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| 7/15 |
| 2008/10/10-15 [Politics/Domestic/California, Politics/Domestic/Election] UID:51466 Activity:nil |
10/9 The gist of the ACORN story
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/223436.php
\_ Do you think the Wingers are trying to whip their crowd into
violence?
\_ http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon1009jl.html |
| 7/15 |
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| talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/223436.php Josh Marshall The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste. ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve. I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented. But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate. Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them. Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections. Late Update: McCain's sleaze and disgrace just runs deeper and deeper. McCain's team has been pushing it on reporters today and just put out one of the most obvious web videos yet. I say "obvious" because the implication of the 24/7 Fox coverage is made blatant. It's saying to white voters, "we know you're angry about the economy. This is a 90-second ad aimed at the base who are watching Fox News. But he's setting up a large proportion (maybe the majority) of the GOP base to believe that scary blacks stole the election for Barack Obama. He is scum, and if in 10 years his name isn't synonymous with Lester Maddox and George Wallace than historians won't have done their job. The essence of McCain's campaign now appears to amount to prepping McCain's base to believe they didn't really lose the election. The election was stolen from them by Barack and his army of gangsters and black street hustlers. |
| www.city-journal.org/2008/eon1009jl.html In his report on Sarah Palin's campaign speech in Clearwater, Florida, laced with mocking Palinisms ("darn right," "betcha"), he wrote that "the self-identified pit bull has been unleashed, if not unhinged." The "unhinging," in Milbank's assessment, came when Palin charged that Obama still has some explaining to do about his relationship with 1960s Weatherman bomber William Ayers. Milbank also wrote that Palin blamed Katie Couric for her "less-than-successful" CBS interview. Other newspapers reported a more light-hearted Palin response to the dismal interview. The Tampa Tribune, for example, reported that she said: "I shoulda told them I was just trying to keep Tina Fey in business." But Milbank's report triggered Democratic rage across the Internet with his charge that "Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness." Some in the Clearwater crowd, he wrote, shouted abuse at reporters. Someone yelled "Kill him," apparently a reference to Ayers; and one person shouted an epithet at a network sound man (apparently the N-word, though Milbank didn't say) and told him, "Sit down, boy." Two shouting extremists in a crowd of 4,500 are two too many, of course. The question is whether these outliers offer sufficient evidence for a clearly hostile reporter to demonstrate that Palin's rallies have gotten ugly. Petersburg Times ran a benign story on the Palin speech. William March of the Tampa Tribune told me, "They booed Obama and the press, but that just makes it a normal Republican rally." March admitted that he was standing further from the speaker's stand than national press reporters, and therefore heard less, but he maintains that the rally was no hate-fest. There's no evidence that Palin did anything more than challenge Obama on Ayers. In the short TV clip available at the Huffington Post, the crowd booed in response to Palin's litany of Obama's liberal votes in the Senate. Milbank's lone racist at the rally soon became a group (or a mob) of people shouting racial epithets. A New York Times editorial Tuesday ("The Politics of Attack") misquoted Milbank's Post column, claiming that one person shouted "Kill him" and "others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew." Many blogs followed suit: "Crowd at Palin Rally Hurled Racial Epithets at African American on News Crew," read the headline at Pensito Review. This was too much for Bob Somerby, the left-leaning blogger at the Daily Howler. One example becomes much more powerful when we stick an s' on the end. At the Huffington Post, the "Kill him" shout directed at Ayers was interpreted as an assassination threat against Obama. Another Huffington piece asked, "Is Palin Trying to Incite Violence Against Obama?" As the misreporting gathered steam on the Internet, writers became ever angrier. "The event sounds like the precursor to a lynching," wrote a Daily Kos blogger. Another opined: "There is a time to start feeling fear." Former New York Times reporter Adam Clymer compared Palin events with George Wallace speeches, though he gracefully conceded that "lots of journalists have worked in situations more menacing than covering Sarah Palin." This was a disastrous outing for the Post, the Times, and bloggers determined to view Palin appearances as brownshirt rallies. If the atmosphere is so hate-filled and racist at these events, why does the evidence come down to one shouter at one rally? |