Latest at Pajamas Meda.   One candidate is supporting avoiding the Constitution in Presidential elections. 

UPDATE:  A letter from the candidate supporting the national popular vote plan.

From the Atlantic City Press:   “After just five minutes on the stand Tuesday morning, Harris asked Batten if he could go to the bathroom. He quickly left the stand and returned later. After several more minutes of testimony in which Harris showed frustration after being asked to speak up and move forward in the witness box, he got sick again.  As the judge talked with attorneys at a sidebar, Harris sat in the witness stand, hunched over a trash can and could be heard heaving and coughing loudly. . . . ‘He actually was singing a song,’ said Michael Schreiber, who is representing defendant LuQuay Zahir. ‘He was saying the words, ‘God is on my side.’ ‘  . . . At one point, he posed as a Press of Atlantic City photographer snapped photos. Then, during another private meeting, he tried to shield himself from pictures, then gave the photographer the middle finger.”

From WTVA: “A judge on Tuesday ordered 40-year-old David Massey of Hickory Flat to serve five years in prison.  Massey was indicted on one count of conspiracy to commit voter fraud and three counts of voter fraud.  The attorney general’s office says the defendant was offered a plea deal but it was withdrawn because of a drug charge.  Massey is the last of 16 defendants to either plead guilty or be found guilty for voter fraud in the 2007 county election.”

Here. 

The Voting Section at the Department of Justice is going on yet another field trip.   Next week, the entire Voting Section will be travelling to the L. William Seidman Conference Center in Arlington, Virginia for a three day retreat.  The retreat will take place on January 18, 19 and 20.  The topic will be redistricting. 

The Seidman Center room costs $1,500 per day to rent.  Over three days, the cost to the taxpayers will be $4,500 plus the meals purchased for the employees, plus ancillary transportation reimbursements.  Not big dollars, for sure.  But it is thousands of tax dollars that someone elsewhere in America earned and sent to Washington that simply didn’t need to be spent.  President Obama has vowed that he wants federal agencies to cut wasteful or unnecessary spending.  The overseers of the Voting Section obviously didn’t get the memo.

One might also question the wisdom of shutting down an entire office for three days.   Then again, based on the litigation activity of the Voting Section, that really isn’t a problem.
 

So where else could they hold the retreat for free?  Lots of places.  For starters, the public press room on the 7^th floor at the RFK building is used all the time for such gatherings.  The tables are regularly rearranged for events this size.  Of course the Great Hall at RFK is another place where events like this take place all the time.  Both are available at no cost to taxpaying Americans.

In an economy as bad as it is, and with people hurting everywhere, wasting thousands of tax dollars on a retreat when free options exist is unfortunate.  This is what happens when zero oversight occurs, either by the media or by a Congress.   That appears to be changing, fast.

At the PJ Tatler.

Pajamas Media has launched the PJ Tatler and I’ll be one of the featured commentators.  The PJ Tatler harkens back to the Tatler of 1709.  The original Tatler’s “intention was to present accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, of poetry, and of foreign and domestic news. These all were reported and ‘issued’ from various London coffee and chocolate houses. In time The Tatler began to investigate manners and society, establishing its principles of ideal behaviour, its concepts of a perfect gentleman and gentlewoman, and its standards of good taste. Dueling, gambling, rakish behaviour, and coquettishness were criticized, and virtuous action was admired.”

The PJ Tatler is a rapid fire internet  “free-for-all, constantly updated conversation about anything and everything that’s happening around the world.”  In other words, a great place to click by and see what’s going on. 

The Supreme Court has set a conference to determine whether it will hear a case involving whether Texas can use an eSlate machine and whether the Department of Justice must approve.  More here.

When it comes to outgoing Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, perhaps the most partisan Secretary of State in the nation, nothing is a surprise, not even to the Ohio Supreme Court:

“The rush to judgment was started by the secretary of state in a fairly transparent attempt to play a role in the resolution of the election before her successor takes office on January 10. Now, this court is along for the ride.”

Full opinion here.   ELC.com first posted about Brunner’s meddling in a local election here.

This is not a reassuring set of data.  They show that white voters fled the Democratic Party in 2010 and minority voters were an even more solid bloc.  In other words, minorities and whites were voting differently in record numbers.  This is precisely the opposite outcome envisioned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The National Journal piece is a must read.  The sample size of the data is enormous: 17,504 voters.

“The new data show that white voters not only strongly preferred Republican House and Senate candidates but also registered deep disappointment with President Obama’s performance, hostility toward the cornerstones of the current Democratic agenda, and widespread skepticism about the expansive role for Washington embedded in the party’s priorities. On each of those questions, minority voters expressed almost exactly the opposite view from whites.”

The implications for elections are enormous.  Racial polarization in elections almost never has a desirable result for racial minorities.  White support for GOP Congressional candidates were at a record level in 2010 – 60% voted for the GOP and only 37% for Democrats.  Outside of the northeast and west coast, the disparity was even more staggering.  In other words, in most parts of the country, white support for Democratic candidates barely registered any effective strength at all. 

On the other side of the ledger, minority support for Democratic candidates was even more cohesive, with 73% percent of minorities voting Democrat.  The story pegs Hispanic support at 60 percent.  That means black support must be at least above 80 percent and is likely higher.

Views on the President were also extremely polarized:

“First among those was Obama’s performance. Exactly 75 percent of minority voters said they approved; only 22 percent said they disapproved. Among white voters, just 35 percent approved of the president’s performance, while 65 percent disapproved; a head-turning 49 percent of whites said they strongly disapproved.”