Saturday, January 12

Singin' with the DC Supemes: GOP Electoral G- and Blind Spots

According to the Bush-Cheney position on presidential elections, only voters--never law-breaking politicos themselves--are guilty of corrupting the U.S. voting process. Others, however, view the issue as dual fronts of Amerika's officially-waged covert class and race wars.

On Wednesday (9 January), Slate featured an cynically erudite piece on the U.S. Supreme Court's current review of Indiana's 2005 voter-ID law.

Titled "Grandma Got Carded," Dahlia Lithwick's essay brings into question the level of judicial objectivity to be anticipated by the Justices in this review through aptly raising the specter of the high court's December 2000 "partisan constitutional atrocity" called "Bush v. Gore."

Translation: Expect Chief Justice John Roberts' court to pull another partisan legal plum from their collective black-robed asses to hand over to the Bush-Cheney U.S. Democrat voter impairment fund for 2008.

From Slate:
Grandma Got Carded

The Supreme Court looks closely at Indiana's voter-ID law.

By Dahlia Lithwick

It's rare that the life of the law dovetails with the life of the nation, although today the Supreme Court looks at a vitally important voting-rights case just as we're all obsessing over the presidential primaries. But this is not the Rehnquist Court, my friends, so the first order of business today is for the justices to distance themselves from the partisan constitutional atrocity that was Bush v. Gore—without, however, expanding voting rights in any way. Thus the Roberts Court sticks to doing what it does best: figuring out subtle ways to close the courthouse doors while appearing to be merely sweeping a little doctrinal dust from the court's front steps.

The real problem with Crawford v. Marion County Election Board is that the whole case is a dance of the seven veils. By which I mean that voter-identification laws are phony ways to solve pretend problems, while today's challenge to those laws is thin on evidence of real voters who've suffered real harms. A chimera doing battle with a fantasy. Oh, goody.

When Indiana adopted its voter-ID law in 2005—requiring voters to present a government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot—the state purported to be beating back the malodorous tide of vote fraud that was ostensibly sweeping the nation. But as professor Richard Hasen has ably demonstrated here in Slate, this vote-fraud epidemic is largely fictional. The major bipartisan draft fraud report (PDF) on the subject concluded there's very little polling-place fraud in America. So, increasingly, the effort to stop fictional vote fraud looks like a partisan effort to suppress votes that tend to go to Democrats—and somehow, it's always indigent, elderly, and minority voters who are disproportionately affected. A Republican-controlled legislature passed Indiana's law on a party-line vote, and then a Republican governor signed it, and every judge to cast eyes upon it thereafter seemed to be for or against it based on his or her own political affiliation.... Read more

The day after Lithwick's article appeared in Slate, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! headlined the story, underscoring the class war theme: "Supreme Court Considers Voter ID Law that Could Disenfranchise Thousands of Poor and Minority Voters."

Moribund Amerikan Electoral Politics

Voters have little reason to expect ballot-protection assistance from a morally bereft Democrat-controlled 110th Congress. After all, Dems welshed on their November 2006 campaign promise to change the GOP course on the Iraq War if voters empowered them to a majority.

Ohio congressman and 2008 Democrat presidential candidate Dennis Kuncinich blew the whistle on his U.S. House party mates, revealing they sold out voters on the war via a classic "bait and switch" a month after the midterm polls closed--a month before Dem leaders gaveled the 110th Congress to order in January 2007.

Since 2000, election fraud journalist par excellence Greg Palast regularly has reminded the literate among us that mainstream news outlets like CBS and the New York Times aren't to be trusted, either.

In addition to his discovery that First Brother Jeb neutralized in 1998-1999 over 90,000 potential Democrat voters by illegally removing them from Florida's voter registry in preparation for an election Brother George won by 537 votes, Greg also obtained incriminating docs confirming the rigged 2004 presidential election, too.

As last spring's Justice Department "Attorneygate" scandal enfolded on the Bush White House's politically deep-sixing eight U.S. Assistant Attorneys for not sufficiently pursuing voters for electoral fraud, Palast revealed he surreptitiously came into possession of confidential emails from Karl Rove via a Republican National Committee server in the basement of a Chattanooga, Tennessee bank.

As Palast told Dollars and Sense magazine in early May (also see here), purging U.S. Assistant Attorneys was at base about more White House-wage class war in the guise of vote tampering:
Dollars and Sense: Bush fired eight prosecutors. You were behind the scenes on that story long before it broke in the US. What are they still withholding from us?

Palast: Look, it’s all about VOTES. You’ll see that the prosecutor that Karl Rove insisted in putting in place is a slithery character named Tim Griffin. He’s the guy I busted as the spider-mind behind the “caging lists” which purged thousands of Black voters. The prosecutors fired, as you’ll see in Armed Madhouse, include those, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, who refused to bring phony cases of fraud against legitimate voters. It’s a matter of economics: the Republican party is systematically knocking out lower-income voters; that makes their purges racially biased — but my data show that’s just the effect of hunting down and attacking the ballot power of working class and poor voters. Disenfranchisement is class war by other means.
Later that same month (30May 2007), Palast reported on London's BBC Newsnight more above Rove's electoral hijinks. After the broadcast, Palast turned over at House Judiciary Chair John Conyer's request hundreds of intercepted pre-2004 presidential election emails from Rove and and Tim Griffin, a "Rove-bot" then serving as the Republican National Committee's campaign Research Director who helped his boss implement the party's nationwide "vote caging" plan to thwart Democrat presidential challenger John Kerry.

By 2006, Griffin's stellar service in neutralizing Democrat voters won him Rove's backing for an interim replacement appointment--without Senate confirmation--as Eastern Arkansas U.S. Assistant Attorney; like the other seven GOP colleagues around the U.S., Griffin's predecessor was fired for insufficient enthusiasm in prosecuting the "fictional voter fraud epidemic" Ms. Lithwick references in her Slate report.

On learning that Conyers had requested the cache of emails Palast cited in his BBC broadcast, Griffin resigned his post in Arkansas.

Writing the next day (1 June 2007) on Griffin and Rove's 2004 "caging lists," Palast reported:
Experts have concluded the caging lists were designed for a mass challenge of voters’ right to cast ballots. The caging lists were heavily weighted with minority voters including homeless individuals, students and soldiers sent overseas [i.e., those likely to vote Democrat].

Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee investigating the firing of US Attorneys, met Thursday evening in New York with Palast. After reviewing key documents, Conyers stated that, despite Griffin’s resignation, “We’re not through with him by any means.”

Conyers indicated to the BBC that he thought it unlikely that Griffin could carry out this massive ‘caging’ operation without the knowledge of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rove.
Ya think?

Ten days before Christmas, Palast updated his ongoing series on GOP election theft when he reported that this time the Washington Post was practicing a shabby notion of investigative journalism by failing to inform readers the real deal behind Karl Rove being charged with contempt of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
If you read US papers, you’d barely note that Karl Rove was just charged with contempt of Congress by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and you sure as hell as wouldn’t know why. The Washington Post mentions that it was Rove’s failure to supply documents to the Committee regarding the firing of US Prosecutors. What you won’t get is what Rove is hiding in those documents.

Well, I’ll tell you. Better yet, I’ll let one of the fired prosecutors tell you. For BBC TV I spoke with David Iglesias, former US Attorney for New Mexico. Iglesias told me that Rove engineered his firing, part of a grand scheme to disenfranchise voters.

The job of the Justice Department is to protect voters. Rove’s scheme was, instead, to harass them - especially those colored brown and blue - i.e. Hispanic Democrats.

Do you think there's any chance John Roberts and the Supremes will consider any Palast's evidence when considering Indiana's voter ID law?

Silly rabbit, elections are for elite thieves. Why not grab a pizza, tune into Fox's new and improved American Idol and let us worry about the big stuff.





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