Colin Powell served the majority of his career in the U.S. Army and related Pentagon positions. He should understand the need for confirmation of identity. For everyone of his thirty years of service, he was required to have a photo ID and other forms of identification. In fact, to gain access to the Pentagon, an individual must have two forms of current government issued identification to confirm ID, including one photo ID. At the State Department, to visit you must have a government issued photo ID or passport.
Maddow’s Dishonest Scare Parade on NC Voting
Last night the great David Webb filled in for Sean Hannity on Fox News. Webb put on Allen West and Juan Williams to talk about urban malaise. The visuals at Fox must have been too much for Rachel Maddow because she put up an hour long show designed to scare people about voting rights. Her already small audience might have been even smaller otherwise.
The special was full of intellectually dishonest scare tactics, hyperbole, false statements, leading questions for reporters and outright fear mongering.
Of course nobody was invited on the show to name the dishonesty.
Naturally the show featured a parade of college democrats and academics out of central casting, including professor and Castro apologist Renee Scherlen. Notice the sign behind Scherlen deliberately placed on camera. Read all about the totalitarian history of “En Cada Barrio” in Cuba. Perhaps Scherlen hangs this sign because she collects relics of totalitarian murder, perhaps she is sympathetic. Given her scholarship tends to be pro-Castro, I’ll go with Door #2. Hanging a sign for En Cada Barrio is the equivalent of hanging a recruiting poster for the S.A. whatever the motive.
Democrat activist student Mollie Clawson also complained that her flip flops might fall off if she had to walk through the grass to her polling place. Such are the complaints of the grievance generation.
That’s standard operating procedure for Maddow. Her skill is preaching to the choir, not having vigorous intellectual debate about ideas. Dissent is forbidden, sort of like En Cada Barrio. That’s why if you want actual debate between both sides of an issue, you need to turn to Hannity, or last night, to David Webb.
Why doesn’t Maddow permit any dissent, any critical guests on her show when it comes to voting issues? It’s not like experts don’t exist who could handily rebut her. She doesn’t permit dissent on her show because her show is about Democrat activism – not voting rights, not airing both sides, not fairness. It’s about activism, period.
Her job is to stoke fears, preferably race based fears. Her job is to present the Orthodoxy of the vote fraud deniers and the racial left. It isn’t to be a journalist. Her job is to mobilize turnout for the 2014 election, nothing more. If that weren’t true, she would invite a guest on to rebut the factual and legal fallacies she airs.
We’ve learned a great deal from the election-focused left lately. They are perplexed that they no longer have a monopoly on the discourse about election issues. Often, this manifests as ridicule. Other times as flippant dismissal. Rarely does it manifest as engagement on the issues. They have a long pedigree in this regard – dissent is not to be tolerated. That’s why Maddow doesn’t have guests appear on her shows about election issues, and she does a disservice to her [small number of] viewers.
Arkansas: “Panel approves rule for voter ID”
link.
On Fox and Friends this AM
Will be on Fox and Friends in the morning.
“Supreme Court be damned: DOJ serves Texas a lawsuit over voter ID”
Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com
“Holder’s Mounting War Against Texas”
Full text from the Foundry: In its mounting war against commonsense election integrity efforts, Eric Holder’s Justice Department announced today that it will be filing a new lawsuit against Texas, claiming that the state’s voter ID law “violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as well as the voting guarantees of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments” to the Constitution. This is no surprise given Eric Holder’s polemical and unsupported claims that voter ID laws are intended to “suppress voting rights.” The constitutional claim is certainly at odds with the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court held in 2008 that Indiana’s voter ID, which is similar to the Texas law, was not a violation of the Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held it was a reasonable requirement to protect the integrity and reliability of the electoral process. Holder’s claim that voter ID is discriminatory under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is also problematic. Section 2 prohibits any voting qualification that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizens of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” The lawsuit that was filed against Georgia’s voter ID law in 2006 also claimed it violated Section 2, but the plaintiffs lost that case—the federal judge ruled that voter ID was not discriminatory under Section 2. As a result, the Georgia law has been in place since the 2008 presidential election. The turnout of voters in Georgia in the last five years of federal and state elections show that Holder’s claim that such laws discriminate against minority voters is patently untrue. Indiana’s experience shows the same. It is quite ironic that Holder is launching a Section 2 lawsuit against Texas over its voter ID law. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department filed 18 successful Section 2 lawsuits during the eight years of the Bush Administration, yet it was roundly criticized by so-called civil rights leaders for supposedly “neglecting” the enforcement of Section 2. Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights commented on the supposed lack of Section 2 cases, claiming there was a “growing distrust among minority communities who feel increasingly abandoned and marginalized by the Division’s litigation choices and priorities.” During the past five years of the current Administration, the Civil Rights Division filed exactly one Section 2 lawsuit, in 2009—and that was a case that was started and investigated during the Bush Administration. Yet not a single critical word has been heard from the same civil rights groups about the Obama Administration’s complete lack of enforcement of Section 2. So when the Administration finally files a Section 2 lawsuit, it is over voter ID—over the type of law that is supported by a majority of Americans, has been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court, has been found by other federal courts not to violate Section 2, and that election turnout evidence shows does not “suppress” minority or any other voters, as has been falsely claimed. Justice also announced it was intervening in a private Section 2 lawsuit filed against the 2011 Texas redistricting plans for Congress and the Texas House of Representatives. DOJ will ask the federal court to reimpose the equivalent of Section 5 preclearance coverage on Texas so that Texas would have to get the approval of the Justice Department for the next 10 years for any other changes in its voting laws. Another example of Eric Holder wasting taxpayer funds and Justice Department resources.
Sensenbrenner Calls Holder About VRA “Fix” – to 3 or 4?
Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner called Eric Holder to complain that his Section 2 lawsuit in Texas will make it harder to “fix” the Voting Rights Act after the Shelby decision.
Lost in the statement is whether Sensenbrenner wants to “fix” Section 3 or Section 4?
If he wants to “fix” Section 4, that means returning some states (probably not Wisconsin I would imagine) back to federal receivership. That would be news, especially to the GOP conference.
If he wants to “fix” Section 3, that makes more sense because, as I have testified to Congress, there are defects in Section 3.
Perhaps someone can call and ask.
Thugging it at DOJ
From PJ Media:
Once upon a time, in another era, the Justice Department didn’t make threats. It didn’t threaten or boast about future litigation it had neither approved nor filed. But these days, Holder’s Justice Department is all about threats, boasts and political mobilization. The case today was about mobilizing the Democrat base before the 2014 midterms, and little else.
DOJ Files First Section 2 Case in Four Years
Holder targets Texas Voter ID. The Obama administration, breaking four years of inactivity in enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and has filed a Section 2 action against Texas Voter ID.
More: Thugging it at DOJ.
More coverage of FVAP and Military Voting at PJ Media
Link here.
“Having partisan Democrats running FVAP hurts military voting and ensures those solutions won’t be implemented. Republicans in Congress make excuses for the mismanagement, or conduct oversight? What happens remains to be seen. We’ll learn a lot about 2014 military voting rights soon when the Pentagon names the new FVAP director.”