COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The 51% Solution. Chads May be the Least of Your Problems

It is obvious that your future, your wealth, your rights and your influence are under assault and have been so since the 1960's. The strategy of the Left has been clear, but you have been too polite to mention it or have been otherwise occupied. While GWB, like most good liberals has been calling for planetary freedom, he has done little to ensure that you keep yours. Borders, laws and now your rights as a citizen are going to be assaulted in the final putsch by the progressive leftists. Snared by legalism and political correctness you as a member of the real majority of US citizens are on the verge of losing your once exclusive franchise. You are going to learn the cruelest lesson in democratic history, the lesson of 51 percent.

Supreme Court to Hear Case on Voter ID Law

By DAVID STOUT
Published: September 25, 2007
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — With the 2008 presidential and Congressional elections on the horizon, the Supreme Court agreed today to consider whether voter-identification laws unfairly keep poor people and members of minority groups from going to the polls.

The justices will hear arguments from an Indiana case, in which a federal district judge and a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in January upheld a state law requiring, with certain exceptions, that someone wanting to vote in person in a primary or general election present a government-issued photo identification. Presumably, the court would rule on the case by June.

Before the law was enacted in 2005, an Indiana voter was required only to sign a book at the polling place, where a photocopy of the voter’s signature was kept on file.

Voter-identification requirements have divided Democrats and Republicans, and the courts, for years. In July, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld that state’s identification law. A month earlier, the Georgia high court threw out a challenge to that state’s identification law. But last year, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned a state voter-identification statute. Other states are considering various identification statutes.

Election-law experts had hoped that the United States Supreme Court would take the Indiana case because that state has perhaps the toughest law in the country. “The court better resolve this question before ballots start getting counted next fall,” Pamela Karlan, a Stanford University law professor, told The Associated Press.

In general, Republicans argue that identification laws reduce voter fraud, while Democrats oppose them on grounds that they lower the turnout among people who tend to vote Democratic.

Coincidentally or otherwise, the two Seventh Circuit judges who voted to uphold the Indiana law, Richard A. Posner and Diane S. Sykes, were put on the bench by Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, respectively), while the one dissenting judge, Terence T. Evans, was elevated by President Bill Clinton.

Writing for the majority, Judge Posner acknowledged that the Indiana law favors one party. “No doubt most people who don’t have photo ID are low on the economic ladder and thus, if they do vote, are more likely to vote for Democratic than Republican candidates,” he wrote.

But the purpose of the law is to reduce voting fraud, “and voting fraud impairs the right of legitimate voters to vote by diluting their votes — dilution being recognized to be an impairment of the right to vote,” Judge Posner said. And assertions that many people will be disenfranchised, or that there is no significant voter-fraud problem in Indiana, are based on unreliable data and “may reflect nothing more than the vagaries of journalists’ and other investigators’ choice of scandals to investigate,” the judge held.

In dissent, Judge Evans wrote that the Indiana law imposed an unconstitutional burden on some eligible voters. “Let’s not beat around the bush,” he wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”

Arguments that the law’s purpose is to stamp out voter fraud amount to a mere “fig leaf of respectability,” Judge Evans wrote. Furthermore, he said, the law is too extreme in view of the fact that no one in Indiana has ever been prosecuted for voter fraud. “Is it wise to use a sledgehammer to hit either a real or imaginary fly on a glass coffee table?” he asked rhetorically. “I think not.”


87 comments:

  1. "It is obvious that your future, your wealth, your rights and your influence are under assault and have been so since the 1960's."

    I'm sorry: This all started in the 1960's?

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  2. "Fight, fight, fight, fight."

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  3. My aunt had no photo ID since about 1965, but then she knew the poll workers, as she was one occasionally. She always voted republican.

    In lieu of a driver's license, how about a Mug Shot ?

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  4. It always was a zero-sum game. Baltic and Atlantic Avenue were always as important as Park Place.

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  5. My hunch is the Supreme Court will require something in the way of identification somewhere in the line. If they don't we might as well chuck the system. I might as well start voting in both Idaho and Ohio, and why not Washington State too, it's only a few miles away. And Oregon.

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  6. Perhaps love beads occluded our vision.

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  7. Problem is, dear host, you're a conservative without a definition - and a cause.

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  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  9. The Left has causes. Conservatives just want to be left alone. The Left uses definitions and legalisms because they are the tools of their trade. Conservative lost when they played the game set for them by the Left.

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  10. Keep America safe for Democrats.
    Picture Ideas, not photo ID's.

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  11. A Buick. A Cadillac. A Ford Falcon?

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  12. I think that's a Plymouth, a Cadillac and a Ford Falcon.

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  13. "A Buick. A Cadillac. A Ford Falcon?"
    ---
    You win the Knife-Set, AlBob!
    I think it's inscribed by OJ!

    That was one of the Goofiest Looking Buicks ever made, a 59, I think.

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  14. CNN.com - Cubans try floating vintage car to Florida - Feb. 5, 2004
    - The Miami Herald said the 1959 Buick was nearly halfway to Key West by Tuesday evening.
    Key West is 90 miles from Havana,

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  15. Hewitt interviews John Burns.
    No non-military Westerner knows Iraq Better, nor do such a good job of being fair and even-handed, as close to an objective view as there is.
    Reminded us that Saddam's Iraq was about the most difficult place ever to get Intel, since not only were agents efficiently caught and terminated, but also, if necessary, their families.

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  16. I see Woodrow Wilson and his era as the beginning of the end.

    Federal income tax passed - which began the welfare/warfare state in earnest.

    Messiah-complex, interventionist foreign policy.

    The XVIIth Amendment, stripping state governments of their representatives in the federal system.

    FDR was our fascist strong man. He and his merry band of communists essentially annihilated the concept of individual liberty in this country. The population was infantilized and had to be "taken care of". The US started referring to itself as a "democracy" - formerly a pejorative term.

    There really have been no friends of individual freedom since.

    The 60s were the New Deal on steroids.

    We still have SS. We still have medicaid and medicare. We still have a federal government meddling in the details of our kids educations. We have no financial privacy so that we pay our "fair share" of income tax as defined by closet marxists. The list can go on and on. Free healthcare, SS and medicare/medicaid will break the country. They can only be funded through coercion and tyranny.

    The state we are in comes from 100 years of democrat and republican rule. No party has taken the position to roll back the size of the fedgov - and actually followed through.

    The democrats and republicans show their lock-step bipartisanship when it comes to defending their spoils system against any reformist threat.

    It cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed.

    Time for Atlas to Shrug.

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  17. Conservative, what is there to conserve?

    I do not know anyone that actually remembers "how it was" preFDR or before the Federals gobbled up the power pie.

    The seeds of today's Society sown long before the 1960's. Ike saw it coming, just no one put up billboards warning US of Mcdonald-Douglas & General Dynamics.

    The President did it in a speach.
    Warned a Nation that did not listen.

    A conservative, today, wants to conserve the freedoms and liberties, the down home decency and innocence, of Woodstock.
    As opposed to the violence and exploitation of Altamont?

    Ahh... the sixties....

    Which in my mind is usually confused with the blossuming of the next decade, the 70's.

    Pining for the "before time"
    When life was good, the water pure, the air clean.

    Oh wobegon, where art thou?

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  18. Brother D-Day:

    The population was infantilized and had to be "taken care of".

    The GOP fear machine drums up the threat of terror and promises to keep us all safe, if we just sign away that pesky bill of rights. What happened to the Home of the Brave?

    We still have SS. We still have medicaid and medicare.

    And now, under Bush, we've got this:

    The White House released budget figures yesterday indicating that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost more than $1.2 trillion in the coming decade, a much higher price tag than President Bush suggested when he narrowly won passage of the law in late 2003.

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  19. The Texicans, famous for big promises on other folks's dimes.

    LBJ & GWB, goin' down in history as budget busters, spendin' for guns & promising butter.
    Guns today, butter tomorrow.

    Will the Iraqi Government that matures after their second round of Parlimentary elections, in '09, have been worth US spending ONE TRILLION USD?

    And the sacrificing of 5,000, or so, brave and patriotic young Americans. If Mr Maliki is reelected, as likely as not a scenario, or his replacement is a clone, will we have recieved value for our investment?

    I must say, the Sauds are masters of the game. They learned well from the British, how to manage a commercial empire.
    Set local factions against one another, while managing the political debate, by defining the rules of the debate.
    Spread lucre around as required, enlist the ruling elites in cause, covertly.

    Behind the scenes, or the curtain.

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  20. If you're talking about the expansion of the state, "Ike" was at best an enabler. Wilson was the epitome of a movement that began a few decades earlier.

    "I see Woodrow Wilson and his era as the beginning of the end.

    Federal income tax passed - which began the welfare/warfare state in earnest.

    Messiah-complex, interventionist foreign policy.

    The XVIIth Amendment, stripping state governments of their representatives in the federal system."


    Sounds a lot like, unintentionally or not, Lincoln's program. Crushed federalism in the name of a "Messiah foreign policy" (setting aside semantics of whether or not the Confederacy actually was a foreign country legally, it saw itself as one).

    And some people will take the argument even further and say it all the way back to the abandonment of Articles of Confederation, which strengthened the central government's powers, especially of taxation. And I'm sure there are arguments there.

    Unless you're an anarchist, there's no purity of "cause" that isn't challenged by someone else on a statist level.

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  21. It wasn't until the 1960s, though, I think, that the politicians actually began electing their own people.

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  22. Or at least, were enabled to - considering politicians are politicians.

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  23. Ordered my
    "Don't Tase Me Bro"
    T-Shirt from Dennis Miller this morning.
    ...a limited run.
    Think I'll make a CD of the kid screaming and the shirt to a local artist here and see what he comes up with.
    Why can't we all just get along?

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  24. Did a terrific imitation of the kid while in the shower yesterday:
    Cat got one of my fingertips w/her razor claws, and I got some Comet Cleanser on my finger in the shower:
    My Scream of
    "Don't Tase me Bro"
    was indistinguishable from the real thing, lending further credence in the wife's mind, to my being classified w/the insane.
    She being in the bathroom at the time of the outburst.

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  25. While Brother 'Rat sees police malefeasance, Miller and I see nothing but high humor, supercharged with a little old tyme justice.

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  26. Is that the Faggot Judge that had the Jewish Mother by his side telling him what to do in Volusia County, or wherever it was, in Florida?
    It was really a scene, as she indeed was seen on tape pushing him around into reading the chad leaves properly.

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  27. Can't remember the name of the county there, South of Limbaugh, where they had their first openly gay Judge.
    Too bad he was also a pushover puss.

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  28. Zero Threat Immigrant
    Will only produce 200 times as much in a lifetime as a "Hispanic Illegal" won't get foodstamps, and won't join any Injun Gangs, but what they hey?

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  29. Multiculturalist Americans - The Lords of Adolescense?
    Once the land of the free and the home of the brave, has the United States become the home of the perpetual adolencent? In today's Washington Times'
    Inside the Beltway - America's 'hush'
    , is a commentary on a recent editorial by Diana West,
    Forever Children.

    Diana West - often quoted here - wrote essentially that Americans today just have not grown up; and this adolescent egocentricity of being forever "young" in which all worlds and civilizations are equal is bringing about the death of Western Culture.
    Well, I am paraphrasing and not well.
    See West's book, The Death of the Grown-up.
    My apologies to our military men and women - they have grown up and fast.
    Conservative Beach Girl
    (Certain Hags say there is no such thing as a "Conservative!")

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  30. No wonder some can't countenance Conservatives:
    We'd have to act like a country, and the military would have to act like...
    well, a military.
    Perish the thought!
    ---
    "And American foreign policy? Well, I'm not talking about the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy (World War I), the War to End Fascism (World War II), or even the Cold War, which ultimately brought down the Evil Empire, at least temporarily. It greatly pains me to say it, but the war to Buy Time For Iraqis to Reconcile (Iraq) — not at all the same thing as the War to Smash Islamic Jihad, which we are regrettably not fighting — is based on the childish, Flower-Powery premise, born of sophomoric, multiculti myths, that no real differences separate cultures, religions and peoples. And besides, the theory goes, if such differences do exist, it is "mean-spirited" or "intolerant" or "racist" to point them out.



    Once upon a time, such adolescent naivete would have driven the grown-ups crazy — or maybe I'm just nuts. How about if we call off the struggle to squeeze into play clothes and try to find out?
    "

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  31. Dad thought the beginning of the end was when you had to report real estate sales.
    I date it to the real beginnings of the interstate highway system.
    The Nez Perce date it to when grandpa showed up. Grandpa probably dated it to the first mechanical horse. He never had one.

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  32. Do conservative women intimidate you, Trish?

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  33. At least you won the knife set!

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  34. So you think Ike started it all?

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  35. My wife says we have gifted, talented people in this county that will persevere and make this country ever greater.

    You see what I have to deal with.

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  36. I'm picturing 200 Hispanics on food stamps voting for ex-gang member Antonio Villagarosa for President!
    Present her THAT picture!
    Could happen.

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  37. ...and the rest of us watching, saying:
    "How could 200 Hispanics on Foodstamps be Wrong?"
    ---
    ...and casting our votes,
    accordingly.

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  38. She says we will all be voting on the internet. I ask how will we know who is voting. She says "we will find a way, life is a process".

    Figure that out.

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  39. Mechanical Horse Envy.
    Now I know where "knightmare" came from.

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  40. I'd say:
    Paper is a process ALSO,
    AND,
    Paper is a SUBSTANCE!
    ---
    Then again, I live here, sreaming:
    "Don't Tase Me, Bro!"

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  41. Do you ever enter the Pyramid in the backyard to pick up some Pyramid Powers?

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  42. Doug: Is that the Faggot Judge that had the Jewish Mother by his side telling him what to do in Volusia County, or wherever it was, in Florida?

    Doug, you should move to Iran, they already killed all their faggots there. Ahmedinejad certifies it a faggot-free zone.

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  43. Killed by the Sceptre of refined Truth and Wisdom!
    Wo, was me!

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  44. He WAS a faggot, and she WAS a classic Jewish mother:
    Should I lie?

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  45. My wife wants to see if I can obtain something of value from you smucks that I waste so much time with. She is fighting a nest of yellowjackets in a wall, spackled the hole shut, and the monsters chewed right through the spackle. What to do? Suggestions. This is after spraying with insecticide about three times. Evidently the nest goes down a heck of a long way in the foundation.

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  46. She says she will take back everything she has ever said about you all if an answer is forthcoming.

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  47. (if I were gay, and ran for judge, I might not do it on a platform of being Openly gay)
    Nor would my many gay acquaintences here, living and deceased.
    RIP

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  48. Bob,

    Here you go:

    http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=SCON&p=D&yr=0&mn=3&dy=0&id=p35596559459


    God bless America!

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  49. AHA!
    The stuff that comes in
    "Wasp & Hornet Killer"
    "Kills on contact
    20ft jet spray"
    is
    DEATH
    to insects.
    We use Ace inside,
    ORTHO Outside, since it SMELLS like CHEMICAL DEATH.
    ...you're home free, AlBob!

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  50. Bob,

    Set a tight stop at $8.58
    And play only with money you afford to lose. :D

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  51. We've tried the "Wasp and Hornet Killer" we will try the Ortho. Evidently they have a kind of Tora-Bora Cave Complex going in there.

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  52. That means I can't play, Mat:(

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  53. Ace Tac Nuke should do the trick:
    Odor Free,
    I'm told.

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  54. We had Bats in our Belfry at the farm.
    I shot one above our bed in the crack between the redwood planks with a pellet gun.
    ...was like the nightmare from the movies right above my bed!
    Oozing Bat Blood.

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  55. If I were still farming I'd back the anhydrous machine up, turn it on, that always got the ground squirrels. I think in our favor in this battle is they only got one exit, otherwise they wouldn't have chewed their way out so fast. Gotta go. Thanks for the advice.

    Bat blood, sounds bad, real bad, dripping from above!

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  56. Bob,

    Well, at least you know the wife doesn't love you just for your money. :D

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  57. Unlike certain Dentists we know!

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  58. arg,
    sorry bout that :
    ..money you ^can afford to lose

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  59. Thanks for reminding me tho:
    I gotta write Miller and tell him to see a Doc:
    He got a chip from his tooth in his eye at the Dentists.
    Washed it out and all, BUT,
    a professor at UCLA, I think, lost an eye that way.

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  60. Nasty stuff, livin in them teeth.

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  61. Doug,

    I would never trust one of those, unless one came prepackaged by mail from Lithuania. At least then you know what you’re getting.

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  62. No, Doug. A mechanical horse dancer.

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  63. A mechanical horse dancer Pole Prancer.

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  64. Teresita said...
    What happened to the Home of the Brave?


    Sister T,

    It died the day the strongman promised the population the fedgov could actually provide "Freedom from Fear and Want" and the people actually believed it.

    The brave remain - in small numbers - but are estranged by the ruling elites. They are a necessary inconvenience to keep around in case of emergency.

    the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost more than $1.2 trillion in the coming decade, a much higher price tag than President Bush suggested when he narrowly won passage of the law in late 2003.

    Compassionate Coercive Conservatism in full-effect.

    Socialism for Jesus.

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  65. Doug,

    You got yours in the mail already?

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  66. Doug,

    To mate with a filly, just introduce yourself as a stud.

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  67. Doug,

    You may first want to consult Tes to make sure that’s not unlawful behavior in violation of the first amendment.

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  68. Two Biological Horses with Man

    Plowing with strong wind to one's back is advised.

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  69. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  70. Doug: Do you ever enter the Pyramid in the backyard to pick up some Pyramid Powers?

    It only works if you have an AMWAY pyramid.

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  71. BOBAL: The Three Part Solution passes in the Senate.

    Oh goody, the Senate approves what is happening on the ground in Iraq anyway.

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  72. Yup.


    The Judge took Craig's request under advisement, will decide next week.

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