“The Adair County District Attorney’s office filed felony charges against Adair County resident Darryl Cates. Cates, 73, of Westville, Okla. had four counts brought against him July 13th in the District Court of the 15th Judicial District of Oklahoma: two were for false affidavit in voting registration and two for false notarization of absentee ballot. This was signed off by Assistant District Attorney Larry Langley. The crime Cates is accused of is punishable by imprisonment for up to 2 years and a fine up to $5,000.”
Perhaps someone got a bit too zealous to get an SEIU sponsered proposal on the ballot in Washington state. OPB News has more here:
“The Washington State Patrol has been asked to investigate allegations of signature fraud on a citizen initiative. A unionized homecare worker is accused of falsifying signatures on at least twenty petition sheets for I-1098. That’s an income tax measure for high-earners on the November ballot. Austin Jenkins reports from Olympia.
The Secretary of State’s office has concluded its internal investigation. It found some 350 questionable voter signatures. Many of them were written in what appears to be the same handwriting.
The woman at the center of the investigation is a member of the Service Employees International Union Local 775, a major backer of the income tax measure.”
Minnesota Majority has some interesting details about discussions with the Federal Government about problems with felons on the voter rolls in Minnesota. Were the Feds asleep at the switch? I will be covering this very issue in great detail in the weeks and months ahead at Pajamas Media. In the meantime, if you thought it was bad in 2008, you can expect worse in the future. See more at my Pajamas Media piece “Lawlessness at the DOJ: Voting Section Told Not To Enforce Purging the Dead or Ineligible from Voting Rolls.”
I received an email from a reader of ElectionLawCenter.com noting that Tim Reid, the actor who has played Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati may be a New Black Panther.
I don’t know the answer. One thing is for sure, the head of the New Black Panther Party, Malik Zulu Shabazz, organized a “National Black Power Conference” complete with plenty of participants such as noted anti-Semite Leonard Jeffries, stacks of New Black Panther Members such as Divine Allah and Queen Sheena Sheba Africa. Reid was a speaker also. I don’t know if Venus has a uniform and is a member, but his appearance at this sort of event comes as a surprise
Sorry for the late notice again. I was already on WFLA in Tallahassee and WSBA in eastern PA talking about my latest piece at Pajamas Media. At 11 EDT I’ll be on nationwide on the American Family Network radio and later on KLZ in Denver on the Jim Pfaff show. I’ll try to post additional bookings today as they become available.
Could this be possible?!?: “Academic work by Jeff Manza and Marcus Britton of Northwestern University and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota has shown that a large majority of felons routinely vote Democratic. The two academics estimated that Bill Clinton pulled 86% of the felon vote in 1992 and 93% in 1996. Statistician John Lott’s own work in Washington State found that felons were 37% more likely to be registered Democrats even when accounting for race, gender, education level, religious habits, employment, age, and county of residence.”
I previously wrote at Pajamas Media how this week we would get some clarity whether or not Eric Holder is willing to use Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to protect all Americans from discrimination, or just some. The Department had a chance to redeem itself and enforce provisions of Section 5 in a racially fair manner by objecting to a Section 5 submission by proven race discriminator Ike Brown. Instead, it issued a no determination letter , and then tried to hide it from the media for over 40 hours. Members of the media sought to obtain the “no determination” letter from the Justice Department but the Department would not turn over the public document. So much for transparency that we heard so much about.
Then, on July 13, the Department filed a motion to expand the remedy in the US v. Ike Brown case. Note that the prior administration had brought the case and obtained the remedy.
My latest Pajamas Media piece deals with the whole sordid affair of the last two days and the continued unwillingness of the DOJ to enforce Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in a race neutral fashion. I will be on a variety of radio and television stations across the country Wednesday and Thursday talking about this cop-out and the DOJ’s unwillingness to use Section 5 to protect all Americans.
Ike Brown made his Section 5 request to allow him to prevent people to vote way back on May 12, 2010. It was not until July 1, over 4 days after my first piece in Pajamas Media appeared, before the Justice Department even contacted a single victim in Noxubee County about this matter. I know because I have spoken with them throughout this entire affair.
“Sadly, the Department did not object to the submission and therefore refused to protect the white minority in Noxubee County in the least costly, most powerful way possible — a simple letter objecting to the proposal. Why? Because it is high heresy to include discriminated-against whites within the protections of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This attitude is common knowledge within the voting section.
Amazingly, the Department is also seeking an order from the federal court to prevent Ike Brown, the discriminator, from making any more inconvenient submissions to the Obama Justice Department which might reveal the hostility toward equal enforcement of the law. Simply put, they are asking the court to prohibit Brown from sending any more submissions under Section 5. Not only would this go beyond the powers of the court to order, it is a naked play to avoid facing the issue of unequal enforcement for the remainder of the first, and maybe last, term of the Obama administration. If Brown can’t file submissions to the DOJ, the DOJ won’t have to take the side of the white victims. This is unnecessary and shamefully transparent.”
It can be very discouraging to fair minded folks to hear some of the outlandish things people are willing to say in this media environment, where accountability and shame seem to be passé, some relic from an America era where common experience bound us together. I will group in this category the claim that various government officials are “racist,” as I attempted to explain in a recent Pajamas Media piece I do not believe to be true. Refusing to enforce the law in a race neutral fashion is not necessarily racist, though I can see why it is attractive to reject my argument.
At the same time, it is unfortunate to hear similarly unhinged arguments from others – like unsupported attacks (incidentally lobbed by a former DOJ voting official who himself was the subject of a racial discrimination complaint against him – but I will devote a future article to that later) and the terrifying development that one’s veracity can be judged by where they fall on the political or ideological spectrum. Those of us who have read the Nobel Prize winning Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn recognize this disturbing psychological tactic.
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle,” he notes.
Truth exists apart from political views, identity and race. But I recognize much of the intellectual history of the west over the last 50 years has sought to eradicate this philosophy, but again, an article for another day.
Hans von Spakovsky has this article at National Review about the New Black Panther case. The Lie du Jour among many on July 12 was that somehow the Bush administration was to blame (the record keeps skipping Hazel) for not bringing criminal charges against the New Black Panthers. Among many other points, Spakovsky notes:
“Yet … the Obama administration could make the decision today to indict the members of the New Black Panther Party, since they are still well within the applicable criminal statute of limitations. But you can rest assured that they will not do so. It is more important to them to block the investigation of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and to creatively excuse what they have done in this case, which was throw away the opportunity to obtain an exhaustive and wide-ranging permanent injunction against the NBPP in the civil case, which would have ensured that what happened in Philadelphia in November of 2008 never happened again at any polling place anywhere in the country.”
The New Black Panther Party chairman undermines some arguments you might have heard. These arguments include:
1. That the deployment of armed Panthers in Philadelphia wasn’t part of any nationally directed plan.
2. That the national New Black Panther Party wholly disapproved of the presence of weapons at the polls.
3. That the actions were renounced.
4. That the Philadelphia chapter was terminated and King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson were kicked out of the national party.
Pay close attention: these are arguments still being promulgated in all corners as factual and important:
So, what does the video reveal?
1. That the deployment in Philadelphia was part of a nationwide deployment directed by the National Party.
2. That the brandished weapons were just “a little too strong” and a “little too black.”
3. That the National Party hardly seems to have renounced the actions, or at least not in a genuine way.
4. That the “termination” of the Philadelphia chapter was a ruse and King Samir Shabazz is loved and welcomed back and Jerry Jackson is also. So much for that all important termination of the Philadelphia chapter.
This is what happens when some people are receptive, for whatever inane reason, to the excuses of wrongdoers who would violate the civil rights of Americans. The irrational sympathies remind me of the sort of things “respectable” segregationists would say about their more nasty backwoods neighbors a generation ago: just a few crackpots, one might go too far on occasion, just “small potatoes,” we can’t do anything about those crackpots because we don’t really have any connection to their craziness.
And pay attention to this: As Malik Zulu Shabazz begins to defend the behavior in Philadelphia in the open, pay close attention to how closely his rhetoric and argument matches the defense made in presumably more respectable quarters, both online and elsewhere.
