Texas Watchdog describes the case of a political activist who turned the task of ‘helping’ the poor, illiterate and homebound into a small moneymaking enterprise by making a few minor adjustments to ballots she was helping others fill. A self-described politiquera recounted how she would fill out mail-in ballots for her favored candidate whatever the illiterate person she was ‘assisting’ wanted. Filling out somebody’s ballot for them seems like an activity that is just asking for trouble. But efforts to make it a misdemeanor to help more than one person fill out the ballots failed to pass. Additional efforts along the same lines were met with a suit from the Texas Democratic Party alleging they attempted to roll back the Voting Rights Act, a Civil Rights era piece of legislation which prohibited imposing literacy tests on voters.
embedded by Embedded VideoEchoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the Act prohibited states from imposing any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure … to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” … Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which Southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise.
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The Civil Rights Act was an attempt to redress an historical injustice. But best laid plans of mice and men go astray and there is no better way to defend a bad action than with a noble reason. Enterprising political operatives have found ways to turn one remedy for disenfranchisement into a way to create another. In Southeast Houston voters who turned up at Precinct 219 found they could not vote because someone had already used their names. Further inquiry showed their ballots had been sent in through a scheme very similar to that described by the politiquera. They had been mailed in by someone else.
Precinct Judge Edna Russell told Local 2 Investigates that some senior citizen voters had to be turned away because absentee ballots had already been mailed in using their names.
“Somebody had already voted for me,” said Georgia Ireland.
She and the other victims reported that people were going door-to-door, offering help to seniors with filing voter registration forms. Some victims signed the paperwork, while others did not, but the scammers then used the information to mail absentee ballots in their names, meaning their votes were stolen from them.
Even primaries are thrown into turmoil by this kind of fraud. MSNBC reported on an Indiana court decision which found that campaign workers incumbent Mayor Robert Pastrick in the 2003 Democratic primary for mayor of East Chicago, Indiana “pressured and coaxed first-time voters or those who were ‘less informed or lacking in knowledge of the voting process, the infirm, the poor, and those with limited skills in the English language’ to vote by absentee ballot” in addition to paying them to vote the ‘right’ way. Pastrick won. Even smaller contests are sometimes tainted. The Democratic Blog describes how one candidate for Justice of the Peace has accused the other of cheating in this manner during the March 10 2nd Democratic Primary.
JP Luis Sepulveda recently filed suit to force a recount of his Primary Election race. Sepulveda, a Democrat in Precinct 5, had the largest number of “ballot box” votes in March 2nd Primary, but lost the election to rival Carlos Medrano, who received more than twice as many ( 606 vs. 245) mail-in ballot votes. Sepulveda says in the lawsuit that all of the 606 mail-in ballots cast for Medrano during early voting were collected with the help of “vote harvesters,” people who assist the elderly and others who can’t make it to the polls. The lawsuit alleges that mail-in ballots were cast by people who are not U.S. citizens, weren’t registered or didn’t live in Dallas JP Precinct.
Once cheating starts it tends to escalate. This highlights one of the problems with cheating; it favors the cheater only when the others play by the rules. But it also creates an incentive for others to follow suit. Soon cheating escalates and unless stopped fraud becomes general. And as the counterfeiter benefits only when there is still real money to substitute for, once counterfeit printing becomes widespread it stops being a paying proposition. At the limit cheating stops when the system collapses because there is no point in cheating a system which everyone has stopped trusting.
Postal balloting has had some problems even in Britain. The recent UK election fiasco, culminating in the inability of many voters to cast their ballots was ascribed to mismanagement by an NGO appointed to supervise the process. The NGO, headed by a woman described as a “modern militant” was created by the Labor Party to help improve voter participation, just like the Civil Rights Act. Its head, Jenny Watson, knows just what’s wrong with the British electoral system. There are too few women, minorities and disabled people in Parliament. At a speech Watson said, “the impending election has, as ever, focused attention on Westminster. And there’s been plenty of debate in recent months about whether Parliament is properly representative of the society its members are drawn from. … there are still only 126 women MPs – less than twenty per cent. And only 15 members from black or minority ethnic communities were elected in 2005. A very small number describe themselves has having a disability … there are few openly gay MPs. There is only one out lesbian in the membership of the Commons and Lords combined.” Such are the defects of the voting system.The Telegraph described Miss Watson:
In the late Nineties Miss Watson was campaign manager at Charter 88 – the Left-wing pressure group that advocated constitutional and electoral reform. … Miss Watson has moved from quango to quango, fronting the Equal Opportunities Commission, where some nicknamed her “Modern Militant”. …
Miss Watson was appointed to her job in January last year by the Speakers’ Committee of senior MPs, and earns another £28,000 for sitting on the boards of the Audit Commission and another government quango. … Official election monitors from Kenya and Sierra Leone yesterday told how the British system as a “recipe for corruption”.
But critics were worried about a different kind of problem: “postal voting fraud”. The Telegraph wrote, “the Commission has repeatedly faced criticism over its record. It previously failed to crack down on postal voting fraud. It is also responsible for overseeing party finance but failed to notice that the Labour Party had funded its 2005 election campaign with secret loans.” Voting by mail has been on the increase in the UK. The Electoral Reform Society said that “at the 2005 general election, 12.1 per cent of the UK electorate voted by post, three times higher than in 2001.”
Recently a reporter for the Independent was beaten as he attempted to investigate allegations of voter fraud in Tower Hamlets. Wikipedia says, “the borough has one of the highest ethnic minority populations in the capital, consisting mainly of Bangladeshis.” The current incumbent is George Galloway. But what brought the reporter to the scene were reports that both Galloway’s party and the Conservatives were being defrauded by an unnamed other political party. “What brought me to Bow yesterday were allegations of widespread postal voting fraud. Both the local Conservative and Respect parties in Tower Hamlets have been looking through the new electoral rolls for properties that have an alarmingly high number of adults registered to one address.” But all he got for his inquiries was a knuckle sandwich. Reporter Jerome Taylor was ambling through the area when he was approached by “Asian teenagers”, UK speak for people of subcontinental origin. Then the assault began.
“Can we see your note pad,” the boy asked.
I declined and then the first punch came – landing straight on my nose, sending blood and tears streaming down my face. Then another. Then another.
I tried to protect myself but a fresh crop of attackers – I guess between four and six – joined in. …
I don’t know how long it lasted – it was probably only a minute – but it was a long minute. I don’t remember them saying anything as they did it. The first noise I was aware of was the beeping of a car horn and a woman screaming.
The noise brought a man out of a nearby block of flats. With little regard for his own safety he waded in and defended me until my attackers ran away. …
The paramedics who treated me told me that they rarely went into the area without a police escort. “These kids are trapped in an endless cycle of poverty,” one of them said. “There’s a lot of drugs and gang-related violence but it is rare for a stranger like you to be attacked.”
The slight difference, of course, is that I’m not a stranger in the normal sense. Whoever these kids were it was evident that they were no strangers to the occasional journalist and photographer sniffing around.
Last night, I managed to speak to the man I wanted to interview about the alleged fraud, and whose house I was outside when I was attacked. He said: “I am not going to talk to you about this. Why have you been knocking on my door. You don’t disturb me. If you knock on my door again I will take you to court.”
And that may close the cycle. Everything is in the mail: the vote, the check and finally the subpoena.
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“…a Civil Rights era piece of legislation which prohibited imposing literacy tests on voters.”
There was never such a thing as literacy test in the Old South. This myth has been repeated so many times that it’s now taken for granted. It was a con job from beginning to end. We have outlawed a valid test merely because a number of scam jobbing racists lied.
Note, quiet respectable retired British people rarely cheat on much of anything. Bengalis packed in housing projects … beat up reporters and apparently cheat at pretty much everything.
Now, why, just why, do Bengalis belong in Britain in the first place? Much less on the dole in housing projects? The sensible person would suggest that Bengalis belong in … Bengal. Britons in Britain (and not ruling over Punjabis or Bengalis or Singaporeans), and Chinese in China (and not places in and around Africa, or Vietnam, or perhaps more radically Tibet and XianXing/Uighur places).
I have yet to see a good explanation of why Bengalis, and Pakistanis, and Caribbean people of various backgrounds belong in Britain, what benefit they bring to Britain, and why they should stay there. I certainly could see the anti-Colonialists point that even if it was going to be a mess, they deserved self-rule as a matter of human dignity and intrinsic natural rights. That Kenya, for example, did not deserve and rightly chose to expel, White colonialists who took from the native people things including land and power, that was not theirs by natural rights to take.
Why then, should Britons be subject to the same? I just don’t get it. I’m sure that nice retired lady Gordon Brown insulted did not cheat on her voting.
“The General Assembly may require each person to demonstrate a reasonably ability, except for physical disability, to read and write the English language as a condition to becoming entitled to vote.”
1895 South Carolina Constitution, Art. 2, Sect. 6
Maybe you are defining literacy test somewhat differently, David?
First out of the gate with an OT but a related one, I saw this on Twitter;
BreakingNews
Benigno Aquino III takes lead in Philippine presidential elections – Philippine Inquirer http://bit.ly/bvBvGm
Perhaps our host can comment on the attraction of celebrity and hereditary candidates in 3rd world enclaves, like until recently Boston. Are the Bush boys analogous to the Kennedys? Why or why not?
Having worked polling stations and possibly looking at getting into the election management business full time, knock on wood, I think no one should be allowed to vote without producing a valid government issued secure ID. No absentee ballot should be accepted without a thumbprint from the voter and another from any person who assisted. The Democrats over the last decade have broken out in pursuit of shameless vote fraud to a degree they would have previously avoided in public. Particularly notable are the fraudulent elections of Christine Gregoire in the state of Washington and Al Franken in Minnesota. Motor Voter will mean the end of any pretense of constitutional government in America.
wretchard:
At the limit cheating stops when the system collapses because there is no point in cheating a system which everyone has stopped trusting.
So, what does plagiarism do to academe? The last I heard, a Harvard Law degree still has value. Does it really matter that Harvard law professors plagiarize the works of others? Would it really matter if the dean of Harvard’s law school fosters an academic environment that condones cheating?
If the reputation of Harvard does not suffer from plagiarism scandals in its law school, just what can possibly damage the reputation of Harvard? Or, if no good idea would ever be listened to unless it had the imprimatur of Harvard, should the plagiarism of Harvard professors be seen as a favor to whomever gets his ideas copied verbatim?
Imagine if the United States Supreme Court were to have a justice who condones academic cheating. Imagine what message that would send to every vote stealer, to every white collar thief, and to every grifter in the land. Could that happen? Your guess is as good as mine.
LOTM,
No doubt about it, Benigno Aquino III has a celebrity name, but my I had no idea he was even around until lately. His sister is much more well known, it seems Benigno Aquino III is mostly okay with living a quiet unassuming life.
Celebrity & “hereditary” candidates have advantages. Aquino can claim the names of his father, mother, and sister; and that gives him a head start. The other candidates had either taint of scandal or the previous administration.
Plus there is the old saying “the acorn does not fall far from the tree”. If you grow up in a political household you naturally are going to develop interest, talent, and skills for it.
I have done some GOTV poll watching and one time when I voted I put my driver’s license on the table. One of the ladies said “we don’t need that” and I told them, it would be easier for them to read my name and address than for me to say it. Another lady at the check in table noted that voters SHOULD be required to provide ID.
Whiskey @2,
I’m curious to know who you think ought to be living in America.
breitbart now saying mulla omar has been captured.
Would it be controversial to say that Mulla Omar should not be allowed to live in America?
I once had an applicant who filled out his welfare application form (he had benefits before but they closed because he refused to apply for Social Security) and gave his race as “humanoid”. Asked to describe his disabilities, he went off on a tangent about a “mis-installed sonic ray gun”. Another client once tearfully claimed that she was a murder victim–presumably she got better. One was an MD (yes, a real one) that had been fired from several hospital jobs and was difficult to interview because she was constantly on her cell phone ordering tests for what had to be nonexistent patients. One swore someone stole her EBT card from her wallet and replaced it with someone else’s card, and another needed a replacement because he saw a cop, panicked and threw the card down a storm drain.
What did they all have in common? They were registered voters. Maybe WE need a Monster Raving Loony Party….
Whiskey
Just a point of information. I think that “nice retired lady” was complaining more about the waves of Central and Eastern Europeans who swept into Britain in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, not immigrants from the sub-Continent.
Duffy: “You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re … but all these eastern European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?”
The “immigration issue” in Britain over the last few years has yes, partly, been a conversation about former colonial subject immigration into Britain. But, a large part has been about the “threat” of the 1.5m immigrants since 2004 who have come from places like Poland.
As part of her sentence, Zaida should be forced to change her name from Bueno to Sin Vergüenza (Shameless).
“Whiskey @2,
I’m curious to know who you think ought to be living in America.”
I guess Whiskey can speak for Whiskey, but as the son of naturalized American citizens, my own answer is, “Americans.”
Part of the naturalization process, to my understanding, was some demonstration of knowledge of the English language, American civics and history, and some degree of indoctrination in the ideals of the American nation state. My parents took all of this quite seriously, priding themselves on having retained more civics knowledge than some of their natural-born fellow citizens (and their public school educated children on occasion).
The Left, the Left, it never sleeps
When power gets, the power keeps
It matters not, the coming deeps
It’s all in keeping score
The quangos running all our lives
With winning smiles and hidden knives
As honey drips from lefty hives
And still they lust for more
No one is safe, we have no chance
To beat the Leftists at their dance
They know their foe with just a glance
Their hearts bleed for the poor
They help the poor fill out the forms
They know the poor know not the norms
By doing so election storms
Are driven from the door
Election fraud is what they do
Mail-in votes, the Acorn crew
They care not all for me and you
For now they own the store
One man, one vote will never work. It is nothing more then a fad.
*Satire for those of you humor challenged.
The first Congressman from the district I live in Was D. Crockett;
http://www.answers.com/topic/davy-crockett
He was elected on the campaign promise of “vote for me and I’ll give you a shot of whiskey”. He kept his promise.
Davy used his own money to buy the whiskey.
Nowadays the politicians are a little more subtle. They make any promise you will believe and then use your money to pay for it. This may not be progress but it certainly is change.
Here is a little write up that actually is short several instances of fraud that were taken to court. Of course there are many others that various democrat state’s attorneys didn’t prosecute because they was either in on the deal or were told to keep out of it, or find nothing to prosecute.
The Complete Guide to ACORN Voter Fraud
Like others here have said including myself, we must try and stop this come the elections. It will take people volunteering for duty before, during and after votes are cast and dozens of lawyers volunteering their time and services to make sure that prosecution of the criminals is done.
ACORN is not dead, they are still getting federal monies and have only changed their names, not their practices.
Papa Ray
Whiskey:
They said “Bangladeshis” not Bengalies. Bangladesh and the Bengal province of India are more or less on the same side of the country, or sort of anyway, but are not the same place.
I think that Bangladeshis are the people who did not want to be in India and later decided they could not stand to be called East Pakistan. Or was it West Pakistan? Anyway, they seem to have some trouble making up their minds about who they are, so that might explain why a number of them ended up in England.
A professor in my master’s program at USC described how he had at one time been put in charge of conducting a survey in Hawaii. Two of the women hired as survey takers went around telling those surveyed what to put down, essentially filling out the surveys for them. He wrote a report saying the survey data was useless because of this corruption but no one seemed to care.
Here in Florida a whole raft of Gore attorneys came to challenge military absentee ballots in the 2000 election. I tried to get a list of their names and corporate affiliations so that veterans groups and the general public could express their appreciation for this effort but it seems that no one thought to write down that information.
OT: some flash script is really killing this site and pretty much all PJM sub-blogs in all my browsers. Opera is really unusable and even Firefox has problems.
Who “should” live in America? Americans. Or more properly, the folks who were here in America in the 1940 Census. After all, that group of people defeated Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini. Not a bad track record. That’s about 90% White and about 10% Black. Reflecting the historic Anglo-Celtic-African culture of America.
I don’t see why America is obliged to take in everyone from other nations when we cannot even provide for our own. More to the point, who “should” America take? Half of Africa, Europe, Asia, and Latin America would like to move here. Should they just move here because … ?
Britain got along perfectly fine with the current voting system, with the old population. There is few problems with corrupt voting in various places with a White middle class population that behaves like … a White middle class population. Compare / Contrast the murder rate of say, South Central LA vs. Lake Forest.
Diversity increases social cost to the point where previously trusted systems become gamed to failure. Because people don’t behave like White middle class Americans just because they’re plunked down among them.
One wonders… I hope I am wrong, but with the Democrats being so unconcerned about the popular resentment against the laws they have been passing I fear something is afoot.
I fear that another 1000 page bill regarding immigration reform will appear out of nowhere and be passed with the speed of light sometime close to the November elections. Amnesty will be proclaimed, and we will have about 20 to 30 million new citizen voters. None of them will have photo ID’s because the system just hasn’t time to process them. And it will be illegal to turn anyone away from voting if they can produce a paper saying they are one on the new American citizens.
And this in turn will enable voter fraud on a scale that was simply unimaginable in the past. It will overwhelm the abilities of the current voter registrars to do any meaningful checking of voter fraud, and laws in the 1000 page amnesty bill will likewise prevent them from doing so.
I mean, who knew that there were actually 300 million voters in the US who were previously classified as “undocumented workers?”
“Somebody had already voted for me,” said Georgia Ireland.
Gives new meaning to the old phrase “Vote for me.”
RWE,
Bangladeshi means Moslem. Bengali can mean Moslem or Hindu.
Rosinante,
Davey Crockett had an absentee record in Congress unmatched until Adam Clayton Powell.
MaryJ,
That is what puzzles me. I can understand Labour pulling in immigrants from Pakistan and Jamaica to change the demographics and build a compliant electorate but why would they want or the Conservatives object to Eastern Europeans? I would think that a couple of million people with first hand experience with Socialism would be a bracing tonic to the UK. On the other hand I understand that nostalgia for the DDR is on the rise in Germany so this may be a measure of the human capacity to forget.
Charles,
Confirmation and a 48 hour rule needed.
“The best laid _schemes_ ‘o mice and men gang aft aglee”
LOTM: “Davey Crockett had an absentee record in Congress unmatched until Adam Clayton Powell.”
If only we could get all congressional critters to emulate Davey!
“Maybe WE need a Monster Raving Loony Party….”
but we already have at LEAST two…..
ba dump tcha!!
Tcobb/18
Amnesty will be proclaimed, and we will have about 20 to 30 million new citizen voters. … And it will be illegal to turn anyone away from voting if they can produce a paper saying they are one on the new American citizens.
We can’t deny their Human Lefts, you know?
I mean, who knew that there were actually 300 million voters in the US who were previously classified as “undocumented workers?”
OK, that is scary! Did they soak them overnight so they gained < 10 times their volume?
Actual ICE figure is about 12.8 million. Still 12.8 million illegals too many.
Oh my god! I figgered it out! Dem Dems are soo brilliant! First, they get in amnesty so that these undocumented immigrants can vote whoever they desire, as long as it is a democrat. Then in five years, Dems will deplete all the resources, there simply won't by any more money to redistribute, and the standard of living will drop below that of Mexico (that is why voting democrats in is so important!). The now documented immigrants will become emigrants, going in the opposite direction across the border. Problem solved!
23. twobyfour
No, it isn’t that their actual numbers are/will be that much, but if ACORN registers each and every one in each and every state there is a problem.
In my original comment I was being sarcastic, but not by much.
As for me I think those who are involved in voter fraud should be put to death with no exceptions at all. And it should be a slow and painful death. But that’s just me.
Where are all the prosecutions for vote fraud? We have so may alleged cases yet so few people in jail for it. Until those engaged in it fear for their continued freedom this will not get better.
Here’s how they plan to do, perhaps (there’s a dozen links imbedded in this quote at its site):
http://www.breakdownofamerica.com/2010/03/29/what-the-democrats-know-universal-voter-registration/
(article opens)
“Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats with no apparent concern for their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago, “What do they know that we don’t?”
We may have found out. It’s called universal voter registration. The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund described the Democrat plan recently at a David Horowitz Freedom Center forum. Watch the video here.
Fund describes the proposal as follows:
In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration. What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states: ‘take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be …’
Fund anticipates that Congress will attempt to ram this legislation through, as with the health care bill. What a surprise! Fund covers the vote issue at greater length in his book, How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections.
(close quote. read more at link. Learn about Motor Voter’s authors, Cloward & Piven! Wonder if that signing in 1993, which amounted to an announcement that henceforth Democrats openly plan to openly steal elections and whoever don’t like it is gonna have to prove every detail of every single ballot every time in every courtroom every day for the rest of time, is when the country went off the rails. After all, thitherto, in our experience only organized crime had ever taken this brazen stance toward crime, this “we don’t care if you know we’re robbing you, you’re still gonna have to prove it” attitude, which was so shocking, so truly new and shocking, at the time.)
I don’t think they can pull off the amnesty/vote scam before November. It is too third world and would probably start a shooting civil war. I look more for incredible levels of voter fraud overwhelming the elections or an October surprise, (some dirt on Bush?) Either way these clowns have no respect for our institutions and will lie, cheat and steal their way to power any dirty way they can.
26. buddy larsen
Exactly–but I fear that is only the tip of the iceberg. When I say there are 300 million voters that will appear when amnesty comes I’m not talking about the number of people I’m talking about the number of votes.
Its like those places where the number of registered voters exceeds the population of the area. It exists. Its nasty. Those responsible for the situation deserve IMHO to be crucified.
t & t @ 27 & 28; right on –a theft that cuts deeper than mere thievery. It’s bad, it’s commie rat, nazi thug, *murder* bad –the swag is the world and the future is the corpse.
trangbang68/27
Some dirt on Bush? C’mon, whatever they could use they did. Anyway, Bush is outta there for a while. But a dirt on opposition candidates… possible. I mean outright lies. 24/7 lie machine. So much of it that the opposition candidate will have time for nothing else but defending against lies. Plus all the other scenarios described in a above posts. And trucks of JIT “lost” ballots in the case the particular elections go wrong way.
That article i linked above closes thus (this snip, at the site, contains nine imbedded links):
Universal voter registration will create massive vulnerabilities to systemic voter fraud nationwide, and if Democrats have proven anything in recent years, it is that they can win elections that way. The George-Soros-funded Secretary of State project (SOS) was designed to take advantage of such vulnerabilities and may have been developed in anticipation of the universal voter registration plan. Al Franken’s stolen election in Minnesota was a trial run for the SOS project. Longtime ACORN friendMark Ritchie was elected Minnesota Secretary of State in 2006 with Soros’s SOS and ACORNmoney, and what followed in Norm Coleman’s Senate runoff election was a frightening demonstrationof just how far Democrats will go to win. Franken won the runoff, and the Democrats got their filibuster-proof sixty-vote Senate majority.
The Motor Voter law was correctly identified as a facilitator of vote fraud. One of the few legal issues Barack Obama actually participated in as a lawyer was a 1995 suit against the State of Illinois, which he brought on behalf of ACORN. Then-Republican Governor Jim Edgars saw the newly passed Motor Voter act as creating the potential for massive vote fraud and refused to implement it. With the assistance of the Clinton Justice Department, Obama’s legal team won that suit. Obama himself actually participated very little, a strategy that seems to have served him well in life. According to theChicago Sun-Times, after identifying himself in court proceedings, Obama sat back and let “the heavy-hitters at the Justice Department make the arguments.”
It is not surprising that the Democrats are now choosing to push this new initiative, for universal voter registration will be Motor Voter on turbochargers. And who better to sign it into law than the president from ACORN?
Where’s a nice asteroid impact when ya need it?
(well, if none would impact the Wannsee Conference then why bother with this?)
Standing behind Lucifer Bill, third and fourth from your right, in light gray suit and dark dress with green coat, are professors Cloward and Piven.
***
Act 1 scene 1 Macbeth
[A heath]
Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches
1. Witch: WHEN shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
2. Witch: When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
3. Witch: That will be ere the set of sun.
1. Witch: Where the place?
2. Witch: Upon the heath.
3. Witch: There to meet with Macbeth.
1. Witch: I come, Graymalkin!
2. Witch: Paddock calls: Anon!
All in unison: Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
The scam folks is N-O-T to use wetbacks and similar types to stuff ballot boxes and change the outcome of elections. Such attempts will occur from time to time but are manageable.
Take an look at where these examples are happening. In precincts where the gerrymander has already insured that left-wing Democrats are gonna win. I call these “separate but equal” districts. They have always been there and their only use to our enemies is to increase the turnout in statewide races. And even that ability is waning rather than waxing. They are at or close to
maxing out to start with.
No. The scheme is to decrease the number of voters while increasing representation. Take California. PLEASE!
On “an if trends continue” basis California was due to increase its Congressional delegate from 55 to over a hundred while the number of people voting decline from a high of 3.5 million in the General Election to 10% of that number. Okay, 15% if they got maximum turnout.
Of course, something seems to have happened to those trends. Californicated Peoples Republic may even lose a Congressional seat this go-around.
Remember the census itself does not assign congressional seats. That takes legislation. And I believe that some
corrective legislation could be had with a new GOP majority.
Point is, be aware of what really are enemy intentions
AND their actual capabilities.
Any questions?
BTW Buddy: According to National Review, long-term Democrat Chet Edwards about 8 points behind GOP challenger
whose family name happens to be “Flores”.
Now don’t breathe a word of this to old Near Beer. Might drive him to excessive consumption of his assumed title.
Dave, why stick to one scheme?
I can imagine that they have already maps with pins in them. Each pin color represents a course of action:
1 – red: lies and slander about opposition candidates
2 – yellow: find more lost ballots
3 – blue: (no id required) – Disney, pets, wetbacks, the sixth sense*
4 – green ….
and so on. Some precincts may have two or more pins.
Also, as an overall strategy, they will start releasing opinion articles, posing as news, in the MSM and elsewhere that the anti-incumbent momentum is losing steam, and supply the numbers (fictitious, but who cares, it will get quoted all over the net) to prove it.
Banana republic? Yewbetcha.
(* “I see dead people”)
yep –GOP polling has their man Flores widening it out –despite Edwards’ folks intimating to their captive braceros that Flores ain’t a ”real” Hispanic due to his being an ”oil company jefe”. Yessir them democrats hates racism so much they just can’t ever quit talking about it. It’s almost like they’re feared if they ever gave it a five minute rest everybody would forget to be pissed off.
twobyfour: Tactics are many. Logistics compress strategy
into a fairly narrow channel.
Number of precincts where fraud can change outcome, or even turnout,appear stable even in trouble spots. On the decline elsewhere.
(Historical perspective: “The Valley” in Texas. Nowadays it votes. Back when it was voted.) Also take a look at how Jindal lost first time, reversed second. )
Am not saying to relax. Am saying enemy capabilities are much more limited than what many on our side fear and which the other side actually believes. Good enough for me.
Dave, you should splain dat to Norm Coleman
Sandman is getting to me Buddy. So I’ll sign off with
a snarky comment about the funny colors you get when you yank those bedsheets off.
You know the story about 1948 and Ballot Box 13.
HOWEVER: I say that by now, Coke Stevenson casts a much longer shadow over Texas than does LBJ.
St Rita does work in mysterious ways at times.
The Saga of Landslide Lyndon
In 1948, Texas Governor Coke Stevenson ran for a U.S. Senate seat against Texas Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson:
“Early indications were that Congressman Johnson had lost. Six days later, however, Precinct 13 in the border town of Alice, Texas, showed a very interesting result. Exactly 203 people had voted at the last minute — in the order they were listed on the tax rolls — and 202 of them had voted for Johnson.
“While Stevenson protested, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black upheld the result, and Johnson squeaked by with an 87-vote victory. For this feat, columnist Drew Pearson gave Johnson the sobriquet Landslide Lyndon.
“It was not until July 30, 1977, that Luis Salas, the election judge in Alice, admitted that he and southern Texas political boss George Parr (who had killed himself in 1975) had rigged the election.”
[The election was the closest senatorial race in the nation's history. Stevenson took his defeat bitterly, retired from public life, and died in June, 1975. Lyndon Baines Johnson became the 36th president of the United States.]
Johnson, Lyndon Baines (1908-1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (1963-69) [noted for his Great Society program (to stimulate economic growth and promote civil rights legislation) and for his deepening of American involvement in the Vietnam War]
[Sources: www; Texas State Library]
***(PS edit)
Grate minds, heh –i was working my Landslide Lyndon post same time you was writin yorn –yeh, sleep –tomorrow creeps in like a cat with a Klaxon Horn
Dave, a good point(s), but given the fact that Nancy Botoxi, in a recent intrview, was not worried about losing majority and HRC recently was overheard saying something’s coming up in October, I have to presume some ace in the sleeve.
Whether it would be an injection of some (sizable) portion of stimulus funds to create a massive job patronage system (that was the part and parcel of the package–to create jobs, but Dems have their own ideas) in october, or something else, they seem to be a little bit too sure of themselves.
Corrupting voting as a means to choose representation has two benefits: by corruption, the right leader can be placed in office, and, when the corruption becomes widespread, the right leader can stand above the corruption to rule by popular acclaim.
buddy larsen,
Thank you, I had forgotten about Obama’s role for Acorn in the 1995 Illinois Motor Voter case. The only other time I know of that he briefly appeared as a lawyer was also for Acorn when they sued Bank of America to force them to issue sub-prime mortgages. The only other job, ‘Community Organizing’ does not count, I think he ever held was for a few months after college when he worked for a news clipping service. He inflated that during his 2008 campaign and I recall some mention that a coworker dryly noted that at his level he did not need to wear shoes.
Bob #25:
Remember the horrific Bush scandal over the 7 fired US Attorneys? The case where Hillary Clinton said you could fire all of them just because you could but could not fire 7 of them for cause?
Well, the “cause” was that they were not prosecuting vote fraud.
It was going to be 8 US attorneys to be fired, but No.8 was named Fitzgerald and he came up with a way to make himself bulletproof by inventing a bogus case against Scooter Libby.
The Democrooks play a deep game.
Really, vote fraud at any level is important enough that it should be a Federal crime punishable by execution. That might put a dent into it.
And such a law will get passed when rocks turn to cheese.
Fraud can happen before during or after an election. The Lib-Dems and Labour do a deal behind the Conservative’s back in the UK. http://tinyurl.com/36zxank
When the American Constitution was passed–narrowly–by an extremely informed voting public, one in four males were eligible to vote, that being one-eighth the number of citizens currently eligible, not counting the illegals everywhere and the dead in Cook county.
This is probably not going to work much longer.
Peterike #45:
Are you aware that the Federal Govt buys a lot of cheese and then hands it out for free to various people, many of who are dumb as rocks? Who do you suppose they vote for?
But vote fraud ought to be at least a felony, punishable by losing the voting franchise for life. Note that this would not affect the returns from Cook County. And based on People Who Run Red Lights video I saw on Youtube yesterday, they should lose their driver’s license, too
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=-qvXbIenivk
LOTM @ 46: “The Lib-Dems and Labour do a deal behind the Conservative’s back in the UK.”
LOTM – you have to remember that the British election system is inherently incapable of delivering a fair result when there are more than 2 parties running. And then the Brits have outrageously gerrymandered their constituencies on top of that.
Cameron’s Conservative Party got only 36% of votes cast in the UK. To put that another way, almost 2 out of 3 voters in the UK (an overwhelming majority) did NOT vote for the Conservatives. If we include the approximately one third of the electorate who chose not to vote, 3 out of 4 citizens in the UK did NOT vote for the Conservatives. Some mandate for Cameron!
Meanwhile the Labour & Lib-Dem Parties combined got about 52% of the vote — the majority. If the Parties who got the majority of the vote want to talk about forming a coalition, what’s wrong with that?
Since the connection between democratic votes and seats awarded is so weak in the twisted British electoral system, maybe the rest of us should not get too excited about Cameron’s attempt to rule without winning a clear mandate in the popular vote.
New York State has amended its general election law to guarantee absentee ballot fraud. It’s no coincidence that absentee ballots have risen from 5% to 25% of votes cast in elections across the country the last several years. A follow up amendment is on the way which will combine voter registration and balloting on the same form, in effect, giving everybody who is alive the legal right to vote in New York elections. The measure was not opposed by members with R after their names.
I heard recently that 45%-50% of the population of NYC is foreign born although I have not confirmed that.
The Roman Republic died the day that Sulla marched his legions into Rome although everybody pretended it was alive if not well for the next 100 years. After that they stopped caring.
The American Republic is dead. Done. Gone. The Great Experiment to create a nation based on values has been subsumed by the re-emergence of paganism and faith in the leader. Blood and race trump liberty and equality on how we will deal with each other in the future. POTUS tells us so with his exhortation to blacks and latinos to continue his program.
We have been mugged by the culture. That is not to say that there is no bright future ahead, just that we are not going back.
I’m unfamiliar with literacy tests in the South. However, I remember in the mid 50′s standing in a polling booth in Westchester county, NY by my father, a graduate of Columbia Medical School, while he took a literacy test to demonstrate a minimal competence to vote. Saw it as a reasonable requirement which helped promote productive values and behavior.
50. Peter Boston.
I’m curious as to what your definition of paganism is.
Kinuachdrach ,
The cure for gerrymandering in the US or UK is to increase the number of seats. The answer is not a move to a Proportional Representation system. If the Scots were spun off and the English had 1000 constituencies then the result would be a solid majority for the Conservatives. Alternatively I could see dividing England into four or five regions. With five it is unlikely that one in the South-West would vote for the Lib-Dems but one in the North might vote for Labour. The introduction of a strong Tory government would probably reduce the hold of Labour over London over time. If the Union Parliament was retained free of the interference of the EU and the current over representation of Scotland was corrected then with all social and most tax policies devolved to regional assemblies the ability of Labour and the Lib-Dems to hold the nation to ransom would be ended.
Forced to stand on its own Scotland would soon have to back off of the socialist follies that have squandered the oil wealth. They had dreamed of leveraging that similar to the way that Putin has tried to use the energy based wealth of Russia to extract political concessions from Europe. The failure of the Scots would serve as a lesson to others facing resource based blackmail. Sean Connery might be pleased as a backer of the Scottish Nationalists.
44. RWE: The left and the media, but I repeat myself, conveniently forget that Clinton fired -all- the US attorneys upon taking office. An unkind interpretation would be that he wanted his own people in there to see what the previous guys had on his buddies.
Next thing you know, the Do-Gooders will advocate for animals to have voting rights.
‘Don’t they also have a voice not be eaten / beaten / mating / whatev?’
Laugh all you want, this is the road we are heading towards.
17. whiskey
“I don’t see why America is obliged to take in everyone from other nations when we cannot even provide for our own. “
That is the plan. To force the United States of America into financial ruin and bringing in millions to vote for the party that gives out welfare like a whore gives out …you know what. While controlling not only the financial sector but energy, industry and health care.
All of this is more than just democrats getting their liberal adjenda fullfilled, but a larger plan to completely change America from the land of the free to a socialist/communist [insert another derogatory here] state.
You think that they care that upwards of 20 million illegals will not only overload but destroy any welfare system they have constructed as well as put many other Americans out of work. NO…that is just an excuse to expand government even more under the guise of “helping the people”.
They know that they can just print more money and tell more lies, and of course there is always the “camps” to take care of those who “need it”.
Like whiskey and others have said. This is the plan. None of this is an accident. And be assured: “accidents or crisis” are to be taken advantage of by the democrats.
And even by those RINOs that we can’t seem to rid ourselves of.
TCobb, I’m afraid your fears are well founded.
Papa Ray
P.S“Actual ICE figure is about 12.8 million. Still 12.8 million illegals too many”
Yes, true for the year it was orgianally quoted -2004.
It has been guesstimated by many now at between twenty (20) and twenty five (25) MILLION in 2010, by various sources within and outside government.
In Nogales, Arizona, a border city , the city government declared the new state border bill “morally repugnant”. That about sums it up. Adherence to borders, culture, American history and national sovereignty is “morally repugnant”. The politically correct Nogales city fathers (or padres) make a stupid emotional statement while across the border in Nogales, Sonora, the cartels are amping up the violence daily.
Maybe that’s the paganism, Peterboston is talking about; sentiment over logic and reason, self hatred and anti-patriotism over courage and love of country, corruption and venality over integrity and service, multicultural crap over “the city set on a hill” Throw in nature worship, narcissism, homosexuality as an icon, garbage pop culture, tattoos and piercings and sounds like paganism to me.
In Minnesota State Representative Phyllis Kahn regularly introduces bills into the legislature to extend the franchise to twelve-year-olds. Though she has been regularly mocked, one of these days she will manage to slide the bill through. Remember, this is the state who repeatedly elected Rudy “Governor Goofy” Perpich, and then replaced him with Jesse “The Booby” Ventura, and has since gifted Al Franken to the Senate in one of last year’s most notorious election frauds. A combination of reasons why I took political asylum in South Dakota.
“The politically correct Nogales city fathers (or padres) make a stupid emotional statement …”
It is not stupid to them. Many of the border state towns look at Mexico as just the southern part of their town where many of their families/friends live. They can’t imagine the border anymore than the idiots in the P.A. can.
And like the P.A. they have their violent representives, mostly gangs and drug dealers that will never honor a border and will do all they can to destroy it even if it means destroying themselves. Much like the P.A.
Papa Ray
LotM/53; odd but useless factlet re Scotland and Russia, the former’s flag and the latter’s naval jack are identical, the blue-on-white Saint Andrew’s Cross. Saint Andrew, one of the ‘fishers of men’, also lends his name to the San Andreas Fault.
Mr. Lucky @52
The broadest definition is a world view that sees humans as just another animal in the forest – instinctual, emotional, bound by heirachy, blood, mythology and race to the pack which survives by dominating or eliminating other packs.
I chose that definition to contrast paganism with the Judeo-Christian world view which sees humans as exceptional and which establishes immutable, universal values as the ideal basis of human interaction. Christianity superseded heirachy, blood and race. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were an attempt to institutionalize that world view into a polity.
I have been fumbling through 19th century writers trying to figure out how the Enlightenment switch got flipped into the Age of Idiocy. Perhaps the source goes much deeper into the human psyche.
61. Peter Boston.
What do you think the idea that some of Judeo-Christian belief is based on pagan myth?
PB/61; could be that since tribes which during say a long protein-starved winter famine might eat the helpless –babies and elders, their future and their history –may have been common and numerous but since they failed to survive in competition with tribes that had the moxie to find a way to taboo cannibalism, they disappeared long ago and we no longer see any trace of them (except maybe in movies such as “13th Warrior”). So what we see as ‘the human race’ is actually a remnant, an elite, with a behavioral if not biological “god gene”.
Here’s an excellent Nyquist from a year ago, “Stone Age Genocide”. Fascinating and unsettling through and through, here’s a small poetic excerpt:
It seems there is a law of history at work. Whenever something good is achieved, a force is formed in diametrical opposition to it. Whenever progress is made, a force emerges that wants to take us back – whether it is Nazis who want to replay the survival game of tribe versus tribe, or Communists who want to return us to our Communist roots as hunter-gatherers. Whenever civilization emerges, the romance of the barbarian wells up to swallow it. The noble savage, the praiseworthy primitive, is set before us as a model. And as we look around at the pathologies produced by our civilization, we wonder whether civilization can survive at all.
The Cheater in Chief got the Democratic nomination in large part because his people stole the Democratic caucuses where that form of “voting” was held. Stealing is an accurate word for what happened. In addition, in true progressive fashion, the Democratic primaries where voting by ballot was done had a hodgepodge mashup way of deciding who “won” which votes, instead of a winner-take-all system like the Republican primaries. Hillary Clinton (FWIW) should have gotten the nomination based on actual preference during the primary process. Caucuses are a curious throwback to the way voting was done in the early days of our Republic. It was rife with abuse or potential abuse.
At this rate, this is likely our voting future. There are also frequent noises about abolishing the Electoral College, one of the smartest election ideas for maintaining a proper republic. As it is, some stupid states have decided to split their electoral votes based on their popular vote. Idiots.
Mr. Lucky @62
I do not want to get into a dogmatic pissing contest. The Jews spent 700 years after Moses before they universally agreed on monotheism. What we may want to characterize as bright lines for our own purposes were not so bright after all.
#53. Lifeofthemind
The key to ending gerrymandering is to adopt a strict mathematical model for districts that isn’t open to interpretation. What I would suggest for the US is to go by zip codes starting at the most northeasterly point of any state and moving north to south and east to west. If a state was entitled to say eight representatives whenever the amount of people in the progression amounted to 1/8 the population of that state that would be the end of that district and a new one would begin.
1) Absentee and mail in ballots should be abolished entirely. Citizens living abroad who wish to vote will need to go to their embassy on election day, in person, to fill out their ballot.
2) Deployed military personnel would vote in unit established polling places supervised by a trio: the First Sgt. / Command Sgt. Major / Command Chief Petty Officer, along with a commissioned officer, and a junior enlisted member. Each deployed ship or battalion would have a polling place. FOBs and other overseas bases should have regular polling places similar to any town back home. All commanders are directed to allow all their personnel to vote if at all possible, or as many as practical consistent with mission accomplishment and safety. This should allow 99.5% of our military personnel to vote. The other 0.5% out on long range patrols deep behind enemy lines, locked in ICBM silos for 72 hours etc, are out of luck for that election.
3) Electronic balloting without a real time printing doubly redundant hard copy paper trail of votes should be abolished in the few places it is practiced. All paper trails and / or ballots from each federal election must be retained for 10 years.
4) Each voter shall have two digits on their hand dipped in permanent ink when their ballot is placed in the locked and sealed ballot box. This should eliminate double voting. Waivers may be granted, with documentation, on a case-by-case basis for those who do not have two digits on a hand.
5) A government issued “real” identification must be presented and verified as belonging to that citizen in order to receive a ballot. In states without modern biometric keyed drivers licenses, voters would be required to present a U.S. passport, military I.D. etc. which meets the requirement.
6) No one except voter’s children may be present when the ballot is marked.
7) To accommodate our growing infirm population, polling places should be located in the lobby, dining facility, or recreation room of retirement homes and communities. It won’t do any harm for younger folks to catch a glimpse into how our elderly are being cared for.
Implementing these changes will eliminate 99% of voter fraud at the ballot box.
It doesn’t begin to address possible fraud when votes are tallied and reported. That is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Don Rodrigo @ 64
Funny that you should mention Democrat “caucuses”.
I did a little research into caucuses. I believe all but one of the states that used them have small minority populations. The race card could effectively be used to trigger “white guilt” and prevent many from voting against Obama for fear of being seen as “prejudiced” or to vote for him to show how progressive they are.
The other interesting fact was the the date for many of the caucuses were move up so they would give Obama a bigger vote total going into Super Tuesday.
These things didn’t just happen. Hopefully some researcher can look into the organization behind these moves.
Aristide ~
Ban absentee ballots.
Keep the polls open 24 hours, or all weekend.
If you must be absent that day, allow early voting – in person – at convenient locations, with lots of ID, a note from your mother, your picture taken, and heck, I wouldn’t mind a modest fee though I suppose that will set some people ballistic.
The increasing use of ballot by mail is questionable also because many will be (properly) submitted days before the end of the campaign. I suggest this is not a good thing.
seems like robin hood on the loose……
cheers…
http://subprime-mortgage-lender.blogspot.com
http://geniusreality.com
LOTM @ 53: “If the Scots were spun off and the English had 1000 constituencies then the result would be a solid majority for the Conservatives.”
Mind, sometimes your posts are deep and insightful. But that was not one of them. That was not even factual.
In England alone, the Conservative party got a minority 38% or so of the vote, hardly different from the 36% of the vote they got in the UK as a whole. There is only one way to translate an actual minority of the English votes into a “solid majority” of your hypothetical 1,000 English constituencies, and that is by Gerrymandering — where many votes get ignored, one way or the other. But the English already know more that most of us about gerrymandering.
Two thirds of the English voted for Far Left (Labour) or Far Left (Liberal Democrats). One third of the English voted for Almost as Far Left (Cameron’s Conservatives). My guess is that the English are going to get what they voted for, good & hard.
Winston Churchill is dead & buried. The English have moved on. You may not like it, Mind, but reality cares nothing for what you (or any of the rest of us) might like.
Welcome to Chicago.
Everybody has already forgotten how the Obama campaign turned off the credit card address verification system for campaign contributions on its websites, raking in tens of millions from foreign sources and letting people make multiple contributions that way exceeded the federal limits.
No one remembers the Obama campaign’s thug tactics in early caucus states, that were a major reason why he so mysteriously did better against Clinton in caucus states than primary states.
On and on.
Whenever there is any attempt to clean up voter rolls, require ID, or regulate absentee ballots, the Dems scream bloody murder and the GOPs fold like a cheap suit before the MSM even has a chance to write about it.
And, here we are.
The other interesting fact was the the date for many of the caucuses were move up so they would give Obama a bigger vote total going into Super Tuesday.
These things didn’t just happen. Hopefully some researcher can look into the organization behind these moves.
68 Aristide:
An organization of pro-Clinton Democratic women did a documentary (serialized on YouTube) that actually videotaped the tactics used in caucuses by the Obami.
I don’t know how deep that rift between the two camps still is, but it would be interesting to see if there is a core group of very angry Democrats who might descend on Obama, should he continue to stumble and falter.
The most fascinating illustration of the phenomenon of the different results between caucuses and primaries was Texas. As I recall, Texas had both for the Democrats. Obama won the caucus, and Clinton the primary. It is a given that Oabama rigged the caucuses.
The Dem party is like an MD who treats one ailment with one med. The ailment is the med. The med is produced by about half the citizens, more or less at the point of a gun, donating several months every year to its manufacture. This is probably about how the Pyramids got built, oddly enough.
Three Cheers for Merry Olde England –no matter how to slice n dice the coming problems, the guy at this minute making a few remarks to the crowd outside his new digs at #10 Downing, is not Brown of Labour but Cameron of the Conservatives; Mr. Brown having said his goodbyes and taken his leave some hour ago.
The story of “the politiquera” points up something I have observed in government bureaucacy.
The real bureaucratic attitudes are resident not so much in the senior people but in the GS-5 secretaries in the like, for whom they are a source of personal power, job security, and even amusement.
Similarly, the Leftist tactics are not only top-down directed by also are inherent in the attitudes of many of the lower level apparachniks. Obama’s entire campaign success has been attributed to manipulations in the Iowa primary orchastrated by one female operative, who put out false polling data.
These people do this not only out of ideology, but for the same reason the boss’s secretary holds up the flow of documents and insists on pointless little changes – it is a source of power, and they have no other life but exercising that power.
And yes, Whiskey, the majority of these people are indeed probably women.
#74. buddy larsen
Correct. And the intrinsic value of the pyramids (other than as a tourist attraction) is zero.
Dismal Tide file, under Signs & Portents:
Nick Taleb, author of the book popularizing anew the term “Black Swan”, is a principal in the fund that apparently made the small trade that set off the Thursday ‘Black Swan’ cascading thousand point bounce.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704879704575236771699461084.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection
Re: Wretchard “At the limit cheating stops when the system collapses because there is no point in cheating a system which everyone has stopped trusting.”
And than our ancestors (hopefully) will have a system where only the people who pay taxes vote.
#17 Whiskey:
I guess you did speak on behalf of yourself to set the cutoff at the 1940 Census (and I guess their progeny). Mr. Fernandez, would you speak well of me to become a permanent resident of Australia?
My original response of America for Americans, by that I mean that America is unique among states on the face of the planet in that being American is based on what you believe rather than on who your Momma or Poppa are or when they came here.
Yes, American citizenship is based on a set of shared civic beliefs, the symbolism of the American Flag (the flag is not such a big deal in other countries — the UK has the Queen), adherence to the rule of law, respect for the rights of one’s fellow citizens, knowledge of our historical heritage, a sense of one’s duties as a citizen in terms of resourceful, contribution to the common good, and not being a burden on others when one has the resources not to, paying one’s taxes (yes, the IRS is based on a largely voluntary system where people adhere to the law without Big Brother watching everything, only some things), and yes, communicating in the public sphere in the English language.
Among these rights and responsibilities, I do not see the right to form ethnic enclaves, based either on ethnicity, a non-English language, or a religion and have special rights or privileges granted to such enclaves. I mean form your communities, speak the Serbian or German of my parents in them, speak Spanish or Arabic or Farsi as part of your right of free association. But don’t expect any government recognition apart from being recognized as patriotic Americans (and American patriotism was integral to the ethnic associations I knew about) for being in return, patriotic.
I really draw a bright red line against the Waving of the Red White and Green (except for December 12, just as we are all Irish and wear green on March 17 — this Cinqo-de-Mayo thing doesn’t count and Maximillian considered himself a Mexican Patriot to the moment of his execution, and he represented MY heritage if some of you want to start a fight over it).
Paul, my views are no more “extreme” than frequent columnist and PJM contributor Victor Davis Hanson who wrote “Mexifornia” bemoaning the radical, permanent, and lamentable transformation of California from what it was in the 1950′s and 1960′s to what it is now — a disaster.
About 100 million Indonesians would like to move to Australia. Should Australia let them in, just because? Wretchard would not like it, I think, if half of China moved to the Philippines, and made it into greater China. Nor would rightfully, most Filipinos.
If most of the Filipinos moved to Australia, would it still be Australia? Would Japan be Japan if half of Nigeria moved there?
Nations are either stable, ethno-states or they are not. Israel is not Israel if the right of return enables demographic overwhelming of Jews by Arabs. But White people are supposed to be ashamed of being White, for original racial sin, because of White skin or something. As if Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and everyone else did not have ancestors doing collectively, very bad things including racism, genocide, slavery, and so on. Show me a nation and a people, and I’ll show you bums in their ancestry (to quote Pappy Boyington).
Robert Bennett called the Constitution an “outmoded arrangement from an archaic agricultural society,” and new Supreme court justice Elena Kagan called the Constitution “a document given sole meaning by what the courts interpret it as.”
The fantasy of Colors of Benneton, or redemption for original sin of racism in a post-Christian heresy, is jut that. A fantasy. SOMEONE will be the discriminated group. Currently, Dems, “libertarians” and the “race does not matter” group argue Whites should just accept being a discriminated, dead-end minority in America, because of past sins and the fantasy of Multiculturalism.
I agree with Duncan Hunter that the kids of illegals should be deported along with their families and parents. Given Bennett’s and Kagan’s views, the Constitution is whatever who has the most power says it is, that is the reality. Because I don’t want to be a discriminated minority, I support this action. Not the least of which is that it allows far less tax money spent on those who loathe me for the color of my skin and the language (English) I speak, and always will, and far more tax money (with lower taxes to boot!) spent on people like me.
#79. grrr
The notion that only people who pay officially designated taxes can vote is misguided. Taxes fall upon everyone if by no other method than increasing the costs of goods that everyone needs or wants to buy.
Bicameralism is really a sign of political genius. It is that, which when properly applied, checks the destructive tendencies of pure democracies.
I think that only people who have a positive balance of what they have paid to the government minus what they have received from the government should be allowed to vote for any race that deals with the House of Representatives. In other words government employees and welfare parasites don’t get to vote in THOSE elections.
As to anyone else they should be given the right to vote for the Senate or the Presidency.
It has been, and always will be, all about checks and balances. When that fails the system dies.
The notion that only people who pay officially designated taxes can vote is misguided. Taxes fall upon everyone if by no other method than increasing the costs of goods that everyone needs or wants to buy.
Agreed.
Democracy is a consensus among all people present, without the sufferance of whom whatever you have may or may not work, but it is not democracy.
#82. Tcobb:
Fine, I do not mind such arrangement. The only prob. is that we are loooong way off and (possibly bloody) turbulence might happen before it will have a chance to be seriously considered.
Whites will be a majority in America for far longer than the projections from census data assume. Much of the notion of being overwhelmed by minorities is perception and projection, rather than demographic reality. Even minorities are starting to have fewer children, even in Mexico this is true. World populations are also maxing out according to recent data.
But that isn’t the real issue. The reality is that “aggrieved” minorities have been allowed to create enormous leverage for themselves which multiplies the effects of their actual numbers. This is true in so-called Eurabia as it is in N. America. Elitists in the political class dismiss the notion of the West being overwhelmed and dominated by outside minorities by citing the actual demographic figures, and thus miss the real point of undue sociological advantages granted to non-whites (granted by that very same political class).
The great danger is that an alarmed and exasperated white majority may become more acutely conscious of their greater numbers, and may then revert to race-consciousness out of a perceived need to do so. That will not be pretty, but the primary fault for that possible future will lie at the feet of multiculturalists and other progressives.
# 84. grrr
You are right. I am speaking in theory, you are speaking in realistic probabilities. Theories die. Reality just keeps coming back no matter how many times the current brand of magical stake is driven through its heart.
Brock, I have an answer for you. Americans should be in America. Legal Americans.
OT – Pirates ‘have all died,’ Russia says, after decrying ‘imperfections’ in international law.
Prediction: Pirates will avoid Russian tankers/ships if they have to starve.
Russians know how to convince pirates and thieves not to molest their ships.
Good for them.
88. twobyfour: Good for the Russians! I saw a Youtube video of Dutch (!) commandos retaking a hijacked ship. The pirates were all in tshirts and flip-flops. I remember thinking that, had I been in charge, I would have sent helicopters to drop their lifeless bodies on their home ports.
That would be the first lesson. The second lesson would involve ground attack aircraft laying waste to the home port with emphasis on damage to infrastructure and civilian casualities. No reporters allowed.
The British stamped out piracy centuries ago by hunting the pirates down and hanging them. Nothing says more about the fecklessness of the West than that we allow a bunch of morons in speed boats and flip-flops to interfere with lawful sea commerce. A little ruthlessness goes a long way. I’m glad to see the Russkies push back.
It isn’t even necessary to “steal” votes in any commonsense meaning of that word. In my Southern California county, social workers, employees of the Regional Center for the Developmentally Disabled, “help” their clients vote (no doubt under the color of “education” as well as “civil rights.” These clients of theirs are obviously people of little understanding, but they are also people pathetically eager to please any kindly disposed authoritative figure. Thus they are practically helpless when it comes to forming an autonomous opinion, and very sensitive to the subtle moue of disapproval or smile of agreement when asked how they would like their ballots to be marked. So it goes; they have in a sense voted their own choice, but it is a choice which was taken from them before the pen ever hit the paper. I work in a related State agency, in a position to hear people talk about this practice. God forgive me for being in a “helping” profession.
Once cheating starts it tends to escalate. This highlights one of the problems with cheating; it favors the cheater only when the others play by the rules. But it also creates an incentive for others to follow suit. Soon cheating escalates and unless stopped fraud becomes general. And as the counterfeiter benefits only when there is still real money to substitute for, once counterfeit printing becomes widespread it stops being a paying proposition. At the limit cheating stops when the system collapses because there is no point in cheating a system which everyone has stopped trusting.
May I offer that at the point where people stop trusting the validity of the vote; consent of the governed absolutely ceases to exist. When the cheating is openly committed by a governnment who has a marked aversion to the concept of the rule of law; there is no advantage in any opposition remaining within the law.
Some time before the inauguration of ‘Teh Won’, I had a custom bumper sticker made up for my car. [It is something I do every so often, since I found a place where I can get them done for about $5 apiece which matches well with buying a stock one.] It says:
The first prerequisite of a Loyal Opposition under the Constitution, is a government that follows the Constitution.
Once the already evident fact that neither the law nor the Constitution has any effect on the actions of the government becomes commonly accepted by a significant portion of the population; then any means to oppose an illegitimate government will be similarly commonly accepted. In a country founded on armed resistance to illegitimate authority, such acceptance may be …. exciting.
I note that our electoral system has been of dubious honesty and under blatant attack by the Democrats for over a decade using deliberately false ballots under the protection of Democrats in office.
In 1996 Congressman Robert “B-1 Bob” Dornan represented Orange County, California. Orange County is definitely the most conservative area of California, and arguably in in the Western United States. He lost the 1996 election by about 900 votes, after winning handily for years. In the post-election investigation it was found that ten thousand+ absentee ballots were voted by illegal aliens from Mexico registered using the addresses of Democrat Party officials. One of them, on paper, had 1300 illegal aliens living with him in his one bedroom apartment.
Miribile Dictu, the Democrat California Secretary of State called for a canvas of all voter registrations in the county to confirm the legitimacy of the voter rolls. This was squashed by Democrat US Attorney General Janet Reno who said that the Federal government would file suit against the canvas as a violation of the Civil Rights Act; because purging illegal voter registrations in California would “have disparate impact on those with Hispanic surnames”. The press, being only slightly less an arm of the Democrats than they are now, pushed the story of how it would be racist to remove ineligible voters.
To expect, as I have phrased it before, “fair, honest, and open” elections in November when already the number of false registrations is probably larger than the margin of victory in most jurisdictions is Panglossian. The question is, what is the appropriate reaction once the election is blatantly stolen or cancelled?
#17 Whiskey:
Who “should” live in America? Americans. Or more properly, the folks who were here in America in the 1940 Census.
An interesting cut off. My father came to this country, alone, 12 years old, and speaking no English; just in time for the Great Depression. He soon learned English and the restaurant business. He was not an “illegal” immigrant because literally under American law, we were not human beings and were neither legal nor illegal. We just had no rights or status at all, nor any access to the protection of the law. And we were not counted in the census. In 1940, he was one of the supervisors in the food service department of OLD Lowry AFB when it was in the Park Hill area of Denver, before moving to the east side of Denver. In 1943 the law changed and he , like all Chinese in this country, became legally people. Despite being almost 30 years old [being a soldier is a young man's game] he immediately enlisted in the Army. He became one of the first non-white squad leaders in the Combat Infantry, and earned his citizenship in Patton’s 3rd Army. His Company literally went the farthest east of any American unit in the ETO, and liberated the last concentration camp in Nazi hands, Gunzkirchen. I got mine the easy way, being born here. But everything I have done and become is because of what he did.
Being and becoming an American if you are born overseas is an act of will. If you will not become an American by law and inside yourself, then you do not deserve to be here. But our genius as a nation was the ability to draw the dregs of every other country here and make them proud Americans.
#19 Lifeofthemind
MaryJ,
That is what puzzles me. I can understand Labour pulling in immigrants from Pakistan and Jamaica to change the demographics and build a compliant electorate but why would they want or the Conservatives object to Eastern Europeans? I would think that a couple of million people with first hand experience with Socialism would be a bracing tonic to the UK. On the other hand I understand that nostalgia for the DDR is on the rise in Germany so this may be a measure of the human capacity to forget.
The opposition to Eastern Europeans in Britain, and indeed in all Western Europe, is literally because they know how bad Socialism is. And they work their butts off once they are in a free country. Being willing to work hard, in countries where the dole is considered a most honorable career and work rules are such as to make getting anything actually done all but impossible, makes the locals consider them to [rightly] be a threat to the livelihoods of those for whom honest labour is something to be avoided. The woman who Brown insulted as a racist was actually a typical [and admitted lifelong] Labour voter who was afraid of the economic competition in jobs by those who worked and competition for government handouts by those who did not.
#67 Armageddon Rex
Agreed except for #5. I don’t like biometric government ID’s. I would go with a simple driver’s license and have states require birth certificates before issuing. Other than that, let’s do it.
Subotai Bahadur
DR/85; you are so right. Affirmative Action is a good example –the KKK was in the same shape as Frankenstein’s monster before Affirmative Action Igor collected the parts and took ‘em to the herr Doktor’s electrifyin’ laboratory.
Re pirates, there may be an insurance scam going on. There was a buried little news item a year or so ago, someone noticed something. Then it disappeared, at least from the news i keep an eye on.
(NOTE: Apologies for the OT post which properly belongs on the last thread, R-Utah. Jobs & life between Sunday & today. I composed the following only to discover that my post was rejected b/c the thread had recently been closed for comments [though no such notice was posted at the bottom of the thread ... not an admin criticism, just an explanation of why I went to the trouble of composing the following]).
Last night was the first night since July that I did not have the Sword of Damocles (aka Job #2, Teacherwork) hanging over my head, and boy, what a great feeling that was. I celebrated by having Hawaiian pizza for dinner & finishing up two movies (“Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Summer Stock”) that I started watching back in March and April, respectively, but had not gotten around to completing.
Anyhoo.
Back to the discussion on the 17th.
I’ve read and re-read everything posted here by the pro-repeal proponents, and for every minute I spent reading I have spent about 10-15 thinking about the pro-repeal arguments.
And I’m still not convinced that repealing the 17th Amendment, in and of itself, will do everything that the posters here have claimed.
With the 17th: $900 billion flows into Washington DC. Members of Congress fight to direct as much as they can to their respective states, so they can brag about this to the voters and get re-elected.
With the 17th repealed: $900 billion flows into Washington DC. Members of Congress fight to direct as much as they can to their respective states, so they can brag about this to their state legislatures and get re-selected.
jack okie writes:
When senators once again represent their state legislatures, expect … Rejection of budgets and taxes that their state legislature does not approve of.
To which I ask, what exactly is the mechanism that kicks in, upon repeal of the 17th, that makes a state legislature disapprove of the federal budget? With the 16th Amendment still in place, that $900 bn is still flowing into D.C. Some of you have said, if the states realize that they can get more of that $900 bn for themselves without the feds taking the lion’s share off the top, there is only one thing they will do: instruct their Senators to de-fund the feds by cutting programs and/or legislating reductions in the federal workforce.
I say: #1: How do you know that is the only thing they will do? Why are you assuming that the best outcome (i.e. the one you want to happen) is the straightforward, guaranteed outcome? How do you know that the feds won’t, for example, use the current dole arrangements to play some states against other states? How do you know that state legislatures will instruct their Senators to vote for elimination of federal programs that will result in heavy job losses within their own states? Because that’s the kind of political will it is going to take, you realize: a willingness to bleed residents of your own state and not just residents of other states. Why would the state legislatures, which you have argued are closer to and thus more responsive to their voters, make this bold and painful and quite possibly riot-provoking choice when they could, instead, just go with the flow of the current system (continue to have their Senators fight for scraps from the federal table) for as long as the $$ keeps getting doled out to the states?
And I say #2: How does the state legislatures’ apportioning themselves, via their Senators, a greater share of that $900bn, result in tax relief for Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer?
***********************
Look, guys, I am not the sharpest knife in the Belmont Club drawer, but I can assure you that I’m a damn ginsu compared to the Average Voter.
And if you guys are not convincing me, you have probably less than a snowball’s chance in hell of convincing John and Jane Citizen.
Why?
Because here’s what the arguments are going to boil down to, as John and Jane Citizen are going to understand the arguments:
Repeal the 17th Amendment = “You’re going to lose your vote for your U.S. Senators.”
In short, repeal of the 17th is going to come across like you are taking something away from John and Jane Citizen. As indeed you will be. Now tell them that it’s for their own good. Now tell them again. Because they won’t be believing you.
Talk about asking someone to swallow cod liver oil!
By comparison, how does a “Repeal the 16th Amendment” come across to that same pair, John and Jane Citizen? It equals “Keep more of your income.”
Okay, class, which repeal argument do *you* think has the potential to get more Americans behind it: “Lose your vote for Senator” or “Keep more of your income”?
……………. (Jeopardy theme)
Now, as I have stated above, at least twice, I’m not against repealing the 17th. I understand the *why* behind it, and whoever said above that the selection of Senators was designed by the Framers to be *different from* the selection of Representatives, has actually made what to me is the clearest, most gettable argument. Namely, the guys who wrote the Constitution designed it that way for a reason; and since the farther government practice strays from original design the more screwed up America becomes, it makes sense to hit the re-set button on this one.
I realize I am the one who kicked off this discussion by asking for explanations, and several of you have obliged by taking the time to indulge me with your careful thought & analysis, all efforts for which I thank you.
But I have to say that I am still not sold on the “Repeal the 17th only … no repeal of the 16th is then necessary” position. Not only am I not sold, but having given it all this thought I am more concerned than ever that pursuing a 17th-only endeavor would be, at best, fruitless for conservatives, and quite possibly worse.
Because not only will your Repeal the 17th appeal be understood by many, perhaps most, as “We’re taking your vote for your Senators away from you, citizen” — it will also be understood as, “We’re taking your vote for your Senators away from you, citizen, AND we’re giving it to the politicians in your state capital.”
For the love of pete, at a time when distrust of government is at perhaps its highest ever, who in their right mind thinks that THAT message is a good one? And don’t tell me, “That’s not what we’re saying.” It’s what the opposition will say you are saying. The opposition, which owns the media, and academia, and the courts, and more politicians than you can shake a stick at. Against which, you will have nothing but your Rube Goldberg of a process to illustrate to ordinary voters (“Fellow Americans! We’re going to slay the Washington beast by repealing the 17th Amendment! Okay, so you’re not going to be able to vote for your Senators anymore yourself. Let me explain how all this works to the detriment of the D.C. monster. First, selection of Senators returns to state legislatures. Yes, we understand that politicians are politicians, and state legislatures are no different, and they are not going to be voting for Senator-Saints out of the goodness of their little state-pol hearts. But by dispersing the selection of the Senate to 50 individual state assemblies blahblahblahblahblah ….”)
Please take a few steps back from your finely worded abstractions and realize that you have a significant marketing problem on your hands.
And while you are doing that, please take time to consider why you ignore at your peril the merits of arguing for repeal of the 16th.
Subotai @ 92:
Sir, my idea to require biometric identification, with verification that it belongs to the citizen carrying it is to ensure the person who shows up at the polling place is actually a citizen, instead of an illegal alien who obtained a fabricated drivers license, possibly with a real citizens name of similar age and ethnicity from one of the dozens of fabrication artists in every major city who can produce a convincing identification in as little as 15 minutes with access to relatively inexpensive equipment.
Thumbprint scanners are now inexpensive, and the technology is now orders of magnitude more reliable than it was just a dozen or so years ago. You need to not only verify the person at the polling place matches the biometric information on their identification, but that the biometric identification data matches the citizen with that name, and that there is indeed a citizen with that name and biometric data.
People who aren’t in the database or whose thumbs don’t scan well could vote using a provisional ballot and their vote would be counted only after verifying their identity through alternative methods. I haven’t thought much about what alternative methods would be acceptable since a thumb scan should work in 99.9% of all cases.
I don’t see another realistic way to prevent non-legal voters with high quality fake identification from voting.
Such use of a biometric identification card would not violate Joe Huffman’s “Jews in the attic” test because if you were trying to hide from an oppressive government, you just wouldn’t show up at the polling place.
http://www.joehuffman.org/Freedom/JewsInTheAttic.htm
If you will not become an American by law and inside yourself, then you do not deserve to be here. But our genius as a nation was the ability to draw the dregs of every other country here and make them proud Americans.
Exactly so. Who is a better American, Marco Rubio (whose ancestors were not here in 1940, or even 1960) or Bill Ayers (whose family was here)? There are people at the Ivies whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower – and they hate and despise America. I grew up knowing people who weren’t here in 1940. They came a few years later, after they had fled Eastern Europe one step ahead of the Red Army. Later on, I met Americans who climbed on rickety boats on the South Vietnamese coast rather than remain put for “reeducation lessons.” The refugees I have met are not welfare cases, but good and productive citizens. They love and know what this country is about on a gut level. And if whiskey thinks America is just a “entho-state” like China or Italy, then they understand it better than he does.
It’s a bit rich, isn’t it, to read “race trumps all” rants on a blog authored by a Filipino with Australian citizenship. In whiskey-world, Fernandez would be sitting in an apartment in Manila and typing in Tagalog.
One of them, on paper, had 1300 illegal aliens living with him in his one bedroom apartment.
You scoff, Subotai, but it has probably happened! /sarc
Subotai @92
“The opposition to Eastern Europeans in Britain, and indeed in all Western Europe, is literally because they know how bad Socialism is.”
Hmm. Maybe. Having grown up in England, I tend to see it more as also part of a long, long, history of British anti-immigrant attitudes. The majority of Conservative, Labour, Lib-Dem, UKIP, and BNP voters in a poll taken at the beginning of May all wanted great reductions in net immigration.
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” Enoch Powell’s speech in the 1960′s was directed specifically against black immigration, but the phrase “Enoch was right” has been a rallying cry in the decades since and even now for general anti-immigrant feeling: the targets just change.
The list of close elections that have gone the Democrats way is astonishingly uniform. My, it’s very much akin to Goldman Sachs’ remarkable string of days of zero losses for the trading desk!
The pattern has become familiar: the vote is close, so we wind up in court as more and more “found” ballot boxes are produced until the Democrat pulls ahead, then the election is called. Quite often we’ll find lawyers on the scene contesting every aspect of military ballots before they’re even opened, and we’ll often find psychologists pouring over mis-marked ballots in order divine the ever-elusive “voter intent.” Al Franken managed to make his way to the Senate, scandalously, by this means the last time. In Virginia the gentlemanly, honest Virgil Goode went down before the same charlatan who’s been since caught on tape saying Congress “will keep robbing you [the taxpayer] blind until you stop us,” and producing a voting record which backs that statement up.
These are just two notable examples from just the last election, but this has been going on increasingly since the infamous election in Washington State. That one, by the way, featured predominantly mail-in ballots, which posters here have correctly identified as abominations that openly invite fraud and manipulation.
Democrats have been getting away with this largely unopposed. Notably, George Allen in Virginia, and the aforementioned Virgil Goode as well, declined to vigorously pursue all their legal options for the sake of the public good and the general faith in elections. This tradition stretches back to most notably Gerald Ford’s decision not to raise hell over massive irregularities in the 1976 presidential election. George Bush, in 2000, most notably bucked this trend and fought back as Democrats and a Kangaroo Florida Supreme Court sought to change the election rules ex post facto. Interestingly, these very rules were ones put in place to prevent this precise thing after a presidential election got stolen there in the 19th Century, ending Reconstruction in the brokerage surronding that crisis.
The lingering bitterness Democrats feel over Bush in 2000 should give no one any pause for one second. Make no mistake the Democrats are masters of skullduggery, and the courts and the mainstream media are their friends. Give them any election that is conceivably close and they’ll take it by hook or crook. Also, as we saw in 2000, having a close majorities in Congress will have them mobilizing for some kind of “power sharing” accomodation or some such boondoggle, which was a favor foolishly granted them at the time, but then withdrawn, by them, once Jeffords went Benedict Arnold.
Time for comity died a long time ago. This is war on our hands these days; it is socio-economic, electoral war. It’s long past time to never give an inch.
99. Cowboy
This tradition stretches back to most notably Gerald Ford’s decision not to raise hell over massive irregularities in the 1976 presidential election.
Actually, the most notable example was the 1960 election. Nixon to his dying day believed that Kennedy stole that election (with crucial help from Mayor Daley and the Chicago mob), but chose not to pursue the matter, for the good of the country.
Strangely, the Democrats seem to equate “good for the country” with “good for the Democrats”.
I agree with you. It is long past time for the Republicans to stop regarding the Democrats as the opposition, and start regarding them as the enemy.
Cowboy/99; Comity? Comity? Remember John Ashcroft? After he generously allowed Jean Carnahan to run against him for the senate as if she was her just-before-election-deceased husband, and then after he generously didn’t dispute the probable theft of the election via some 13,000 bogus ballots, choosing instead to treat the widow Carnahan with utmost gallantry, he was then, later, after appointment as GWB’s AG, thanked by those beneficiaries by being daily, hourly, called the worst names possible, accused in the MSM by Dem pols and celebrities, and BY the MSM in editorials and bogus news slants, of every sort of fascist perversion and hidden jackboot conspiracy imaginable, for his entire term.
***
BW/94; everything you say is true but there’s something else, hard to quantify but a sea-changey sort of thing –the Senate sans the 17th would be a MUCH more serious deliberative body –with no need to botox up and bawl on camera, no need to GET on camera at ALL, forget having to look like a Ken Doll for the unwashed masses back home watching cable, we would soon enough have an entirely different sort of senator-ideal, and the whole game would change with serious men and women making up the body.
Cowboy wrote:
This tradition stretches back to most notably Gerald Ford’s decision not to raise hell over massive irregularities in the 1976 presidential election.
You make good points, but I’d say it goes back further. In 1960, Nixon decided not to raise hell over massive irregularities in both Texas and Chicago, where, as usual, the armies of the dead voted Democratic.
Of course, that decision won Nixon exactly zero credit. You have to wonder, did the complete and unrelenting hostility to Nixon finally lead him to conclude that hell, if he was going to be damned as the devil incarnate no matter what he did, what did a bit of wire-tapping amount to?
A data point today for those who think the Democrats must have some secret plan, for no one could be stupid enough to march into oblivion so resolutely: I give you Gordon Brown, who just marched into oblivion in the UK, thinking that he was going to end up on top right up until the minute he got evicted from #10.
Or take Al Mulhollan, W. Va, who was the first Dem who voted for the health care bill to lost re-election today.
They are all so removed from reality that they simply cannot believe it will really happen to them. They’ve got a lot in common with the Black Knight of Holy Grail fame.
“I’m INVINCIBLE!!!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMkth8FWno
OT W, What time do you normally post, US Pacific time?
Ned
…and bogie, the marketing problem you stress, that of persuading Joe and Jane to relinquish their direct vote, is easy enough to finesse, by reminding them that those pricks that keep voting in Senators that you can’t stand, lose THEIR vote too.
Anyhoo, a seriously august body of elders, free of the populist demagoguery urge, to keep a restraint on the executive as well as the house (and equal in gravitas to the SCOTUS, too, BTW) would do wonders for the ship of state.
A data point today for those who think the Democrats must have some secret plan, for no one could be stupid enough to march into oblivion so resolutely
Excellent point, wws. Yes, maybe I’ve being naive, but I think Pelosi’s optimism is not due to a vast left-wing conspiracy, but rather total cluelessness as to the depths of the anger felt by millions of average Americans.
How can they know? Pelosi’s own district, a motley crew of SF Marxists, is hardly representative of Americans as a whole. And she, and other Dems, are surrounded by bootlickers and yes-men in DC. They get their news from CNN and the WaPo.
I lived in DC for 13 years and I know that that “inside the Beltway mentality” is real, because I had it too. Even though I became a conservative while living there and was not a government worker (although everyone in the Beltway makes their living directly or indirectly from the government), it wasn’t until after I had moved away from the area that I became aware how much just living in DC colors your perspective. Someone in the actual seat of power is just sucked into the vortex that much deeper.
That’s why I admire Paul Ryan’s decision to sleep on a cot in his office from Monday through Thursday and fly home to Wisconsin on the weekends. He isn’t invested in D.C. It doesn’t matter to him, personally, what the real estate market is doing there. (It’s booming now, as it always does during a Dem administration.) If you’re a rep who has a house in DC worth at least a couple of million, well, isn’t it in your best personal interest to keep that market booming?
Donna V #102: I think that the 1960 election marked the last time—-or close to it—- that the Rio Grande Valley did not vote, but was voted.
It had long been conceded in Texas politics that “the valley” while geographically in Texas was culturally in Mexico. It was ass u me’d that it always would be.
Instead, the bosses all went downhill and were not replaced. Our Anglo-Celt culture prevailed and has seemingly made inroads into Northern Mexico as well.
The drug wars are being waged primarily by those who cannot accept the change.
Once again: Situation critical but none too serious.
#95 Armageddon Rex
I understand your, very commendable, motivation for wanting a biometric ID. My problem is not for voting verification, which would be an appropriate use. What I fear is that just as the SSN was not supposed to be a national ID requirement; you cannot do bloody near anything without giving your SSN.
Once a biometric identifier is mandatory for voting, it will shortly become mandatory for anything; from employment, to purchases/rationing [in the Age of Obama at least], to all financial transactions, to the soon to be discovered necessity for it to be an internal passport for any travel. Part of the nature of freedom in this country is the ability to decide to chuck it all and move somewhere else to start over. I have no desire to have to register with the local police if I go to another town for a visit or to move, like they do in Europe.
#98 MaryJ
I don’t deny a racial component in the Brit reaction to immigration. I remember Enoch Powell, and I also remember the betrayal of the Hong Kong Chinese, whose British passports were NOT honored to allow them to move to Britain when the Brits bailed on Hong Kong. Mind you, we benefited from it here in North America, because Vancouver, BC is now a very cosmopolitan city with a strong enough Chinese component to be called “Hongcouver”. On my first visit there, before Hong Kong was retroceded; I was amazed that in the rich part of town [the first ones to leave HK were those who could well afford it] the signage was not in English and French, but rather English and Chinese. BC is far more welcoming to those of us with epicanthic folds, than Britain.
However, what I was keying in on was that Brit woman’s emphasis on Eastern Europeans. One of the strongest memes in the EU/Britain from the admission of the former Warsaw Pact states until the Euro started going Tango Uniform was the infamous “Polish Plumber”. He was the metaphor for hard-working Eastern Europeans who both undercut the union prescribed wage scale [and were willing to work under the table] and who were actually willing to work, far harder than their counterparts in Western Europe. We both may be right to a degree, but I have to wonder how Slavic types are regarded on the “wog” scale in comparison to say “Asians” from the Subcontinent?
#106 Donna V.
The Paul Ryan example actually is an excellent one. It does not take much for a Congress-critter to change from being someone from his home state who works in DC, to someone whose home and heart [and frequently his family] is in DC and he has to go visit those rednecks back in the sticks. I had a Congressman named Scott McInnis who literally slept on his office couch for the first of his 3 terms, and came home on weekends like Ryan. In his second term, he rented a small studio apartment. And after 3 terms he decided that he had done his duty and came home voluntarily. It shows what kind of a person he was. He’s running for governor now, and there are a whole lot of us in Colorado who remember that he did NOT “go Beltway”. Presumably, he would not “go Denver”.
I wish we could forbid Congress-critters from moving their families to DC, on pain of losing legal residency in their home state. No second homes, just allow them to rent apartments. Just so that they don’t forget where they came from. No way, of course, that anything that restricts our Houses of Lords will become fact until and unless we win in the coming unpleasantness.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai: Dean Heller R-Nevada is another who sleeps on a cot in his office.
I think that Congressmen and Senators should reside in
barracks and be confined to post while Congress is in session. Ditto for their staffs.
A lack of perks on the taxpayer’s dime would go a long ways towards eliminating the spoiled brat behavior that is all too common.
sorry o/t –dave, it’s been hard to find any noncontradictory info on what was happening on the drilling rig, but i think it’s coming out now.
Of course this doesn’t answer how in the living hell BP could make such a mistake series –no lock ring on the production casing hangers, well, seen that often, 9999 of 10000 nothing is gonna blow that pipe into the BOP and jam the rams. Skipping even a leak off test on the cement job before displacing the mud wt, now that’s getting into high worminess. in fact it’s crazy, but i can see it happening –the rig was full of brass and everybody was puckered.
So, it was probably, knowing the Gulf, 17 to 18 lb mud or thereabouts, and as the column displaced with seawater and lightened, the cement, down there in the hypercold slow-setting only 20 hours, failed –and let in a little gas, which swabbing uphole in a closed annulus effervescing and claiming volume quickly, lightening the hydrostatic pressure in the pay zone to effective zero, suddenly –all in the production string annulus until near surface –unloaded the hole, possibly even at the wellhead/BOP seal. If the top joint or two of the string didn’t fail, and if the gas didn’t possibly break out around the BOP as well as up the riser to the rig floor, if it hadn’t caught fire, then because the drillstring was still no doubt circulating ‘bottoms up’, a quick and easy kill was righjt there, no need to bullhead back in, just open the valve and start that heavy drilling fluid back down.
Anyhoo, those upper joints of the production string, in tension with a bad cement job then in sudden compression, could’ve easily broken seals and come up thru the wellhead and if a joint got into the shear rams they would not have closed, and quickly enough then the fire would’ve destroyed the manual control panel links even IF there’d been somebody left on the floor to toggle ‘em.
i suspect the whole disaster –already waiting in the mind of any supervisor with a slipshod glitch in his git along, was set in motion by that BP brass coming out to the rig –a rarest of events –and the hurry-up on to displace and come out of the hole (and get that “Done!” photo? so the seven BP execs could get back on the bank and keep a flight schedule?).
So anyhoo, mechanical/chemical fails aside, the killer leadership fails seem to’ve been 1) the BP company man (with a schedule and visions of a desk job with the brass coming out?), and 2) the Transocean toolpusher who should have taken a private meet with that BP co man and if he had to, have made an incident over the cement job test procedure skip thru, and 3) the Halliburton crew chief who should’ve taken a private meet with both fellers before they started displacing and just raised holy goshdamn hell.
Anyway, it’s here, comment #2 by Michael Williams.
No sweat Buddy. I am off for some sack time soon as I finish this.
Suffice it to say that whenever there is a catastrophic failure it is almost never the result of a single incident/human action. Rather a whole bunch of people
either fail to run their check list and/or stick their noses in where they don’t belong and do so at just the wrong moment.
The other thing is: the last hired and first fired will always be the guy who knows how to head trouble off
right before the defecation encounters the oscillation. When things are going well he doesn’t have a lot to do, so the brass consider him an unecessary payroll expense. I’ve been that guy a few times although not on anything as expensive as a deepwater rig. I ain’t whining about being the victim cuz I seen it happen to others as well.
As the Old Man noted: “Never underestimate the power of human stupidity”.
BTW: Be sure to check out the latest Fehrenbach column at mysa.com. Why Western Civilization always pulls through while others stagnate. Love the quote: “the shortest distance between two points is a bullet”.
Be sure to read all the comments too. Especially the first one. Saves me the trouble of having to repeat myself.
And with that: ZZZZZZZZZZ time.
BW/94; everything you say is true but there’s something else, hard to quantify but a sea-changey sort of thing –the Senate sans the 17th would be a MUCH more serious deliberative body –with no need to botox up and bawl on camera, no need to GET on camera at ALL, forget having to look like a Ken Doll for the unwashed masses back home watching cable, we would soon enough have an entirely different sort of senator-ideal, and the whole game would change with serious men and women making up the body.
buddy – The elimination of campaigning for an entire state of voters, and thus the elimination of all the money that requires & all the corrupting influences of the money donors, is a substantial recommending factor, and one which I do take into account.
BUT. No one has convinced me that these politicians will change their behavior merely because the mechanism of their selection has changed. Look at the cities and counties where the political structure is that the mayor or county commissioner is selected by council rather than elected directly by the populace. No campaigning there, either. And we’re talking as local as local gets. Has that produced the “sea change” of “serious men and women” filling these offices? No. Politicians doing the selecting still produces the same breed of politicians, not a different breed.
Why is this supposed to be suddenly different when it’s the state legislature choosing a U.S. Senator?
The only thing that changes politicians’ behavior is pressure from outside their system. The only thing that stops these people from spending, taxing and borrowing is when they are legally restrained from doing so (and sometimes not even that, alas). Money, OUR money, and debt being piled up with our names on the IOUs, is what is funding the runaway growth of government. It is the root of the problem. We have a mechanism to take an axe to that root. It’s called repealing the 16th Amendment. Will it solve the borrowing & printing (inflationary) habits of the feds? No. But it will begin to choke them on tax revenue, and that’s a good and direct start.
Unless the money flow into Washington is reduced, by outside forces, the politicians in Washington are still going to spend their time divvying up the booty, not de-funding and eliminating the federal apparatus. Until there is no more money, they do not get the message. Even then, sometimes they STILL don’t. But the money has to run out before you even start to get that sea change you talked about.
They are addicted. Not repealing the 16th is enabling them.
Repealing the 17th is fine, esp. as a restoration of the founders’ original vision, but IMO it is ineffective as a mechanism to produce the change people are hoping for if everything else goes untouched.
…and bogie, the marketing problem you stress, that of persuading Joe and Jane to relinquish their direct vote, is easy enough to finesse, by reminding them that those pricks that keep voting in Senators that you can’t stand, lose THEIR vote too.
And how much time have we spent on BC decrying the politics of envy?
*shakes head*
Anyhoo, a seriously august body of elders, free of the populist demagoguery urge, to keep a restraint on the executive as well as the house (and equal in gravitas to the SCOTUS, too, BTW) would do wonders for the ship of state.
I’m still waiting for the claims that repealing the 17th will make mountains of cole slaw, cure baldness, and make Ben Affleck a Best Actor contender.
Seriously, peeps, the “it will produce WONDERFUL politicians!” argument does not jibe with anything we have ever seen in history or human nature, does it? Restraining politicians’ power to do evil (or to f*ck things up unwittingly) is about as “wonderful” as we are going to get out of any of them.
Limited government. Operating on a small, finite budget.
We restrain them by (1) checks and balances, dispersion of powers, and (2) giving them only the barest moneys necessary to do the basic necessary functions of government at their level.
Repealing the 17th addresses #1. Repealing the 16th addresses #2.
Arguing that repealing the 17th will automatically lead to #2 is foolish, IMO. Arguing that it will eventually lead to #2, after eons of “levering” and “sea changery” is, also IMO, putting too much hope in an uninterrupted domino effect happening … a weirdly placed hope, insofar as a direct path to #2 is available via repeal of the 16th.
We have a mechanism to defund the insane levels of malice that are being practiced at our expense and to our detriment. Refusal to use that mechanism … refusal to even discuss using it (and only ONE of the pro-repeal-17th people has even breathed a word about the 16th) … leaves me scratching my head.
It’s like you guys are standing in front of the big red box that says, “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.” And you are calmly & artfully discussing whether the properties of diamond or metal are superior for glass-cutting, and from what vendors a metal or diamond tool might be purchased, and who has the Crackberry to look up said vendors in the Yellow Pages, and whether said vendors work off-hours, etc. etc.
For the love of pete. You have the tool already. It’s called your elbow.
Break.The.Damn.Glass.Already.
Thanks, folks. I’m done arguing this.
Nations, like chemical systems, have equilibrium points. Many factors can shift the equilibrium point, either in a favorable or unfavorable direction.
Having would-be Americans make formal application, wait some reasonable time, then pass a test of civics and history to become citizens, acts as a filter that only highly-motivated people make it past. This results in high-quality, highly motivated citizens–and shifts the equilibrium point in a favorable way.
By contrast, when corrupt Democrat officials allow vote fraud–and any investigation is quashed by sympathetic Democrat officials at the federal level–people learn that the law is meaningless because it can be violated with impunity. This understandably shifts the eq in an unfavorable way.
Similarly, when the federal govt not only refuses to control the nation’s borders, but threatens states that attempt to do that, masses of people enter illegally, with no desire to become citizens or to assimilate. And the eq shifts unfavorably.
Similarly, all policies that encourage single mothers to have more kids shift the eq unfavorably. Do that for long enough and the percentage of thugs and muggers goes up quite a bit. We see the results daily.
The federal govt–the president, congress and bureaucracies–routinely establishes rules and policies that shift the eq unfavorably. They do this seemingly deliberately. Thus one can make the case that the federal govt is no longer “our” government.
That is all.
D/111; hey thanks for that pointer –one of prof Fehrenbach’s nifty scherzos –and you’re right, the two taxonomies are dead-perfect overlays.
BW/112; but…but…but…
(every heard the term ‘hardheaded’?)
SF/113; not only do i have the feeling it ain’t ‘our’ government, i’m not even certain, when i see the insiders on the tv set struggling to appear as normal human beings, that these critters aren’t from some place other than the planet Earth.
On the topic of “Eastern Europeans”. I have learned the need to speak in euphemism, often found in semi-socialist countries. In addition to the very real work ethic Subotai mentions, there are other things. Gypsies may not be that large a factor in Britain yet, but the British must be aware of them as a serious nuisance factor in other parts of Western Europe. Then there is the negative publicity of the Russian Mafiya. And of a number of negative incidents recently involving the FSB/KGB, such as “polonium tea”. Then there is the effect of a large influx of foreigners with strange ways from anywhere. One or two Slavs are cute with their exotic ways; if they’re political refugees they are also admirable. They generally try to conform to the local custom. But now a they are not so cuddly because they have not come seeking freedon but to make a better living, often by gaming the system and ignoring rules. Worse, they do not assimilate, but clan together, maintaining their old ways. And the foreign language excludes the natives. In America, I have found a real difference between the old Soviet-era refugees and those who emigrated in the early 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, and the new crop of immigrants from the post Soviet world.
Buddy, I think you have hit the nail on the head. You’re the first one I’ve seen who’s put the whole picture together, and yep, I remember that the dog and pony show for the brass *always* screwed something up.
116/wws; yep, i can see it all, seven of those guys, all over the rig, distracting. I mean, the driller would have seen pump pressure fall off as soon as the intrusion started up the annulus (‘behind the drill pipe’ as the jargon puts it) –*if* he had been looking at the giant pressure gauge right there by the brake handle.
They had cemented the shoe 20 hours before, and at that depth wireline logging the cement job would for sure cost a day or two, but, my lord, the risk –surely they had run a leak-off test –wish i knew the mud weight and how far up they had displaced the seawater.
be something wouldn’t it, if it turned out to’ve been some halliburton f/u back at the blending plant –a few pounds of polymer extreme-conditions buffer left out and they could have ‘woc’ (as the old ‘waiting on cement’ shorthand put it) forever and not got a shoe job that would let a fluid wt decrease by half (seawater for 18 lb mud). Such things happen by accident or even April 20 EarthDay sabotage –you can’t be sure of any material, ever –which is why you test and test and test before you take down the weight of the fluid column that you know exceeds pore pressure.
there just seems to be such a huge outbreak of unbelievable dumbass, everywhere ya look these days. re a bleed-off test, the whole damn world seems to be bleeding off the pressure of being competent at the vital junctions. it’s as if there was something in the air or water –as if say all the Manhattan Project scientists had woken up one morning and forgotten how to do arithmetic. wish i knew wtf was going on. is it the Cheerios?
Re: biometric id
It’s worthless when there are sanctuary cities giving anybody who asks a driver’s license, no questions asked.
Bob:
What cities? Where? The last time I checked, the only city issuing drivers lisences was Washington D.C. In every other U.S. location, driving privillages are controlled by the state government.