Saturday I will be speaking in Dallas Texas at David Horowitz’s Texas weekend.  My topic is Obamism, namely, how the Rule of Law has suffered under this administration.  Here are details and registration information:

 KMOV link.

 WND: “U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, in remarks that largely have escaped notice, has claimed that “creating a mechanism for [illegal aliens] to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows… is a matter of civil and human rights.”

Holder also said that the federal government will work hard “to safeguard the rights of language minorities.”

Escaped notice? 

In North Carolina, a photo voter ID bill cleared the state House and heads to the state Senate.   It appears that based on the partisan makeup of the legislature (43D-77R), the bill passed with a small number of Democrats supporting the measure.  Sort of like the Carolina Blue Blue Dog Democratic caucus.

Presenting photo identification before being able to vote in North
Carolina moved a step closer to reality Wednesday when the House
approved a Republican-backed proposal.House Bill 589 passed on an 81-36 vote and now moves to the Senate.

“Our
system of government depends on open and honest elections,” said Rep.
David Lewis, R-Harnett. “Having people prove they are who they say they
are makes sense.”

The bill, dubbed the Voter Information
Verification Act, or VIVA, would require IDs with every election held
after January 2016. It would allow people to present various
state-issued IDs, such as public university IDs and state employee
IDs, but private university IDs would not qualify.

 Link.  “This wasn’t just a single case of confused testimony; it was repeated, deliberately false representation. The man is a serial prevaricator.”

“The trial is underway for a former Democratic official and a Board of Elections worker who are accused of being part of a plot that has raised questions over whether President Obama’s campaign — when he was a candidate in 2008 — submitted enough legitimate signatures to have legally qualified for the presidential primary ballot.”

Link.

 Wall Street Journal Video.  Issa: “Mr. Perez has trouble telling the truth.”

From TexasGOPVotes. 

The Democrats say it is convenient and the Colorado clerks say that
all-mail voting reduces the costs and complexity of elections overall. 
The media plays along.

The Denver Post: Those promoting the changes said the bill is uniquely Colorado, and the
state could take the lead nationally on making elections more convenient
to voters.

However, the media ignores the data,
reporting only the shiny side of story and not the looming negative
impact on voters.  Leading the nation in convenience?  The big loser will
be the voters of Colorado. Without even getting into the increased
potential of absentee fraud with mail ballots, the big secret being kept
from voters is that all-mail and absentee voting balloting is not the
preferential way of voting because it has a much higher rate of
rejection due to voter errors and other issues that ultimately rejects
the ballot.  And turnout will be reduced except in special and local
elections.

In 2012, the Scientific-American highlighted a report that exposed the weaknesses on mail voting:

A new report by the Voting Technology Project (VTP)—a
joint venture between the California Institute of Technology and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology—finds that even though absentee
ballots account for about only a quarter of all ballots cast during an
election, the number of uncounted absentee and election-day ballots may
be roughly the same.

The researchers estimate that
up to 3.9 million absentee ballots were requested but not received by
voters in the 2008 presidential election. Another 2.9 million ballots
sent to voters requesting them were not
returned for counting. And 800,000 returned absentee ballots were
rejected for one reason or another. In all, 21 percent of requested
absentee ballots were never counted in 2008—35.5 million requests for
absentee ballots led to 27.9 million mail-in ballots being counted.

Studies in Florida showed more issues and, more importantly, a much higher rate of
rejection of absentee and absentee provisional ballots.  Additionally,
according to a University of California study (highlighted in article), “experimental evidence
finds that mail-in voting can actually lower turnout by about 2.6%,
except in special or less publicized elections, where it raises turnout
by 7.6%.” 

Charlie Cook at National Journal looks at the decline of swing seats, a potential Republican advantage and finds redistricting to be a secondary factor.  So one conclusion can be drawn from the data:  It may have helped pad the majority but the Republican majority is not a result of gerrymandering.

The trend lines are clear. In 1998, we found 164 swing
seats—districts within 5 points of the national partisan average, with
scores between R+5 and D+5 (a score of R+5 means the district’s vote for
the Republican presidential nominees was 5 percentage points above the
national average). The data 15 years ago showed just 148 solidly
Republican districts and 123 solidly Democratic seats. Today, only 90
swing seats remain—a 45 percent decline—while the number of solidly
Republican districts has risen to 186 and the count of solidly
Democratic districts is up to 159.

…How did we get here as a country? Debates
rage at political-science conferences: Are voters aligning in
like-minded areas, or is blatant partisan gerrymandering to blame? Our
newest index points mostly to the former, which has in turn amplified
the power of the latter. In 2011 and 2012, redistricting diminished the
number of swing seats from 103 to 99. But when we factored in the 2012
election results, the count fell more sharply, from 99 to 90.

In
fact, setting aside redistricting, we found that 76 percent of
Democratic-held House seats had grown even more Democratic in the past
four years and 60 percent of GOP-held seats had grown even more
Republican. Some districts swung dramatically, mostly along racial
lines. Republican Rep. Hal Rogers’s 96 percent white district in eastern
Kentucky jumped from R+16 to R+25, and Democratic Rep. Loretta
Sanchez’s 82 percent nonwhite district in Orange County, Calif., moved
from D+3 to D+9.