The Tyranny of Oil and how intertwined it is in our gov't

And how have the politics of oil shaped the ’08 election? Oil money still speaks loudly and both candidates have received their fair share of campaign contributions from the powerful lobby. That said, McCain has been the recipient of significantly more oil money and the Republican Party has placed offshore drilling and oil extraction at the center of its platform. “Drill Baby, Drill,” is now part of the political lexicon. Here to unpack the role of the oil industry in American politics and U.S. foreign relations is Antonia Juhasz, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and the author of The Tyranny of Oil.

2007: 75000 registration cards in trash in Atlanta. Not national news. Nonexistent voter fraud?

One of the greatest frauds in voter history

Palm Beach Post, thankfully, bothered to do some actual reporting yesterday, and led with the following good news:

Republican National Committee officials are turning up the heat on a left-leaning organization linked with Sen. Barack Obama that tried to register "Mickey Mouse" to vote this summer, but state officials say accusations of voter fraud in Florida are mostly unfounded.

The story goes on to quote FL Secretary of State Kurt Browning who says: "'we have not seen a persistent problem across the state of Florida' with registration fraud by ACORN or other groups."

And FL's Republican Governor Charlie Crist who says: "There's some who sort of enjoy chaos. That's kind of what's going on more than fraud."

...

It's also no small point that the comments above come from FL's Crist and Browning. Those two have been in the process of purging thousands of legal Florida voters from the rolls based on the flawed "No Match, No Vote" concept which dumps thousands of legal voters from the rolls simply because they do not have a perfect match on their registration forms with either the state's Dept. of Motor Vehicles or the U.S. Social Security databases.
Eg., If I'm registered to vote as "Brad Friedman", but my driver's license says "Bradley Friedman", I can be tossed from the rolls, along with thousands of others, under the sort of strict matching that Crist/Browning are now allowing in their state.
That same sort of "perfect match" test, previously approved by a wholly politicized U.S. DoJ, resulted in the purging of some 26% of new voters in CA in 2006, and 43% purged in Los Angeles County alone, before the policy was trashed in this state.

That's a similar type of database cross-checking that OH Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner is being forced to make following a Republican lawsuit brought against her this week. She's now had to file an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court, to avoid the "chaos" being brought about in Ohio, after the federal appeals court ordered her to change the state's policies by Friday. Republicans had filed suit alleging 200,000 improper voters might have recently signed onto the Buckeye State voting rolls.


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But, as we've pointed out previously, these last minute claims of "ACORN voter fraud!!!" are nothing new. See Lorraine Minnite's must-read "The Politics of Voter Fraud" [PDF], and even the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC)'s own bi-partisan report [PDF] on voter fraud in the U.S. (or lack thereof) before it was re-written by the GOP "voter fraud" scammers who controlled the commission.

Despite all the phony charges and bogus lawsuits against ACORN in 2004 having fully collapsed by the next year, the same nonsense was drudged up again in 2006.

After the Bush Administration had managed to purge a number of their own U.S. Attorneys because they refused to bring phony ACORN "voter fraud" charges during the previous election, their new USA in Missouri was kind enough to bring several indictments just days before an incredibly tight Senate race in the state. We would later learn that bringing such indictments at that time, so close to an election, was in strict violation of the DoJ's written policies.


...

Presuming the GOP's California failures were accidents and not meant to defraud the democratic process, much less create an opportunity for Republican voter fraud (I realize that's a big presumption), that doesn't even begin to explain the purposeful destruction, by outfits paid by the RNC, of Democratic registration forms alleged to have occurred in in Nevada, and elsewhere where Team Bush actually paid millions to such operatives, and then tried to hide that fact from public disclosure.
And what about those 75,000 voter registration application cards discovered "in a construction trash bin at Atlanta Technical College in southwest Atlanta" in 2007? Did John McCain, the GOP, and Fox "News" forget to get exercised about that one for some strange reason?MORE

Dems don't seem to be getting the seriousness of what's going on, if their general lack of response to the sliming of ACORN is to be used as a yardstick for their thoughts. Are they just this dumb?

What she said

Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy's health.

Or, did ANYONE actually pay attention to the POINT/REASON for the mass firings of the mostly Republican or Republican-leaning US Attorneys?

The connection between wrongful voter registration and actual polling-place vote fraud is the stuff of GOP mythology. As Rick Hasen has demonstrated, here at Slate and elsewhere, even if Mr. Mouse is registered to vote, he still needs to show up at his polling place, provide a fake ID, and risk a felony conviction to do so. Large-scale, coordinated vote stealing doesn't happen. The incentives—unlike the incentives for registration fraud—just aren't there.

In an interview this week with Salon, Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College, who has studied vote fraud systematically, noted that "between 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty others were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five were guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters." Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that U.S. attorneys, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired for searching high and low for vote-fraud cases to prosecute and coming up empty. Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that five days before the 2006 election, then-interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman exuberantly (and futilely) indicted four ACORN workers, even when Justice Department policy barred such prosecutions in the days before elections. RNC General Counsel Sean Cairncross has said he is unaware of a single improper vote cast because of bad cards submitted in the course of a voter-registration effort. Republican campaign consultant Royal Masset says, "[I]n-person voter fraud is nonexistent. It doesn't happen, and ... makes no sense because who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?"





In the end, all roads lead back to John Paul Stevens. He wrote the plurality opinion in last term's Crawford v. Marion County, which upheld Indiana's restrictive voter-ID law. Stevens understood that there is no such thing as polling-place vote fraud, conceding that "[t]he record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history." But, continued Stevens, in the manner of someone rationally discussing the likelihood of UFO sightings, "flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this nation's history." Like, um, an 1868 mayoral election in New York City, he notes, and a single 2004 incident from Washington. Stevens was more worried about shaky "voter confidence" in elections than actual voting. The message that went out from on high was clear: undermine voter confidence. Even if it's irrational and hysterical and tinged with the worst kinds of racism, keep telling the voters the system is busted.

Each time they spread the word that Democrats (especially poor and minority Democrats) are poised to steal an election, John McCain and his overheated friends deliberately undermine voter confidence. That is the point. It encourages citizens to accede to ever-harsher voter-verification laws—even if they are not needed. It musters support for voter purges that are increasingly draconian. Insist often enough that the other side is cheating, and you may even encourage partisans to take matters into their own hands, leading to the worst forms of polling-place vigilantism—from a cross burning in Louisiana on the eve of a 2006 mayoral election to the hiring of intimidating partisan "poll watchers" to volunteer at inner-city polling places. When McCain goes after ACORN, he's really just asking you to join him in believing that the system is broken. And if you choose to overheat along with McCain, the Supreme Court promises to sign off on any measure that might calm you down later. John McCain might want to be a little more careful about accusing Obama, ACORN, or anyone else, of "destroying the fabric of democracy." In so doing, he's either deliberately or unconsciously encouraging his own supporters to grab a handful of the stuff and start ripping.

Yo! Lets take this female McCarthy OUT of Congress.

NOW

Also, Palin? FUCK RIGHT OFF. Small town are NOT more American or patriotic than people who live in cities, Washington DC or otherwise. FUCK RIGHT OFF with that rhetoric.

SNOB....

The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin reported earlier on a fundraiser Sarah Palin attended in North Carolina last night. Palin, the item explained, "made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the 'pro-America' areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic."
This, not surprisingly, raised a few eyebrows. Palin thinks some parts of America aren't "pro-America"? The Post report was a paraphrase, though, and folks wanted to get the whole context.

In order to clarify comments GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin made last night at a Greensboro, N.C., fundraiser about it being in a "pro-America" area, the campaign issued a slightly more detailed version of the pool report that came out yesterday.
The upshot? Washington, D.C., is neither "real America" nor "pro-America." Other parts of the nation? It's unclear, but if you live in a small town, you're probably patriotic from Palin's point of view.
"We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe" -- here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers -- "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."
She continued: "This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom."MORE