Officeholders Not Entitled

Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich’s blatant misuse of his office reveals what too many politicians feel after being elected: Entitlement.

Hey pols, you're then to represent the people, not serve your self or your party.

Though Blagojevich’s actions were particularly brazen, we see the same corrupt use of office from our own Attorney General, J.B. Van Hollen, fighting for the Republican Party and trying to make voting like navigating a DMV phone answering tree.

An elected office is not licence to enrich yourself or your political party, it's for the people.

Friedman Rips Apart ACORN Voter Fraud Hoax

Update: See A Dose of Reality on the ACORN Hysteria.

Brad Friedman eviscerates the GOP voter fraud lie aimed at the group ACORN, the Association for Community Organisations for Reform Now.

The crimes of ACORN are as Friedman writes in The Guardian:

... that Acorn managed to register some 1.3 (million) low-income (read: Democratic-leaning) voters over the past two years. The rest is, pretty much, just made up. ... Despite the screaming wall-to-wall coverage of 'Democratic voter fraud in 11 swing states' as seen on Fox News and even the once-respectable CNN, none of it's true

The fact that the GOP is simply engaging in another political lie (that shouted loudly and often enough may get to be heard) is known, but the media feels obligated to repeat GOP propaganda. Writes Friedman:

Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic('fraudulent', 'incomplete', et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming 'Acorn is committing fraud' know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

The GOP has its marching orders and that is to scream fraud. Well, fraud is what we expect from that Muslim-city-slicking-Arab-black man's people.

Concludes Friedman:

And where (the GOP) can, they'll parlay it all into new photo ID restrictions at the polls (knowing full well that some 20 million, largely Democratic-leaning voters don't own the type of ID they'd need to jump over that next Republican hurdle.)

Wisconsin has seen this effort up close and personal.

Fortunately, Republican REAL ID legislative attempts have been knocked down by Gov. Doyle who vetoed REAL ID legislation, J.B. Van Hollen's suppression suit looks doomed, so all the GOP can do now is scream and try to smear Obama as $trillions in Americans' retirement savings go up in smoke.

For a comprehensive knockdowns of the voter fraud lie see the Brennan Center.

Many Were Killed and Risked Lives for Voting Rights

As the GOP and its allies disparage and even ridicule efforts to fight voter disenfranchisement efforts led by our own Attorney General, it's worth honoring those who risked their lives for seeing voting rights won for all Americans.

Below is Madisonian Jim Zwerg, a Freedom Rider in 1961, giving an interview from his hospital bed after he was beaten in a Montgomery, AL bus terminal.

People like rightwing blogger Jim Wigderson (I won't link to the ignoramus) think this sort of civil rights stuff is funny, the fare of those Madison liberals. Many know better.

RF Jr. on Voter Suppression

RFK Jr. is sounding the alarm about GOP dirty tricks, including Van Hollen's perfect match scheme. Though Van Hollen is not the original inventor, he's just an unoriginal tool.

From Air America:

There are about 30 scams the Republicans are deliberately using, particularly in the swing states to get Democratic voters off the rolls. These scams originate in the so-called Help America Vote Act which was passed after the Florida debacle in the year 2000. ... And instead of reforming what happened in Florida it basically institutionalized all the problems that happened in Florida. And institutionalized a series of impediments that make it very difficult for democrats to register, for democrats to vote and then for democrats to have their vote counted.

One of these requirements under HAVA is called 'the perfect match,' and what that does is little known but it is devastating. A quarter of the voters in Colorado have just been removed from the rolls because of this--[and] just this one scam. And what it does is, they use a computer system to compare your registration application to all [your] other government records in the state. So they'll look at your Social Security records, your Motor Vehicle records, and any time you've had any interaction with the government, and if there is any information on your voter registration that is different than the information on another government record that they find, they remove you from the voting rolls.

For example, if I registered as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and yet my motor vehicle license said Robert Frances Kennedy Jr., I'd be removed from the rolls. If your initial is different, if you leave an initial out, if you leave a "Jr." out, if you leave a hyphen out in your name. And what they've done is a study in New York that said 80% of the errors are errors by state clerks taking down this information. And particularly [in] immigrant communities, [where] people tend to vote Democratic, people have names spelled Muhammad with an "o" instead of a "u"