally handling ballot applications and mail-in ballots that belonged to other voters … according to the state attorney general’s office.
The charge of possessing and handling the ballot of another person is a … violation of the Texas Election Code. The four San Diego residents indicted Thursday were Lydia Molina, 70; Maria “Kena” Soriano, 71; Elva Lazo, 62; and Maria Trigo, 55….
Check out those last names. What border do you think they came across?
6) Nursing homes are another prime source of legitimate voter names that can be manipulated. And from what population of day laborers might all those low-paying service jobs in the nursing homes be filled? The attendants, janitorial staff, groundskeepers?
Sadly, the use of absentee ballots to commit voting fraud has been well documented in Alabama in past elections. While many people used absentee ballots legitimately, past court cases have disclosed numerous instances where the outcomes of elections have been skewed by people who manipulate absentee ballots in one way or another…. Residents of nursing homes have legitimately filed for absentee ballots only to find that someone else had already filed in their name….
And the state of Florida, as a retirement destination, has a disproportionate senior population. Nursing home fraud is pervasive:
In 1998, the mayoral election in Miami was thrown out after it was learned “vote brokers” had signed hundreds of phony absentee ballots…. “In this area there’s a pattern of nursing-home administrators frequently forging ballots under residents’ names,” says Sean Cavanagh, a Democratic county supervisor who uncovered the scandal. He believes law enforcement turns a blind eye to voter fraud in many other places….
7) State-wide voting, rather than precinct voting, increases the chance for fraud. The poster child for “dead souls” is Maryland:
It should normally be difficult to pick the worst state legislature in America, but Maryland’s is way out in front…. Democratic legislators … passed three election-related bills and again mustered the necessary three-fifths votes to overturn his [GOP Gov. Bob Ehrlich, 2006] vetoes. Together the election laws would so weaken safeguards against voter fraud as to make Maryland the nation’s prime example of Election Day irresponsibility….
The most troublesome bill undermines the concept of local polling places by allowing all voters to vote anywhere in Maryland using a provisional ballot. Gilles Burger, chairman of the state’s Board of Elections, flatly says the bill invites fraud. His testimony prompted the Beall commission to warn that it would mean “a provisional ballot could be cast successfully in multiple counties and not be detected until after the votes were certified.”
As you can see, there are two factors in the danger of state-wide voting. First is the lack of local scrutiny regarding eligibility. Second is the potential for using the same ID in multiple precincts.
…California and many other states don’t require voters to show any identification at the polls. This continues at a time when you have to show photo ID to cash a check, board an airplane or even get a library card. Those under age 27 now have to show ID to buy cigarettes, but not to vote.
California? Er, Mexifornia? The home of sanctuary cities?
Some politicians try to make the current system even more susceptible to fraud. Vice President Gore’s office took the lead in convincing the Immigration and Naturalization Service to waive “stupid rules” on background checks so that hundreds of thousands of people awaiting citizenship would be “processed in time” for the 1996 election. It was later learned that 75,000 new citizens had arrest records when they applied. A spot check of 100 random new citizens by the House Judiciary Committee found that 20% of the sample had been arrested for serious crimes after they were given citizenship.
10) The practice of allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections also poses a problem. Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forumexplains:
The Scam of Voting by Noncitizens — ….the Democrats are seeking odd-ball constituencies to enhance their numbers. They and their liberal-advocacy law firms and lobbyists … are going after the votes of noncitizens. Many millions of noncitizens live in the United States, some legal and some illegal, and the Democrats see this as a win-win effort to get them to the polls on election day. They figure the percentages are pretty good that those constituencies will vote Democratic. Local decisions to allow noncitizens to vote in city, county and school board elections should not give them a pass to vote in federal elections, but once they are on the precinct registration rolls, who is going to stop them? Certainly not the Democratic polling officials.
“Thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in some states, and tens if not hundreds of thousands in total may be present on the voter rolls nationwide. These numbers are significant: Local elections are often decided by only a handful of votes, and even national elections have likely been within the margin of the number of non-citizens illegally registered to vote,” said Hans A. von Spakovsky, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation.
“There is no reliable method to determine the number of non-citizens registered or actually voting because most laws to ensure that only citizens vote are ignored, are inadequate, or are systematically undermined by government officials. Those who ignore the implications of non-citizen registration and voting either are willfully blind to the problem or may actually favor this form of illegal voting,” said Spakovsky, an expert on the subject of illegal aliens and immigration law…
11) And then there are those pesky electronic voting machines. From Popular Mechanics — Hack The Vote:
Four companies, Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic and ES&S, are supplying the large majority of the machines… Proponents of the new technology insist these ATM-like devices will save us from the debilitating ambiguity and sloppiness of old tallying methods that complicated the 2000 deadlock in Florida. But critics fear that this generation of machines may create far more problems than it solves, such as systemwide breakdowns, lost votes–even the potential for widespread tampering.
… anyone who combats vote fraud comes in for abuse. The Justice Department has become expert at raising cries of “voter intimidation” at any attempt to monitor polling places. Last week Justice dispatched investigators to Fort Worth, Texas, merely because a political activist there distributed leaflets alleging Democrats were casting absentee ballots on behalf of shut-in voters. When the Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the fraud in that city’s mayoral election, the Pulitzer jury noted it had been subject to “a public campaign accusing the paper of ethnic bias and attempted intimidation.” Local officials who’ve tried to purge voter rolls of felons and noncitizens have been hit with nuisance lawsuits alleging civil-rights abuse.
Estimating the Percentage
There’s a quick and easy way to guesstimate the percentage of illegal aliens registered to vote — winnowing the juror pool. The Cutting Edgeshares this data:
In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration rolls over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens….
Thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in some states, and tens if not hundreds of thousands in total may be present on the voter rolls nationwide. These numbers are significant: Local elections are often decided by only a handful of votes, and even national elections have likely been within the margin of the number of non-citizens illegally registered to vote.
American Enterprise Institute — Absentee Balloting for Convenience This is a good article on the historical development of absentee balloting and the trade-off between convenience and privacy.
By Dr. Ron Hei | Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Why doesn’t the mainstream media pick up on this stuff? Of course we all know the answer to that one. They’ve chosen this guy as the next president.
One year ago, Human Events published an article that revealed wild discrepancies between the narrative in Barack’s impassioned speechifying and the actual facts.
Obama Offers Wild Revision of His Own History
by Paul R. Hollrah | 03/27/2007
Tuning in to C-SPAN recently, I found myself listening to a speech by Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Hussein Obama. He was standing at the pulpit of a black church in Selma….
…as he spoke, I found my B.S. alarm going off repeatedly. But I couldn’t quite figure out why until I actually read excerpts of his speech several days later. Here’s part of what he said:
“Something happened back here in Selma, Ala. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called ‘ripples of hope all around the world.’ Something happened when a bunch of women decided they were going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing somebody else’s laundry, looking after somebody else’s children.
“When [black] men who had Ph.D.s decided ‘that’s enough’ and ‘we’re going to stand up for our dignity,’ that sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son. His son, who grew up herding goats in a small village in Africa, could suddenly set his sights a little higher and believe that maybe a black man in this world had a chance….
“So the Kennedys decided we’re going to do an air lift. We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is.
“This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves. But she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that, [in] the world as it has been, it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala., because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama, Jr., was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Ala. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Ala.”
Okay, so what’s wrong with that? It all sounds good — but is it?
Obama told his audience that because some folks had the courage to “march across a bridge” in Selma, Ala., his mother, a white woman from Kansas, and his father, a black Muslim from Africa, took heart. It gave them the courage to get married and have a child. The problem with that characterization is that Barack Obama, Jr., was born Aug. 4, 1961, while the first of three marches across that bridge in Selma didn’t occur until March 7, 1965, almost four years after Obama was born.
Obama went on to tell his audience that the Kennedys — Jack and Bobby — decided to do an airlift. They would bring some young Africans over so that they could be educated and learn all about America. His grandfather heard that call and sent his son, Barack Obama, Sr., to America.
The problem with that scenario is that, having been born in August 1961, the future senator was not conceived until sometime in November 1960. So, if his African grandfather heard words that “sent a shout across oceans,” inspiring him to send his goat-herder son to America, it was not Democrat Jack Kennedy he heard, or his brother Bobby, it was Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Alert researcher Paul R. Hollrah goes on to conclude:
Obama’s speech is reminiscent of Al Gore’s claim of having invented the Internet, Hillary Clinton’s claim of having been named after the first man to climb Mt. Everest (even though she was born five years and seven months before Sir Edmund climbed the mountain), and John Kerry’s imaginary trip to Cambodia….
It appears that Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is not the “fresh face” media sycophants like to describe him as. He’s just another in a long line of Democratic snake-oil salesmen.
One common assumption about democracy is that the choice of an elected leader will represent the preference of the majority of the people governed. Let’s take a look at the last half-century of presidential elections to see how often this has been true in the United States …… never.
Year
Registered Voters
Voter Turnout
Winner Total
Popular Support
1960
63.5%
Kennedy – 49.7%
31.5%
1964
64.7%
62.0%
Johnson – 60.6%
37.6%
1968
70.1%
62.8%
Nixon – 43.4%
27.3%
1972
71.5%
57.1%
Nixon – 60.3%
34.4%
1976
71.7%
55.7%
Carter – 50.1%
27.9%
1980
70.8%
54.2%
Reagan – 50.8%
27.5%
1984
74.0%
55.2%
Reagan – 58.8%
32.5%
1988
72.8%
52.8%
Bush #1 – 53.4%
28.2%
1992
74.5%
58.1%
Clinton – 43.0%
25.0%
1996
78.5%
51.8%
Clinton – 49.2%
25.5%
2000
66.7%
57.0%
Bush #2 – 47.9%
27.3%
2004
70.1%
62.0%
Bush #2 – 51%
31.6%
From the total residential and expatriate population of the United States, those eligible to vote are that subset meeting the following qualifications:
person is of voting age
person is a legal citizen, by birth or naturalization
person is not institutionalized, or has not had franchise revoked due to crime
From the pool of eligible voters, only a percentage make the effort to establish their bona fides with their local precinct and place their authorized signature in the voting records, becoming registered voters.
During an election, not all of the registered voters participate. The voter turnout fluctuates from year to year, but is usually higher during presidential election years than for those in-between years featuring only state or local races.
Authentic democracy occurs when two conditions are met:
100% of eligible citizens register to vote
100% of registered voters participate in an election
The table above shows, in effect, the degree to which the United States election process differs from real democracy due to civic laziness and voter apathy.
References:
An excellent research project is ongoing at George Mason University (GMU), Fairfax, Virginia under the auspices of Dr. Michael McDonald, Associate Professor, Department of Public and International Affairs. The United States Elections Project gives a detailed summary of relevant data for the years 1980 through 2006. More importantly, it shows that the apparent decline in voter participation reported by the United States Census Bureau results from their analytical methods, rather than actual voting patterns. Two important definitions from the GMU project:
VAP — The voting-age population is defined by the Bureau of the Census as everyone residing in the United States, age 18 and older. Before 1971, the voting-age population was age 21 and older.
VEP — The voting-eligible population is the population that is eligible to vote. Counted among the voting-age population are persons who are ineligible to vote, such as non-citizens, felons (depending on state law), and mentally incapacitated persons. Not counted are persons in the military or civilians living overseas.
Prior to 1980 the difference between the voting age population and the number of eligible voters in any given presidential election year was less than one or two percent of the total population. Since separate official VEP numbers are not available for those years, we used VAP data as the basis of calculation. However, as the discrepancy began to grow rapidly with the onslaught of illegal immigration, we used the available VEP data from 1980 onward.
The eligible voter totals (in millions) for the years 1980 through 2004 used in our computations are from the GMU research. The registration totals (in millions) for the years 1964 through 1996 used in our computations are from the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The registration totals compiled by the FEC for the year 1960 do not include sixteen states, and so we did not make a computation for that year. The voter turnout totals (in millions) for the years 1960 through 1996 are also from the FEC. Both the registration totals and the voter turnout totals for the years 2000 and 2004 are from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The percent of eligible voters who did their civic duty and registered for each presidential election is computed by dividing the registration toal by the eligible voter total (or the VAP total prior to 1980). The percent of turnout is computed by dividing the turnout total by the eligible voter total.
The Winner Total percentages from 1960 through 2000 are taken from President Elect, the unofficial website of the United States Electoral College. They differ only slightly from the numbers given on another popular reference page, History Central, which is also often quoted.
The popular support for every president-elect represents the percentage of eligible voters who actuallly wanted that candidate to be president. It is computed by multiplying the percentage turnout by the percentage of votes garnered by the winner. In every case it is considerably less than half of the electorate. Contrary to media spin, the least popular president-elect in the last half-century was Bill Clinton, who was favored by only one quarter of the electorate in both of his successful bids for the office.
In order for the form of representative democracy practiced in the United States to function effectively, it is necessary to have an intelligent and informed electorate. We have all become aware of the failure of the mainstream media outlets to keep us accurately informed. The poll figures showing the strong support for the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton call the intelligence factor into question as well.
We have watched with amazement as large numbers of voters bought into the theory that being married to a politician equals experience in governance. While most aspiring candidates work their way upward through local and state offices, Hillary Clinton went directly from a scandalous marriage to the seat of the US Senator from New York State. However, one reflects that there are large ethnic blocks in that state which would vote for anyone who runs as a Democrat, so perhaps that is explainable.
Like other women extending the term-limited or death-limited cult of a previously governing male — dime store clerk Lurleen Wallace or nightclub dancer Isabel Perón — Hillary slid into the Senate on Bill’s stained coattails. Admittedly, Hillary has better academic credentials than the two examples cited. But what is to account for her success in the nation’s heartland? It is almost incomprehensible. The following two items detail the situation:
From an email making the rounds:
Deanna Favre starting QB for the Packers this Sunday
In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers this coming Sunday. She claimed she is qualified to be starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers. Because of this she understands how to pick up a corner blitz and knows the terminology of the Packers offense. A poll of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move.
Does this sound idiotic and unbelievable to you? Yet Hillary Clinton makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of democrats polled agreed.
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Universal Voter Registration
