(Raleigh, NC)—MAR 20, 2013—The NC State Board of Elections has confirmed their intent to prosecute five people on suspicion that they voted in both Florida and NC during the November 2012 election, according VIP-NC Finds Dual Voters in FL & NC, according to the North Carolina chapter of the Voter Integrity Project.

(Raleigh, NC)—MAR 20, 2013—The NC State Board of Elections has confirmed their intent to prosecute five people on suspicion that they voted in both Florida and NC during the November 2012 election, according to email records provided by the Voter Integrity Project of NC, the group that investigated and identified the voters to both states’ election offices earlier last month.

The group initially identified what it thought were 33 potential instances of double voting. Of these, they classified “19 as ‘highly likely,’ six as ‘probable’ and eight as ‘possible’ vote fraud candidates.” The NC Board of Elections, however, determined that several apparent instances of double voting were clerical errors. After a VIP-NC search consuming who knows how many man-hours, the NCBOE confirmed 5 for possible prosecution by matching signatures on voter rolls in NC and FL.

If successfully prosecuted, double voting is punishable as a felony. And it should be.

VIP-NC is frustrated that the state BOE cannot prosecute the five remaining cases itself. That is the purview of local District Attorneys. So VIP-NC is asking the legislature to expand the BOE’s jurisdiction. They don’t want local prosecutors determining whether or not to prosecute alleged voter impersonation fraud — which these five cases are not. The voters who allegedly cast ballots in two states (which is still illegal) did so in their own names. And while alive, too.

The Voter Integrity Project believes these five cases are “only the tip of the iceberg,” says Executive Director, Jay DeLancy.

You remember Jay DeLancy. He’s the amateur sleuth who challenged 550 voters’ registrations in Wake County last year. The Wake County BOE found only 18 that merited further investigation. After the board threw out those remaining 18, DeLancy “snatched his microphone off the board’s table mid-meeting, kicking glass doors open in front of him as he stormed out of the meeting room,” WRAL reported.

On the VIP-NC site, DeLancy dismisses those who insist that voter ID is a solution in search of a problem, saying, “Vote fraud deniers make nice poetry and they give good sound bites, but the idea is as absurd as claiming that no speeding happens on I-40 unless the Highway Patrol writes tickets.”

Except the Highway Patrol is not expected to prevent all speeding. The force is sized and budgeted as a deterrent, to minimize speeding and to prosecute it when they find it. If, for example, the Voter Integrity Project really expected the Patrol to prevent all speeding violations, they had better hand their wallets to the tax man. They would end up creating a lot of those government jobs that government never creates and find themselves living in the police state that tea party members fear.

If on the other hand, DeLancy wants increased enforcement of existing voting laws to eliminate the potential of, say, five double-voters found only after an exhaustive search, fine. Perhaps they’ll also find that funding that enhanced enforcement is cheaper than inconveniencing millions of legitimate North Carolina voters with a Voter ID law instead.

And how many of DeLancy’s five suspects already had photo IDs that played no part in preventing double voting? If the suspects can flit back and forth between their NC and FL addresses by car, the odds are all of them. This will not likely dissuade Republican legislators in Raleigh from passing a Voter ID law in the current session. Their leadership recently abandoned voter fraud as the primary rationale for passing it anyway, which means that for all the pious hand wringing about protecting the integrity of the election process, they never took their own warnings seriously.

If instead of a preventing someone from casting an illegal vote at a polling place, the discussion was about preventing someone from buying a firearm at a gun show illegally, supporters of North Carolina’s Voter Integrity Project might make a very different argument. To wit, they might claim that no amount of legislation would prevent a determined criminal from getting his hands on a gun. Instead, laws passed to stop him will simply interfere with law-abiding Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms.

Just don’t expect them to believe that a Voter ID law will interfere with law-abiding Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Oh wait, that’s not the debate and Candy Crowley is [...]]]> Last night’s townhall style debate featured two candidates on fire and determined to win four years in the White House. Mitt Romney blasted Barack Obama for not doing enough while the President dished Romney’s multiple positions on issues right back at him. It was epic!

Oh wait, that’s not the debate and Candy Crowley is no Abraham Lincoln. The debate last night ran over time as Crowley allowed the two men to speak well past their time limits and jump over each other. Instead we have moments like this.

Crowley’s shining moment came when she blunted Romney’s remarks with the facts. A fact-checking in real time at a debate… quite the concept. Romney stumbled in other places as well, especially when he made the remark of having binders full of women when he was considering who to hire for his cabinet positions as Governor of Massachusetts. His terrible comment came during his answer on pay equity. An advisor has said Romney would have vetoed the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Emily’s List and others have already pounced on it by creating another meme surrounding Romney’s problems with women.

Unlike two weeks ago the President actually looked engaged and ready to argue. He came off as passionate and poised to defend his record. The performance came at a pivotal point for the President with just three weeks remaining in the election. Romney has gained in the polls since the first debate pushing the election into a real horserace. Obama managed to close the debate on a solid note (again unlike the first debate).

Obama’s closing sold a somewhat progressive vision for his second term by using Romney’s 47 percent comments in a way that most progressive envision the role of government. One that tries to level the playing field for all citizens, rewards hard work, allows people to climb the socio-economic ladder, provides a social safety net for everyone, and helps veterans after their service.

This is not rocket science. As I wrote earlier today:

This election is too damn important to rely upon one-liners or thoughts that Romney’s monetary success qualifies him to lead a nation of more than 300 million people… not counting the corporations, of course.

The civil rights of my LGBTQ friends are on the line. The ability for my peers and younger family members to go to college depends upon it. Care of veterans and bringing troops back from Afghanistan and hopefully avoiding a war with Iran. Just keeping social security and medicare in decent shape matters because Obama would not privatize them. Promoting a society that helps each other matters greatly.

Barack Obama is not the perfect candidate. He wasn’t in 2008 either. But his desire to see a country that works for 100 percent of the people is miles ahead of a party and a candidate that believes 47 percent of the population is simply too damn lazy to do well.

We can be a better nation. I believe four more years of Barack Obama’s leadership can do that. I also believe that we will all have to push our Congressional leaders and Obama himself to advance the goals mentioned above. It will take a continued movement to make the United States a better country. One that says yes to marriage equality. One that truly honors the service of a veteran. One that pushes diplomacy and peace before war. One that practices what it preaches in the words of the Declaration of Independence – “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

The Nation reports from Michigan:
“Some 1,500 people voted under dead people’s and prisoners’ names from 2008-11, according to Michigan’s auditor general. Many might be clerical errors, but this [...]]]> The zombies are back. It seems like only yesterday (okay, it was January) they were walking the sand hills of South Carolina.

The Nation reports from Michigan:

“Some 1,500 people voted under dead people’s and prisoners’ names from 2008-11, according to Michigan’s auditor general. Many might be clerical errors, but this illustrates the need to ensure accurate voter rolls.”

Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson wrote this in a July 2 Times-Herald column, and she lied.

Brentin Mock continues:

While it’s true that the auditor general initially found close to 1,500 cases in which a dead or imprisoned person appeared to vote, the Department of State’s Bureau of Elections (BOE) said the auditor general was mistaken on all 1,500 counts (pdf; page 17). The auditor general reports that BOE informed investigators “that in every instance where it appears a deceased person or incarcerated person voted and local records were available, a clerical error was established as the reason for the situation. In addition, the Department [BOE] informed [the auditor general] that in some cases, voters submitted absent voter ballots shortly before they died. The Department informed us that the examples provided did not result in a single verified case that an ineligible person voted.” (My emphasis.)

Like model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the groundless allegations from Michigan are almost a carbon copy of the January episode in which South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson (R) made similar claims:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Attorney General asked SLED to investigate potential voter fraud in the state after evidence that more than 900 dead people appear to have “voted” in recent elections. The evidence was uncovered by Kevin Shwedo, the director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, during an extensive review of data related to the state’s new voter ID law, officials said.

Let’s recap what the investigation by the South Carolina State Election Commission revealed after a wasting staff time and taxpayer money on this earlier snipe hunt:

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

Of course, proof isn’t the point of these stunts. Advancing the “voter fraud” narrative is, and these allegations accomplish just what they are intended to. They get front-page headlines and prominent news-at-six coverage with an eye-popping crawler at the bottom of viewers’ TV screens: Dead People Vote! Investigations that reveal the allegations to be bovine excrement end up on page A6. There are no crawlers condemning the state attorney general or secretary of state for running a con on the public. Republican operatives toss these “voter fraud” smoke bombs into newsrooms every few months to keep fresh anecdotes of voter fraud in circulation and, over time, to convince people that it is widespread, that where there’s smoke, there must be a fire … somewhere, one that can only be put out by passing Voter ID laws not designed to prevent it.

Urban legends of the dead voting are targeted not so much at the general public, but at the same conservatives who lapped up Bush administration lies about Iraqi WMDs like milk from a saucer. The GOP knows its base well. Tell supporters credulous enough to fall for the WMD lie that the dead are voting en masse, and the marks will fall for that, too. Wrap it in a flag and they’ll believe anything.

A pattern of fraud? You damn betcha!

Courtesy of the Brennan Center (2007):

Exaggerated or unfounded allegations of fraud by dead voters include the following:

• In Georgia in 2000, 5,412 votes were alleged to have been cast by deceased voters over the past 20 years. The allegations were premised on a flawed match of voter rolls to death lists. A follow-up report clarified that only one instance had been substantiated, and this single instance was later found to have been an error: the example above, in which Alan J. Mandel was confused with Alan J. Mandell. No other evidence of fraudulent votes was reported.

• In Michigan in 2005, 132 votes were alleged to have been cast by deceased voters. The allegations were premised on a flawed match of voter rolls to death lists. A follow-up investigation by the Secretary of State revealed that these alleged dead voters were actually absentee ballots mailed to voters who died before Election Day; 97 of these ballots were never voted, and 2715 were voted before the voter passed away. Even if the remaining eight cases all revealed substantiated fraud, that would amount to a rate of at most 0.0027%.

• In New Jersey in 2004, 4,755 deceased voters were alleged to have cast a ballot. The allegations were premised on a flawed match of voter rolls to death lists. No follow-up investigation publicly documented any substantiated cases of fraud of which we are aware, and there were no reports that any of these allegedly deceased voters voted in 2005.

• In New York in 2002 and 2004, 2,600 deceased voters were alleged to have cast a ballot, again based on a match of voter rolls to death lists. Journalists following up on seven cases found clerical errors and mistakes but no fraud, and no other evidence of fraud was reported.

Michigan’s Secretary of State and South Carolina’s Attorney General were undoubtedly unaware of these facts, or or else didn’t think they mattered. Republicans have been crying voter fraud since the 1980s, at least. What is different now is they have more channels for promoting the lie.

Examining the effects of recently passed Voter ID bills, the Washington Post  reports that the “numbers suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent.”

In trying to promote Voter ID passage, the Republican National Lawyers Association published a report last year citing some “400 election fraud prosecutions” in the entire country in the last decade. The Post  observes, “That’s not even one per state per year.” Among the dead links the association provides to substantiate its claims, only six cases are listed as voter impersonation fraud — the kind Voter ID laws are supposedly designed to stop — and none of those indicate votes actually being cast by anyone passing themselves off as someone else, dead or alive. Most involve vote buying or falsified registrations.

Meantime, the Christian Science Monitor  reports that Georgia rejected 873 provisional ballots in 2008 due to ID requirements, and 64 more in this year’s presidential primary. Indiana tossed hundreds of provisional ballots in 2008, plus a hundred more in this year’s primary. In its 2012 primary, Tennessee blocked 154. That’s 1200 votes rejected in Georgia and Indiana alone according to an Associated Press investigation.

The party that believes government doesn’t work has found a concrete way to prove it. Too cowardly to face the voters in a fair election? It’s nothing a dose of vote suppression Viagra won’t help. And Voter ID is only one of the tools in play. Common Cause just released an updated summary of additional Deceptive Election Practices and Voter Intimidation to watch out for this fall.

In an unguarded moment just weeks ago, Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny) revealed the real agenda behind passing Voter ID:

“We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we’ve talked about for years,” said Turzai in a speech to committee members Saturday. He mentioned the law among a laundry list of accomplishments made by the GOP-run legislature.

“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.” [Emphasis mine]

Regarding Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, Digby writes:

If there is nothing else that can convince thinking people that the Republicans are a malevolent, anti-democratic Party, this should. There is no evidence, none, that there is any, election voter fraud, much less a systemic enough problem to turn elections, but there is ample evidence that if you make people go through ridiculous hoops to vote, a lot of them will give up. That’s the point, that’s what they’re trying to do, everyone knows it.

It’s pathetic to watch Republican spokesmen pretend otherwise. As Wally once said to The Beaver, everybody’s wise to Eddie except Eddie. Then again, fooling the rest of us is not the point, is it? Many of the lies are directed at and spread by their own base. Between the lies they tell the rest of us and the lies they tell each other, daily, on Fox News, on talk radio, and in chain e-mail propaganda shared far and wide across the Internet, it is hard to know how many know the difference between truth and lies any more. Much less care.

Years ago, I read a report about a school bus service operator in North Carolina who bought a half dozen new buses, only to have multiple problems with them. Fresh from the factory, several would not pass inspection. Clutches kept burning out. He complained to the manufacturer and got nowhere. He called other owners and documented that they were having similar issues. Yet the manufacturer insisted there was no problem with the product. It must be his drivers.

Finally, the owner met with a regional manager who told him the same thing to his face. This was his reaction:

He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he was lying anyway, not because he had anything to gain from his lies, but because it was company policy.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

The Sun  urged caution in adopting measures aimed at stopping “the phantom menace of voter fraud” when they threaten to disenfranchise “tens of thousands of legitimate Maryland [...]]]> Dueling editorials in the February 24th edition of the Baltimore Sun  revisit the ongoing arguments over the new voter ID laws popping up around the country.

The Sun  urged caution in adopting measures aimed at stopping “the phantom menace of voter fraud” when they threaten to disenfranchise “tens of thousands of legitimate Maryland voters as the cost for uncovering a minuscule number of fraudulent ballots.”

In his op-ed, former Maryland Governor and U.S. Congressman Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr. cited a recent Pew Center on the States report that found “24 million invalid voter registrations and nearly 2 million dead people still on U.S. voter rolls.” That, and the fact that he must produce an ID to get his Claritin D prescription filled, led Ehrlich to wonder why there is not more focus “on fixes to broken election systems around the country.”

Ehrlich joins the ranks of the voter fraud Frighteners (Republicans, typically) convinced that dead voters on inaccurate registration databases and vivid anecdotes of the dead voting are a clear and present — hypothetical — danger to election integrity. Like other Frighteners, Ehrlich of course argues for photo ID laws, while not explaining how voters having their pictures made wipes the dead from state databases, nor why digital signature matching (used to verify absentee ballots) is insufficient for voters who appear at the polls in person.

In a critical response to the Sun ’s editorial board, a letter writer asked why our society treats the “most sacred” of our freedoms “with such little concern.”

Indeed. The Pew study cited by Ehrlich also found that 51 million U.S. citizens – nearly 1 in 4 of the eligible population – are unregistered. Evidently, there is little legislative appetite for helping 1 in 4 Americans to exercise their most sacred of freedoms. Moreover, Pew found that (emphasis mine):

In the 2008 general election, 2.2 million votes were lost because of registration problems, according to a survey by researchers at the California Institute of Technology/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Voting Technology Project. Additionally, 5.7 million people faced a registration related problem that needed to be resolved before voting, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

Evidently, there is little legislative concern for protecting registered voters’ sacred freedoms, either – only for pursuing the phantom menace of voter fraud. As the Sun  observed,

… the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, conducted a massive investigation between 2002 and 2006. Only 120 people were charged and 86 convicted during a period when nearly 200 million votes were cast in federal elections. According to a New York Times  review of the Justice Department’s efforts, just 26 of those cases involved voting by people who were ineligible, multiple voting or registration fraud — the kinds of offenses that an ID law might catch.

A 2005 report by the Brennan Center found the most common causes of voting irregularities were not people impersonating others at the polls but clerical mistakes, computer errors and instances where two people with the same or similar names were flagged as the same person voting twice. The Brennan study warned that voter ID laws are far more likely to prevent legitimate voters from casting ballots than to prevent fraud.

Where is the Frighteners’ concern that their “remedy” might actually interfere more with the sacred freedoms of legitimate voters than it catches actual fraud?

The Brennan finding is consistent with the recent investigation by South Carolina’s State Election Commission into allegations that 900 dead people had voted in the 2010 general election. (Citing manpower costs, the Commission pulled the plug after reviewing 207 of the contested votes.) The Commission found that 95 percent were either alive and eligible or did not actually vote. There was insufficient data to say on the remaining 5 percent, but no evidence of voter fraud:

Of its review of the 207 contested votes cast in 2010, the commission found:

• 106 votes were clerical errors by poll workers – mistakes like marking John Doe Sr. instead of John Doe Jr.

• 56 votes were “bad data matching” – meaning the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which raised concerns about zombie voters, was wrong in assuming the voters were dead.

• 32 votes were “voter participation errors,” meaning someone was credited as voting in an election when they did not, most likely because of a stray mark on the voter rolls that was electronically scanned to record a voter’s participation.

• Three ballots were cast absentee by voters who died before Election Day.

Ehrlich suggested that there needs to be more focus on our broken elections systems, and that is in fact the subject of the Pew report he cited. Pew’s study, titled “Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient,” like its 2010 study, “Upgrading Democracy,” focuses on upgrades to a voter registration system with paper-based, 19th-century origins that “has not kept pace with advancing technology and a mobile society.” Canada, for example, spends 12 times less than the U.S. in maintaining a nationalized database: less than 35 cents per voter, and 93 percent of its eligible population is registered. Along with guarding against registration fraud and inaccuracies, technological upgrades would benefit candidates and campaigns, Pew argues, the kind of thing one would think politicians and parties would welcome:

Accurate lists also will allow political campaigns and nonpartisan efforts to avoid wasting time and money reaching out to registrants who have moved, died, are ineligible, or otherwise are no longer voting in a jurisdiction.

Voter lists are inaccurate because of bad data entry, because people register at their new addresses and don’t de-register at their old ones. Neither do relatives typically take death certificates down to the Board of Elections to have their deceased family members removed. Massive home foreclosures in recent years have made matters worse. The flood of election year paper voter registrations delivered by independent groups is a logistical headache. In fact, dead people remain on the voter rolls because states must comply with federal and state law in purging inactive voters from their lists. In North Carolina (where I live) the general guidelines are explained here. Unless the dead person requests to be removed (unlikely), he or she will remain on the list for eight years (four federal election cycles) before being purged. And voter ID laws fix that how?

Keeping a database up to date costs money and manhours. Yet how many Frighteners are so concerned about the dead voting that they are prepared to pay more in taxes – to pay whatever it takes – to keep their sacred registration lists pristine?

I didn’t think so.

Fortunately, Pew’s working group of over three dozen experts from over 20 states believes that a modern registration system could keep lists more accurate and lower costs by pursuing technology upgrades in three areas:

1. Comparing registration lists with other data sources to broaden the base of information used to update and verify voter rolls.

2. Using proven data-matching techniques and security protocols to ensure accuracy and security.

3. Establishing new ways voters can submit information online and minimize manual data entry, resulting in lower costs and fewer errors.

So, did that Pew report recommend photo ID as a plausible fix for the dead voter problem? Uh, no.

Reports of their voting have been greatly exaggerated. A lot of places. Particularly in South Carolina, where Republicans insist zombies have photo IDs to vote — the kind any respectable Undead can obtain where they get their driver’s licenses, at the DMV (Dead Men Voting) office.

The Institute for Southern Studies reports [...]]]> Zombies.

Reports of their voting have been greatly exaggerated. A lot of places. Particularly in South Carolina, where Republicans insist zombies have photo IDs to vote — the kind any respectable Undead can obtain where they get their driver’s licenses, at the DMV (Dead Men Voting) office.

The Institute for Southern Studies reports on efforts that would — in a sane world — put down the dead men voting zombie lie for good.

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

After claims that hundreds of the walking dead had voted in the Republican primary, the Attorney General released the names of only six to the State Election Commission for review.

By early February, the election officials were able to confirm all of the voters were legitimate: five were very much alive, and one had voted before dying. Clerical errors were blamed.

Even as Fox News pressed ahead with its zombie voter headlines, the State Election Commission pressed ahead with its investigation, reporting its findings this week:

In 197 of [the 207 cases examined], the records show no indication of votes being cast fraudulently in the name of deceased voters. Research found each of these cases to be the result of clerical errors, bad data matching, errors in assigning voter participation, or voters dying after being issued an absentee ballot. In 10 cases, the records were insufficient to make a determination.

Alas, this is not a sane world, and the report was no bullet through the brain for these zombies. The South Carolina Republican Party is — unsurprisingly — undeterred, NPR reports:

The state attorney general’s office in South Carolina said in a statement Thursday afternoon that the question of “dead” voters is still being investigated by the State Law Enforcement Division and that no “final answer to this problem” can be determined until that investigation is concluded.

“To give this state’s election process the clean bill of health we would like, we can’t simply rely on the review of some 200 of 950 records … that is unsatisfactory,” the statement said.

That’s why the GOP insists we need Zombie ID. Because we must be absolutely certain. Because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence where the Voting Dead are concerned. The minority-looking people in line in front of you, all around you at the polls — What’s that BEHIND YOU!  — may seem  normal, but what if they’re not? They might be zombies. If we never looked at things and thought of what might be, why we’d all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

More there than [...]]]> Primary voters just gave former Speaker Newt Gingrich the win in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, “America’s most conservative state.” Reddest of the red. Buckle of the Bible Belt. CNN welcomed viewers to the Charleston debate this week with “Welcome to the South,” a place “where values matter.”

More there than anywhere else? What values mattered most to South Carolinians who gave Gingrich his win?

Not trust. Why should they trust Newt Gingrich? His three wives can’t.

Not “family values.” Gingrich is on his third marriage and committed adultery with his last two wives. In the soft-focused 1950s of conservative nostalgia, South Carolina Republicans would have dismissed Gingrich as a serial philanderer, and his third wife as a loose woman running for First Homewrecker. But not today. For the modern conservative, values compress to suit the flawed candidate most likely to win (with apologies to Cyril Northcote Parkinson).

Not humility. Mr. “Stand aside everyone! ‘I think grandiose thoughts.’” has compared himself to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Charles de Gaulle, the Wright Brothers, the Duke of Wellington, Robert the Bruce, Pericles and Moses. Why shouldn’t Newt want to share that greatness with as many women as want him? As he once said of himself, “I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.”

Fox and Friends  and conservative talk radio would spend weeks flaying any Democratic candidate who said that as a self-centered elitist. Mitt Romney’s not wearing a flag pin in Charleston failed to elicit the patented conservative hissy fit about a lack of patriotism. So what values do matter to South Carolina Republicans?

“[W]e need someone who’s mean,” said Harold Wade from a Charleston suburb. The Washington Post  quotes Debbie Peterson of Piedmont: “I have a little bit of a problem with the divorces, but I need somebody to beat Obama. I like Romney, he is decent and moral, but I just don’t see him beating Obama.”

Maybe what CNN really meant was that the South is the place where values matter … far less than the self-righteousness suggests. As with Gingrich, don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do. For all the bluster, conservative voters value winners more than virtues, and prefer someone they think will stick it to their ideological foes to someone who is all Bible and no bite.

Presumptive Democratic candidate, President Barack Obama, has high likeability numbers, isn’t known as a philanderer, has one wife, two beautiful children, and one stable family life. Yet if Newt Gingrich wins his party’s nomination, self-described values voters nonetheless will support him this fall, treat Obama as the antichrist, and tie themselves in knots rationalizing why it is consonant with their values to support a man whose baggage has baggage.

Just in time, this case in point, “Newt Gingrich’s three marriages mean he might make a strong president — really,” written by Fox News contributor and Glenn Beck collaborator, psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

“It’s not that I’m a good debater,” Gingrich said in his victory speech on Saturday, “it’s that I articulate the deepest felt values of the American people.” He just doesn’t see any need to live them. In September 2010, ex wife No. 2 (Marianne) told John Richardson of Esquire  that Gingrich told her, “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.” Richardson this week added a postscript to the Marianne Gingrich interview, insisting that the focus on Gingrich’s infidelity misses the real problem: “the ferocious and manic drive that … collapsed in a breakdown so severe his own Republican peers had to force him out of power.” That, and her conclusion about his financial ethics and heavy lobbying since leaving Congress — that he chose corruption.

In the end, none of that mattered in the place where “values matter.” In a state where 65 percent of Republican primary voters self-identify as evangelicals or born-again Christians, voters abandoned their standard bearer, Rick Santorum, and overwhelmingly chose to dance with the devil who speaks in dulcet tones — because he looks more like a winner.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare…

And today, over at the Great Orange [...]]]> Yesterday, on Facebook, one of my friends posted a graphic of the president and this recent quote, which is making the rounds:

I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare…

And today, over at the Great Orange Satan, msblucow has an interesting poll up aimed at gauging how likely voters are to support Obama’s reelection bid in 2012. More to the point, why they are likely to vote for him (or not)? If you click through to the poll, there’s a series of questions that asks if the president’s actions on a series of issues make you more likely to vote for him, less likely, undecided, or do his actions and policies have no effect.

For instance:

• President Obama’s recent push for job creation makes me more/less likely to vote/volunteer/donate in 2012
• President Obama’s proposal to make millionaires pay more taxes makes me more/less likely to vote/volunteer/donate in 2012
• President Obama’s handling of the mortgage crisis makes me more/less likely to vote/volunteer/donate in 2012

On most of these questions I put “no effect.” That may seem odd, given how important I feel some of these issues are. At the bottom, in the comments field, I explained why.

I said that Obama’s pronouncements on things like jobs and taxation don’t make me more likely to vote for him not because I don’t agree with those policies. I do – wholeheartedly. But I simply don’t believe he means it and I expect these proposals to come to nothing. I don’t see these as actual moves by a president, I see them as campaign messaging, and I think we learned last time that he’s great at promising and horrible at delivering. If he actually delivers progressive results by the election, I might reconsider. Otherwise I’m voting Green.

Which is sort of like the comment I left on my friend’s FB entry:

I wish I shared your enthusiasm. This isn’t Obama being president, it’s Obama campaigning for a second term. Campaigning always brings out the pretty words in him.

So yeah, I’m skeptical. Over the past four or five years Mr. Obama has proven a few things fairly conclusively:

• When campaigning, he talks a compelling progressive game.
• Once elected, he reverts to right/centrist corporatism and makes sure he doesn’t upset rich white people.
• His fetishization of bipartisanship is nearly pathological, revealing a deep-seated need not only to be loved by everyone, but specifically to be loved by those who hate him the worst, even if it means alienating those who actually support him.
• He has bargaining skills the world hasn’t seen since the last time Mr. Haney went nose-to-nose with Lisa Douglas.

Which adds up to a very simple proposition: Mr. Obama has demonstrated that the words he says mean absolutely nothing. Whether he believes them or not, we cannot count on them generating results. As such, only a rube would pay any attention to anything the man says between now and Election Day.

I always try to teach my students that, in writing, it’s important to illustrate and evidence instead of simply asserting things. My advice to them is the same as I have now for Candidate Obama: show, don’t tell.

– Mike Lofgren, former GOP Congressional [...]]]>

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document.

– Mike Lofgren, former GOP Congressional staffer

After two and a quarter centuries of progress which saw expansion of the franchise from land-owning white men to blacks, women and eighteen year-olds, many conservatives have decided they have had quite enough “more perfect union,” thank you, and have accelerated their efforts to shrink participation in democratic elections.

In recent days, American Thinker  posted “Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American,” by Matthew Vadum, reflecting conservative concerns about too many of “those people” participating in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. But American Thinker‘s title says it all:

Registering [the poor] to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

[...]

Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor. It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money. It’s about raw so-called social justice. It’s about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.

The comments section is a trove of anti-democratic sentiment: “I believe that the vote should be limited to people that own property or a business”; “One person one vote is a recipe for political suicide and the Communist’s dream”; “Unless you pay taxes, you should not be permitted to vote”; “We should not only purge welfare slackers and other un-Americans from the voter rolls — including anyone who is unemployed and therefore not a producer, but voting should be proportional depending on net worth or taxes paid”; etc. Such patriots think their views echo the beliefs of the founders. But then, so does owning other human beings.

Thus, efforts by liberal groups and Democrats to make voting easier are met by the right with legislative hurdles that make it harder to participate. Ari Berman’s Rolling Stone  piece, The GOP War on Voting, elaborates on GOP vote suppression efforts:

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots … In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

In a lengthy Truthout  commentary, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” longtime congressional staffer, Mike Lofgren, provides insider background on the vote suppression effort and details his reasons for leaving his staff job. There is rottenness in both parties, he explains, and Democrats seeking “centrism” may have brought working people NAFTA, the World Trade Organization and permanent most-favored-nation status for China that helped erode the middle class. “But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way,” writes Lofgren. “The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy,” on the Republican side, something Beltway pundits are slow to recognize and/or too cowed to say publicly.

“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.”

Oft-repeated sentiments from prominent Republicans (and their media mouthpieces) about who are and who are not “real Americans” underpin the effort to keep their fellow Americans from voting. Republicans have spent 30 years demonizing their neighbors: from Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, to Muslims and gays, immigrants and intellectuals, to people living in what Americans once proudly considered the cultural melting pots of its largest cities. To anyone, writes Lofgren, “who doesn’t look, think, or talk like the GOP base.” More recently, the enemies list has expanded to include school teachers, public employees, and the nearly half of Americans who — according to carefully parsed propaganda — pay “no taxes.”

Most of the GOP elite probably do not believe all the “paranoid claptrap,” says Lofgren, but that doesn’t keep them from feeding “the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.” Even as the economy shrinks, the conservative message machine has so assiduously widened its citizenship exclusion zone that paranoid patriots may soon find themselves cut off and surrounded in what the founders’ War Department dubbed “Indian country.”

Lofgren, who spent most of that same 30 years working for the GOP on Capitol Hill, now finds himself exiled among the lessers. He concludes:

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don’t want those people  voting.

You can probably guess who those people  are.

As for Lofgren, he retired out of concern for the direction his party is taking America, as well as out of contempt for the “feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats” without the spine to stop them. But retiring, he admits, was also “an act of rational self-interest.” It was fine working on the payroll of an apocalyptic cult so long as its targets were union members and the private sector pensions and health benefits of those people . But once the GOP turned its “decades-long campaign of scorn” against government workers like Lofgren, it was time for him to cash out. “First they came for the communists,” as it were.

The Lofgrens of the Republican Party might long suppress any latent empathy for the struggles of Americans they were hired to serve, but money? Money they understand.

Mitt Romney has been kicking ass on the campaign fundraising trail, leaving his GOP rivals in the dust raising $15-20 million through June 30, 2011:

“Obviously, Romney has leveraged his standing in the polls to raise early money in the race,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a professor at Boston University’s College of Communication.