The Smoke Break

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Dems Lose – No Matter What

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Today’s special election in Massachusetts is historical, yes, but even though there are still a few hours to go before the polls close today, a loser has emerged and I dare say it’s ranking at the bottom of the political landfill will be a long stay.

Watching how the campaigns are handling the fever-pitch race that is, effectively, a referendum on the Obama administration and the progressive liberal Democrat majority has laid bare one thing:  those liberal progressive Democrats are truly nasty, evil people and the unintended consequences of their actions over the last year is going to keep them in a world of hurt for a very, very long time.  There are endless reports coming in about campaign signs for Martha (“Curling Iron”) Coakley right at the doors of voting precincts (illegal within 150 feet of a precinct in Massachusetts).  There are losers hanging around precincts .  She has union members (from New York’s UFCW Local One, no less) manning one of her offices, kicking out a reporter and calling them a Nazi. 

By 3:45 p.m., the Massachusetts Secretary of State had received two separate reports of voters being given ballots already filled out for them.

 Then the markets closed higher today on hopes of a Scott Brown victory, which is hysterically funny when you remember that among the hosts of Coakley’s D.C. fundraiser last week were Eli Lilly (up 4.4percent at $37.41), Humana (up 7.1 percent at $51.94). 

And while His Transparency “was both surprised and frustrated” with what he apparently sees as needless fuss over Ded Ted’s replacement, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, however inadvertently, actually called it correctly:  “In many ways we’re here because of that upset and anger.”

The Dems Are Faking Suicide

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The Democrat-controlled Congress is busy planning how to ram their visions of health care “reform” down America’s throat and the rising backlash against their tactics and, indeed, against their progressive liberal ideology is becoming more and more severe.

So severe, that true to the form of all yellow-bellied selfish cowards, Democrats are turning tail and dropping out of 2010 elections left and right.  And the pious spinning begins.  Among the louder dropouts is the infamous sleazeball Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn).  Perhaps to spend some time licking his wounds at his Countrywide sweetheart-deal-bought cottage in Ireland? 

 
Yeah, right.  He seems to forget our flying pigs are waiting patiently in the wings.
 
The real reason that Dodd, Dorgan (ND), Kaufman (DE), and Burris (IL), along with Colorado Governor Bill Ritter are leading the rat charge off the sinking ship is because in the larger progressive liberal Democrat scheme of things, they’re expendable.
 
How can they be expendable when the Democrats need their 60-vote majority in the Senate?  Let us count the ways.  The first answer is contained in three little words:  “universal voter registration”.
 
Simply put, this is a tactic planned by the Democrats that will force – by federal mandate – the states to register everyone to vote. 
In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration. …  It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states: “take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be …” 
 
The problems with universal voter registration are numerous and obvious. Many states’ lists include vast numbers of illegals, including some states which allow illegals to obtain drivers licenses; because many homeowners have more than one home, there will be duplicates; because so many people are on so many separate federal and state government agency lists, there will be duplicates; and because so many lists exist with little or no cross-checking capability, all of these duplicates are likely to go uncorrected. Add to this the fact that Dems hope to extend voting rights to felons, and the whole thing begins to look like a nationwide Democrat voter registration drive facilitated by taxpayers.
 
The second answer is that odious little poster child for all things fraudulent and illegal:  ACORN.  Under investigation in numerous states for their 2008 “assistance” to the Obama campaign, when something as precious as a 60-seat Democrat Senate majority hangs in the balance, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of false voters registered and as many fraudulent ballots cast.  Politico nicely outlined the ACORN problem last year:

Larry Lomax, the chief elections officer in Las Vegas, responded that the group’s claims it had extensive quality controls to catch fraudulent registrations were “pathetic.” He noted that ACORN had hired 59 inmates from a work-release program at a nearby prison and that some inmates who had been convicted of identity theft had been made supervisors. That led some local wags to joke that at least ACORN was hiring specialists to do their work.

ACORN’s second line of defense has been that fraudulent registrations can’t turn into fraudulent votes, as if the felony of polluting voter lists was somehow not all that serious. But that defense goes only a short distance. “How would you know if people using fake names had cast votes in states without strict ID laws?” says GOP Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, who this year won a major Supreme Court case upholding his state’s photo identification law. “It’s almost impossible to detect and once the fraudulent voter leaves the precinct or casts an absentee ballot, that vote is thrown in with other secret ballots there’s no way to trace it.”

Anita MonCrief, an ACORN whistle-blower who worked for both it and its Project Vote registration affiliate from 2005 until early this year, agrees. “It’s ludicrous to say that fake registrations can’t become fraudulent votes,” she told me. “I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots.”

…some ACORN affiliates had a conscious strategy of flooding voter registration offices with suspect last-minute forms in part to create confusion and chaos that would make it more likely suspect voters would be allowed to cast ballots by overworked officials. Nate Toller, who worked on ACORN registration drives and headed an ACORN campaign against Wal-Mart in California until 2006, agrees. “There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances,” he told me.

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Perhaps the clearest look at how fraudulent registrations can be converted into votes comes from Wisconsin. Earlier this year, the Milwaukee Police Department’s Special Investigation Unit released a stunning 67-page report detailing an “illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome” of the 2004 presidential election. 

 It noted many documented cases of staffers for a presidential campaign and an allied 527 group who illegally voted. Those involved in the scheme “represent multiple levels of both the organizations, from upper management to the street level canvassers.” The task force report found many ineligible voters had cast ballots, ineligible felons not only had voted but also worked at the polls, transient college students had cast illegal votes along with day-trippers from nearby Chicago, and homeless voters may well have voted more than once.

 The Milwaukee police report explained just how easy it is to cast an illegal vote without ever being detected., “Michael A. Smith can become Mike Smith, M.A. Smith, or Mickey Smith, depending on the person reviewing the Same Day registration card, and unless a specific allegation is made against one of those name variants, the new name would just be added to the overall database. Even if the new system were capable of discerning the differences in recorded names, the finding would not be discovered until after any multiple ballots had been cast and recorded.” Indeed, the task force found that 1,100 registration cards filled in by voters were declared invalid or untraceable by election officials.

 Another way that fraudulent registrations can be converted into illegal votes is when groups like ACORN either purposely or recklessly sign up visitors from out-of-state or felons who are ineligible to vote. The New York Daily News reported in August, 2004 on how some 46,000 New Yorkers are registered to vote in both the city and Florida, what it called a “shocking finding” because it “found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters have voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine,” and noted that “efforts to prevent people from registering in more than one state rely mostly on the honor system.”

For answer number three, we can’t forget granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.  Aka giving criminals given an easy path to citizenship.  While it has been reported that House members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have threatened to vote against any health care bill that doesn’t allow illegal (criminal) immigrants access, word is slipping out that they’ll back down if they get an agreement from Obama that health care coverage for criminals who “earn” a path to citizenship will be addressed in an immigration bill.  A bill rumored to be already in the planning stages.  Then beholden to their savior, the Democrats are counting on their votes.

But there is a small sliver of hope.  Business Week reports that America’s “misery index” (the sum of a country’s unemployment and inflation rates)  has reached 11.8% and there is no reason to think it will not continue to move higher over the next year.  This is its highest point since May 1991, and more than 3 percentage points higher than its average since then.  It topped out at 22% in 1980 – helping to usher in the Reagan era.

It can be another case where misery loves company.  In this case, the company can be found at the polls.  And in such numbers the Democrats’ attempts to steal any election will be so blatant they are put away for good.