(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.)

I never thought I’d be writing Penthouse, but I had an experience that I’d like to share with your readers. I was walking by a “sit in” on the Stanford campus during the summer of love when I noticed a skinny blonde “hippie chick” protesting the war. She was gorgeous and I could [...]]]>

Issue of Penthouse in which this letter appeared. Hippie Chick on the Cover of Penthouse

Dear Penthouse.

I never thought I’d be writing Penthouse, but I had an experience that I’d like to share with your readers. I was walking by a “sit in” on the Stanford campus during the summer of love when I noticed a skinny blonde “hippie chick” protesting the war. She was gorgeous and I could see her erect nipples peeking though her fringed leather vest. I could tell she was easy because she wasn’t wearing a bra. I thought it was time for me to get some of that “free love” everyone was talking about. (Not that I ever had to paid for it in my life!)

I wasn’t against the war, I wasn’t for it either, as long as other people were doing the fighting it wasn’t really any of my business.  But I do know one thing, blonde hippie chicks are HOT!  I was about to grab a sign against the war when I saw a hot conservative chick on a bike protesting AGAINST the hippie chick. Well, since I had short hair, was wearing a blazer and khakis (to hide my 14 inch cock) I figured I had a better shot at the blonde preppy chick in the skirt. Her firm perky breasts strained against her white cotton blouse as her crisp white skirt stretched against her thighs parted by the hard black leather bike seat. I was already fantasizing about her bike seat.

There was a reason that she was surrounded by men, and it wasn’t because they were against the anti-war protesters. Like me, they wanted to get laid and were willing to do or say anything to get it.

I picked up a sign saying, “Speak Out! Don’t sit in!” and smiled at the girl.  She smiled back and I said, “Hey, what are you doing after the protest?” She responded with a shy giggle and said, “My sorority sisters are going out for tea, so the house will be empty. I’ll probably just listen to some records and study economics.”  My ears perked up, “Economics? Have you read Ayn Rand’s The Fountain Head?”

Well I guess I said the magic word because her eyes lit up. “You know who John Galt is?” she said.
“Know him? I AM him!”

To make a long story short we ended up balling in her room for hours. Conservative chicks are WILD in bed!  And I didn’t have to stop bathing and grow my hair to get into their gates of heaven.  Conservative chicks have a repressed sexuality that makes them want to stuff big dirty things (like my 16 inch cock!) in all the holes of their body. And I do mean ALL the holes.

I never saw her again, but I’ll never forget that special day. Thank god she wasn’t like some of the other girls I balled, it turns out I’m amazingly fertile, but that’s another story for another day.

Mitt Romney at pro-draft demonstration at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in May 1966. Note the 10 men surrounding one woman.

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.)

Not anymore. [...]]]> Welcome to the United States of Scam-erica. Or Griftopia, as Matt Taibbi calls it in his book on the Wall Street meltdown. “There are really two Americas,” Taibbi writes. For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making  money,” while “in everybody-else land, the government is something to be avoided.”

Not anymore. Here is the lesson Americans gleaned from the financial meltdown on and bailout of Wall Street: If the feds won’t prosecute ‘em, join ‘em. Corruption has trickled down.

Now the government haters have their hands out, too. One Georgia Christian school, for example, instructs parents in how to use a state scholarship program to launder their taxable income and turn it into tax-free tuition money. Georgia’s private school scholarship program launched in 2010 diverts about $50 million a year from state school budgets by giving “dollar-for-dollar tax credits” of up to $2,500 a couple for donations to nonprofit scholarship organizations that help needy students access private schools. As the New York Times reports:

That was the idea, at least. But parents meeting at Gwinnett Christian Academy got a completely different story last year … A handout circulated at the meeting instructed families to donate, qualify for a tax credit and then apply for a scholarship for their own children, many of whom were already attending the school.

Once the scholarship bill passed, the Times continues, “parents of children in private schools began flooding public school offices to officially ‘enroll’ their children.” To enroll, but not to attend. Rep. David Casas, one of the bill’s sponsors, explained why in a YouTube video (the video has been taken down; transcript by the Southern Education Foundation):

“Some people felt a little bit weird about that; felt it was a little dishonest that they would take their child, enroll them in a public school and not have them actually attend, but all of a sudden they actually qualify for a scholarship. I’m telling you, we deliberately put the wording in there for that.”

Georgia House Bill 325 is a reverse Robin Hood, a legal document worthy of the pay-day loan industry. Even Casas’ audience for the video worried that his scheme was a scam, but the Georgia Department of Education accepts his interpretation. Nevertheless, Johnathan Arnold, headmaster of Covenant Christian Academy in Cumming, Ga. views using the program to discount tuition for existing private school students “unethical.”

Similar back door voucher programs like Georgia’s are already in place in eight states, and recently approved in Virginia. Of course, these bills owe their parentage to the American Legislative Council (ALEC), and draw heavily on its model bill, The Family Education Tax Credit Program Act. Most of the private schools are religious, according to the Times, receiving what public school officials consider “poorly disguised state subsidies.” Because Georgia’s student scholarship organizations (SSOs) have been slow to award scholarships, money has piled up to be rolled over to future years. The Southern Educational Foundation found that instead of saving the state money in the short term, “the state government incurred an additional cost of $7,510 in financing a partial scholarship in a private school above and beyond what it would have paid in 2009 for the education of the same student in a public school.” That is, assuming all students who receive SSO scholarships had actually moved from struggling public schools to private ones (presumably better, but often not).

The Southern Education Foundation found that the low-income students are not the ones being helped by Georgia’s SSO scholarships. The highest growth in Georgia’s private school enrollment is in the 1/3 of schools located in rural areas. SEF concludes that “most of the private schools currently working with SSOs to receive tax funds to finance student scholarships are in the five counties that also have Georgia’s higher performing public high schools.” The report further suggests that most of the students receiving scholarship money to attend private schools had followed Casas’ strategy and had not actually transferred from public schools. Between 2007, the year before enactment, to 2009, the first full year of implementation, “private school enrollment increased only by about 1/3 of one percent in the Georgia metro counties where more than two out of every three private schools affiliated with an SSO are located.” And because they were already in private schools, these students are costing the state money it was not spending on them before.

North Carolina is preparing to join Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Rhode Island. The Asheville Citizen-Times reports this week that North Carolina House Majority Leader Paul Stam, R-Wake introduced a bill that would give state corporations a tax credit worth up to “their entire yearly state tax debt” in exchange for contributions to funds run by nonprofit scholarship-funding organizations. Scholarships of up to $4,000 per year are allowed for pupils attending private schools. If passed, the law would allow the tax credit to be spread out over five years. Up to $40 million in credits are allowed starting in 2013, potentially increasing by 35 percent following each year in which donors claim 90 percent of the previous year’s credits. If successful, the program in theory could expand by 35 percent per year until consuming North Carolina’s entire state revenue stream for funding K-12 education. That makes State Board of Education Chairman Bill Harrison’s description of the bill as “the latest effort to dismantle public education” a modest understatement.

WRAL Raleigh observed that the U.S. Supreme Court “validated that middle-man approach” to funding vouchers in a ruling last year “against an Arizona lawsuit claiming violation of constitutional church-state separation requirements.” Scholarship funds avoid church-state separation issues by having donations collected and disbursed by the nonprofit groups. The money never passes through state hands.

At a rally organized to support the bill, Stam told several hundred people, “It is a beginning and it will be funded by corporations that believe in educational access for everyone.”

There’s the money quote. If you believe corporations contribute because they believe in “educational access,” watch how many turn up as investors in for-profit private schools, charters and virtual schools — partaking of both the middle-man profits and the corporate tax breaks. Now that’s the kind of government reform conservatives can get behind.

In confirmation, the Times recounts how over the past three years, working through the Bridge Educational Foundation, XTO Energy donated $650,000 in Pennsylvania — “as much as 90 percent” underwritten by taxpayers — to ingratiate itself with Pennsylvanians concerned about its hydraulic fracking operations and with politicians that regulate them. In Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, it is industry lobbyists, politicians and staffers, not educators, running the largest scholarship funds. Because it is not about education reform, it is about the money.

Reagan taught that government is the problem. In post-financial meltdown America and in the absence of Wall Street prosecutions, with presidential candidates and major corporations hiding profits offshore to avoid taxes, with tech billionaires renouncing their U.S. citizenship rather than pay theirs (and being hailed as heroes in the financial press for doing it), scamming the taxpayers to subsidize your child’s private education seems like pretty acceptable behavior, even for churches. But it is not arising from dogmatic anti-governmentism. Small-time players have simply discovered what the big-time grifters already knew — that government is the enemy only so long as public tax dollars are going into someone else’s pockets. Thus, conservatives, fundamentalists and others have gotten behind the movement to “reform” public education by diverting public tax dollars into their own pockets in the name of providing more choices for the underprivileged.

Rep. Paul Stam, too, is selling his proposal as a way to help children from low-income families. Yet, one of his supporters at the rally, Michael Pratt, principal of Victory Christian Center School in Charlotte reports that his operation is suffering from low income of its own. The vaunted free market? Not so forgiving. Enrollment is off by 17 percent and contributions towards tuition are down in this recession. So as in other states with similar scholarship programs, North Carolina private schools with and without affiliated churches are looking to dip Scotch-taped fingers into the public collection plate, fishing for tens and twenties.

(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.)

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) [...]]]> So much misdirected anger.

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) revisited. It is the Lee Atwater/Roger Ailes revolving door, “Willie Horton” campaign ads from 1988. It is the right blaming hurricane victims in New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 for not leaving town in their SUVs and checking into Shreveport or Dallas hotels until Hurricane Katrina blew herself out. It is conservatives blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The government, you see, forced private mortgage lenders and Wall Street to fatten themselves on CDOs built from the “liar loans” they invented and sold to shiftless poor people. In the United Kingdom, it is BBC’s 2010 “The Scheme,” a series critics described as “poverty porn,” depicting welfare recipients that London’s tabloid Daily Mail calls “welfare junkies” (Well, what do you know?) and “foul-mouthed, lazy scroungers, cheats, layabouts, drunks, drug addicts” leeching off “the goodwill of taxpayers.”

In 2012, it is Newt Gingrich again calling President Obama “the best food stamp president in American history” at appearances last week in New Hampshire:

“And so I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps,” Gingrich said earlier today in Plymouth, N.H.

Echoing Lee Atwater, Gingrich again denied any tinge of racism in his phrasing. “This is not an attack … It’s not negative, it’s a fact.” But Newt knows his Republican base grinds its teeth to nubs over the thought that a lesser someone, somewhere is getting something for nothing from programs that government thugs force god-fearing conservatives to pay for with money they earned with no help from anyone anywhere since being born in little log cabins that they built themselves.

Which brings us to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program. Food stamps. In 2009, the New York Times reported, “Even in Peoria, Ill. — Everytown, U.S.A. — nearly 40 percent of children receive aid.” In 2009, 94 percent of the program’s budget was spent on benefits. Thirty-two percent of recipients were white, 22 percent were African American, 16 percent Hispanic. Forty-seven percent of recipients were children. Another forty-four percent were nonelderly, working-age adults (ages 18 to 59), and nearly two-thirds of those were women. The rest were 60 years-old or older. SNAP provided food assistance to about 40 million Americans at a cost of $53.6 billion, 1.7 percent of $3.1 trillion in federal expenditures. (FY 2009 budget figures used for consistency among available data sets.)

Just for comparison, the Pentagon had a “base” budget of $515 billion in 2009 to staff and maintain 545,000 facilities at 5,300 sites both in the United States and around the globe (not including tens of billions in GWOT supplementals and other off-budget and “black” budget costs). Thus, it is not easy to determine how much all U.S. security agencies spend on defense annually, nor to separate out how much the Pentagon alone spends just to maintain the offshore portion of our global empire. But drawing on various sources, assumptions, and the fact that one-quarter of U.S. troops are stationed abroad, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated the 2009 costs of our overseas operations (wars included) at $250 billion annually “to maintain troops, equipment, fleets, and bases overseas.”

So, the Pentagon spent almost half of its “base” budget, or (at least) 8 percent of the FY 2009 federal budget to maintain 865 or more military bases scattered among the world’s nearly 200 countries outside the United States. And many of those outposts are in countries most Americans cannot even name or find on a map. Strategic planner Thomas P.M. Barnett (“The Pentagon’s New Map“) calls security America’s greatest export commodity.

Now, if there is something else besides personal weakness conservatives cannot abide, it is deadbeats. So one wonders why they focus so much of their ire on the moral hazard of providing food assistance to American compatriots (mostly children) when they spend five times as much on a wide, multicultural world that sleeps under the very blanket of security they provide, and for which the rest of the world pays nothing.