Gee, it's almost as if staking out the position that women should have no control over their reproduction, and defending that position with narratives like "women are lying bitchez about rape, anyway," as if women are a dispensable voting bloc and not 52% of the population, is a bad idea. Huh. Who knew.
The racial dimension of the 2012 clash over weekend voting burst into the open last month when one of Ohio's most powerful Republicans, Franklin County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse, told the Columbus Dispatch, "We shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African American — voter-turnout machine."From the second (Slate):
Some Democrats see the developments in Ohio as part of a national drive by Obama's opponents to minimize turnout of his supporters, one that includes efforts elsewhere to impose new voter ID rules.
"Too much of this is going on for this not to be a coordinated effort," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party in the tea party stronghold of southwestern Ohio.
The Rev. Rousseau A. O'Neal, one of a group of black ministers from Cincinnati who provided buses to take African Americans to the polls in 2008 and plan to do so again in November, described the tea party project and the curtailment of weekend voting as "bigotry of the highest order."
"Who ever thought we'd be fighting for the right to vote in 2012?" he asked.
The tea party groups, scattered around the state, have joined forces under the banner of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project. It is an offshoot of True the Vote, a Texas organization that has recruited volunteers nationwide to challenge voter rosters and work as poll watchers.
[...]
In Ohio, election records show, one of the project's top priorities has been to remove college students from the voter rolls for failure to specify dorm room numbers. (As a group, college students are strongly in Obama's camp.)
Voters challenged include 284 students at the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, 110 at Oberlin College, 88 at College of Wooster, 38 at Kent State — and dozens more from the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Lake Erie College, Walsh University, Hiram College, John Carroll University and Telshe Yeshiva, a rabbinical college near Cleveland.
So far, every county election board that has reviewed the dorm challenges found them invalid.
At issue are potentially thousands of Ohio ballots that the state will not count solely because of poll worker error. Here’s the problem: A number of the state’s polling places, especially in cities, cover more than one voting precinct, and in order to cast a valid vote, a voter has to be given the correct precinct ballot. Poll workers, however, often hand voters the wrong precinct ballot mistakenly. In earlier litigation involving a disputed 2010 juvenile judge race in Hamilton County, Ohio, a poll worker testified to sending a voter whose address started with the numbers “798” to vote in the precinct for voters with odd-numbered addresses because the poll worker believed “798” was an odd number. This “right church, wrong pew” problem with precinct ballots was a big problem in 2008, when over 14,000 such ballots were cast.Ohio, remember, is a swing state; there was some dispute about the results in 2004.
Ohio law says wrong precinct ballots cannot be counted, even for the races for which a person is eligible to vote (including president), and the Ohio Supreme Court confirmed this point in 2011, in the dispute over the juvenile judge race. Astonishingly, under Ohio law a voter can be disenfranchised not through some nefarious plan but through the simple incompetence of poll workers.
In the SEIU case, voters are arguing that the failure to count wrong precinct ballots caused by poll worker error violates the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. A federal district court in Ohio agreed, and issued a preliminary injunction requiring the state to count these ballots (and some other provisional ballots as well). Ohio has appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit—that’s the hearing today.
The thing I was asked to be an expert about — and I wasn't, which was one reason I said no — was about executive compensation. A senior exec was hired away from another firm. He did almost nothing at the new firm — and what he did do was by his own admission, wrong. They fired him and he left with a $20 million Golden Parachute. (I told them I could make bad decisions for them for less than half that salary.) The suit was about that he thought he deserved more.
So to recap: the President a) refuses to acknowledge that insurance-paid contraception is actually abortion; b) refuses to admit that for-profit operations which receive federal funds but are owned by a particular cult are, in fact, churches, because 1) Karl Rove and 2) the Constitution clearly say so. And that c) this qualifies as "unprecedented", despite the fact that the identical thing has occurred in American history, and occurs today with some of those same institutions under state law, and has actually been topped, unquestionably, by other restrictions on religious expression (notably the anti-Mormon laws that preceded Utah statehood).
And, earlier this year, in 2012, the Sacramento Republican Party was found to have hired Momentum Political Services, a firm headed up by a woman described as a "professional con-artist". The group allegedly turned in thousands of fraudulent voter registrations as part of a $50,000 bounty scheme seeking Republican registrations, as paid for by the GOP in the district of Republican Congressman Dan Lungren.Brad Friedman, author of this article, has an earlier story on higher-level fraud.
All the while, Republicans were loudly accusing Democrats of committing "voter fraud" requiring polling place Photo ID restrictions to stop it, even though there are just 10 known cases of in-person impersonation --- the only type of voter fraud that can possibly be deterred by Photo ID --- out of hundreds of millions of votes cast in all 50 states since 2000, according to a recent exhaustive report by the non-partisan investigative news consortium, News21.
It’s important that you make sure you are registered to vote and that you know the laws of your state regarding what you need to identify yourself when you come in to vote (here’s what you need for the state of Ohio, for example). The longer you put this off, the more chance you have to be unpleasantly surprised by requirements you did not know about.I'm Onyx Lynx, and I approve Mr. Scalzi's message.
Yes, there’s an entire conversation to have about “voter fraud” and laws being passed to “combat” it, and yes, those scare quotes are there for a very good reason. However, that’s an argument to have some other time. Right now, what I want you to focus on as as a prospective voter is this: Don’t be surprised, do know what hoops your state is going to make you jump through on election day, and jump through those hoops. Don’t go to the polls unaware.
In other words, a lot of Republicans get benefits and then live in denial. Not surprising, really. It’s the same reason that a lot of Republicans use contraception, but nonetheless think that it’s just fine and dandy to claim Sandra Fluke is the Biggest Ho Ever because she uses contraception.P.S. Libertarians, too.
Austerity is killing Greece’s economy, and taking Greek citizens down with it. Forty percent of Greece’s GDP comes from the public sector — represented by the workers going on strike this week. Cuts to the public sector must eventually impact the private sector negatively, as more people are out of work, and can’t or don’t pay bills.Terrance of Republic of T reports.
Isn't that just typical? Whenever reality contradicts conservative ideology, it's always the reality that's wrong, and the conservative solution is always to create their own version of whatever so-called "liberal" thing vexes them at the moment. It must be exhausting creating your own alternate reality: your own news network, your own Bible, your own science and history, and on, and on. Expensive, too. But there you have it.Conservapedia doesn't get mentioned, but it was my first thought.
[...]
Anything deemed "liberal" by conservatives now has its right-wing counterpart, catering exclusively to right-wingers. The results have been predictable: a core group of intractable true believers increasingly cut off from the rest of the electorate.
Would this batch of swing state Republicans do that for Romney.The Smirking Chimp, sounding a warning. Also, they're fundraising, so if you have spare cash, you might want to slip them some.
We don’t know.
COULD they do it?
Absolutely.
Would you be able to find definitive, legally admissable proof that they did it?
No.
Would the courts overturn such a tainted victory?
Not likely.
What could ultimately be done about it?
In the short term: ....nothing.
In the long-term, only a bottom-up remaking of how we cast and count ballots ballots can guarantee this nation anything resembling a true democracy. It is, to put it mildly, a reality worth fighting for.
Conservative anti–voter fraud fervor first arose around the same time as two turning points in American politics. The first was John F. Kennedy’s narrow presidential win in 1960, which many Republicans attributed to voter fraud in Illinois and Texas. The second was the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which, by banning discriminatory voting practices, stoked fear in some quarters about the rising power of black voters. During the run-up to the 1964 presidential election, the Republican National Committee launched Operation Eagle Eye, the nation’s first large-scale anti–voter fraud campaign. As part of the program, the RNC recruited tens of thousands of volunteers to show up at polling places, mostly in inner cites, and challenge voters’ eligibility using a host of tools and tactics, including cameras, two-way radios, and calls to Republican-friendly sheriffs.
In The Times on Monday, Stephanie Saul described how the plan works. True the Vote grew out of a Tea Party group in Texas, the King Street Patriots, with the assistance of Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Koch brothers that works to elect conservative Republicans. It has developed its own software to check voter registration lists against driver’s license and property records. Those kinds of database matches are notoriously unreliable because names and addresses are often slightly different in various databases, but the group uses this technique to challenge more voters.Also, Sarah Silverman has a video encouraging getting necessary ID. In, of course, her own inimitable style. Not safe for work, around conservatives, or people who don't like her humor.
This year, though, Belle's exhortations to her friends have become less about simply exercising the right to suffrage and more about preserving other hard-won rights. She believes that regardless of who they vote for, all women should vote – but, she tells her friends, we should vote for the party that will do most for women. There's a great deal to be done to ensure that women have all the same opportunities as men, and she knows that the Republicans won't do it.What with all the disenfranchisement efforts going around (see the label "You don't want me to vote." [which I need to relabel, stupid Blogger] for instances of attempts to suppress the electorate, using
This generation wants to hear the rest of the biblical message, that faith without works is dead, do not look down on anybody, the only thing that matters is faith expressing itself through love, judgment is based on how you treat the most needy people.
These things, the heart of Christian living it seems to me, have not been traditionally emphasized. Instead it's like, "Repent, adopt Victorian Era sexual norms and be saved from hell!" That's not a particularly appealing message. Don't get me wrong, our culture's sexual norms are sinful. But we should not expect people who do not accept, or necessarily understand, the Gospel message to abide by Christian moral standards. Why should they? There are good reasons I waited to have sex until I got married. But we cannot make sense of that choice, which looks so silly on the surface, until we've explored all the more important stuff from which it stems: the grace of God, faith expressing itself in love, caring for the needy, etc.
The right needs to value robust argument more highly. And to denigrate those who subvert it more forcefully. For public discourse is all it has to test ideas and formulate an evolving agenda.[I removed a pair of names tht do not sully my space voluntarily.]
If Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager reflect on why they conduct themselves with more integrity [...], even though they needn't do so to succeed in talk radio; if the most intellectually honest scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation think about why they hold themselves to a higher standard than the most hackish of their colleagues; if all the people who know better reflect on the reasons for their own behavior, they'd perhaps better appreciate why it is vital to stop staying silent when prominent co-ideologues fall short of the most minimal standards.
Last week, round one in the battle to strike down the onerous provision [§1021(b)(2) of the NDAA], one that saw me joined by six other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, ended in an unqualified victory for the public. U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, who accepted every one of our challenges to the law, made her temporary injunction of the section permanent. In short, she declared the law unconstitutional.
It apparently doesn’t faze Minnesota Republicans one bit when it’s pointed out that the ALEC-inspired "Voter ID" amendment legislation — legislation which by the way won’t stop the sort of voter fraud Republicans say it was meant to stop — will make it harder for many nonwhite Minnesotans to vote. For the leaders of the Grand Old Party, which has used the Southern Strategy as its operational platform for so long its members have forgot they were once the Party of Lincoln, Jim Crow racism isn’t a bug but a feature — they figure that the more their fan base hears this, the better.Phoenix Woman at -- yes -- Daily Kos, via Mercury Rising. (Bluestem Prairie has done a lot to expose the financial aspect of
But when the fact that it stands to ruin the budgets of dozens of Minnesota counties gets publicly aired by a growing number of local media outlets, that’s when the Republicans get worried.
But it isn’t just low-income households that pay no federal income taxes, Williams said. He estimated that 1,400 millionaires didn’t pay federal income taxes in 2009, with many likely taking advantage of foreign tax credits or charitable donations to lower their tax liability.In other words, Mr. Romney should have queried his figures before slinging numbers around.
So far, more than a dozen ARPA-E-funded companies have already attracted follow-up venture funding. They're very excited about 1366 Technologies, which has developed a new solar manufacturing process. Basically, instead of slicing silicon ingots like salami, which is a difficult way to make wafers and wastes a lot of silicon dust, they're creating the wafers directly from liquid silicon like pancakes, which could cut the price of solar panels by a third. The other big winner so far is Envia Systems, which has developed the world's most powerful lithium-ion battery; it could slice $5000 off the cost of the second-generation Chevy Volt. But there are all kinds of exciting projects: lithium-air batteries that could put lithium-ion out to pasture someday, wind turbines shaped like jet engines, electric transformers the size of a suitcase instead of a kitchen, laser drilling technology that could cut costs of geothermal wells as well as petroleum wells. We'll see what pans out.
Despite the fact that this trend is well under way, we’re certain to hear a steady diet of haranguing from neoliberal economists about how American workers have to suck it up and accept even lower wages. What’s driving falling real wages is poor domestic economic policies, namely, the mismanagement of the post crisis period. Japan warned the US early on that the biggest mistake it had made was not forcing its banks to recognize losses. But we ignored their lesson and are in the process of suffering what may turn out to be a lost decade. Time to blame the real perps, our bank enablers, rather than the poster bad guy, the Chinese wage slave.
