Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (126427)	3/15/2012 7:40:17 AM
From: TideGlider	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 224755

The Holder Justice Department, voter ID laws, and the liberal mind posted at 12:04 pm on March 14, 2012 by Howard Portnoy Eric Holder—U.S. Attorney General, finagler, and bungler par excellence—needs all the help he can get in his never-ending war on windmills (the kind you tilt at, not the kind that provide wind energy). Liberals in Congress had his back when he stubbornly fought to try 9/11 mastermind Kalid Sheik Muhammad in downtown Manhattan until they got a look at the price tag on security and bolted. They cried foul when their Republican colleagues in the House had the temerity to grill a furiously backpedaling Holder on what he knew about Operation Fast and Furious and when he knew it. Now liberals are again running interference for the AG in his latest campaign, to overturn state laws requiring that voters present photo IDs at the poll. Holder’s current target is the state of Texas, and of the Justice Department’s battle to win “electoral equality” there, one liberal commentator went so far as to offer kudos. That was Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum, who opined earlier in the same column: These kinds of laws are problematic even in the best cases, but Texas being Texas, their law is almost laughably brazen in its intentions. For example, in addition to driver’s licenses, the law specifies that military ID and handgun permits are acceptable forms of identification; specifies that student IDs aren’t acceptable forms of identification; and automatically qualifies elderly voters to cast mail-in ballots, which require no ID. In other words, the law does its best to make voting easy for every possible identifiably Republican-leaning constituency and hard for every possible identifiably Democratic-leaning constituency. Before turning to Drum’s specific arguments against the law, it is worth noting his deliberate avoidance of the 800-pound gorilla in the room. That is the pervasive problem of voter fraud, which is rampant among identifiably Democratic-leaning constituencies throughout the country. The most recent example, the handing out of primary ballots to dead voters, occurred in the state of Vermont (which I guess Kevin Drum would write off as “Vermont being Vermont.”). Breitbart disciple James O’Keefe provides video documentation of this crime in progress. (O’Keefe compiled video evidence of the same shenanigans in neighboring New Hampshire in January.) AG Holder knows a thing or two himself about voter fraud. According to erstwhile J.O.D. attorney turned whistle blower J. Christian Adams, a deputy assistant attorney general in 2010 instructed attorneys not to pursue enforcement of a key part of the federal “Motor Voter” law, telling them: We’re not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it. But let’s go back to Kevin Drum’s proof of Texas’s “laughably brazen intentions.” Examine the three types of acceptable ID he notes—driver’s license, military ID, handgun permit—plus the one that is disallowed: student ID. Let’s play the game “Which one does not belong?” popularized on Sesame Street. Now, class, what is different about student IDs? I’ll give you a hint: A list of U.S. universities compiled by the University of Texas at Austin contains over 2,100 entries. In contrast, there are only 50 states (57 if you’re the president) in which a person can obtain a driver’s license or handgun permit, and military IDs come in only one flavor: federal. So which of the above would be the easiest to phony up? Anyone with a little imagination, access to an ink-jet printer, and a copy shop that provides lamination services can be an instant college graduate. But Drum isn’t finished. Acknowledging that election-identification certificates are available from the state of Texas at no charge (they are obtained via the Department of Public Safety), he notes that getting one is still a “hassle”: First, you need a birth certificate. Middle-class folks might not realize this, but not everyone has a birth certificate handy, and both the hassle factor and the cost of getting one can be real deterrents. Add to that the hassle of getting a ride to a DMV office two counties away during working hours, and voting in the next election suddenly got a whole lot harder for you than it is for your average middle-class white suburbanite. You might even never get around to it. That’s it? The best argument in the liberal quiver is that the state government doesn’t make it easy for residents to beat the system? Also, complaints about government red tape make sense coming from a Martian. But anyone who has spent at least 18 years living in the United States should be accustomed to lines and other vestiges of our vast bureucracy. The simple truth—flaccid counterarguments by Justice and its liberal water carriers aside—is that voter IDs keep elections honest. They are not, moreover, the scourge for minorities that liberals make them out to be. Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation reported in April of 2011 that black voter turnout in Georgia increased more dramatically more dramatically in 2008—the first presidential election held after the state’s photo-ID law went into effect—than it did in states without photo ID. Georgia had a record turnout in 2008, the largest in its history—nearly 4 million voters. Related Articles NM dog becomes registered voter Is Obama courting the ‘dead’ vote? NAACP worker sentenced to prison for voter fraud The truth behind Holder’s push for ‘electoral equality’ Election law: Eric Holder’s cowardice is showing Federal judge: Nonpartisan elections are unfair to minorities CT mayor seeks to extend voting rights to illegal immigrants Will “Fast and Furious” be Eric Holder’s Waterloo? AG Holder, brother ‘weren’t aware’ of taxes owed on family home in Queens Bombshell: Justice Department accused of encouraging voter fraud New documentary alleges voter fraud by Obama campaign in 2008 primaries Trying KSM and his co-conspirators in federal court in New York: At what cost