The electoral process, vote fraud, SEIU/ACORN et al, etc.

[Crafty_Dog]

Eric Holder must be amazed that President Obama was elected and he could become Attorney General. That's a fair inference after the Attorney General last Friday blocked South Carolina's voter ID law on grounds that it would hurt minorities. What a political abuse of law.

In a letter to South Carolina's government, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez called the state law—which would require voters to present one of five forms of photo ID at the polls—a violation of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Overall, he noted, 8.4% of the state's registered white voters lack photo ID, compared to 10% of nonwhite voters.

This is the yawning chasm the Justice Department is now using to justify the unprecedented federal intrusion into state election law, and the first denial of a "pre-clearance" Voting Rights request since 1994.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was created to combat the systematic disenfranchisement of minorities, especially in Southern states with a history of discrimination. But the Justice position is a lead zeppelin, contradicting both the Supreme Court and the Department's own precedent. In 2005, Justice approved a Georgia law with the same provisions and protections of the one Mr. Holder nixed for South Carolina. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that an Indiana law requiring photo ID did not present an undue burden on voters.

A second case offers a further glimpse into the High Court's perspective on the modern use of Section 5. In 2009's Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder, the Court declined to decide the question of the constitutionality of Section 5, writing that while it imposes "substantial federalism costs," the "importance of the question does not justify our rushing to decide it." But the Justices didn't stop there.

They also cast real doubt on the long-term viability of the law, noting in an 8-1 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts that it "imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs." That such strong criticism was signed by even the Court's liberals should concern Mr. Holder, who may eventually have to defend his South Carolina smackdown in court.

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley tells us she "will absolutely sue" Justice over its denial of her state's law and that challenge will go directly to federal district court in Washington, D.C. From there it may be appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which would have to consider whether South Carolina can be blocked from implementing a law identical to the one the High Court approved for Indiana, simply because South Carolina is a "covered" jurisdiction under the Voting Rights Act.

In such a scenario, Mr. Holder's tactics could well doom Section 5 itself. That's a big gamble for the sake of trying to stir up election-year minority voter turnout.

Civil-rights groups claim this Justice offensive is needed to counteract a voting environment in which little has changed since Jim Crow. But South Carolina's law, like Indiana's and Georgia's, explicitly addresses potential disenfranchisement by offering state-issued IDs free of charge. When civil-rights groups fretted about the ability of minority voters to get to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to pick up a free state-issued ID card, Governor Haley created an 800 number to offer free rides to anyone who couldn't afford the transportation. About 30 people called.

In October, the South Carolina Department of Elections reported that some 240,000 state voters lacked ID cards. The DMV now says more than 200,000 of those had allowed their IDs to expire, lived in other states or were dead.

The Voting Rights Act was once needed to counteract the gap between black and white voter registration. By 2009 the gap had narrowed to a few percentage points in some covered states while blacks out-registered whites in others. Yet Justice retains a federal veto on election-law changes no matter how innocuous or racially neutral. Section 5 has become a vehicle not to pursue equal access to the polls but to play the grossest kind of racial politics.

As African-American men at the most exalted reaches of government, Messrs. Obama and Holder are a testament to how much racial progress the country has made. It's a shame to see them pretending little has changed so they can scare up some votes.

[Crafty_Dog]

Here come the Presidential primaries, and right on schedule here come the campaign-finance scolds. The latest target of the folks who deplore the role of money in politics are so-called super PACs, or political action committees that can raise and spend unlimited funds as long as they don't coordinate with a candidate. What we really have here is another progressive reform boomerang.

In the common media wisdom, super PACs are a result of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling. This is said to have created a "loophole" that the super PACs have exploited to evade campaign-finance restrictions on the money that candidates can raise on their own.

The real loophole is the U.S. Constitution. The High Court merely restored the right of corporations and unions to exercise their First Amendment right to political speech, which includes the right to assemble to support candidates with money. Congress had illegally restricted that right with McCain-Feingold, which was the latest attempt to do the impossible and banish money from politics.

This is the history of the campaign-finance movement going back to Watergate and before that to the progressive era. Congress passes some limit on campaign fund-raising or spending, but the candidates and their supporters find a way around the law, often after the courts strike down one provision or another. Then the reformers say we need new laws to plug the holes their old laws failed to plug. Some people have wasted their lives playing this unconstitutional game of whack-a-mole.

The super PACs were inevitable as long as the politicians reacted to Citizens United by maintaining strict limits on donations to individual candidates. Under current law, a donor can give $2,500 for a primary and another $2,500 for the general election per candidate.

Enlarge Image

CloseGetty Images
 .The effect has been to reduce political competition by helping the well-heeled who can fund themselves, or the well-connected who can call upon networks of money men to bundle $5,000 contributions. A candidate who touches a populist nerve today can also compensate by tapping tens of thousands of small donors over the Internet. But it's easier to set up a super PAC that allows unlimited donations and spending.

The charade is that these PACs must be formally independent of candidates, even if everyone knows the candidates they are backing. The Restore Our Future super PAC has spent well north of $1 million in Iowa pounding Newt Gingrich on behalf of Mitt Romney. Yet when Mr. Gingrich faulted the ads, Mr. Romney was obliged to do a Sergeant Schultz of "Hogan's Heroes" act and claim he knew nothing about it—though Restore Our Future is run by former Romney aides who don't need to be told how they can help Mr. Romney.

Thus have the campaign-finance scolds also reduced political accountability. The candidates can deny responsibility for any attack ads while their super PAC allies savage their opponents. When candidates have to take responsibility for their advertising, they are likely to be more careful about the rhetoric and facts.

To his credit, Mr. Romney got to the heart of the matter when he told MSNBC that "We really ought to let campaigns raise the money they need and just get rid of these super PACs." If candidates could raise unlimited funds the way they once could, super PACs wouldn't be needed.

We also might get more and better candidates who are currently put off by the burden of raising money in $2,500 increments or less. To raise $10 million at $2,500 a pop requires 4,000 donors, if everyone gives the maximum. Assuming an improbable success rate of one donation for every two calls, that's 8,000 phone calls. Then multiply that by three because it's assumed that a competitive primary run requires upwards of $30 million or more. That's a lot of phone calls.

President Obama's campaign has boasted that it will have as much as $1 billion to spend this campaign year, and you can bet his super PACs will come out swinging at the GOP nominee as soon as that choice is clear. The Republican nominee had better have more than one super PAC spending on his behalf as early as March if he doesn't want to suffer the fate of Bob Dole in 1996 when Bill Clinton bludgeoned him unfairly on Medicare.

In our raucous, media-saturated democracy, candidates need to raise such sums to inform voters and break through mainstream media distortions. The campaign-finance obsessives want the corporations that run the New York Times, the Washington Post and NBC to be able to spend whatever they want to influence campaigns via their reporting and commentary, but they want to deny that same right to others. The next time you hear someone denounce super PACs, remember they are denouncing what their own misguided reforms made necessary.

[ccp]

From the 2012 election thread:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/12/indiana-gop-get-schooled-on-election-fraud/

It looks obvious to me this list of "signatures" was written all by one hand.
I wonder how common this is.  It must be far more common than we think just because, in general, fraud, etc is always more common than is brought to public forbearance, so to speak.

I cannot for the life of me think of any reason on Earth why States should have the right to insist that photo ID be presented at the time people vote do you?

Surely this is only a cynical attempt from Republicans to intimidate and "disenfranchise" voters.   

[Crafty_Dog]

Not Just A Democrat Dirty Trick, But A Crime


A few years ago, as part of its strategy of facilitating voter fraud as a means of winning close elections, the Democratic Party undertook a campaign to secure as many Secretary of State offices in swing states as possible. From those perches, the Democrats would be in a position to oversee elections and enforce (or decline to enforce) election laws. That strategy has been quite successful, but the Democrats suffered a setback in Iowa in 2010 when conservative Republican Matt Schultz won an upset victory in the Secretary of State race. Since then, Iowa Democrats have targeted Schultz.

That targeting has taken a sinister turn–a criminal one, in fact–as the Des Moines Register reports:

A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office.

Zachary Edwards was arrested Friday and charged with identity theft.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety issued a news release saying Schultz’s office discovered the scheme on June 24, 2011 and notified authorities.

Iowa blogger Shane Vander Hart has more here.

Edwards is a former Obama staffer who directed “new media operations” for Obama in five states during the 2008 primaries. Thereafter, he was Obama’s Director of New Media for the State of Iowa. In the Democratic Party’s lexicon, “new media” apparently includes identity theft.

Edwards now works for LINK Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm with extraordinarily close ties to Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin. Its principal, Jeff Link, has served as Harkin’s campaign manager and chief of staff. Link, too, is a former Obama staffer. The LINK Strategies web site says that Jeff Link “served as a media consultant to the Obama for President Campaign, coordinating branding, all paid media and polling in 25 states, including seven battleground states (VA, NC, FL, CO, NM, NV, MT)….”

That Edwards allegedly tried to steal the Secretary of State’s identity in order to frame Schultz for “unethical behavior in office” is no coincidence. Iowa Democrats, as Kevin Hall of the Iowa Republican points out, have mounted a campaign of false accusations against Schultz:

Since his surprise victory over incumbent Michael Mauro in November 2010, Secretary of State Schultz has been a target of the Iowa Democratic Party. Interestingly, on June 24, the same day as Zach Edwards alleged crime, Under the Golden Dome, a blog connected to Iowa Democrats, launched a three-part series of articles critical of Matt Schultz. They were based on documents obtained through an open records request from “a tipster.” The blog alleged that a batch of emails from Schultz’s office “raise some serious questions about his ability to remain independent and ensure election integrity”.

Just 15 days earlier, on June 9, the Iowa Democratic Party filed an ethics complaint against Schultz, claiming the Secretary of State of used public resources to campaign against presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman. The Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board dismissed the complaint on July 19.

So on its face, Edwards’s identity theft appears to be part of a coordinated effort by the Iowa Democratic Party to bring down the Republican Secretary of State so he can be replaced with a Democrat. We hope that Edwards will get the long jail term that he deserves, but the more important question is, from whom was he taking instructions? Circumstantially, one would guess from his boss, Jeff Link. But if so, who was instructing (and paying?) Link’s firm? The White House? Tom Harkin? Iowa’s Democratic Party?

Much like Watergate, which began with a seemingly simple (if puzzling) burglary and ultimately unraveled the Nixon administration, it is impossible to say how far the trail of criminality will go if the Edwards case is pursued aggressively. Will that happen? I don’t know; stay tuned.

[Crafty_Dog]

U.S. AG Eric Holder, DoJ Head Lanny Breuer Linked To Banks Accused Of Foreclosure Fraud

First Posted: 1/20/12 07:00 AM ET Updated: 1/20/12 09:23 AM ET

By Scot J. Paltrow


Jan 19 (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.

Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients.

Reuters reported in December that under Holder and Breuer, the Justice Department hasn't brought any criminal cases against big banks or other companies involved in mortgage servicing, even though copious evidence has surfaced of apparent criminal violations in foreclosure cases.

The evidence, including records from federal and state courts and local clerks' offices around the country, shows widespread forgery, perjury, obstruction of justice, and illegal foreclosures on the homes of thousands of active-duty military personnel.

In recent weeks the Justice Department has come under renewed pressure from members of Congress, state and local officials and homeowners' lawyers to open a wide-ranging criminal investigation of mortgage servicers, the biggest of which have been Covington clients. So far Justice officials haven't responded publicly to any of the requests.

While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers.

DEFENDER OF FREDDIE

Servicers perform routine mortgage maintenance tasks, including filing foreclosures, on behalf of mortgage owners, usually groups of investors who bought mortgage-backed securities.

Covington represented Freddie Mac, one of the nation's biggest issuers of mortgage backed securities, in enforcement investigations by federal financial regulators.

A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington's involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS "vice presidents" or "assistant secretaries."

Covington in 2004 also wrote a crucial opinion letter commissioned by MERS, providing legal justification for its electronic registry. MERS spokeswoman Karmela Lejarde declined to comment on Covington legal work done for MERS.

It isn't known to what extent if any Covington has continued to represent the banks and other mortgage firms since Holder and Breuer left. Covington declined to respond to questions from Reuters. A Covington spokeswoman said the firm had no comment.

Several lawyers for homeowners have said that even if Holder and Breuer haven't violated any ethics rules, their ties to Covington create an impression of bias toward the firms' clients, especially in the absence of any prosecutions by the Justice Department.

O. Max Gardner III, a lawyer who trains other attorneys to represent homeowners in bankruptcy court foreclosure actions, said he attributes the Justice Department's reluctance to prosecute the banks or their executives to the Obama White House's view that it might harm the economy.

But he said that the background of Holder and Breuer at Covington -- and their failure to act on foreclosure fraud or publicly recuse themselves -- "doesn't pass the smell test."

Federal ethics regulations generally require new government officials to recuse themselves for one year from involvement in matters involving clients they personally had represented at their former law firms.

President Obama imposed additional restrictions on appointees that essentially extended the ban to two years. For Holder, that ban would have expired in February 2011, and in April for Breuer. Rules also require officials to avoid creating the appearance of a conflict.

Schmaler, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that "The Attorney General and Assistant Attorney General Breuer have conformed with all financial, legal and ethical obligations under law as well as additional ethical standards set by the Obama Administration."

She said they "routinely consult" the department's ethics officials for guidance. Without offering specifics, Schmaler said they "have recused themselves from matters as required by the law."

Senior government officials often move to big Washington law firms, and lawyers from those firms often move into government posts. But records show that in recent years the traffic between the Justice Department and Covington & Burling has been particularly heavy. In 2010, Holder's deputy chief of staff, John Garland, returned to Covington, as did Steven Fagell, who was Breuer's deputy chief of staff in the criminal division.

The firm has on its web site a page listing its attorneys who are former federal government officials. Covington lists 22 from the Justice Department, and 12 from U.S. Attorneys offices, the Justice Department's local federal prosecutors' offices around the country.

As Reuters reported in 2011, public records show large numbers of mortgage promissory notes with apparently forged endorsements that were submitted as evidence to courts.

There also is evidence of almost routine manufacturing of false mortgage assignments, documents that transfer ownership of mortgages between banks or to groups of investors. In foreclosure actions in courts mortgage assignments are required to show that a bank has the legal right to foreclose.

In an interview in late 2011, Raymond Brescia, a visiting professor at Yale Law School who has written about foreclosure practices said, "I think it's difficult to find a fraud of this size on the U.S. court system in U.S. history."

Holder has resisted calls for a criminal investigation since October 2010, when evidence of widespread "robo-signing" first surfaced. That involved mortgage servicer employees falsely signing and swearing to massive numbers of affidavits and other foreclosure documents that they had never read or checked for accuracy.

Recent calls for a wide-ranging criminal investigation of the mortgage servicing industry have come from members of Congress, including Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., state officials, and county clerks. In recent months clerks from around the country have examined mortgage and foreclosure records filed with them and reported finding high percentages of apparently fraudulent documents.

On Wednesday, John O'Brien Jr., register of deeds in Salem, Mass., announced that he had sent 31,897 allegedly fraudulent foreclosure-related documents to Holder. O'Brien said he asked for a criminal investigation of servicers and their law firms that had filed the documents because they "show a pattern of fraud," forgery and false notarizations.

[DougMacG]

Vikings fans are excited to see Tom Brady and Tim Tebow getting registered to vote in MN.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=GqMVxeZhflI&feature=player_embedded

Support ID check.

[G M]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/02/cronyism-101.php

Cronyism 101

 
I wrote about my participation in the Koch brothers’ semi-annual seminar in Palm Springs two weekends ago here. Along with Peter Schweizer, I did a presentation on cronyism. My speech focused on corporate cronyism, while Peter’s centered on the sort of political cronyism that he detailed in his book Throw Them All Out. I included in that post a couple of the Power Point slides that accompanied my speech, and several readers wondered whether they could see the whole thing. So I fleshed out my outline into a complete text, and have interspersed the slides where I showed them in Palm Springs. Here it is, a pretty good introduction, I think, to the subject of corporatism in the Age of Obama:

Read it all.

[Crafty_Dog]

I have a rather low opinion of Rachel Maddow, but it sure seems like she is raising a fair point here.  Why is this getting so little coverage?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pngwcQQW5bA&feature=player_embedded

[ccp]

I saw this last night.

Yes.   One has to wonder are there the result of incompetence, honest mistakes, or outright bribes or just political operatives doing stuff for their guy?

We will never know.

Romney has money.

[DougMacG]

Rachel Maddow has uncovered unreported results before they were reported or recorded?  Yes maybe a scandal of timing or incompetence with the volunteers.  She presents the question of whether or not it was rigged without even a suggestion of evidence of rigging.  The accusation is that someone may have tried to affect the timing of reporting in order in one area in Maine to influence a news story. OMG.

Slow news day, that is a lot of hoopla over a non-binding straw vote of caucus attendees.  In our caucus we were required by state law to announce to the caucus the exact results of the vote before it was called in.  Then it was called in cell phone to cell phone (to the volunteer daughters of one of the organizers) and accumulated with other results to try to get something preliminary reported onto the evening news.  The procedure was set long before anyone knew who the result would favor.  That is not exactly an election result certified by a Secretary of State.

Someone please post the video of Rahel Maddow's outrage over the 'uncounted' Al Franken votes found in the trunk of a Minneapolis car late on election night after Norm Coleman was originally called the winner and dozens of other irregularities in an ABC documentary .I have posted previously. I'm sure she was all over it.  Votes known to be wrong were certified by the move-on.org Sec State and provided the 60th vote in the Senate to deem health care passed, affecting everyone for generations, not an evening news non-binding straw poll preliminary result.  Just my two cents.

[Crafty_Dog]

oth the Left and Right have expressed concern over potential abuse in America’s current voting process. But as the rhetoric flies, what are the facts? And is the Department of Justice heeding all concerns?
-------------------
From Townhall Magazine's EXCLUSIVE March feature, "Voter ID Laws: Racist or Reasonable?," by Brandon Darby:

There’s been much said lately about election integrity and voter identification laws. Both sides of the American political spectrum have raised concerns over polls and potential abuses in the American voting process. In fact, due to the serious voter registration irregularities identified by groups like True the Vote in Texas, along with the numerous voter fraud convictions across the nation involving workers from politically motivated groups like the failed organization ACORN, many states are pursuing photo identification as a means of addressing such assaults on election integrity. Texas, South Carolina and Florida have all taken steps to mandate photo identification as a requirement for voting. ...

 

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Take, for example, Harris County, the county encompassing Houston, Texas. The irregularities in voter registration in this jurisdiction have raised serious concerns over election integrity through the investigative efforts of nonprofits and Harris County agencies alike.


True the Vote, a nonpartisan, Houston-based nonprofit focusing on electoral integrity has revealed some startling information. Their effort, which started out of a small tea party group, focused on volunteering as poll workers in their local 2009 elections. According to the group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, what started as a simple effort to exercise civic duty and get involved brought them face to face with what she referred to as frightening and gross incompetence on the part of some election and county workers at the polls. Engelbrecht pointed out in her interview with Townhall that even though Texas law allowed 11 different forms of identification to be used at that time to verify identity, which was required to vote, she and her 70 election volunteers noticed that many voters were being allowed to vote without any identification at all. Texas has since passed voter identification laws which require the use of a photo identification card.


Engelbrecht’s volunteers ultimately submitted 800 signed affidavits outlining problems they encountered, including having overheard some election judges telling people who they should and should not vote for. After these experiences, the group decided to form True the Vote and to investigate how citizens could help ensure voter integrity and what processes existed to report abuses or irregularities. Engelbrecht says these efforts revealed even more frightening examples of degradation to the election process.

...
 


Engelbrecht’s True the Vote organization then decided to look at the actual registry and not just the new registrations. The group obtained the nearly 2,000,000-person Harris County Voter Registry Role. The group subdivided the registry by congressional district due to the size of the data.


After the registry was divided into the seven congressional districts which Harris County encompasses, True the Vote needed a starting point to isolate red flags for possible irregularities. They decided to start looking at registrations that had addresses six or more people were registered to.


The group found the seven congressional districts had four that were predominantly Republican and three that were predominantly Democratic. The four predominantly Republican districts had a range from 1,973 to 3,300 addresses with six or more people registered to them. The three predominantly Democratic districts had much higher numbers. Though this could possibly be attributed to variations in socioeconomic factors between the predominantly Republican and predominantly Democratic districts, what the group found next was alarming. The predominantly Democratic districts themselves had large variations between them in the number of addresses with six or more registered voters. The first had 7,560, the second 8,981, and the third—the district of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the prominent, outspoken Democratic congresswoman—had 19,596 instances with six or more voters registered at one address.


True the Vote then compared the socio-economic demographics of the three predominantly Democratic congressional districts in an effort to explain why Jackson Lee’s district could have such a high number in comparison. Engelbrecht told Townhall the group had found no significant difference to explain such a drastic variation in the numbers.
 

The group began doing research into the abnormalities in Jackson Lee’s district. They took the first 3,800 registrations of the flagged 19,596 homes with six or more registrants and began to investigate further. The group visited addresses and scoured property tax records. The group found many of the addresses were vacant lots or business addresses. Thirty-nine were registered at businesses and 97 of the addresses were nonexistent. One hundred six of the registrations revealed the same registrant registered more than once, and 207 of the addresses turned out to be vacant lots. Meanwhile, 595 registrations had registrants with driver’s license addresses not matching the registration, and many were voting in a district they did not live in. Of the random 3,800 registrations from Jackson Lee’s predominantly Democratic district, 25 percent had critical errors which Engelbrecht believes could result in an erosion of election integrity.


The media began to focus on the findings from the Harris County tax assessor’s office and True the Vote. Shortly after the August 24 press conference announcing the results of the office’s investigation, a fire of unknown origins burned down the warehouse containing all of Harris County’s voting equipment. In total, the fire claimed 10,000 voting machines, which was approximately $30,000,000 worth of equipment.  ...
Read more of Brandon Darby's piece in the March isssue of Townhall Magazine.

[Crafty_Dog]

Pravda on the Hudson takes a contrarian POV.  No surprise there, but its worth seeing how the other side makes its case:

When Texas lawmakers were writing one of the nation’s most restrictive voter-identification laws last spring, they rejected a proposal to allow voters to use other forms of ID beyond a narrow list. They rejected another suggestion to help voters without an ID card apply for one. And when a lawmaker offered an amendment to offer free access to birth certificates in order to get a card, instead of charging $22, they rejected that, too.

Related News
Justice Dept. Blocks Texas on Photo ID for Voting (March 13, 2012)
Justice Department Seeks Trial on Florida Elections (March 4, 2012) So it was no surprise on Monday when the Justice Department did the right thing and forcefully rejected the state’s voter-ID law entirely. The department said the law clearly disadvantages Hispanic voters, who lack photo ID’s at a much higher rate than the state’s overall population. The Voting Rights Act requires that states and counties with a history of racial discrimination prove that new voting laws don’t discriminate in purpose or effect, and Texas was unable to meet that test.

The department’s action comes after it also blocked a similar law in South Carolina in December, a demonstration that it is serious about overturning a growing body of politically inspired legislation that could make it harder for people in more than a dozen states to vote. (It has also blocked Florida’s decision to curtail early voting and third-party registration drives.) These laws, pushed by Republicans, would erect barriers to minorities, students and the poor, all of whom tend to vote for Democrats.

In a letter to Texas elections officials, the Justice Department said the state submitted no evidence that it is suffering from a voter-impersonation problem that would be solved with an ID requirement. But, at the department’s request, Texas did submit data showing how the requirement would affect Hispanic voters, and the numbers were disturbing. Nearly 11 percent of Hispanic registered voters lack a driver’s license or government-issued card, compared with nearly 5 percent of non-Hispanic voters. (Hispanics were the only minority group analyzed because it was easier to identify their last names.)

That means that as many as 800,000 Hispanic voters in the state could be disenfranchised if they cannot get a government ID. And the department notes that the state did nothing to make that task easier, refusing to open more driver’s license offices (lacking in 81 out of 254 counties) or even to extend the hours of the existing ones.

Another blow against discrimination on Monday came from a Wisconsin judge who ruled that the state’s voter-ID law violated the State Constitution. The judge, Richard Niess, wrote that the people most affected by the law “would consist of those struggling souls” who are qualified to vote but the lack the financial or physical resources to get an ID card. What right does the government have, he wrote, to “simply cast aside the inherent suffrage rights of any qualified elector” in the hopes of preventing some unqualified people from voting?

The challenges to these two state laws will now move through the courts, which will have an opportunity to restore a basic constitutional right to those who have lost it.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.dickmorris.com/obama-promotes-voter-fraud-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/

[G M]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZf25pmgR4c&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZf25pmgR4c&feature=player_embedded

Funny how the left never lives up to their own standards.

[Crafty_Dog]

 

If this is born out, the implications are profound , , ,

===================

http://www.westernjournalism.com/wikileaks-obama-team-stole-election-bribed-jesse-jackson-and-took-russian-money-in-2008/

Revealed By WikiLeaks: Obama Team Stole Election, Bribed Jesse Jackson And Took Russian Money In 2008
April 23, 2012 By Kevin "Coach" Collins 37 Comments
inShare.60

According to internal Emails circulated among the staff at Stratfor, an Austin Texas based private intelligence gathering firm, John McCain was presented with proof that Democrats in Pennsylvania and Ohio used voter fraud to win those states and committed other disturbing crimes. The communiqués were stolen and made public by WikiLeaks.

An Email dated November 7, 2008 under the subject line “ Insight – The Dems & Dirty Tricks ** Internal Use Only – Pls Do Not Forward **,” was sent by Fred Burton, Stratfor’s V.P. of Intelligence. It said in part, The black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly and Ohio as reported the night of the election and Sen. McCain chose not to fight. The matter is not dead inside the party. It now becomes a matter of sequence now as to how and when to “out”.

Burton also mentioned a “six-figure” Democrat donation/bribe to Jesse Jackson to buy his silence about Israel. On October 14, 2008 Jackson told fellow attendees in at the World Policy Forum in Evian France a ‘President Obama’ would “remove the clout of Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades.”

Burton continued with an explosive charge he apparently considered quite believable, The hunt is on for the sleezy Russian money into O-mans coffers. A smoking gun has already been found. Will get more on this when the time is right. My source was too giddy to continue. Can you say Clinton and ChiCom funny money? This also becomes a matter of how and when to out.

This allegation makes some sense of Obama’s reassurances to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev caught by an open mic. Obama said “….but it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space.”

Medvedev responded: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you …”

Obama: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir [Putin]…”

Fred Burton is a known quantity in the highest Intelligence circles. He has been Deputy Chief of the Department of State’s counterterrorism division for the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS).

Stratfor has acknowledged that last December its internal communications system was hacked and the group “Anonymous” has taken credit for the sabotage .  WikiLeaks started to publish Stratfor’s stolen Emails last month. Startfor will neither confirm nor deny whether the communiqués attributed to its staff are real or fabrications.

Congressman Darrell Issa are you listening?

[DougMacG]

This story if true is amazingly scary.  That Obama won by 7 points and the cheating if true was unnecessary is irrelevant to the crimes.  That John McCain said nothing is also irrelevant.   Nixon won 49 states in 1972 and did not need any of the wrongdoing either.

Each fraudulent vote is a felony (?) and if the corruption reaches the top, or wherever it reaches, it is treason IMO to systematically undermine our electoral system.

OTOH, hard to believe they are sitting on "proof" and don't come forward.

[Crafty_Dog]

Very interesting that Stratfor is cited as a source.  IF TRUE, this carries real weight.  If I have energy after teaching tonight (1600 right now and I'm getting ready) then I will see if I can figure out how to access my Stratfor account from here.

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/04/21/john-mccain-the-2008-election-and-civil-unrest/?singlepage=true

By J. Christian Adams

McCain, the 2008 Election, and Civil Unrest

April 21, 2012 - 6:48 am - by J. Christian Adams      There is an interesting story about the 2008 election coming out of Wikileaks. Memos from Stratfor released by Wikileaks say that widespread voter fraud occurred in Ohio and that “black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly.”  The McCain campaign knew about the fraud but feared taking action because of the “possibility of domestic violence” if they challenged the results in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The memos say campaign staff urged candidate John McCain to act in court:

“Staff felt they could get a federal injunction to stop the process.”

AdvertisementOne of the Wikileaked memos says: “Sen. McCain chose not to  fight.”  The reason?

The memo states:

“McCain felt the crowds assembled in support of Obama and such would be detrimental to our country and it would do our nation no good for this to drag out like last go around, coupled with the possibility of domestic violence.”

With the blessings of hindsight, we see that fear of mob violence in our country is no longer a hypothetical in the mind of a presidential candidate.  The call by the New Black Panther Party in Sanford, Florida, to seize (or kill) a private citizen is no longer the stuff of a senator’s imagination.

Recall Philadelphia was where the entire New Black Panther Party controversy started on election night. Poll watcher Bartle Bull has opined that one purpose of the presence of the New Black Panthers was to intimidate poll watchers, the exact people trained to detect and memorialize polling place misbehavior. That’s another reason why the dismissal of the lawsuit by the Holder Justice Department, even before discovery took place to investigate the events in Philadelphia, was such a blow to the rule of law.

Whether or not ballot boxes were stuffed by “black Dems” in Philadelphia is probably something we will never know. What we do know is this: First, that people in the McCain campaign thought they had evidence of election tampering that cost McCain the election.  Second, that McCain thought it best for the country to do nothing about it, in part because of fears of mob violence.

America is coasting along a slippery surface, and small concessions to the mob can resonate in ways we can’t predict. In seven months, we have a chance to reverse the mistakes of 2008, even if only to stand up to the mob this time.

Which raises the problem of Philadelphia. Obviously something is going very wrong in the City of Brotherly Love.  Elections there are a big giant spigot for the Left to keep the state blue.  GOP poll watchers are thrown out of precincts, New Black Panthers stalk the polls, and, worst of all, not enough poll watchers are available to cover all the precincts. It’s time that changed.  That’s why True the Vote is holding a summit April 27-28 in Houston, to mobilize and train a poll-watching army to deploy across the nation in November.

If you are sitting on the couch on Election Day watching it on TV, if you are at work instead of not using available leave, if you aren’t inside the polls on Election Day to prevent the mess of 2008 from repeating, you aren’t doing enough.  If not 2012, when?

[DougMacG]

Walter Russell Mead makes a great point that this man-made disaster is right in one of America's once great cities and no one seems to care.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/05/05/rogue-democrats-loot-detroit-as-nation-sleeps/

May 5, 2012
Rogue Democrats Loot Detroit As Nation Sleeps
Walter Russell Mead

Few readers will be surprised to learn that decades of incompetence and entrenched corruption in Detroit’s government have not only helped wreck the city; firms linked to former Democratic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick also looted the pension fund.

The latest scandal, which leaves even hardened observers of the abysmal Democratic machine that has run the city into the ground bemused, involves a real estate firm which gave the felonious mayor massages, golf outings, trips in chartered jets and other perks as this enemy of the people went about his hypocritical business of pretending to care about the poor while robbing them blind. The firm, apparently run by a sleazy low class crook named by the reprehensible Kilpatrick to be the Treasurer of what was left of Detroit’s finances, used Detroit pension funds to buy a couple of California strip malls. Title to the properties was never transferred to the pension funds, and they seem to be out $3.1 million.

Kilpatrick’s partner in slime is his ex-college frat brother Jeffrey Beasley, who is accused of taking bribes and kickbacks as he made bad investments that cost pension funds $84 million.  Overall, a Detroit Free Press investigation estimates that corrupt and incompetent trustees appointed by Democratic officials over many years in Detroit are responsible for almost half a billion dollars in investments gone wrong.

I honestly don’t know why there is so little national outrage about this despicable crew and the terrible damage they have done. The ultimate victims of the crime are Detroit’s poor and the middle class and lower middle class, mostly African-American municipal workers who may face serious financial losses in old age.

The 41 year old Kwame Kilpatrick may well be the worst and most destructive American of his generation; his two terms as Mayor of Detroit are among the most sordid and stomach churning episodes in the storied history of American municipal corruption. Now under federal indictment for, essentially, running Detroit City Hall as a criminal enterprise, Kilpatrick reportedly turned down a plea bargain that included a 15 year prison term. Insiders say that since the maximum time for the charges he faces was 18 years, the offer from the prosecutors indicates strong confidence in their case. Indicted with him was his father; it’s nice to think that father and son will have some quality time in the can.

We must all hope for mercy in this world and the next and VM doesn’t exactly wish the worst on these people, but if between the civil penalties, fines and lawsuits from those they have wronged Kilpatrick and company are picked so clean that they have to depend on their prison earnings for snack money in jail, helping them out won’t be at the top of our charitable giving list. And one thing Michigan legislators should check is whether the state has a nice harsh pension forfeiture law.

These judgments are always subjective, but it seems to me that there is not nearly enough national publicity about and outrage over the crimes of Kwame Kilpatrick. If a white or Asian Republican pol had looted fire and police pension funds, blighted the lives of a generation of minority kids and helped do more damage to a great American city than Hurricane Katrina, I don’t think this would be primarily a local news story. I would expect that the scandal would grip the nation, and there would be wall to wall national media coverage.

As there should be.

As it is, an eerie silence envelopes the subject. Outside the Michigan area, only the most dedicated news hounds and political junkies follow this story.

Three factors seem to be at work. One is quite simply financial; falling newsroom budgets in the MSM mean that it is harder for national papers and legacy networks to cover the country.

The second factor is more disturbing: there is a pervasive national sense of ennui and despair about urban areas in which African Americans are the majority. ‘We’ expect decline, decay and corruption in these places, so the Kilpatrick story strikes many editors and journalists as just another ‘dog bites man’ story: not news. Cory Booker is news; Kwame Kilpatrick isn’t.

That ennui and despair intensify when the subject is Detroit. Frankly, while the genteel world hates the thought of being racist, in reality there is a widespread belief in even the most liberal and well educated portions of the white upper middle class that nothing much better can happen in Detroit. I don’t believe that, and this is one of the reasons the city’s decline makes me angry as well as sad. Lax law enforcement and oversight from federal and state authorities allowed a climate of unrestrained corruption to grow up in Detroit over many years.

Putting a lot more people in jail much earlier in their careers, and instilling a healthy fear of the law in Detroit’s political class would have slowed the decline at least, and might well have created openings for better politicians to emerge. The failure of Detroit’s political class must also be seen as a dramatic failure of national and state law enforcement. The horses had been out of this stable for a long time before the authorities showed up with padlocks in hand. One hopes that the Department of Justice will move aggressively to target big city machines for investigation before more Detroits pop up. Similarly, state governors might want to suggest to their attorneys general that corruption bears watching. Michigan taxpayers are going to be stuck with huge bills as the state struggles to cope with the consequences of misrule in Detroit; smart governors might not want to wait until their cities collapse.

Finally, there is a disconnect between important local news and our national news culture today. The New York Times does a lousy job covering New York city and New York State; in the rarefied world of Times readers, local news is dull. Many of our national news editors and writers see themselves as cosmopolitan citizens of the world, interested in much more exciting and important things than the grubby realities of local and municipal life.

In this, the journalists faithfully reflect the thinking of many members of the genteel upper middle class; it is a kind of weird Platonic vision of reality in which the ‘lower’, grubby levels of politics and national life count for less than the ‘higher’, ‘nobler’ levels. Call it the gentrification of news; before Ivy Leaguers filled the newsrooms, American papers focused on the nuts and bolts of life. Now, they are much too highfalutin and hoity-toity for crime and city hall reporters to be the cocks of the walk.

Thus, even as interest in and reporting on the economic and social meltdown of so many once prosperous American cities and states ebbs, the ‘aristocracy’ of the press corps intensifies its endless and endlessly overdone coverage of the national election cycle. Very little that is said or done in either the Romney or Obama campaigns right now has much to do with what voters will be thinking about and voting on six months from now. But that doesn’t stop the legacy press from obsessing about it while ignoring far more consequential developments taking place on every side.

Detroit doesn’t matter all that much to the New York Times and many of its readers for the same reasons that Albany, Queens, Buffalo and Schenectady don’t matter. The new American elite wants to live and think as if it has transcended all that dreary provincial mess and lives on high in a world of Big Ideas and Global Issues. Mrs. Jellyby is much more interested in visionary programs to uplift the inhabitants of Borrio-Boola-Gha than on making sure her own children are well dressed and well cared for.

(At the American Interest we are trying to change this pattern. Go here to read a review of some recent books on Detroit by John G. Rodwan that appears in our May/June print issue.)

There is something profoundly wrong with an American political culture that accepts chronic misgovernment in major cities as OK. It is not OK; the people who do these things may call themselves liberal Democrats and wear the mantle of defenders of the poor, but over and over their actions place them among the most cold blooded enemies and oppressors of the weak.

American cities have been festering pits of graft and bad governance since at least the early 19th century, but there is a difference between the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall and the nihilistic destruction practiced by some of today’s urban machines. Today’s situation, in which some city machines are so dysfunctional that the parasite is literally killing the host (and not just in Detroit), is new and, again, the most vulnerable in our society suffer the worst consequences. Minority children are the greatest ultimate victims of this loathsome corruption: they attend horrible schools and grow up in decaying, unsafe urban landscapes where there is no growth, no jobs and no opportunity for the young.

How is it anything but racist not to care about that — and not to burn with the desire to put the scabrous thugs who misgovern our cities and waste our social funds in prison where they belong?

(Mead is a Democrat who voted for Obama.)

[Crafty_Dog]

Pravda on the Hudson saying what one would expect:
==========
It was nearly 10 p.m. on Wednesday when Paul Broun, a Republican congressman from Georgia, rose on the House floor to propose that no more money be spent enforcing a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The act is one of the most momentous laws ever passed by Congress, removing the discriminatory barriers that had blocked generations of African-Americans from the polls. Yet a Southern representative tried to slip in an amendment to an appropriations bill that would prevent the Justice Department from supervising election-law changes in his state and in 15 others where there has been a history of discrimination.

Moments later, Representative John Lewis, a Democrat of Georgia, strode to the microphone with a furious denunciation. Mr. Lewis, whose skull was fractured by a police baton in Selma, Ala., during a 1965 voting rights march, said it was “unbelievable” that a fellow Georgia lawmaker could offer such an amendment.

“It is shameful that you would come here tonight and say to the Department of Justice that you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dollar to carry out the mandate of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” he said, his voice loud and trembling. “People died for the right to vote! Friends of mine, colleagues of mine! Speak out against this amendment — it doesn’t have a place.”

On the floor, Mr. Broun’s explanation for getting rid of Justice Department supervision was that it had become “antiquated” and unfair. But he also said he wanted the Justice Department to back off because it has raised objections to a voter identification law in his state and several others. Those laws are the Republican Party’s modern attempt to disenfranchise minorities, the poor and older Americans for political gain.

After being confronted by Mr. Lewis, he withdrew his amendment, condemned discrimination and apologized “for any hurt feelings anyone has.” The issue, however, is far bigger than hurt feelings. Mr. Broun owes an apology to history.
==========

Thoughts?   Why didn't Broun insist on his POV?  What on earth is wrong with Voter ID?  Why not frontally face down the progressive assertion of disenfranchisment?  To start and not finish is worse than to never have started.

[Crafty_Dog]

This in from GB:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/florida-investigating-thousands-of-potentially-non-citizen-voters/

In a surprising development , , ,

"Florida officials have requested access to Department of Homeland Security databases to further help determine who is a citizen — a request the Obama administration has denied."

 

[ccp]

Kali-fornicate (itself) with 55 of the 538 votes.   Without it, Brock would have no chance.  Thank God for Texas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States)

[Crafty_Dog]

The United States of America has a black President whose chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, is also black. They have a lot of political power. So how are they using it? Well, one way is to assert to black audiences that voter ID laws are really attempts to disenfranchise black Americans. And liberals think Donald Trump's birther fantasies are offensive?

"In my travels across this country, I've heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who—often for the first time in their lives—now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation's most noble ideals," Mr. Holder said Wednesday in a speech to the Council of Black Churches. Voter ID laws and white discrimination, he added, mean that "some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance."

That's right. The two most powerful men in America are black, two of the last three Secretaries of State were black, numerous corporate CEOs and other executives are black, and minorities of many races now win state-wide elections in states that belonged to the Confederacy, but the AG implies that Jim Crow is on the cusp of a comeback.

It's demeaning to have to dignify this argument with facts, but here goes. Voter ID laws have been found by the courts not to be an undue burden under the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. The landmark Supreme Court opinion, upholding an Indiana law in 2008, was written for a six-member majority by that noted right-winger, John Paul Stevens.

Enlarge Image

CloseAssociated Press
 
Attorney General Eric Holder
.Black voter turnout increased in Georgia and Indiana after voter ID laws passed. Georgia began implementing its law requiring one of six forms of voter ID in 2007. According to data from Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the black vote increased by 42%, or 366,000 votes, in 2008 over 2004. The Latino vote grew by 140% or 25,000 votes in 2008, while the white vote increased by only 8% from four years earlier.

No doubt Mr. Obama's presence on the ballot helped drive that turnout surge in 2008, but then the black vote in Georgia also increased by 44.2% during the midterm Congressional races of 2010 from 2006. The Hispanic vote grew by 66.5% in 2010 from four years earlier. Those vote totals certainly don't suggest that requiring an ID is a barrier to the ballot box.

As for public opinion, an April 2012 Fox News survey found that a majority of Democrats (52%), Republicans (87%) and independents (72%) support voter ID laws. This is no doubt because Americans understand intuitively that ballot integrity is as important as ballot access to democratic credibility. Everyone's franchise is devalued if an election turns on the votes of the quick and the dead.

All of this honors Mr. Holder too much because the real key to understanding his speech is to think lower. A May 4 story in the Washington Post got to the heart of the matter: "The number of black and Hispanic registered voters has fallen sharply since 2008, posing a serious challenge to the Obama campaign in an election that could turn on the participation of minority voters."

In the 2008 heyday of hope and change, strong minority turnout helped push Mr. Obama to victory, especially in such swing states as Virginia and New Mexico. But as another election approaches, the minority thrill is gone. According to the Census Bureau, Hispanic voter registration has fallen 5% across the U.S., to about 11 million. The decline is 28% in New Mexico and about 10% in Florida, another swing state. Black registration is down 7% across the country.

The likeliest explanation is economic, as job losses and mortgage foreclosures lead to dislocation and migration to new areas. But it's also possible that many minorities are as disappointed as everyone else with the lackluster recovery. For all of Mr. Obama's attempts to portray Mitt Romney as out of touch, no one has suffered more in the Obama economy than minorities.

Which explains Mr. Holder's racial incitement strategy. If Mr. Obama is going to win those swing states again, he needs another burst of minority turnout. If hope won't get them to vote for Mr. Obama again, then how about fear?

Mr. Holder's Council of Black Churches address is merely the latest of his election-year moves that charge racial discrimination of one kind or another. These include voting-rights lawsuits to block voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, intervention in immigration cases in Arizona, and various housing and lending discrimination suits. Whatever the legal merits of these cases, their sudden proliferation in an election year suggests a political motivation.

The courts will eventually expose much of this as meritless, but it's a shame the media won't call Mr. Holder on this strategy before the election. Imagine the uproar if a Republican AG pursued a similar strategy. It's worse than a shame that America's first black Attorney General is using his considerable power to inflame racial antagonism

[DougMacG]

Many states have Voter ID on the ballot this year.  Democrats vehemently oppose it; it will block people's right to vote.

Meanwhile quite humerous is that at the Mass. Dem convention this weekend endorsing Elizabeth Warren, the convention required voter id.  It seems that they wanted to be certain who each person was because the vote is important and they don't want any fraud.  Hmmm.  What about the disenfranchised.  Who looks out for them?

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/06/01/voter-id-ma-democrats-disenfranchise-their-delegates

Voter ID is good for me, but not for thee.

[Crafty_Dog]

 

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/06/12/meet-the-radical-doj-lawyer-keeping-foreigners-on-florida-voter-rolls/

[ccp]

I keep hearing Democrats saying that there is no proof of "rampant" voter fraud.   That it is an aboration, rare, the exception to the rule.

But this begets the question how can we know if we don't even ID anyone how much fraud there really is?

How can one know without following people around if they are who they say they are or are elligible to vote or are not voting for other people without some ID (at least)?

If only 1% of vote are fraudulent that could have still meant 20 thousand votes in Wisoconsin were illiegitimate.   While 1% is not a lot 20,000 is.   Try sorting out one of a hundred.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/06/14/holder-defends-foreigners-voting-in-florida-elections/

=======================

Patriot Post

Florida v DOJ Over Voter Purge
On Tuesday the state of Florida filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security in order to continue with Republican Gov. Rick Scott's plan to purge ineligible voters from the rolls. "I have a job to do to defend the right of legitimate voters," said Scott. "We've been asking for the Department of Homeland Security's database, SAVE, for months, and they haven't given it to us. So this afternoon, we will be filing a lawsuit, the secretary of state of Florida, against the Department of Homeland Security to give us that database. We want to have fair, honest elections in our state, and we have been put in a position that we have to sue the federal government to get this information."
Almost immediately after the Florida suit was filed, the Justice Department filed their own suit against Florida, claiming that the Sunshine State is violating Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act. Notably, DOJ dropped its allegations that Florida is violating the Voting Rights Act. Scott claims that the state has identified 100 non-U.S. citizens who were registered to vote, 50 of whom already cast illegal ballots in Florida elections. Apparently, the DOJ thinks that's just fine. After all, Florida will once again be a crucial swing state in the upcoming presidential election, and Barack Obama will need every vote he can muster, illegal or otherwise.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/06/27/doj-vs-florida-round-one-florida/

[Crafty_Dog]

A Modest Suggestion for the American Election
The present administration and the Democratic Party have much to answer for.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-modest-suggestion-for-the-american-election/
by
David Solway

The corruption of electoral practice is now so deeply entrenched in American political usage, riveted in place by massive spending, systemic lying, media compliance, and the exercise of arbitrary power, that one despairs for the future of the country. This is especially the case with the Obama administration, which represents not the United States of America so much as the Democratic Party, its many dissident factions, radical groups, disaffected constituents, and its well-heeled backers. It is diligently engaged in subverting the electoral process to solidify its hold on national office, sparing no effort to bring about this problematic end. The following examples are only scattershot in what amounts to a veritable fusillade.
Florida is — or was — attempting to purge ineligible voters from the electoral rolls. The process has been halted for the present, but Secretary of State Ken Detzner claims the Department of Homeland Security has denied the state access to the federal immigration data base, thus impeding its efforts to identify instances of vote falsification. Florida governor Rick Scott has initiated a lawsuit against the DHS, and the Justice Department responded in kind. Indiana passed legislation in 2005 to counter voting irregularities, provoking the Democrats to file suit. Texas is determined to pass a new voter ID law, to which the DOJ has formally objected. Attorney General Eric Holder is also blocking implementation of voter ID laws in South Carolina. And so it goes.
Indeed, research conducted by the Pew Center shows that there are approximately two million dead voters listed on the registries, and that one in every eight voter records contains inaccuracies. It is also a well-known fact that up to three million voters can cast their ballots in several different states, facilitated by the Motor Voter bill introduced by the Clinton administration.

As Peter Ferrara, general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), urges in an article called “Stealing Our Elections” for The American Spectator, “Let’s be fully frank.” The obvious reason that Obama, Holder, and the Democratic Party oppose proof of citizenship and voter ID, he writes, is that “vote fraud is a central Democrat strategy for ‘winning’ elections.” The Democrats appear to be the party of the dead and the morally contaminated. Identification is anathema to them. And yet ID is required in almost every facet of official civic life — driver’s licenses, club memberships, medicare consultations, and a host of other such categories, without which recognition is not forthcoming and access is denied. Even Eric Holder’s own Washington, D.C., office requires photo ID, and a sign posted by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law reads: “ALL VISTORS MUST SHOW ID.”

Why should the voting process be any different — unless there are ulterior motives at work? What other conclusion can any reasonable person arrive at? As the Washington Times editorializes, “The Obama administration’s refusal to recognize the fundamental importance of an honest count only strengthens the growing notion that it seeks advantage, not justice.” It is plain that something must be done to avoid the scandal of a potentially rigged or manipulated election and to ensure, so far as possible, that dead voters be re-interred, multiple voters fractioned back to single balloting, mail-in fraudsters outed, forgers detected, noncitizens removed from the rolls, and illegal voter registration schemes investigated.

Here, then, is my modest suggestion. Determined to avoid a looming travesty, the Republican Party should insist that an international committee of legal experts and electoral watchdogs be invited to monitor the upcoming federal election.

Reputable observers might be recruited from that rapidly diminishing assortment of countries that still retain a degree of respectability in the international arena: Canada (cf. Canada’s International Election Observation project), Australia, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Andorra perhaps. (Israel would make an ideal contributor to the procedure were it not the innocent victim of a worldwide campaign of slander and disinformation.) The United Nations, of course, should be avoided like the proverbial plague lest it assemble a squad of observers from Zimbabwe (recently appointed to head the UN World Tourism Organization), Iran (recently chosen as rapporteur for the UN Committee on Information), and other degenerate and autocratic stalwarts like Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and, naturally, the Palestinians.

The same goes for the Carter Center, which is sullied by a left wing and pro-Islamic agenda, and for the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), which is, by any account, pretty well useless. But a cohort of impartial sentries hailing from countries generally acknowledged as more or less decent in their international relations might lead to “sober second thought” — a phrase applied to the Canadian Senate — in the minds of some politicians.

[DougMacG]

How Do You Get Into the NAACP Convention to Hear Eric Holder Say That Voter ID Laws Are Racist?

Of course: you have to present a “government-issued photo I.D. (such as a driver’s license).” You can’t make this stuff up...
July 10, 2012 — John Hinderaker, Powerlineblog.com

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/how-do-you-get-into-the-naacp-convention-to-hear-eric-holder-say-that-voter-id-laws-are-racist.php

[Crafty_Dog]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/07/10/texas-voter-id-on-life-support/?singlepage=true

[Crafty_Dog]

Dear Patriot,

OK, the uniforms the US Olympic Team will be wearing in the London Games were made in China. They were not paid for with tax dollars but instead by Ralph Lauren who designed them and had them produced in one of his factories. It would have been nice to have them made here but thanks to overreaching unions, America really does not have much of a garment industry left.

In an obvious pandering play to the union powers, Harry Reid was "outraged" by such a travesty. “The USOC should be embarrassed, they should be humiliated. ... Our athletes should not wear clothes manufactured in China.” He went on to say, "they should be placed in a pile and burned".

Forget for a moment how you feel about the uniform issue itself and consider Reid's record on foreign manufacturing.

Fact 1. The government gave now bankrupt solar panel manufacturer, Solyndra, nearly half a billion dollars for nothing. 

Fact 2. When Harry Reid pushed through funding and sweetheart land deals for a huge solar power generating facility near his home town in Nevada, the solar panels were purchased from his good friend, and Chinese manufacturing billionaire, Wang Yusuo. You guessed it, the panels installed in Nevada were made in China! I am sure it is a mere coincidence that Harry Reid's son, Rory Reid, is employed as a lobbyist for the solar venture!

Folks, this is the sort of corruption and deceit we are fighting. We know that most in the mainstream media will not touch a story like this. Our fight is to educate enough voters about what elected politicians are really doing behind the fake anger.

Help us place Harry Reid into the MINORITY PARTY in November with a generous contribution --here--
 
 
Sincerely,
 
Todd Cefaratti
Freedom Organizer


P.S. Our strength is in numbers. Please help our efforts by forwarding this message to a friend.


 
TheTeaParty.net | 1701 Pennsylvania Ave. NW,
Suite 300, PMB #433 | Washington, DC 20006

[objectivist1]

What is even more shocking than what Obama did here, which was totally lawless, is the the fact that no mainstream media is covering the story!

People can now literally sit on thier butts and collect welfare - all in the interest of more votes for Obama.

The Welfare Work Requirement: Obama Obliterates Clinton’s Best Achievement

By Herman Cain
July 16, 2012

President Obama likes to blame everything on George W. Bush, but apparently he does not discriminate. This week, Obama obliterated one of the best things Bill Clinton ever did.
Conservatives don’t look back fondly at the Clinton years, and for good reason, although he looks decent compared to what we have today. But you have to give credit where it’s due: Clinton did some good things, and one of the best – at the prodding of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress to be sure – was the signing of the 1996 welfare reform act.
The bill “ended warfare as we know it” as Clinton liked to say, and introduced stringent requirements that able-bodied welfare recipients either work or spend time preparing for work. It was a good idea and it reversed the expansion of the welfare rolls for the first time in decades. The key was that states were not allowed to waive the work requirements. Congress wrote this section of the law very carefully because they knew that some state bureaucrats would try to do just that.
Now the work requirement is gone, not because new legislation was passed to remove it, but because Obama once again decided the law does not apply to him.
On Thursday, the Obama Administration issued a directive allowing states to waive the work requirement – and only the work requirement. The directive explains: “The Secretary (Kathleen Sebelius) is interested in using her authority to approve waiver demonstrations to challenge states to engage in a new round of innovation that seeks to find more effective mechanisms for helping families succeed in employment.”
In fact, Sebelius has no authority to grant such waivers. The bill makes that very clear by limiting the allowance of waivers to one section only, and it very explicitly excludes the work requirement from that section. This was not an accident. The power of the bill, and of the whole idea, was that it would only succeed if the work requirement was mandatory for all states and for all recipients.
And there’s no need for the Obama Administration to “find more effective mechanisms.” Welfare reform has been a roaring success.
Of course, that depends how you define success. It only took four years after the bill had eliminated the old Aid for Families with Dependent Children program, and replaced it with the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, for poverty to plummet while welfare caseloads were cut in half, according to a report from the Heritage Foundation.
So why would Obama get rid of the work requirements? I can think of two reasons – one ideological and the other political.
The ideological reason is that liberals hated welfare reform from day one. They predicted it would push millions more children into poverty. When it did exactly the opposite, their hatred was not abated in the slightest. They are convinced that the only way for people to get by is the reliability of a check from the government, and to them, the notion that you would replace this security blanket with this strange thing called a job is simply absurd.
The political reason is cynical but simple. People who depend on the government to be their primary benefactor vote Democratic, and if their dependence is permanent, then they vote Democratic for life. Even if these folks don’t vote, expanding the welfare rolls will allow for the expansion of the programs all across the country – and the newly hired welfare bureaucrats will vote Democratic, because their subsistence is dependent on the government as well.
Ronald Reagan liked to say that he defined compassion not by how many people we help, but by how many people no longer need our help. Obviously, and not surprisingly, Barack Obama’s view is exactly the opposite. The more people who depend on government largesse, and the easier it is for them to get it and keep getting it, the more job security he creates – for himself.
And he’s even willing to grant waivers that the law expressly forbids in order to make it happen.
I wonder what Bill Clinton thinks about what Obama did to one of his most positive achievements. After all, Clinton (who was re-elected the same year he signed welfare reform) worked with a Republican Congress to pass this bill, to cut the capital gains tax and to balance the budget for several years running.
Now the first Democratic president to follow him is undoing all of the above, or trying to. It’s almost enough to make you wonder, when Clinton walks into that voting booth in November and closes the curtain behind him . . . what he will really do.

[Crafty_Dog]

In further proof that you and I have similar sources, I already posted this on the Government Programs thread now nearby. 

[objectivist1]

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO STAGE ‘REICHSTAG’ EVENT AS TRIGGER FOR MARTIAL LAW, DHS SOURCE WARNS

‘Reichstag’ event could involve false assassination attempt blamed on “white supremacists”
Incited racial riots would lead to calls for government “crackdown”
Civil unrest would lead to martial law, DHS travel checkpoints, indefinite delay of elections

Washington, DC – The Obama agents, through the DHS and other assorted colluders, are plotting a major ‘Reichstag’ event to generate racial riots and produce the justification for martial law, delaying the November 2012 elections, possibly indefinitely, a DHS whistleblower informed the Canada Free Press on Tuesday.
The ‘Reichstag Event’ would take the form of a staged assassination attempt against Barack Obama, “carefully choreographed” and manufactured by Obama operatives. It would subsequently be blamed on “white supremacists” and used to enrage the black community to rioting and looting, the DHS source warned.
The Obama administration would then use the violence and chaos they created as justification for the imposition of martial law in major urban cities in America, the creation of DHS checkpoints, restriction of travel, and the indefinite delay of the November 2012 elections.
The Reichstag event refers to a fire started during Hitler’s rise to power. The fire allowed him to grab emergency powers and murder his opposition. Historians have long believed that Hitler started the fire himself, while he blamed it on the Communists.
The anonymous whistleblower elaborated on how the Obama administration is using the Occupy movement, labor unions, and other assorted subversive groups to create massive chaos within the nation.
“Using untracked campaign funds, they are paying people to infiltrate the various movements to cause physical destruction of property and disrupt commerce. That began last year, but has increased ten-fold already this year,” the DHS source shared.
“Obama is using some high profile people as pawns to foment the revolution. I heard several times through very credible sources that [Louis] Farrakhan is on the CIA payroll. Other have been named as well, but I’m not prepared to identify them yet. Farrakhan is to coordinate the Blacks and the Muslims to prepare for riots this summer, using any means necessary.”
The recent revelations appeared to complement warnings given by other government insiders, who alleged that Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson were all agent provocateurs whose mission was to inflame racial tensions and spark open conflict in the streets of America.
According to the DHS source, a global economic collapse is coming, which the Obama administration is well aware of. They wish to build a system of global governance from the ashes of the previous financial system. In order for this mission to be completed, the Obama administration needs more time at the helm of power. Their reasons for concern are justified; as recently as May 8, influential political prognosticator Dick Morris predicted a Romney landslide if the election were held today.

The shocking news also seemed to confirm recent actions taken by the DHS, such as their purchase of 450 million rounds of ammunition and their recent BlackHawk helicopters operation in Chicago, which looked frighteningly similar to a civil unrest exercise, but was described as “routine training”.
The concept of a staged assassination attempt against Barack Obama is not new as well and was first voiced by a knowledgeable White House insider known only as “WHI”.
Ulsterman:  So what is it?  Pull what off?
Insider:  A manufactured threat against the President of the United States.  Something easily digested by the media and the American public.  Not a real threat – something totally of their own making. They will use it if they need to – got no doubt whatsoever about that.  Jarrett has approved the idea…and did so a long time ago.  There were whispers of it during the 2008 campaign.  McCain was so god-awful it never reached a serious consideration…but the plan was discussed.  If needed – they were willing to go that route.  It would be the ultimate use of the race card in the history of American politics.  And…it would likely work if they got away with it.
Ulsterman:  They would go that far? Risk something like that?
Insider:  You don’t need to ask that question.  Not after what we’ve discussed this past year.  Not after what I’ve told you has proven out over and over again.  So stop asking the fu—ing question.  You need to accept the fact…if you haven’t done so yet – you need to accept the fact these people are playing for keeps.  I told you – how many times?  How many times have I said it?  These are not Democrats.  These folks are something else entirely.  And they are willing to push the country – all of us, right against the fu—ing wall.  Hard.  I’m pushing back.  Others are too.  All of this is part of that effort.  A small part, but an important one.
As with the Occupy movement, it appears as if the Obama administration executed a test-run of the plot, with a “shot being fired” at the White House. This would lend credibility when they choreographed the attempt for the masses.
As early as August 2011, WHI also predicted race riots coming in the summer of 2012. The use of the Trayvon Martin death and the subsequent incitements to violence by the media, Obama operatives, and useful idiots, followed by the subsequent threats by the NBPP of a coming “race war” appear to have been merely a sign of what’s to come.
Middle-class American citizens were shocked and appalled at the allegations, with many hoping they were not true. Some said they had harbored similar suspicions for quite some time, due to the many anomalies and inaccuracies emanating from the current operatives inhabiting the White House.
The DHS source claimed that campaign funds were being directly used to fund the incitements to violence and rioting that the Obama administration was seeking to spark.
“Using untracked campaign funds, they are paying people to infiltrate the various movements to cause physical destruction of property and disrupt commerce. That began last year, but has increased ten-fold already this year,” stated this source.
“He added that they are using some lower level DHS agents to make the payments under the context of tracking subversives, but they are the unwitting subversives.”

The use of campaign funds, funneled through DHS agents to street-level agitators for the purpose of fomenting violence, would be extremely legally questionable, if not outright illegal, certain legal experts shared.
Intelligence officials said that if the allegations were true, the degree to which extremists had penetrated the upper echelons of the American government, finance, and security structure was unparalleled.
“Let’s just say that we are not taking these accusations lightly,” one official remarked on condition of anonymity. “Certain figures will be placed under a microscope, along with their associates.”
Valerie Jarrett, the shadowy figure always at Obama’s side, has been accused by some of “manipulating” or “controlling’ the President. Just who does she work for? Who does she take orders from?
The possibility that Barack Obama’s operatives, under the direction of Valerie Jarrett, was actively involved in the facilitation of street violence and mob chaos disturbed citizens, with many deeming it unpatriotic, subversive, and possibly seditious.

“Isn’t this why HUAC was created?”, one middle-class citizen angrily questioned. “Congress must re-instate HUAC, hold hearings, and find out if there is any truth to this.”
The intensely close co-ordination of seemingly separate entities confirmed the suspicions of many that communist agents had infiltrated major institutions, organizations, and trade unions, and were working together to sabotage America.
Who is Valerie Jarrett?
“Their apparatus can be seen as a type of octupus, having many tentacles,” one intelligence source confided on condition of anonymity. “Occupy is one tentacle, the unions are another, the Black Panthers are another, the radical black/islamic supremacists(Wright, Farrakhan, Van Jones, Sharpton) are another, DHS and its’ umbrella agencies are another, the mainstream press is another,” the source explained. “These tentacles are all working together, seemingly separate, but eventually they are controlled by the same small group of people. They receive their directives and marching orders and mindlessly execute them.”
The intelligence official predicted that in the very near future, all of the seemingly separate entities would be clearly exposed as working together, co-ordinating their activities together, and driving for the same goal – the destruction of America as a constitutional republic, the destruction of its capitalist system, and the dethroning of the U.S. as a superpower.

[Crafty_Dog]

Not Just A Democrat Dirty Trick, But A Crime


A few years ago, as part of its strategy of facilitating voter fraud as a means of winning close elections, the Democratic Party undertook a campaign to secure as many Secretary of State offices in swing states as possible. From those perches, the Democrats would be in a position to oversee elections and enforce (or decline to enforce) election laws. That strategy has been quite successful, but the Democrats suffered a setback in Iowa in 2010 when conservative Republican Matt Schultz won an upset victory in the Secretary of State race. Since then, Iowa Democrats have targeted Schultz.

That targeting has taken a sinister turn–a criminal one, in fact–as the Des Moines Register reports:

A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office.

Zachary Edwards was arrested Friday and charged with identity theft.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety issued a news release saying Schultz’s office discovered the scheme on June 24, 2011 and notified authorities.

Iowa blogger Shane Vander Hart has more here.

Edwards is a former Obama staffer who directed “new media operations” for Obama in five states during the 2008 primaries. Thereafter, he was Obama’s Director of New Media for the State of Iowa. In the Democratic Party’s lexicon, “new media” apparently includes identity theft.

Edwards now works for LINK Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm with extraordinarily close ties to Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin. Its principal, Jeff Link, has served as Harkin’s campaign manager and chief of staff. Link, too, is a former Obama staffer. The LINK Strategies web site says that Jeff Link “served as a media consultant to the Obama for President Campaign, coordinating branding, all paid media and polling in 25 states, including seven battleground states (VA, NC, FL, CO, NM, NV, MT)….”

That Edwards allegedly tried to steal the Secretary of State’s identity in order to frame Schultz for “unethical behavior in office” is no coincidence. Iowa Democrats, as Kevin Hall of the Iowa Republican points out, have mounted a campaign of false accusations against Schultz:

Since his surprise victory over incumbent Michael Mauro in November 2010, Secretary of State Schultz has been a target of the Iowa Democratic Party. Interestingly, on June 24, the same day as Zach Edwards alleged crime, Under the Golden Dome, a blog connected to Iowa Democrats, launched a three-part series of articles critical of Matt Schultz. They were based on documents obtained through an open records request from “a tipster.” The blog alleged that a batch of emails from Schultz’s office “raise some serious questions about his ability to remain independent and ensure election integrity”.

Just 15 days earlier, on June 9, the Iowa Democratic Party filed an ethics complaint against Schultz, claiming the Secretary of State of used public resources to campaign against presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman. The Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board dismissed the complaint on July 19.

So on its face, Edwards’s identity theft appears to be part of a coordinated effort by the Iowa Democratic Party to bring down the Republican Secretary of State so he can be replaced with a Democrat. We hope that Edwards will get the long jail term that he deserves, but the more important question is, from whom was he taking instructions? Circumstantially, one would guess from his boss, Jeff Link. But if so, who was instructing (and paying?) Link’s firm? The White House? Tom Harkin? Iowa’s Democratic Party?

Much like Watergate, which began with a seemingly simple (if puzzling) burglary and ultimately unraveled the Nixon administration, it is impossible to say how far the trail of criminality will go if the Edwards case is pursued aggressively. Will that happen? I don’t know; stay tuned.

[Crafty_Dog]

Second post of the evening.  Note that it is from January:

U.S. AG Eric Holder, DoJ Head Lanny Breuer Linked To Banks Accused Of Foreclosure Fraud

First Posted: 1/20/12 07:00 AM ET Updated: 1/20/12 09:23 AM ET

By Scot J. Paltrow


Jan 19 (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.

Both the Justice Department and Covington declined to say if either official had personally worked on matters for the big mortgage industry clients. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Holder and Breuer had complied fully with conflict of interest regulations, but she declined to say if they had recused themselves from any matters related to the former clients.

Reuters reported in December that under Holder and Breuer, the Justice Department hasn't brought any criminal cases against big banks or other companies involved in mortgage servicing, even though copious evidence has surfaced of apparent criminal violations in foreclosure cases.

The evidence, including records from federal and state courts and local clerks' offices around the country, shows widespread forgery, perjury, obstruction of justice, and illegal foreclosures on the homes of thousands of active-duty military personnel.

In recent weeks the Justice Department has come under renewed pressure from members of Congress, state and local officials and homeowners' lawyers to open a wide-ranging criminal investigation of mortgage servicers, the biggest of which have been Covington clients. So far Justice officials haven't responded publicly to any of the requests.

While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers.

DEFENDER OF FREDDIE

Servicers perform routine mortgage maintenance tasks, including filing foreclosures, on behalf of mortgage owners, usually groups of investors who bought mortgage-backed securities.

Covington represented Freddie Mac, one of the nation's biggest issuers of mortgage backed securities, in enforcement investigations by federal financial regulators.

A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington's involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS "vice presidents" or "assistant secretaries."

Covington in 2004 also wrote a crucial opinion letter commissioned by MERS, providing legal justification for its electronic registry. MERS spokeswoman Karmela Lejarde declined to comment on Covington legal work done for MERS.

It isn't known to what extent if any Covington has continued to represent the banks and other mortgage firms since Holder and Breuer left. Covington declined to respond to questions from Reuters. A Covington spokeswoman said the firm had no comment.

Several lawyers for homeowners have said that even if Holder and Breuer haven't violated any ethics rules, their ties to Covington create an impression of bias toward the firms' clients, especially in the absence of any prosecutions by the Justice Department.

O. Max Gardner III, a lawyer who trains other attorneys to represent homeowners in bankruptcy court foreclosure actions, said he attributes the Justice Department's reluctance to prosecute the banks or their executives to the Obama White House's view that it might harm the economy.

But he said that the background of Holder and Breuer at Covington -- and their failure to act on foreclosure fraud or publicly recuse themselves -- "doesn't pass the smell test."

Federal ethics regulations generally require new government officials to recuse themselves for one year from involvement in matters involving clients they personally had represented at their former law firms.

President Obama imposed additional restrictions on appointees that essentially extended the ban to two years. For Holder, that ban would have expired in February 2011, and in April for Breuer. Rules also require officials to avoid creating the appearance of a conflict.

Schmaler, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said in an e-mail that "The Attorney General and Assistant Attorney General Breuer have conformed with all financial, legal and ethical obligations under law as well as additional ethical standards set by the Obama Administration."

She said they "routinely consult" the department's ethics officials for guidance. Without offering specifics, Schmaler said they "have recused themselves from matters as required by the law."

Senior government officials often move to big Washington law firms, and lawyers from those firms often move into government posts. But records show that in recent years the traffic between the Justice Department and Covington & Burling has been particularly heavy. In 2010, Holder's deputy chief of staff, John Garland, returned to Covington, as did Steven Fagell, who was Breuer's deputy chief of staff in the criminal division.

The firm has on its web site a page listing its attorneys who are former federal government officials. Covington lists 22 from the Justice Department, and 12 from U.S. Attorneys offices, the Justice Department's local federal prosecutors' offices around the country.

As Reuters reported in 2011, public records show large numbers of mortgage promissory notes with apparently forged endorsements that were submitted as evidence to courts.

There also is evidence of almost routine manufacturing of false mortgage assignments, documents that transfer ownership of mortgages between banks or to groups of investors. In foreclosure actions in courts mortgage assignments are required to show that a bank has the legal right to foreclose.

In an interview in late 2011, Raymond Brescia, a visiting professor at Yale Law School who has written about foreclosure practices said, "I think it's difficult to find a fraud of this size on the U.S. court system in U.S. history."

Holder has resisted calls for a criminal investigation since October 2010, when evidence of widespread "robo-signing" first surfaced. That involved mortgage servicer employees falsely signing and swearing to massive numbers of affidavits and other foreclosure documents that they had never read or checked for accuracy.

Recent calls for a wide-ranging criminal investigation of the mortgage servicing industry have come from members of Congress, including Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., state officials, and county clerks. In recent months clerks from around the country have examined mortgage and foreclosure records filed with them and reported finding high percentages of apparently fraudulent documents.

On Wednesday, John O'Brien Jr., register of deeds in Salem, Mass., announced that he had sent 31,897 allegedly fraudulent foreclosure-related documents to Holder. O'Brien said he asked for a criminal investigation of servicers and their law firms that had filed the documents because they "show a pattern of fraud," forgery and false notarizations.

[Crafty_Dog]

Third post of the evening

Bribery, compromised officials leave indicted financial-crime suspects free from prosecution under Holder’s DOJ

By Matthew Boyle
Published: 10:16 PM 02/01/2012 | Updated: 10:29 PM 02/01/2012


A U.S. Justice Department source has told The Daily Caller that at least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives who were indicted under court seal within the past 13 months, but never arrested or prosecuted.

The sitting governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, his attorney general and an unspecified number of Virgin Islands legislators also accepted bribes, the source said, adding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is aware prosecutors and elected officials were bribed and otherwise compromised, but has not held anyone accountable.

The bribed officials, an attorney with knowledge of the investigation told TheDC, remain on the taxpayers’ payroll at the Justice Department without any accountability. The DOJ source said Holder does not want to admit public officials accepted bribes while under his leadership.

That source said that until the summer of 2011, the two compromised prosecutors were part of a team of more than 25 federal prosecutors pursuing a financial crime ring, and at least five other prosecutors tasked to the case were also compromised by the criminal suspects they were investigating, without being bribed.

TheDC is withholding the name of the source, a knowledgeable government official who served on the Justice Department’s arrest team and was involved in the investigation, in order to prevent career retaliation from political figures in the Obama administration.

A former high-level elected official vouches for the government source’s veracity. “[The source] was trustworthy … and you could tell [the source] information or [the source] could hear information and [the source] would keep things close to [the source’s] chest,” that former official told TheDC. “You could trust [the source] with your life.”

The identities of the prosecutors who accepted bribes and others who were compromised have not yet been made public, and TheDC has not yet independently confirmed their identities. The prosecutors themselves are now cooperating with Justice Department investigators.

Eric Holder, the source said, personally approved the makeup of the investigation and arrest teams.

“The team which was put in place, of course, in tracking all the information that we had — Holder had to sign off on the teams. He signed off on them a year and a half ago,” the source said during an interview. “He wasn’t fully in control of it, but of course the knowledge and approval of it came from him.”

“There are internal documents, of course. He was briefed. He got a full scope of what transpired, and he got a full scope of what is going on with this case in particular. There is nothing going on in this case that Holder doesn’t know about right now.”

DOJ leadership has been fretting internally, the source said, about how to handle the story when the news breaks because it represents a new level of corruption in the Obama administration. The Holder Justice Department is concerned about the appearance that it lacks the competence to enforce the laws in which Obama has shown political interest, including those related to corruption and other financial crimes.

[Crafty_Dog]

4th entry of the evening:

(this case was discussed here rather thoroughly at the time btw)


Federal Court: DOJ Official May Have Lied About the New Black Panther Case


In a little noted decision on July 23, a federal district court judge concluded that internal DOJ documents about the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case “contradict Assistant Attorney General [Thomas] Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in” the decision to dismiss the case.

In other words, the sworn testimony of Perez, the Obama political appointee who heads the Civil Rights Division, before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was apparently false.

The decision in Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice by Judge Reggie Walton was in a case filed by Judicial Watch after the Civil Rights Division refused to turn over documents about the NBPP case requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Walton is the same federal judge who presided over the prosecution of Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

As Judge Walton outlined, Judicial Watch’s FOIA request “sought documents relating to the DOJ’s decision to dismiss civil claims in the New Black Panther Party case.” Walton awarded Judicial Watch a small amount of attorneys’ fees and costs, having concluded that the Judicial Watch lawsuit “was the catalyst for the DOJ’s release of records.”

According to the court, the DOJ documents, including emails from former Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli (who was the number-two official at DOJ) and former Democratic election lawyer and Deputy Associate Attorney General Sam Hirsch, “revealed that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims.”

This included emails from Perrelli to lower-level DOJ attorneys on May 14 and 15, 2009, the day before and the very day the case was dismissed against three of the defendants on May 15. As Judge Walton concluded in discussing the importance of the Judicial Watch lawsuit, “urely the public has an interest in documents that cast doubt on the accuracy of government officials’ representations regarding the possible politicization of agency decisionmaking.”

Neither Perrelli nor Hirsch has ever answered any questions about why top officials in the Justice Department were so interested in one of the many cases handled by the Civil Rights Division or what actions or instructions they communicated. And they have never said who else they discussed the case with above them, either in the Office of the Attorney General or in the White House. We don’t know the actual content of many of these emails because the court upheld the exemption from disclosure claimed by DOJ for many of these documents under a FOIA rule that protects certain legally privileged documents.

But the court also said that DOJ had failed “to show that its withholding of some documents from Judicial Watch prior to the filing of this lawsuit was legally correct or had a reasonable basis in law.” That is no surprise. Far too many of the actions of this Justice Department, particularly the Civil Rights Division, have not been legally correct or had a reasonable basis in law. And in this case, DOJ tried to avoid releasing documents as mandated by FOIA that it found politically embarrassing since there was no justifiable legal reason for dismissing an open-and-shut case of voter intimidation that had already been won by default.

But what is most disturbing about this court order is that it strongly suggests that Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez essentially lied in sworn testimony. At a hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on May 14, 2010, Perez was asked by Commissioner Peter Kirsanow whether “any political leadership [was] involved in the decision not to pursue this particular case.” Perez’s answer, on page 79 of the transcript of that hearing, is an uncategorical “No.” When the statements of Perez are compared to the documents that Judicial Watch forced DOJ to release in the FOIA lawsuit, it is clear Judge Walton was polite when he said they are contradictory and “cast doubt on the accuracy” of Perez’s account.

A less diplomatic judge might have said that Perez testified falsely in his hearing testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights. In other words, he may have committed perjury if he knew his statements were false when uttered.

The Commission on Civil Rights repeatedly asked Attorney General Holder to appoint a special counsel to investigate the handling of the NPBB case by the Department and the refusal of Perez to comply with lawful documents requests and subpoenas served on DOJ by the Commission. When will the attorney general do so, and when will he ask for an investigation of this possible perjury by Perez?

Where is the investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of whether Perez violated his ethical and professional obligations as a DOJ attorney? Will the DOJ inspector general open an investigation of the possible violation by Perez of 18 U.S.C. §1621, which outlaws presenting false statements under oath in official federal proceedings? Or will they all respectively yawn and ignore this?

Imagine if a conservative political appointee at DOJ had just been cited in a federal court decision as having apparently testified falsely under oath. Not only would it be a top headline at The New York Times and The Washington Post, but the IG and OPR would be rushing to investigate. All of which is a sad commentary on the liberal bias not just of the media, but of too many of the offices and officials within the Justice Department who are supposed to administer justice in an objective, non-political, and impartial manner.

[Crafty_Dog]

By COLLIN LEVY
Pennsylvania's Republican governor, Tom Corbett, is pushing back on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder this week, calling a Justice Department inquiry into the state's voter ID law "unprecedented" and the department's interest in the matter politically driven.

In a letter to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Pennsylvania General Counsel James Schultz wrote that while the state had provided the Justice Department with tens of thousands of documents, the fishing expedition by Justice was going too far. "In light of the absence of authority for your request for information, I question whether your inquiry is truly motivated by a desire to assess compliance with federal voting rights laws, or rather is fueled by political motivation," he wrote.

The Justice Department's sniffing around Pennsylvania's voter ID law, which requires people to present photo identification at the voting booth, raised eyebrows because the state is not one of the handful that is required to get the Justice Department's permission for changes to its voting procedures under the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Mr. Holder's interest in the matter instead seemed geared to drum up racial tensions in the swing state in an election year, adding the prospect of a federal civil rights lawsuit to cast further doubt on the legitimacy of the new voting requirements.

The tide has been going against the law's opponents in the Keystone State. Earlier this month, a state judge ruled against an American Civil Liberties Union attempt to prevent the law from going into effect. The defeat was a setback for the group, which had specifically avoided arguing the case in federal court in an effort to end-run a Supreme Court precedent that had already rejected similar theories in an Indiana case. Witold Walczak of the Pennsylvania ACLU said that "going into federal court is like going to the plate with two strikes already against you." Somebody should share that insight with the Justice Department.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.dickmorris.com/dem-registration-craters-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports

[Crafty_Dog]

As Michelle Aids Military Families, Pentagon Tries To Hold Down Turnout
Published on DickMorris.com on September 7, 2012

Dear Friend,

Click Here To Sign The Petition To Increase Military Voter Turnout!

Even as First Lady Michelle Obama eloquently addresses the needs of military families, her husband's Defense Department is cutting back on programs mandated by Congress to increase military voter turnout.

In 2009, Congress passed the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE) to stimulate turnout among active duty military, in part, by establishing Installation Voter Assistance Offices (IVAO) on each base to help military personnel vote.  But, in a report just issued by the Pentagon's Inspector General, only about half of the installations have voter assistance offices even though the MOVE Act required them all to have them.

Why is the Obama Pentagon dragging its feet in catalyzing a turnout of military voters?  It is probably because they would overwhelmingly back Romney if they were able to vote.

Among military veterans, Romney leads Obama by 58-34.  One would assume that active duty military have a similar inclination.  In the 2000 cliff-hanger Gore/Bush election, Democrats moved to exclude military absentee ballots from the Florida vote tally because they skewed so heavily against them.

How outrageous is it that the Pentagon is failing to implement a bi-partisan act of Congress designed to help those who defend our freedom participate in it by voting on Election Day?

This Pentagon report comes on the heels of lawsuits filed by the Democratic Party in Ohio to cut back the number of days during which military personnel can cast absentee ballots.  The Ohio legislature had extended the period until the day before Election Day.  But the Democratic lawsuit is trying to cut it back to four days before Election Day.  Their suit is based on their contention that treating military absentee ballots differently from other kinds of absentee voting is discriminatory.  But how easy is it to vote when you are in the wilds of Afghanistan, out on patrol during the day, constantly on the alert for snipers?  These are obstacles most absentee voters don't face and the military are entitled to special efforts to make their voting easier.

Please sign this petition to Michelle Obama, her husband, and the Pentagon to insist that the Defense Department move immediately to implement fully the requirements of the MOVE Act and establish voter assistance centers on all military bases and installations.

Put your actions where your words are!

Click Here To Sign The Petition To Increase Military Voter Turnout!
Thanks,

Dick

[Crafty_Dog]

An observation: 

Even with God himself watching from Jerusalem, the capitol of his Chosen People and tens of millions of Americans watching on TV, the Dems could not stop themselves from committing vote count fraud.

[Crafty_Dog]

PJ Media has learned that a team of career lawyers, expert analysts, and supervisors in the Justice Department Voting Section recommended that South Carolina’s photo voter identification law be precleared under the Voting Rights Act as non-discriminatory.  Presidential appointees in the Justice Department then disregarded the career recommendation and an objection followed, blocking South Carolina’s voter ID law.
 
South Carolina filed suit in federal court, and a trial concluded a few weeks ago.  The parties are briefing the case and a decision is expected shortly. (See “DOJ Lawyers Waste Your Money Over Fonts” at PJ Media.)
 
This information directly contradicts a central theme of Attorney General Eric Holder’s civil rights enforcement — that career civil servants have been placed back in charge of Voting Rights Act enforcement.  It also raises questions about political interference during an election year that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs from a federal court lawsuit to defend the decision by political appointees to overrule the career recommendation.  Had voter ID been precleared, South Carolina would not have needed to sue Eric Holder for approval in court.


Democrats have pushed the narrative that Bush political appointees overruled the recommendation of career lawyers inside the Voting Section and precleared Georgia voter ID in 2005.  This story is false because the career civil servant in charge of the Voting Section recommended that Georgia voter ID should be precleared, and the political appointees followed his recommendation.
 
That didn’t stop Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) from saying “the Washington Post ran two front page articles detailing how President Bush’s political appointees within the Division were overriding career litigators’ recommendations on crucial voting rights cases. . . .There are disturbing reports that career lawyers have been shut out of the Division’s decision-making process.”
 
Even then-Senator Barack Obama joined in, attacking now-PJ Media contributor Hans von Spakovsky’s role in approving Georgia voter ID: “Reports indicate that Mr. von Spakovsky joined other senior officials in overruling the recommendations of several career staff lawyers who had reviewed the Georgia voter ID law and determined that it would unduly hinder the ability of black voters to cast their ballots.”  The actions of the Bush-era Voting Section became a central campaign theme of candidate Obama, as I document in my book Injustice.
 
Once upon a time, the opinion of career staff at the Voting Section about a voter ID submission was the lodestar to Leahy and Obama.
 
The South Carolina voter ID law was reviewed by civil rights analysts, a veteran attorney reviewer, the deputy chief in charge of Section 5 enforcement, and ultimately the section chief.  Extensive and detailed memos were prepared by career staff recommending that South Carolina voter ID be precleared.  There was a very small difference in voter ID possession between blacks and whites – only a 1.6% difference.  South Carolina made photo ID free and allowed anyone with a reasonable impediment in obtaining one to vote anyhow after completing an affidavit. Based on these facts, career staff recommended preclearance.
 
But according to DOJ staff familiar with subsequent events, Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Matthew Colangelo then overruled the career staff and ordered that the Department of Justice object to South Carolina’s voter ID – precisely repeating the same behavior that Leahy and Obama had falsely accused the Bush Justice Department of conducting.
 

Tom Perez
 
This revelation is also damning because it means there is extensive DOJ documentation supporting South Carolina’s lawsuit.  DOJ lawyers did not reveal to the three-judge federal panel the internal preclearance recommendation stating that the law did not discriminate.  Nor did the Justice Department provide these documents to South Carolina in discovery.
 
Moreover, the career civil servants who recommended preclearance have significantly more experience in enforcing the Voting Rights Act than does Colangelo, a lawyer that one DOJ employee characterized to me as “seriously lacking” in any Voting Rights Act experience.  Assistant Attorney General Perez also lacks firsthand experience litigating Voting Rights Act cases, particularly compared with the DOJ staff that recommended preclearance of South Carolina’s voter ID.
 
In personal meetings with career Voting Section staff, Perez told them to ask outlandish and inappropriate questions of state officials in Section 5 reviews to discern if state officials enacted voter ID with a racially discriminatory intent.  Voting Section staff characterized Perez’s suggestions to me as wholly inappropriate.
 
Nevertheless, in the voter ID court litigation, other Justice Department lawyers have asked similarly outlandish questions of Texas and South Carolina officials in depositions – such as whether they belong to a country club, what cable news channels they watch, whether they spoke with the Heritage Foundation, and what their views toward “sanctuary cities” are.
 
This political interference comes on the heels of the Obama re-elect campaign making opposition to voter ID a cornerstone of a base-mobilization strategy.  Political appointees at the DOJ ensured that official government action would comport with campaign rhetoric.
 
Whether news outlets that once expressed outrage at the idea of career Voting Section employees being overruled by political appointees in a voter ID case will be outraged when it actually happens remains to be seen.  I somehow don’t expect the Washington Post,  USA Today, and the ridiculously biased Greg Gordon at the drain-swirling McClatchy to be consistent. Perhaps they should at least ask DOJ public affairs for their own copy of the documents the career civil servants produced recommending that South Carolina’s voter ID law be approved.  That way the federal court can learn the entire story.
 

[Crafty_Dog]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/how-to-commit-voter-fraud-in-ohio/?singlepage=true


Disclaimer: Nothing in this article should be considered an encouragement to commit voter fraud. The intention of this satirical how-to guide is to expose the flaws in Ohio’s election laws and to call for reform of a system that makes it incredibly easy to vote fraudulently in this important swing state. Voter fraud is a felony in Ohio.
 


As a precinct election official, I have seen exceptionally professional behavior by my fellow poll workers and county board of election officials. However, they are at the mercy of loose state election laws. Though Ohio has a Republican governor and legislature, they backed down on their efforts to pass a voter ID law and refused to reform the state’s no-fault absentee voting rules, making the commission of voter fraud a relatively simple matter.

 
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“Providing voters with free, fair, open, and honest elections ensures voter trust in the process of choosing our political leadership and the direction of our community’s future. Voters who have confidence in the elections process are more likely to continue to vote.” (Ohio Precinct Election Official Manual)
 
As a tribute to my state’s open invitation to voter fraud, I present:
 
The Idiot’s Guide to Committing Voter Fraud in Ohio
 
While all of these methods are illegal, some are more complicated than others. I’ve arranged them into three levels, depending on their complexity and outside resource requirements.
 
Novice Level:
 
•Vote for a friend or family member you know won’t show up at the polls on election day.
 
If you decide that one vote just isn’t enough to show your love for your favorite candidate on Election Day, why not “help” a sick (or lazy) friend or family member you know won’t be voting? This could be your roommate, your brother who hates politics and never bothers to vote, or your grandfather, who is bedridden with Alzheimer’s disease. Fortunately, Ohio makes it easy and you won’t even need anything as complicated as a fake ID.
 
Here are some acceptable forms of ID permitted in Ohio:
 
* A cable or cell phone bill (electronically transmitted or paper copy)
 
* A bank statement
 
* A government check (even an out-of-state government check will do) or a paycheck
 
* Other government document. This can be a school report card, college transcript from a state university (in or out of Ohio), or divorce papers.
 
As long as you can come up with a document that matches the current name and address on file at the board of elections, you can vote for someone else in Ohio.
 
When you arrive at the precinct, you will be required to sign the signature poll book on Election Day. In theory, it should match the signature on file in the book. According to the 2012 Precinct Election Official Training Manual:
 

If the voter’s signature, in the opinion of the majority of all four precinct election officials, does not substantially conform to the signature in the Signature Poll Book, the voter MUST vote a provisional ballot.
 
Not a problem. There are two simple ways to get around this. The first way is probably the least complicated. The signature pollbook with the “real” signature will be right there in front of you. You have to really botch the signature to convince three poll workers (from a slate of two Republicans and two Democrats) that it does not “substantially conform” to the original. This is especially true if you arrive at a busy time, when poll workers are looking at a line out the door. Just feign an injury to your writing hand and apologize for your scribbles. Another option would be to simply sign with an “X” and then proceed to vote a regular ballot. (This may invite additional scrutiny, so the first method is preferred.)
 •A variation to this method is to show up with no ID and present the last four numbers of your friend’s Social Security number in lieu of ID.
 
This is a bit more complicated because you will be required to sit at a separate booth, fill out a provisional ballot envelope, and vote a paper ballot. It’s slower than voting at the touch-screen voting machines, but avoids ALL ID requirements. When the board of elections receives your provisional ballot, they are only required to check to see that the name, address, and last four digits of the Social Security Number all match a registration on file at the BOE; the vote will then be counted.
 •An even easier way to accomplish your goal of voting early and voting often is to do so in the privacy of your home through the convenience of the absentee ballot.
 
Ohio has no-fault absentee voting. “Any qualified Ohio voter…may request and vote an absentee ballot without stating a reason.” To make it even easier, the secretary of State, in an attempt to calm Democrats who cried foul over Ohio’s ban on counties sending out unsolicited absentee applications, is sending preemptive applications to every registered voter in the state. Simply apply for an absentee ballot for a friend who doesn’t plan to vote and follow the instructions on the ballot. All you’ll need are the last four digits of the friend’s Social Security number, OR their Ohio driver’s license number, OR a cable TV bill (see above for acceptable forms of ID). Have the absentee ballot sent to your address and mail it in before Election Day. Repeat as necessary for all your sick and tired friends.
 
[Note: In prior elections, we have recommended voting for deceased voters who are still on the registered voters lists. But we recently spoke to Matt McClellan, press secretary for SOS Jon Husted, who told us that Ohio has removed 150,000 dead voters from the rolls since Husted took office. He said that Ohio's voter registration lists "are in the best shape they've been in in years." Husted confirmed that (officially?) via his personal Twitter account on Sept. 10th. We now suggest sticking with the names of "live" voters.]
 
Intermediate Level:
 •Commit campus voter fraud. Register non-resident college students who are attending school in Ohio.
 
This is an excellent group project, especially for community organizers. Though the Ohio Revised Code defines “residence” for voting purposes as the place of permanent, fixed habitation which would exclude a temporary college residence, no one is going to check and SOS Husted will likely not issue a directive advising boards of election not to accept registrations from such students.
 
Here is an Ohio college student from Texas in 2008 explaining why registering and voting in the swing state of Ohio gave her vote more “weight” than it would have had in her home state of Texas (see 3:49-4:08):
 


College students who have the misfortune of being legal residents of very liberal or very conservative states that won’t matter much in November are, sadly, disenfranchised. We should make every effort to help them by organizing voter registration drives for these kids who have every intention of returning to their home states during the summer and after graduation. Though technically illegal, registering them to vote in Ohio would help their votes to “count more.” Since young voters tend to be unreliable on Election Day, it might be worth taking the extra step of requesting absentee ballots for them, so they don’t have to crawl out of their dorm rooms on a frigid November day in Ohio.
 •Overwhelm boards of election with provisional ballots by voting in the wrong precinct.
 
Last month, a U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the S.E.I.U., saying that, contrary to Ohio law, provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct in Ohio must be counted, unless the board of elections can “verify” that poll workers directed the voter to the correct precinct and the voter refused to go. Either way, if you (or your group) can flood the precincts with voters who don’t belong there, poll workers will be forced to offer you provisional ballots. Provisional ballots must be hand-processed and checked against the voter registration list at the county board of elections. Imagine the mayhem that will ensue on election night when boards, in addition to their regular duties, are flooded with thousands of unexpected provisional ballots. The risk that some of these fraudulent “overvotes” or votes in the wrong location will slip through the system will be multiplied if we can flood the system with provisional ballots. [Note: Attorney General Mike DeWine filed a motion to intervene in the case recently since SOS Husted declined to appeal, so this recommendation is subject to change.]
 
Advanced Level:
 •Commit widespread voter fraud on a massive scale.
 
A special interest group determined to commit widespread voter fraud should consider Ohio, since it’s a relatively easy target. Most of the techniques listed above can be adapted to large groups, provided you have a competent computer hacker or insider to provide you with Social Security numbers or bulk utility bills. While this may seem like a tall order, keep in mind that in 2010, the computers at The Ohio State University were hacked, compromising the Social Security numbers of 760,000 people. And in 2006, the Ohio Secretary of State’s office sent CD’s to 20 political operatives, exposing the Social Security numbers of 7.7 million registered voters. It’s probably less a matter of “rocket science” than it is a matter of having the right person in the right place at the right time.
 
Once you know you have that required information available to you, it’s simply a matter of going through lists of registered voters (available at the county boards of elections) and finding people who have not voted in recent elections. If you can assemble a team that is willing to work hard on Election Day, you can potentially vote for thousands of registered voters who won’t show up at the polls. After all, you know they love your candidate and would vote for him if they weren’t too busy, tired, apathetic, or lazy, so you’re doing the right thing.
 
This is by no means an exhaustive list of voter fraud techniques. The list will continue to expand as the Obama campaign continues to bombard the courts with lawsuits alleging all manner of voter suppression. Members of the mainstream media, including Senator Sherrod Brown’s wife, Connie Schultz (until recently, on staff at the Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper), will continue to plead our case to the public, insisting that voter ID amounts to racism and that no voter fraud exists, mainly because they haven’t caught any of us yet. Of course, it would be nearly impossible to detect most of the voter fraud we are suggesting here. We salute you, Connie (and others in your noble profession). See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is one of our best weapons. We also salute Governor Kasich, the Ohio legislature, and Sec. of State Husted for not enacting voter ID laws in this important election year. We were a little worried after Republicans took over the legislature and all statewide offices in 2010. As it turned out, our fears were unfounded.
 
Though it’s too late for a voter ID law for this election, we know our days are numbered as the American people overwhelmingly favor such measures. Our biggest fear in November is not only vigilant poll workers and county election workers scrupulously carrying out their duties, but also volunteer poll watchers, who keep them accountable and make sure procedures are followed on Election Day. Beyond that, there’s not much they can do to stop us this year.
 
Our goal in November is not only to scrape out a few more votes for our chosen candidates, but to undermine confidence in the elections process — and if it’s a close election, to send the outcome to the courts, where we are confident we can win.
 


Paula's first battle with the MSM was in 2004, when the Akron Beacon Journal ran a week-long series associating homeschoolers with murderers and child molesters. She has since expanded her interests beyond homeschooling to blogging and online activism. An unapologetic Christian and a Constitutional conservative, Paula lives in a N.E. Ohio 'Water Tower Town' with her husband, youngest son, three dogs, two parrots, and a ferret. Her eldest son is a junior at Hillsdale College.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://freebeacon.com/dnc-literally-in-hock-to-seiu/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://watchdog.org/55187/va-military-absentee-ballots-going-awol-in-2012/

[DougMacG]

When these jerks in the campaigns and in the activism organizations keep pushing states and voters to vote earlier and earlier, such as the Obama campaign, do they ever ask if the voter is ready - do they have all the information they need for the other contests, like judges, soil and water conservation board, the amentments, the city council, etc??  On October 1 have they viewed all the debates that haven't happened yet or the economic data that hasn't come in yet?  Of course not.  So why do they do it?  To advance their own candidate, not to empower the voter.

Nothing is more reliable than having each person come in, in person, to a place with election judges on site, on the same day, verify who they are, and then cast one secret ballot.

Don't let them tell you otherwise.  MHO.

[Crafty_Dog]

Longish piece from Pravda on the Hudson on how absentee voting tends to have more fraudulent votes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121007

[Crafty_Dog]

http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/school-lets-dems-register-students-to-vote-but-not-gop.html