Sunday, September 30, 2012 4:35:42 PM
GOP Volunteer In Florida Tells Voters: Don't Vote For Obama, He's A Medicare-Killing Muslim (AUDIO)
09/28/2012
[...]
"Y'all sound like y'all are senior citizens, right? Yeah. You don't want Obama. You really don't want Obama. Because he'll get rid of your Medicare. You might as well say goodbye to it," she says. "I don't know if you've done any research on Obama or not, but he is a Muslim, um, he is, um, gotta socialistic view on the, ya know, economy, the government, the whole nine yards. If he had his way, we'd be a socialistic country."
[...]
"Pay attention to Fox News. If you can get out and watch that movie '2016' do so," she says.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/gop-volunteer-florida-obama-muslim_n_1924051.html [with audio embedded, and comments]
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Republican Jewish Coalition Gives iPads To Woo 'Volunteers'
09/28/2012
WASHINGTON -- The Republican Jewish Coalition [ http://www.rjchq.org/ ] on Thursday began offering "volunteers" who work the phones in key battleground states "awesome thank-you incentives" for their time helping to defeat President Barack Obama in November.
Put in at least 20 hours at an official RJC phone bank in California, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York or here in Washington and receive a $100 American Express gift card. Up that to 30 hours and one gets an older model iPad 2 (worth about $200). And to volunteers who dial up Jewish voters for 50 hours or more, the RJC will give a new 32GB iPad 3, worth $599. Less time gets a lesser tablet, with 40 hours on the phone equaling a 16GB iPad 3 ($499).
If the Romney supporters were being paid, that would add up to between $5 and $12 an hour. But the RJC said the swag is just "our way of saying thank you for volunteering your valuable time."
[...]
Asked whether his volunteers were being similarly rewarded, David Harris, president and CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said, "Oh my goodness, no. When we've done phone banking with local volunteers over many hours, we've offered cheese pizza for dinner, water. That's it. No American Express cards, no iPad 3s, no iPad 2s.
"The difference may be that folks volunteering for us and helping us out may feel deeply committed to the cause," Harris said. "I've not seen the need to offer high-end consumer electronics or American Express cards to garner so-called volunteers."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/republican-jewish-coalition-ipads_n_1923870.html [with comments]
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Todd Akin's Pollster Compares His Situation To That Of Cult Leader David Koresh [UPDATE]
Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin (R)
By Laura Bassett
Posted: 09/28/2012 2:53 pm EDT Updated: 09/28/2012 5:35 pm EDT
Referring to the Republican Party's attempts [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/21/politics/akin-controversy/index.html ] to "smoke" Senate candidate Todd Akin (R-Mo.) out of the race following his "legitimate rape [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/19/todd-akin-abortion-legitimate-rape_n_1807381.html ]" remarks, Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway compared the situation of Akin, her longtime client, to notorious cult leader David Koresh in a radio interview on Thursday.
The day after Akin made the "legitimate rape" remark "was like the Waco with David Koresh situation, where they’re trying to smoke him out with the SWAT teams and the helicopters and the bad Nancy Sinatra records," Conway told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gop-pollster-advised-akin-withstand-controversy-david-koresh-faced-atf-waco ] on the "Washington Watch Weekly" radio show. "Then here comes day two, and you realize the guy’s not coming out of the bunker. Listen, Todd has shown his principle to the voters."
Koresh, a religious cult leader and accused child rapist, died with 54 other adults and 28 children in his compound in 1993 after a 51-day standoff with the FBI in Waco, Texas.
Akin's Koresh-like determination to stand his ground, Conway said, could lead more Republicans to send him their endorsement ahead of November, as former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) already did this week [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/rick-santorum-jim-demint-endorse-todd-akin-in-missouri/ ].
"You saw former speaker Gingrich there on Todd’s behalf at a fundraiser on Monday, saying it’s just 'conventional idiocy' that’s preventing people from backing Todd," she told Perkins. "And he predicts that come mid-October, everyone will be following yours and his lead back to Missouri, with their money."
Akin's spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
UPDATE: 4 p.m. -- Conway told The Huffington Post that she did not mean to compare the two men. "My comparison was to the tactics used to push Akin from the race, not to the men involved," she wrote in an email. "I would never compare David Koresh to Todd Akin."
Akin spokesman Ryan Hite told the St. Louis Dispatch [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/kevin-mcdermott/akin-consultant-compares-his-fortitude-to-cult-leader-david-koresh/article_42658a4a-0996-11e2-990d-0019bb30f31a.html ] that Conway's comment "was a stupid comment to make."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/todd-akins-pollster-cult-david-koresh_n_1923613.html [with comments]
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Christian conservatives hold “America for Jesus” prayer rally in Philly ahead of election
By Associated Press, Published: September 27 | Updated: Friday, September 28, 2:08 PM
Christian conservatives who blame “moral depravity” for everything from the recession to terrorism are converging on Philadelphia for a rally they hope will spark a religious revival as Election Day nears.
Called “America for Jesus 2012,” the prayer assembly on Independence Mall is attracting support across a spectrum of Protestant clergy and activists. Among the scheduled speakers are religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, along with preachers such as Cindy Jacobs of Generals International ministry who say they’re prophets with a direct line to God. Many backers had also endorsed “The Response,” the prayer rally hosted last year by Texas Gov. Rick Perry just before he entered the GOP presidential primary.
John Blanchard, national coordinator for “America for Jesus 2012,” said the two-day event starting Friday night is nonpartisan. It’s modeled after the 1980 “Washington for Jesus” rally, considered a pivotal show of organizational strength by the then-fledgling Christian right. Bishop Anne Gimenez, whose late husband John helped lead the 1980 assembly, is a lead organizer of the Philadelphia gathering.
“We are praying that God would touch America,” said Blanchard, executive pastor of Rock Church International in Virginia, which the Gimenez family founded. “We’re not Democrats and Republicans. We’re Christians.”
Still, many of those offering prayers at the event have been outspoken critics of President Barack Obama. Steve Strang, the influential Pentecostal publisher of Charisma magazine, wrote in a blog post inviting readers to join him in Philadelphia that America is under threat from a “radical homosexual agenda” and Obama “seems to be moving toward some form of European socialism.”
Jacobs blamed a mysterious Arkansas bird-kill last year on Obama’s repeal of the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” enabling gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.
David Barton, a self-taught historian who emphasizes the Christian roots of the U.S., is another rally supporter. Barton wrote in a Feb. 29 article that Obama has shown “hostility toward Biblical people of faith” while giving “preferential treatment” to Muslims. (Obama has said he was raised in a nonreligious home and later became Christian.) The publisher Thomas Nelson last month withdrew Barton’s book, “The Jefferson Lies,” citing historical errors. The book challenged the belief that Jefferson was largely secular and promoted the separation of church and state.
Anne Gimenez said in a phone interview that although the event is Christian, the assembly will not advocate that the U.S. government be limited to Christians.
“I have no boundaries or limitations on that. I would just like to see someone who is God-fearing” in public office, she said.
Gimenez said Philadelphia was chosen because of its importance in U.S. history. The rally will be held outside the building where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Pennsylvania is also where evangelist George Whitefield preached during the first Great Awakening, the 18th-century religious revival that spread through the American colonies. Blanchard said his group successfully petitioned Pennsylvania lawmakers to declare Saturday “William Penn Day” in honor of Pennsylvania’s founder, who championed religious freedom.
“America is in a state of emergency evidenced by the symptoms of widespread moral depravity and economic meltdown,” organizers wrote on the rally’s website. “Education, government, and man’s wisdom cannot solve this problem.”
Two weeks ago, the ministry coalition behind the assembly distributed food and offered medical care throughout Philadelphia as part of the run-up to the gathering. Attendees will be asked to start 40 days of prayer and fasting, through the Nov. 6, election, to help turn the nation toward God. Preachers representing Messianic Judaism, which teaches that Christ is the Messiah, a belief at odds with traditional Judaism, will blow the shofar, a ram’s horn used in Jewish ritual.
The major speakers are scheduled for Saturday. Joel Osteen, the Texas megachurch pastor, has sent a video prayer message to the event. An executive with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is also among those offering prayers. A message of support from 93-year-old evangelist Billy Graham will be read.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/christian-conservatives-hold-america-for-jesus-prayer-rally-in-philly-ahead-of-election/2012/09/27/a89beb7a-08d7-11e2-9eea-333857f6a7bd_story.html [with comments]
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Thousands Pray for US at 'America for Jesus' Rally
Dharma Bohall, 13, extends her arms in prayer during the America for Jesus prayer rally, Friday Sept. 28, 2012, on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. Christian conservatives who blame “moral depravity” for everything from the recession to terrorism are converging on Philadelphia for a rally they hope will spark a religious revival as Election Day nears.
(AP Photo/ Joseph Kaczmarek)
By MARYCLAIRE DALE Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA September 30, 2012 (AP)
Thousands of conservative Christians gathered Saturday on Independence Mall in Philadelphia to pray for the future of the United States in the weeks before the presidential election.
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins topped a full day of speakers at "The America for Jesus 2012" prayer rally.
Robertson, a former Republican candidate for president, called the election important, but didn't mention either major political party or candidate by name.
"I don't care what the ACLU says or any atheists say. This nation belongs to Jesus, and we're here today to reclaim his sovereignty," said Robertson, 82, who founded the Christian Coalition and Christian Broadcasting Network, and ran for president in 1988.
Organizers plan another prayer rally Oct. 20 in Washington, D.C., two weeks before President Barack Obama faces Republican Mitt Romney in the presidential election.
Perkins asked the crowd to pray for elected officials including Obama.
"We pray that his eyes will be open to the truth," Perkins said.
A number of event organizers, though, have been vocal critics of the Democratic president.
Steve Strang, the influential Pentecostal publisher of Charisma magazine, which was distributed at the rally, recently wrote in a blog post that America is under threat from a "radical homosexual agenda." He also said Obama "seems to be moving toward some form of European socialism."
And speaker Cindy Jacobs has blamed a mysterious Arkansas bird-kill last year on Obama's repeal of the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell," which allows gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.
Speakers throughout the day condemned abortion, gay marriage and population control as practiced by Planned Parenthood. Christian rock music filled the historic mall as speakers challenged the crowd to overcome the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and slothfulness.
The rally was held outside of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Pennsylvania is also where evangelist George Whitefield preached during the first Great Awakening, the 18th-century religious revival that spread through the American colonies.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/thousands-pray-us-america-jesus-rally-17357296 [with comments]
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Andrew Beacham, Kentucky House Candidate, Airs Shock Ad Featuring Dismembered Fetus
By Nick Wing
Posted: 09/28/2012 2:28 pm EDT Updated: 09/28/2012 2:33 pm EDT
If you think President Barack Obama is a baby murderer who has a lot in common with Adolf Hitler and serial killer Ted Bundy, Kentucky has a congressional candidate with just the ad for you.
His name is Andrew Beacham, an independent candidate running for Kentucky's 2nd Congressional District. He has no real chance of winning, but that's just fine by him, because that's not what his campaign is actually about. He admitted as much in a recent interview with the Associated Press [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57520081/anti-abortion-ad-to-begin-airing-wednesday-in-ky/ ].
"Clearly, our main goal is to cause Obama's defeat," Beacham said. "But if I were to get elected, that would be great."
Instead, Beacham, an Indiana resident and cohort of anti-abortion crusader Randall Terry, can use his infeasible candidacy to skirt the Federal Communications Commission's indecency regulations and run graphic ads depicting such things as dismembered fetuses.
And that's not all. Beacham's spot compares Obama to Hitler and Bundy, as well as Al Capone, and shows photos of slain Christians and Jews. Beacham claims that the president is akin to these notorious historical figures because he allows federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions along with a large number of other health services.
“If you vote for Obama, the real question is, what are you smoking?” a bearded Beacham says, puffing a cigar.
(Watch the ad here [ http://www.mrctv.org/videos/andrew-beacham-congress-what-are-you-smoking ], if you really feel like you need to see it for yourself)
And while his ad seems extreme, there's not much local stations do to stop it from airing. The AP reports that it cost about $5,000 to purchase airtime for to run the spot about 22 times in three Kentucky markets. Bowling Green's WKBO has said it can't refuse to show it. The station is instead looking into including a disclaimer about the offensive nature of the content.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/andrew-beacham-kentucky_n_1923409.html [with comments]
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The Separation of Satan and State
By James Moore
Posted: 09/25/2012 7:02 pm
Maybe it's time for the comedy writers in New York and Los Angeles to move to Texas. They need to be closer to their source material because Texas Governor Rick Perry is making it easy for everyone to be a comic. Of course, it might not be Perry; it could just be Satan making Perry look like a clown, assuming, of course, you think Satan exists. (And if he does, is Satan important enough to be capitalized?)
Regardless of whether you believe Perry's assertion [ http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Perry-discusses-tuition-freeze-budget-3885035.php ] that the horned one stalks the universe, the governor's arguments about faith and government are even funnier than him insisting the devil is trying to make politics the province of only evil types. Hell, look at what Perry's administration has done to Texas in recent years with regards to making health care unobtainable for the poor, cutting school budgets so he could run for president, and forcing women to get sonograms before abortion procedures; he's a case study in the evil nature of politics. Perry appears to have given Satan a blowtorch and made taxpayers put on gasoline suits.
"I believe in Satan," the governor said at the Texas Tribune Festival. "And I hope most of the people in here do, too. The great trick that Satan pulls is making people believe that he didn't (sic) exist. It's a very interesting discussion we need to have as a country."
Yes, of course, one out of every four people living in Texas is without health care [ http://www.texastribune.org/texas-health-resources/health-reform-and-texas/texas-reacts-health-care-ruling/ ], we have the highest number of people over age 25 without high school diplomas [ http://www.literacytexas.org/index.php/Resources/literacy_facts/ ], we are firing teachers, our roads are being turned into cash machines for corporations because the Perry administration won't fight to have the state fund them, and he wants to talk about Satan. Perry believes that there is no doubt Satan is trying to keep people of faith out of government. Satan appears to be about as competent as Perry, however, since our political stages continue to be tread by Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, and others who make their Christian faith a part of what informs their politics, though the interpretations of what is Christian vary wildly in political parties.
Satan can't be all that smart if he has Rick Perry doing his PR.
"If you don't want to think there's forces of darkness and spiritual forces at work that's your call," Perry told his interviewer [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/09/24/rick_perry_s_sleep_apnea_destroyed_his_presidential_run_was_satan_involved_.html ]. He noted:
My Christian faith teaches me that. The idea that you believe that Satan could be involved in every act and decision in the world, it's not out of the ordinary for those of us of the Christian faith, and if he's trying to keep people out of the public arena any way he can by hook or crook or lying or whatever you wanna put out there. I believe he's certainly capable of that. That's my belief and I don't apologize for it.
Perry has too many other things he needs to apologize for. But his misdirection call is, "Hey look, Bub, it's Beelzebub." Nobody's ever asked him to abandon his faith. What's annoying and destructive is when he tries to force his faith into the institutions of government because he thinks it's what best for Texas and the rest of the country. It's easy to figure out what his opinion on that idea would be if we had a Jewish or Muslim governor. Perry's not talking about people of faith, he's referring to people of his Christian religion, and he thinks the law is virtually persecuting Christians and keeping them from practicing their religion in the U.S.
"When there's a directive that comes down from a federal court that says you can't pray at a public event," he explained, "that's basically saying people of faith should not be involved in the public arena. There's case after case where folks have been pushed back on from standpoint of being engaged in prayer."
Those of us who believe in the separation of church and state will continue to hope that the court will keep prayer away from public institutions. If you are Jewish or Muslim or Hindu and pay taxes, why would you want to pay for buildings and public venues where Christians pray and you don't? Perry is no different than other Christian evangelicals and wants his belief system adopted by, not just all Americans, but the entire world. At a political event in San Antonio several years ago, he was asked by a Jewish reporter about the pastor's claim from the pulpit that anyone who didn't believe in Jesus Christ as their savior was "bound to burn in hell." Perry, less than subtle, let the Jewish journalist know he didn't have much of a future.
"I believe that no one goes to heaven unless they have Jesus Christ as their savior," he said.
That same Jewish reporter and I had traveled on many presidential and gubernatorial campaigns together and I always winced when we were in taxpayer-funded buildings, like schools, and he had to tolerate Christian invocations before he then tolerated the political rally.
Perry, like many others who are religiously intolerant of different belief systems, constantly refers to America's Founding Fathers as his argument for prayer in schools and public places, oblivious, of course, to the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson. In his letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut, who complained to the president that they were not being allowed to practice their brand of Christianity, Jefferson made clear that faith and government ought not ever be wed, and he cast the phrase that has guided our country on this matter for more than two centuries.
'I contemplate with sovereign reverence," Jefferson wrote, "that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."
The line is hardly subject to misinterpretation but it suffers an abundance of distortions. Both the Constitution and one of its designers wanted to prevent the government from doing anything that promotes any religion, and praying, especially organized prayer, in a public institution, or at a high school football game, or before convening a legislative body in a taxpayer funded capitol, is offering sustenance to a belief system that is not held by everyone who submits to the tax laws. It is, therefore, wrong.
But it's possible I forgot to sign off my computer and Satan wrote this while I was runnin' around sinnin' somewhere.
Also at www.moorethink.com [ http://www.moorethink.com/2012/09/25/the-separation-of-satan-and-state/ (with comments; image above from]
Copyright (C) 2012 Moore Think
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/separation-satan-and-state_b_1914267.html [with comments]
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Fighting Over God’s Image
Mark Pernice
By EDWARD J. BLUM and PAUL HARVEY
Published: September 26, 2012
THE murders of four Americans over an amateurish online video about Muhammad, like the attempted murder of a Danish cartoonist who in 2005 had depicted the prophet with a bomb in his turban, have left many Americans confused, angry and fearful about the rage that some Muslims feel about visual representations of their sacred figures.
The confusion stems, in part, from the ubiquity of sacred images in American culture. God, Jesus, Moses, Buddha and other holy figures are displayed in movies, cartoons and churches and on living room walls. We place them on T-shirts and bumper stickers — and even tattoo them on our skin.
But Americans have had their own history of conflict, some of it deadly, over displays of the sacred. The path toward civil debate over such representation is neither short nor easy.
The United States was settled, in part, by radical Protestant iconoclasts from Britain who considered the creation and use of sacred imagery to be a violation of the Second Commandment against graven images. The anti-Catholic colonists at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay refused to put images of Jesus in their churches and meetinghouses. They scratched out crosses in books. In the early 1740s, English officials even marched on an Indian community in western Connecticut, where they cross-examined Moravian missionaries who reportedly had a book with “the picture of our Saviour in it.”
The colonists feared Catholic infiltration from British-controlled Canada. Shortly after the Boston Tea Party, a Connecticut pastor warned that if the British succeeded, the colonists would have their Bibles taken from them and be compelled to “pray to the Virgin Mary, worship images, believe the doctrine of Purgatory, and the Pope’s infallibility.”
It was not only Protestants who opposed sacred imagery. In the Southwest, Pueblo Indians who waged war against Spanish colonizers not only burned and dismembered some crucifixes, but even defecated on them.
In the early Republic, many Americans avoided depicting Jesus or God in any form. The painter Washington Allston spoke for many artists of the 1810s when he said, “I think his character too holy and sacred to be attempted by the pencil.” A visiting Russian diplomat, Pavel Svinin, was amazed at the prevalence of a different image: George Washington’s. “Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home,” he wrote, “just as we have images of God’s saints.”
Only in the late 19th century did images of God and Jesus become commonplace in churches, Sunday school books, Bibles and homes. There were many forces at work: steam printing presses; new canals and railroads; and, not least, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Catholics who brought with them an array of crucifixes, Madonnas and busts of saints. Protestants began producing their own images — often, to appeal to children — and gradually became more comfortable with holy images. In the 20th century, the United States began exporting such images, most notably Warner Sallman’s 1941 “Head of Christ,” which is one of the most reproduced images [ http://www.warnersallman.com/collection/images/head-of-christ/ ] in world history.
But there was also resistance. When Hollywood first started portraying Jesus in films, one fundamentalist Christian fumed, “The picturing of the life and sufferings of our Savior by these institutions falls nothing short of blasphemy.” Vernon E. Jordan Jr., an African-American who was later president of the National Urban League and an adviser to President Bill Clinton, recalled that white audience members gasped when he played Jesus as an undergraduate at DePauw University in Indiana in the 1950s.
In fact, race has been a constant source of conflict over American depictions of Jesus. In Philadelphia in the 1930s, the black street preacher F. S. Cherry stormed into African-American churches and pointed at paintings or prints of white Christs, shouting, as one observer recounted, “Who in the hell is this? Nobody knows! They say it is Jesus. That’s a damned lie!”
During the civil rights era, black-power advocates and liberation theologians excoriated white images of the sacred. A 1967 “Declaration of Black Churchmen” demanded “the removal of all images which suggest that God is white.” As racial violence enveloped Detroit that year, African-American residents painted the white faces of Catholic icons black.
More recently, there have been uproars over the Nigerian-British painter Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” and the New York artist and photographer Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Mr. Serrano’s image of Jesus on the crucifix, submerged in the artist’s own urine, roused a crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts in the late 1980s. Mr. Ofili’s painting of a dark-skinned Madonna with photographs of vaginas surrounding her enraged Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The mayor, who mistakenly claimed that elephant dung was smeared on the image when it in fact was used at the base to hold the painting up, tried to ban it [ http://blogs.artinfo.com/culturalaffairs/2012/09/12/after-attacks-in-egypt-and-libya-what-the-state-department-can-learn-from-the-art-world/ ] from being displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in 1999. (One upset Christian smeared [ http://artcrimes.net/holy-virgin-mary ] white paint over it.)
Images of the sacred haven’t caused mass violence in the United States, but they have generated intense conflict. Our ability to sustain a culture supersaturated with visual displays of the divine, largely without violence, came only after massive technological change, centuries of immigration and social movements that forced Americans to reckon with differences of race, ethnicity and religion.
Edward J. Blum [ http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/histweb/faculty_and_staff/faculty_bios/e_blum.htm ], an associate professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey [ http://paulharvey.org/about/ ], a professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, are the authors of “The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Color-Christ-Saga-America/dp/product-description/0807835722 ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/opinion/fighting-over-gods-image.html
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Voter ID Laws Could Delay Outcome Of Close Election
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R), says his office is trying to reduce the number of provisional ballots.
(AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
09/26/12 12:22 PM ET EDT
WASHINGTON — New voting laws in key states could force a lot more voters to cast provisional ballots this election, delaying results in close races for days while election officials scrutinize ballots and campaigns wage legal battles over which ones should get counted.
New laws in competitive states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could leave the outcome of the presidential election in doubt – if the vote is close – while new laws in Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee could delay results in state or local elections.
Some new laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls are still being challenged in court, adding to the uncertainty as the Nov. 6 election nears.
"It's a possibility of a complete meltdown for the election," said Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida.
Voters cast provisional ballots for a variety of reasons: They don't bring proper ID to the polls; they fail to update their voter registration after moving; they try to vote at the wrong precinct; or their right to vote is challenged by someone.
These voters may have their votes counted, but only if election officials can verify that they were eligible to vote, a process that can take days or weeks. Adding to the potential for chaos: Many states won't even know how many provisional ballots have been cast until sometime after Election Day.
Voters cast nearly 2.1 million provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election. About 69 percent were eventually counted, according to election results compiled by The Associated Press.
Provisional ballots don't get much attention if an election is a landslide. But what if the vote is close, as the polls suggest in the race between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney?
Most of today's voting nightmares go back to Florida in 2000, when the results of balloting and thus the winner of the presidential contest were not known for weeks after Election Day. Questions about recount irregularities and the validity of ballots with hanging chads – paper fragments still attached to punch-card ballots – preceded the eventual declaration that George W. Bush had won the state by 537 votes and was the next president.
"In a close election, all eyes are going to be on those provisional ballots, and those same canvassing boards that were looking at pregnant chads and hanging chads back in 2000," Smith said. "It's a potential mess."
The federal election law passed in response to the 2000 presidential election gives voters the option to cast a provisional ballot, if poll workers deny them a regular one. Voter ID laws could slow the count even more.
In Virginia and Wisconsin, voters who don't bring an ID to the polls can still have their votes counted if they produce an ID by the Friday following Election Day. Pennsylvania's law gives voters six days to produce an ID. The Wisconsin and Pennsylvania laws are being challenged in court.
In Ohio, which has competitive races for both president and the Senate, provisional voters have up to 10 days following the election to bring an ID to the county board of elections.
If voters in Florida don't bring an ID to the polls, they must sign a provisional ballot envelope. Canvassing boards then will try to match the signatures with those in voter registration records, a process that conjures up images of the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
"Americans have gotten used to the expectation that you could turn on the TV and you would know that night who won the election, even after Florida in 2000," said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. "But this could be an election in which we don't know the answer for several days."
Florida could see a big increase in provisional ballots because the state has tightened its change-of-address requirements. This year, voters who move from one county to another in Florida without updating their voter registration will have to cast provisional ballots. In previous elections, they could change their address on Election Day and cast a regular ballot.
Four years ago, Florida voters cast about 36,000 provisional ballots. About half of them were eventually counted, though the percentages varied greatly from county to county.
This year, Florida could have 300,000 provisional ballots, said Michael McDonald, an election expert at George Mason University.
"You want to see chaos in Florida? There it is," McDonald said.
In Ohio, address changes were the biggest reason voters cast provisional ballots in 2008, said Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted. Ohio voters cast about 207,000 provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election – second only to California. About 130,000 of them were cast because voters moved and didn't update their voter registration, Husted said.
In 2004, the number of provisional ballots cast in Ohio was larger than Bush's margin of victory over Democrat John Kerry. Kerry didn't concede until the following morning, when the provisional ballot picture became clear.
In 2008, the number of provisional ballots cast in North Carolina was larger than Obama's margin of victory over Republican John McCain. The Associated Press didn't declare the state for Obama until the day after Election Day, though Obama had already won enough states to claim the presidency.
Husted said his office is trying to reduce the number of provisional ballots in Ohio by using change-of-address information from the Postal Service to send out more than 300,000 postcards to Ohio voters, reminding them to update their registration.
"If we can potentially reduce the number of ballots cast provisionally, then you lessen the likelihood that there will have to be a prolonged process as it relates to those ballots," Husted said. "Understand, a provisional ballot is a second chance because you didn't do it right the first time, meaning that you didn't update your address, you didn't bring in the proper form of ID, there's something that the voter didn't do at the onset that prevented them from voting a regular ballot."
Associated Press writer Connie Cass and AP election research coordinator Christina Bryant contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/26/voter-id-laws-elections_n_1915571.html [with comments]
===
Voter Harassment, Circa 2012
Editorial
Published: September 21, 2012
This is how voter intimidation worked in 1966 [ http://www.pfaw.org/sites/default/files/thelongshadowofjimcrow.pdf ]: White teenagers in Americus, Ga., harassed black citizens in line to vote, and the police refused to intervene. Black plantation workers in Mississippi had to vote in plantation stores, overseen by their bosses. Black voters in Choctaw County, Ala., had to hand their ballots directly to white election officials for inspection.
This is how it works today: In an ostensible hunt for voter fraud, a Tea Party group, True the Vote, descends on a largely minority precinct and combs the registration records for the slightest misspelling or address error. It uses this information to challenge voters at the polls, and though almost every challenge is baseless, the arguments and delays frustrate those in line and reduce turnout.
The thing that’s different from the days of overt discrimination is the phony pretext of combating voter fraud. Voter identity fraud is all but nonexistent, but the assertion that it might exist is used as an excuse to reduce the political rights of minorities, the poor, students, older Americans and other groups that tend to vote Democratic.
In The Times on Monday [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-true-the-vote-are-looking-very-closely-for-voter-fraud.html?pagewanted=all (about 70% of the way down at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79762375 )], Stephanie Saul described how the plan works. True the Vote grew out of a Tea Party group in Texas, the King Street Patriots, with the assistance of Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Koch brothers that works to elect conservative Republicans [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhcGeEUwWmo ]. It has developed its own software to check voter registration lists against driver’s license and property records. Those kinds of database matches are notoriously unreliable because names and addresses are often slightly different in various databases, but the group uses this technique to challenge more voters.
In 2009 and 2010, for example, the group focused on the Houston Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a black Democrat. After poring over the records for five months, True the Vote came up with a list of 500 names it considered suspicious and challenged them with election authorities. Officials put these voters on “suspense,” requiring additional proof of address, but in most cases voters had simply changed addresses. That didn’t stop the group from sending dozens of white “poll watchers” to precincts in the district during the 2010 elections, deliberately creating friction with black voters.
On the day of the recall election of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, the group used inaccurate lists to slow down student voting at Lawrence University in Appleton with intrusive identity checks. Three election “observers,” including one from True the Vote, were so disruptive that a clerk gave them two warnings, but the ploy was effective: many students gave up waiting in line and didn’t vote.
True the Vote, now active in 30 states, hopes to train hundreds of thousands of poll watchers to make the experience of voting like “driving and seeing the police following you [ http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/08/true_the_votes_large_and_growing_far-right_network.html ],” as one of the group’s leaders put it. (Not surprisingly, the group is also active in the voter ID movement, with similar goals.) These activities “present a real danger to the fair administration of elections and to the fundamental freedom to vote,” as a recent report by Common Cause and Demos [ http://www.demos.org/publication/bullies-ballot-box-protecting-freedom-vote-against-wrongful-challenges-and-intimidation ] put it.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits intimidation or interference in the act of voting, but the penalties are fairly light. Many states have tougher laws, but they won’t work unless law enforcement officials use them to crack down on the illegal activities — handed down from Jim Crow days — of True the Vote and similar groups.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/opinion/voter-harassment-circa-2012.html [with comments]
===
Voter Law In New Hampshire Sparks William O'Brien, New Hampshire House Speaker, To Challenge Attorney General
The New Hampshire capitol dome in Concord.
By John Celock
Posted: 09/29/2012 12:16 pm EDT Updated: 09/29/2012 12:26 pm EDT
The Tea Party speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, William O'Brien (R-Mont Vernon), is asking a state court to force the state attorney general to accept his interpretation of a new voter registration law relating to college students.
Legislators passed the law -- over the veto of Gov. John Lynch (D) -- earlier this year to require those registering to vote to obtain residency in the state, including a driver's license and car registration. The previous law said that living in the state -- including living in a dorm room -- was sufficient to vote.
O'Brien is objecting [ http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120929/GJNEWS_01/709299896 ] to a state judge's ruling -- and state Attorney General Michael Delaney's view -- on the law the Legislature passed because the ruling does not change the state's definition of "residency' and "domicile" in the Granite State, Foster's Daily Democrat reports. The law was challenged in court with Delaney arguing that O'Brien's interpretation is not included in the version of the law passed.
Foster's Daily Democrat reports [id.]:
The judge ruled New Hampshire law continues to distinguish between having a "domicile" and being a "resident." He called the new wording on the voter registration form an "inaccurate and confusing expression of the law," and said it "does not pass constitutional muster."
Associate Attorney General Richard Head, who handled the court case for the state, did not attempt to persuade [the judge that] O'Brien's interpretation of the law is correct, nor did he advance it in court.
"My office is only able to defend the law that the Legislature actually passed, not the law that the Speaker wishes had been passed," Delaney said in a prepared statement. "The law that the Legislature passed did not, in any way, modify the definition of residency in New Hampshire. The Speaker's position is simply not supported by the law and will weaken our position in defending the law. We will not present it in court."
O'Brien accused Delaney of constitutional harm [ http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/statenewengland/977322-469/court-dispute-over-nh-voter-registration-law.html ] in a statement, the Nashua Telegraph reported.
"The attorney general's office is turning the Constitution on its head in order to compel the court to gag the Legislature from providing a defense that the people deserve for a duly passed law either because the attorney general is unable or unwilling to provide that defense," O'Brien said. "The people of New Hampshire deserve not to have non-residents wandering around diluting their votes."
O'Brien and the Tea Party-controlled House have been pushing stronger voter identification laws and other conservative leaning laws since taking office in 2011. In May, the Legislature overturned Lynch's veto of O'Brien's voter ID law in a contentious debate that included state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt (R-Manchester) giving O'Brien a Nazi salute [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/15/steve-vaillancourt-new-hampshire-lawmaker-voter-id_n_1518432.html ] on the House floor after O'Brien blocked him from opposing the bill.
In July, O'Brien barred the Concord Monitor from his press conferences after the paper ran a cartoon of him with a Hitler-style mustache [ http://concord-nh.patch.com/articles/nhgop-calls-on-newspaper-to-retract-insulting-cartoon ]
following the Vaillancourt incident.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/29/voting-law-bill-obrien-new-hampshire_n_1925235.html [with comments]
===
More Suspicious Voter Forms Are Found
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: September 29, 2012
MIAMI — The number of Florida counties reporting suspicious voter registration forms connected to Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm hired by the state Republican Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html ] to sign up new voters, has grown to 10, officials said, as local election supervisors continue to search their forms for questionable signatures, addresses or other identifiers.
After reports of suspicious forms [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/us/politics/florida-gop-reports-suspect-voter-registration-forms.html ] surfaced in Florida, the company — owned by Nathan Sproul, who has been involved in voter registration efforts since at least the 2004 presidential election — was fired last week by the state Republican Party and the Republican National Committee [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_national_committee/index.html ]. The party had hired it to conduct drives in Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia.
In Colorado, a young woman employed by Strategic Allied was shown on a video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdk55dLsFhc (next below)]
The Florida Division of Elections [ http://election.dos.state.fl.us/ ] has forwarded the reports of possible fraud to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation. Prosecutors in some affected counties are also investigating. It is unclear how many forms have been forwarded, in all: in Palm Beach County, the election supervisor found 106 suspicious forms, but the number in several other counties is far lower.
Bay County has found eight suspicious forms with the Republican Party registration code connected to Strategic Allied. In Pasco County, three have been found.
The state Republican Party, which paid the company $1.3 million to register voters here, said it would file an elections fraud complaint against Strategic Allied, which is based in Tempe, Ariz.
Mr. Sproul was once the executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. In 2004, his voter registration project was investigated by the Justice Department and the attorneys general in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon after widespread allegations of fraud surfaced, but no charges were brought.
Questions are now being raised about how the company’s employees were paid to register voters.
Mary Blackwell, a volunteer for the League of Women Voters [ http://www.lwvokaloosa.org/ ] in Okaloosa County, said she was registering voters this month at Northwest Florida State College. Sitting nearby was a man who said he was registering voters for the Republican Party of Florida. The man told her he received $12 an hour but had to bring in at least 10 forms to get paid.
Paul Lux, the election supervisor for Okaloosa County, a Republican who is still combing through registration forms in his office, said he was told by several “concerned citizens,” including Ms. Blackwell, that the employees were being paid for the number of forms they brought back.
In Florida, it is illegal to pay someone per registration form.
“I told my friends in the party then that paying people to do this was a bad idea, and it almost inevitably leads to problems,” Mr. Lux said. “Unfortunately, I was not proven wrong.”
Fred Petti, a lawyer for Strategic Allied, said the employees were paid only by the hour, with no quota attached. He added that they also were instructed to register anyone from any political party, not just the Republican Party.
Previous investigations of Mr. Sproul’s operations focused on efforts to register only Republicans or allegations that Democratic forms were torn up. Mr. Petti also said that Mr. Sproul cooperated with the Palm Beach County election supervisor to find out who was at fault and has offered to do the same with other election supervisors.
In Palm Beach County, one person was responsible for the fraudulent forms, officials said. Mr. Petti said he does not yet know how widespread the problem is in other counties.
Election supervisors said they have come across forms with handwriting that did not match previous registration forms, bogus addresses and other identifiers like driver’s license numbers that appeared to be invalid. But in other cases, the forms were just incomplete, which does not constitute fraud.
“Until we see what the cards are, it’s hard for us to comment,” Mr. Petti said.
Mark Anderson, the Bay County supervisor, said he has found eight questionable forms in his county, but he is looking for more. The forms had either unchecked boxes for party affiliation or signatures that looked different from previous ones. He said he had also received calls from voters who said they had not changed their party affiliation, although it appeared they had. “I don’t believe there is going to be massive numbers,” Mr. Anderson said.
Election supervisors are able to pinpoint the group responsible for the questionable forms because of a 2011 state law that tightened rules on voter registration groups. The law, which sparked lawsuits and controversy, requires groups to register with the state and have their registration number on the forms they distribute.
A provision that required groups to turn in registration forms within 48 hours was struck down in court this year. “The Republican Legislature was beaten up pretty badly, partially by myself,” Mr. Lux said. “But they seem to have been doing something to improve the process.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/us/politics/suspicious-voter-forms-found-in-10-florida-counties.html
===
Colo. girl registering ‘only Romney’ voters tied to firm dumped by RNC over fraud
September 28, 2012
[...]
And FOX31 Denver has confirmed that the young woman seen registering voters outside a Colorado Springs grocery store in a YouTube video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdk55dLsFhc (embedded in the preceding item)], in which she admits to trying to only register voters who support Mitt Romney, was indeed a contract employee of Sproul’s company.
[...]
http://kwgn.com/2012/09/28/colo-girl-registering-only-romney-voters-tied-to-firm-dumped-by-rnc-over-fraud-2/ [no comments yet]
===
RNC cuts ties to firm after voter fraud allegations
Voters mark their ballots in Hialeah, Fla, during primary elections.
(Alan Diaz / Associated Press)
By Joseph Tanfani, Melanie Mason and Matea Gold
September 27, 2012, 4:02 p.m.
WASHINGTON – The Republican National Committee has abruptly cut ties to a consulting firm hired for get-out-the-vote efforts in seven presidential election swing states after Florida prosecutors launched an investigation into possible fraud in voter registration forms.
Working through state parties, the RNC has sent more than $3.1 million this year to Strategic Allied Consulting, a company formed in June by Nathan Sproul, an Arizona voting consultant. Sproul has operated other firms that have been accused in past elections of improprieties designed to help Republican candidates, including dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/parties-movements/democratic-party-ORGOV0000005.topic ], but none of those allegations led to any criminal charges.
Sean Spicer, spokesman for the RNC, said the party, has “zero tolerance” for voter fraud and cut ties to the firm on Wednesday, urging state parties to do the same. The forms in question in Florida were all submitted by one worker and were not the result of an effort to suppress votes, he said.
“If you don’t do it right, it doesn’t assist us in any way,” he said.“When the allegations yesterday were brought to our attention, we severed our relationship. We acted swiftly and boldly.”
Strategic Allied Consulting was hired to do voter registration drives in Florida, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada, and had been planning get-out-the-vote drives in Ohio and Wisconsin, according to Sproul.
Sproul owns another company, Lincoln Strategy Group, that was paid about $70,000 by the Mitt Romney [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/government/mitt-romney-PEPLT007376.topic ] campaign during the primaries to gather signatures. He said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the request of the Republican National Committee because of the bad publicity stemming from the past allegations. In 2004, there were allegations in states such as Nevada and Oregon that employees of his firm -- which had a similar contract with the RNC -- registered Democratic voters and then destroyed their forms. (Sproul noted that no criminal charges were ever filed.)
Strategic Allied was set up at an address in Glen Allen, Va., and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.
“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.
Sproul said his company has a vigorous quality control system that includes running criminal background checks on all employees, requiring viewing instructional videos on registration laws (an example of which can be seen here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7yHJhQjNaY ]) and cataloging voter cards with serial numbers that identify who collected each registration. That quality check, Sproul said, enabled the company to quickly determine the individual who submitted the problematic cards in Palm Beach County.
The RNC’s rapid decision to distance itself from the company derailed a major voter registration drive just six weeks before the presidential election, which could hinge on voter turnout in about eight battleground states. It also comes as Republicans [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/parties-movements/republican-party-ORGOV0000004.topic ] around the country have sought to make voter fraud an issue, in part by pressing for voter identification laws.
In Florida, the state party fired the firm on Tuesday after election workers in Palm Beach County discovered numerous registration forms that appeared to be filled out in the same handwriting, some including wrong addresses and birthdays. Some of the forms switched addresses and party registrations, including changes from Democratic or independent to Republican, said county elections supervisor Susan Bucher.
The company helped identify 106 forms submitted by the same worker. Bucher turned them over to Palm Beach County prosecutors, who have begun a criminal investigation.
Five Republican state parties, all in key battleground states, recorded payments to the firm, often soon after large transfers from the national Republican Party.
In Nevada, for example, the RNC transferred $167,000 to the state party on July 25. The next day, the state party made a nearly identical payment -- $166,665— to Strategic Allied Consulting.
A similar pattern occurred in Florida. On July 12, the same day the Florida GOP received $667,000 from the national Republican party, it paid Strategic Allied Consulting $667,597.
In all, the consulting firm received at least $3.1 million in July and August from the Republican parties of Florida, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado. No payments in Ohio or Wisconsin have yet shown up on reports.
“The Colorado Republican Party takes any threat to the voting process very seriously,” said Justin Miller, a spokesman for the Colorado GOP.
joseph.tanfani@latimes.com
melanie.mason@latimes.com
matea.gold@latimes.com
*
Related
Tea party groups work to remove names from Ohio voter rolls
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ohio-voting-fight-20120927,0,811761.story
Federal court strikes down Texas voter identification law
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-texas-voter-id-law-20120830,0,6674365.story
John Lewis exhorts Americans to fight voter ID laws
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-voter-id-john-lewis-20120906,0,5760337.story
Pennsylvania Supreme Court casts doubt on voter ID law
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-pennsylvania-supreme-court-voter-id-20120918,0,5216422.story
*
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-republicans-voter-fraud-florida-20120927,0,5472858.story [with comments]
===
In Election 2012, Game-Change Is Status Quo, Senators Say
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) say that if Democrats maintain control of the Senate and White House in the 2012 election, it will be a game-change.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
By Michael McAuliff
Posted: 09/25/2012 12:01 am EDT Updated: 09/25/2012 11:21 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- Before U.S. senators fled the Capitol for the campaign trail early Saturday, members of each party made an unusual prediction: If this year's election changes nothing in the alignment of national elected offices, it will be a game-changer.
Their takes on whether that would be good varied, but they agreed it would be better for Democrats.
On the Republican side, outspoken South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that by every economic standard, Mitt Romney should be headed for a win over President Barack Obama, with coattails for down-ticket offices.
But in acknowledging a trend in the polls [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/2012-polls-obama-bounce_n_1910146.html ] against the GOP standard-bearer, Graham said it would show that America's demographics have so changed -- in Democrats' favor -- that a president's stewardship of the economy no longer is a deciding factor.
"If we lose this election, performance as president doesn't matter like it used to," Graham said in a discussion with The Huffington Post and several other reporters outside the Senate chamber last week.
"There's a reason no president has ever been reelected with an economy like this," Graham said. "It would tell me that it's more of a demographic race for president than it is a performance-based race. And that may be where we're at as a nation, and maybe where we are as a party, and we just don't know it."
Graham, who said earlier that the country wasn't "generating enough angry, white guys" to keep the GOP in business, was referring to the growing trend of Republicans depending on white voters [ http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2012/08/30/from-lindsey-graham-startling-honesty-on-race-and-politics/ ] to win elections.
It's a startling admission from a Southern white politician, but one he stood by. "If he's able to do this, President Obama's rewritten history," Graham said. "If we lose as Republicans, we're going to have to ask ourselves, who are we going to be? If we don't beat this guy, who are we going to be?"
Democrats also agreed that keeping both the White House and the Senate in Democratic hands -- even without taking back the House -- would mark a turn in the nation's political makeup.
But they argued it would be for the better, signaling what they predicted would be a return to a more bipartisan, compromising style of politics that became anathema to the Tea Party movement that swept the GOP to control of the House in 2010.
"You have two groups of Republicans in House and Senate -- there are no moderates left," said Sen. Chuck Schumer in a late-week news conference. "Half of them are hard-right Tea Party types. Half of them are what I call mainstream conservatives."
Schumer argued that the Tea Party has essentially outflanked the mainstream for the last two years. That would change if Democrats keep what they have. "If we keep the Senate and the president wins -- and even better if we take the House -- the mainstream Republicans are going to be strengthened -- they've told me that," Schumer said.
Schumer predicted that "they're going to want to reach out and work with us because the embrace of the Tea Party that Mitt Romney has done -- that is in my view dragging down all of their candidates -- will have failed."
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), said the Tea Party argument has become so unpopular that the name of its movement has gotten to be a dirty word.
"The Tea Party candidates never use the word Tea Party anymore," Durbin told reporters. "They can't get elected that way. They're running as bipartisan candidates. [If] they come back, do you think they're going to revert to Tea Party roots? Go ahead and test the 'Tea Party' phrase across America. People despise it. It is just the symbol of obstruction."
Indeed, even Senate candidates such as Indiana's Republican state treasurer Richard Mourdock -- who ran in his primary promising against compromise [ http://www.indystar.com/article/20120411/NEWS08/204110323 ] -- have begun running ads promising [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/paul-ryan-richard-mourdock_n_1857097.html ] bipartisanship.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) speculated that once Democrats hold the Senate -- a prospect that is looking more likely than it did half a year ago -- then the Senate Republican leader -- who Reid suggested might not be current Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- would work much more readily with Democrats to head off things like the looming fiscal cliff and to come up with mutually agreeable deficit-cutting plans.
"Maybe whoever is the Republican leader will want to legislate for the good of the country, not try to defeat Obama again," Reid said.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/25/election-2012-game-change_n_1903327.html [with comments]
===
Mitt Romney Arms Race: Obama Fundraising Forcing Frantic Pace, Tough Choices
09/21/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/mitt-romney-race-obama-fundraising_n_1902191.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
===
Mitt Romney Fundraising Efforts Focus On California
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a fundraiser at the Grand Del Mar Court resort September 22, 2012 in San Diego, California.
(MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GettyImages)
By STEVE PEOPLES
09/22/12 11:07 PM ET EDT
DEL MAR, Calif. — Facing criticism that he's too focused on raising campaign cash, Mitt Romney is about to launch what advisers call an "intense battleground state schedule." But on Saturday, the Republican presidential nominee focused exclusively on courting donors in a state that hasn't supported a Republican presidential candidate in almost a quarter century.
Speaking to roughly 650 supporters gathered at Grand Del Mar, a luxury hotel north of San Diego, Romney said his campaign schedule has been hectic.
"I'm not even going to be able to go home today," he said of his second home in nearby La Jolla. "We're just coming to town to see you and keep the campaign going. It's nonstop."
Later at fundraising event in the Los Angeles-area, Romney criticized President Barack Obama for failing to "fix Washington."
"The truth is, he has proven he cannot fix Washington from the inside," Romney said at an event at the Beverly Hilton Hotel that his campaign said raised about $6 million.
The former Massachusetts governor's schedule, particularly his focus on fundraising over campaigning in battleground states with voters, has drawn criticism from some Republicans who fear the campaign is moving in the wrong direction less than seven weeks before Election Day. President Barack Obama on Saturday campaigned in Wisconsin, which has emerged as a swing state, where he also raised money. Polls suggest that Obama has a narrow lead in several key states.
Romney adviser Kevin Madden defended the fundraising focus, while highlighting a shift in the coming days
"We're here raising the resources we're going to need to compete in all those battleground states through Election Day," Madden said. "That's also been matched with a really intense battle ground state schedule that's going to be coming up starting Sunday night. We're keeping very busy."
Over the last week, Romney has attended five public events and at least a dozen fundraisers.
Cognizant of the criticism, his campaign added a Colorado rally to his Sunday night schedule ahead of a three-day bus tour in Ohio. He'll also campaign in Virginia next week. All three states are considered highly competitive.
The shift comes as Romney works to get his campaign back on track.
Already facing reports of campaign infighting, Romney suffered another setback early in the week after his remarks surfaced in an unauthorized video declaring that almost half of Americans are dependent upon government and believe they are victims. On Friday, Romney released his 2011 tax returns showing income of $13.6 million, largely from investment income.
Romney seemed to be trying to move past his video-taped remarks on Saturday.
"This is a tough time," he told donors. "These are our brothers and sisters. These are not statistics. These are people. The president's policies -- these big-government, big-tax monolithic policies -- are not working."
Earlier in the week, conservative columnist Peggy Noonan called Romney's campaign "incompetent."
"Romney doesn't seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems_in this he is exactly like the president_to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events," wrote the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter.
Romney's California fundraising chairman sought to ease donors' concerns that the GOP nominee's campaign was headed in the wrong direction. Thomas Tellefsen told the crowd at the Beverly Hilton he understood they are "probably feeling a bit worried" and frustrated by coverage of the 2012 race.
"I wanted to share some thoughts with you tonight. They can provide you with some comfort," he said. "Polls are not elections. The voters have not yet spoken."
Romney, who would be among the wealthiest presidents ever elected, has struggled to shed the image of an out-of-touch millionaire.
At the Saturday fundraiser in the San Diego-area, where donors paid as much as $25,000 to attend, Romney did little to help that image. He told the audience he spent the night before raising money at a San Francisco area mansion.
"Property up there is, I'm sure, very, very expensive. And we got to her driveway – it was at least a mile long, up and up, it's like, Oh my goodness, how in the world?" Romney said. "And then we came to the home, and it was like San Simeon, you know, the Hearst castle. It was this beautiful home with gardens, manicured gardens, and a pool and a topiary and so forth."
Romney charged that the president is taking America on a "pathway to become like Europe," adding a jab at his audience's home state.
"Europe doesn't work there. It's never going to work here," Romney said. "It's even possible we could be on a pathway to become California – I don't want that either."
He later said he was joking.
And before promising that he was done raising money in the San Diego area, Romney encouraged his California donors to help him reach voters in more competitive states.
"I need you to find someone who voted for Barack Obama, maybe in a swing state, and give him a call, and tell him to go to the polls and support this effort," he said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/22/mitt-romney-fundraising_n_1906566.html [with comments]
===
My white male millionaire friend is voting for WHO!?!
by 4democracyFollow
Mon Sep 17, 2012 at 08:19 AM PDT
I got a call from my buddy last night to come watch Sunday Football, drink a couple beers, and just catch up. We talk politics like we watch football: We mutually respect each other's right to be who we are, but also take great pleasure in giving each other crap about our teams, our candidates, and our economic philosophies.
On my way over last night, I was smiling to myself while coming up with my top ten list of reasons why he should vote for Obama. Not to change his vote, mind you, but just to get him riled up and fire something back over beers. Deep down, I knew he was going to vote for Romney. His business ventures put him in the top one percent, income-wise; He is a big critic of the welfare state; He's a socially-moderate, fiscally conservative Catholic (rarely attending, though); He thinks and works hard to fulfill his own self-interest in his business and personal life, and feels no need to apologize for that.
So, I got to his place and settled into my beer, passed a round of chewing tobacco over to him (you can take the boy out of Missouri, but you can't take the Missouri out of the boy), smiled a smartass smile, and asked him the question I had been waiting for.
"So, who are you voting for for president?"
"I'm not sure," he said completely seriously, "but I think I'm going to vote for Obama."
I nearly choked on my Skoal.
If there's a slam dunk vote for Romney, I thought, this guy was it. I even half-heartedly tried to talk him out of it (I wasn't going to give up easily on having at least SOME sort of debate), telling him that his income bracket would seem to lend itself to Romney's economic promises just as much as his business management needs would find relevance with Romney's promises to ease the regulations governing short-term lending or whether he provided his employees with health-care. I talked about how critics of Obama's economic policies say that all of this uncertainty about government intervention/regulation makes banks/investors more skeptical about investment and has slowed the recovery. As devoid of legitimate talking points as the (R) platform is, there's enough nuggets there when, turned over the right way, are worthy of debate. I mean, who did he think he was, ruining my sparring match by freaking agreeing with me?
But, aside from not really liking that Romney is a Mormon, he said that his decision was based on, of all things, economics and prospects for his business. Without revealing too much personal information about him, his business caters to low to middle class families in an area with a large (nearly 50%) Latino population. He just said matter of factly (to paraphrase) - "I'm a numbers guy - and my numbers have been better under Obama, just like they were under Clinton. If those guys keep my customers coming through the door, I'll pay the 35% tax and not blink."
He added that a big part of it was that he can take (the equivalent of) food stamps for his business as well, so in a way the artificially-expanded middle class as a result of low-income entitlements is a big help to his bottom line. As long as a government is committed to maintaining a certain level of support for low income people, he will maintain the volume he needs to succeed as a business. In addition, he provides health care voluntarily anyway for all of his full-time employees ("It's just smart", he says, "because it allows me to find the right people, keep them healthy and happy, and keep them around."), so he's really not worried about Obamacare running him out of business - it will actually save him money to the extent that it makes health care cheaper.
On the Latino population, he also worried about what the immigration crusade mentality will do to his customer and employee base. This includes losing business from undocumented, poorly documented, or even legally documented families depending on how far the anti-immigration people (which includes Romney and more prominently Ryan) take that. In an area with a 50% latino base, this could devastate him. He also related a story to me of one of his regular employees, a green card holder who is paying the $800 to get her citizenship process dealt with. She was really nervous about the test and figuring out where to get the cash to go through the process, but she was more nervous about what people who advise that community are saying will likely happen if Romney is elected. Though most people think Obama is going to win, she didn't want to take the chance of being too far back in the line for citizenship that would rapidly form if Romney is elected and the Republicans start trying to get rid of Mexicans.
Life is Interesting.
Vote for Obama.
© Kos Media, LLC
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/17/1132739/-My-white-male-millionaire-friend-is-voting-for-WHO [with comments]
===
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09/28/2012
[...]
"Y'all sound like y'all are senior citizens, right? Yeah. You don't want Obama. You really don't want Obama. Because he'll get rid of your Medicare. You might as well say goodbye to it," she says. "I don't know if you've done any research on Obama or not, but he is a Muslim, um, he is, um, gotta socialistic view on the, ya know, economy, the government, the whole nine yards. If he had his way, we'd be a socialistic country."
[...]
"Pay attention to Fox News. If you can get out and watch that movie '2016' do so," she says.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/gop-volunteer-florida-obama-muslim_n_1924051.html [with audio embedded, and comments]
===
Republican Jewish Coalition Gives iPads To Woo 'Volunteers'
09/28/2012
WASHINGTON -- The Republican Jewish Coalition [ http://www.rjchq.org/ ] on Thursday began offering "volunteers" who work the phones in key battleground states "awesome thank-you incentives" for their time helping to defeat President Barack Obama in November.
Put in at least 20 hours at an official RJC phone bank in California, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York or here in Washington and receive a $100 American Express gift card. Up that to 30 hours and one gets an older model iPad 2 (worth about $200). And to volunteers who dial up Jewish voters for 50 hours or more, the RJC will give a new 32GB iPad 3, worth $599. Less time gets a lesser tablet, with 40 hours on the phone equaling a 16GB iPad 3 ($499).
If the Romney supporters were being paid, that would add up to between $5 and $12 an hour. But the RJC said the swag is just "our way of saying thank you for volunteering your valuable time."
[...]
Asked whether his volunteers were being similarly rewarded, David Harris, president and CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said, "Oh my goodness, no. When we've done phone banking with local volunteers over many hours, we've offered cheese pizza for dinner, water. That's it. No American Express cards, no iPad 3s, no iPad 2s.
"The difference may be that folks volunteering for us and helping us out may feel deeply committed to the cause," Harris said. "I've not seen the need to offer high-end consumer electronics or American Express cards to garner so-called volunteers."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/republican-jewish-coalition-ipads_n_1923870.html [with comments]
===
Todd Akin's Pollster Compares His Situation To That Of Cult Leader David Koresh [UPDATE]
Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin (R)
By Laura Bassett
Posted: 09/28/2012 2:53 pm EDT Updated: 09/28/2012 5:35 pm EDT
Referring to the Republican Party's attempts [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/21/politics/akin-controversy/index.html ] to "smoke" Senate candidate Todd Akin (R-Mo.) out of the race following his "legitimate rape [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/19/todd-akin-abortion-legitimate-rape_n_1807381.html ]" remarks, Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway compared the situation of Akin, her longtime client, to notorious cult leader David Koresh in a radio interview on Thursday.
The day after Akin made the "legitimate rape" remark "was like the Waco with David Koresh situation, where they’re trying to smoke him out with the SWAT teams and the helicopters and the bad Nancy Sinatra records," Conway told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gop-pollster-advised-akin-withstand-controversy-david-koresh-faced-atf-waco ] on the "Washington Watch Weekly" radio show. "Then here comes day two, and you realize the guy’s not coming out of the bunker. Listen, Todd has shown his principle to the voters."
Koresh, a religious cult leader and accused child rapist, died with 54 other adults and 28 children in his compound in 1993 after a 51-day standoff with the FBI in Waco, Texas.
Akin's Koresh-like determination to stand his ground, Conway said, could lead more Republicans to send him their endorsement ahead of November, as former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) already did this week [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/rick-santorum-jim-demint-endorse-todd-akin-in-missouri/ ].
"You saw former speaker Gingrich there on Todd’s behalf at a fundraiser on Monday, saying it’s just 'conventional idiocy' that’s preventing people from backing Todd," she told Perkins. "And he predicts that come mid-October, everyone will be following yours and his lead back to Missouri, with their money."
Akin's spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
UPDATE: 4 p.m. -- Conway told The Huffington Post that she did not mean to compare the two men. "My comparison was to the tactics used to push Akin from the race, not to the men involved," she wrote in an email. "I would never compare David Koresh to Todd Akin."
Akin spokesman Ryan Hite told the St. Louis Dispatch [ http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/kevin-mcdermott/akin-consultant-compares-his-fortitude-to-cult-leader-david-koresh/article_42658a4a-0996-11e2-990d-0019bb30f31a.html ] that Conway's comment "was a stupid comment to make."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/todd-akins-pollster-cult-david-koresh_n_1923613.html [with comments]
===
Christian conservatives hold “America for Jesus” prayer rally in Philly ahead of election
By Associated Press, Published: September 27 | Updated: Friday, September 28, 2:08 PM
Christian conservatives who blame “moral depravity” for everything from the recession to terrorism are converging on Philadelphia for a rally they hope will spark a religious revival as Election Day nears.
Called “America for Jesus 2012,” the prayer assembly on Independence Mall is attracting support across a spectrum of Protestant clergy and activists. Among the scheduled speakers are religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, along with preachers such as Cindy Jacobs of Generals International ministry who say they’re prophets with a direct line to God. Many backers had also endorsed “The Response,” the prayer rally hosted last year by Texas Gov. Rick Perry just before he entered the GOP presidential primary.
John Blanchard, national coordinator for “America for Jesus 2012,” said the two-day event starting Friday night is nonpartisan. It’s modeled after the 1980 “Washington for Jesus” rally, considered a pivotal show of organizational strength by the then-fledgling Christian right. Bishop Anne Gimenez, whose late husband John helped lead the 1980 assembly, is a lead organizer of the Philadelphia gathering.
“We are praying that God would touch America,” said Blanchard, executive pastor of Rock Church International in Virginia, which the Gimenez family founded. “We’re not Democrats and Republicans. We’re Christians.”
Still, many of those offering prayers at the event have been outspoken critics of President Barack Obama. Steve Strang, the influential Pentecostal publisher of Charisma magazine, wrote in a blog post inviting readers to join him in Philadelphia that America is under threat from a “radical homosexual agenda” and Obama “seems to be moving toward some form of European socialism.”
Jacobs blamed a mysterious Arkansas bird-kill last year on Obama’s repeal of the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” enabling gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.
David Barton, a self-taught historian who emphasizes the Christian roots of the U.S., is another rally supporter. Barton wrote in a Feb. 29 article that Obama has shown “hostility toward Biblical people of faith” while giving “preferential treatment” to Muslims. (Obama has said he was raised in a nonreligious home and later became Christian.) The publisher Thomas Nelson last month withdrew Barton’s book, “The Jefferson Lies,” citing historical errors. The book challenged the belief that Jefferson was largely secular and promoted the separation of church and state.
Anne Gimenez said in a phone interview that although the event is Christian, the assembly will not advocate that the U.S. government be limited to Christians.
“I have no boundaries or limitations on that. I would just like to see someone who is God-fearing” in public office, she said.
Gimenez said Philadelphia was chosen because of its importance in U.S. history. The rally will be held outside the building where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Pennsylvania is also where evangelist George Whitefield preached during the first Great Awakening, the 18th-century religious revival that spread through the American colonies. Blanchard said his group successfully petitioned Pennsylvania lawmakers to declare Saturday “William Penn Day” in honor of Pennsylvania’s founder, who championed religious freedom.
“America is in a state of emergency evidenced by the symptoms of widespread moral depravity and economic meltdown,” organizers wrote on the rally’s website. “Education, government, and man’s wisdom cannot solve this problem.”
Two weeks ago, the ministry coalition behind the assembly distributed food and offered medical care throughout Philadelphia as part of the run-up to the gathering. Attendees will be asked to start 40 days of prayer and fasting, through the Nov. 6, election, to help turn the nation toward God. Preachers representing Messianic Judaism, which teaches that Christ is the Messiah, a belief at odds with traditional Judaism, will blow the shofar, a ram’s horn used in Jewish ritual.
The major speakers are scheduled for Saturday. Joel Osteen, the Texas megachurch pastor, has sent a video prayer message to the event. An executive with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is also among those offering prayers. A message of support from 93-year-old evangelist Billy Graham will be read.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/christian-conservatives-hold-america-for-jesus-prayer-rally-in-philly-ahead-of-election/2012/09/27/a89beb7a-08d7-11e2-9eea-333857f6a7bd_story.html [with comments]
--
Thousands Pray for US at 'America for Jesus' Rally
Dharma Bohall, 13, extends her arms in prayer during the America for Jesus prayer rally, Friday Sept. 28, 2012, on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. Christian conservatives who blame “moral depravity” for everything from the recession to terrorism are converging on Philadelphia for a rally they hope will spark a religious revival as Election Day nears.
(AP Photo/ Joseph Kaczmarek)
By MARYCLAIRE DALE Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA September 30, 2012 (AP)
Thousands of conservative Christians gathered Saturday on Independence Mall in Philadelphia to pray for the future of the United States in the weeks before the presidential election.
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins topped a full day of speakers at "The America for Jesus 2012" prayer rally.
Robertson, a former Republican candidate for president, called the election important, but didn't mention either major political party or candidate by name.
"I don't care what the ACLU says or any atheists say. This nation belongs to Jesus, and we're here today to reclaim his sovereignty," said Robertson, 82, who founded the Christian Coalition and Christian Broadcasting Network, and ran for president in 1988.
Organizers plan another prayer rally Oct. 20 in Washington, D.C., two weeks before President Barack Obama faces Republican Mitt Romney in the presidential election.
Perkins asked the crowd to pray for elected officials including Obama.
"We pray that his eyes will be open to the truth," Perkins said.
A number of event organizers, though, have been vocal critics of the Democratic president.
Steve Strang, the influential Pentecostal publisher of Charisma magazine, which was distributed at the rally, recently wrote in a blog post that America is under threat from a "radical homosexual agenda." He also said Obama "seems to be moving toward some form of European socialism."
And speaker Cindy Jacobs has blamed a mysterious Arkansas bird-kill last year on Obama's repeal of the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell," which allows gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.
Speakers throughout the day condemned abortion, gay marriage and population control as practiced by Planned Parenthood. Christian rock music filled the historic mall as speakers challenged the crowd to overcome the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and slothfulness.
The rally was held outside of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Pennsylvania is also where evangelist George Whitefield preached during the first Great Awakening, the 18th-century religious revival that spread through the American colonies.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/thousands-pray-us-america-jesus-rally-17357296 [with comments]
===
Andrew Beacham, Kentucky House Candidate, Airs Shock Ad Featuring Dismembered Fetus
By Nick Wing
Posted: 09/28/2012 2:28 pm EDT Updated: 09/28/2012 2:33 pm EDT
If you think President Barack Obama is a baby murderer who has a lot in common with Adolf Hitler and serial killer Ted Bundy, Kentucky has a congressional candidate with just the ad for you.
His name is Andrew Beacham, an independent candidate running for Kentucky's 2nd Congressional District. He has no real chance of winning, but that's just fine by him, because that's not what his campaign is actually about. He admitted as much in a recent interview with the Associated Press [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57520081/anti-abortion-ad-to-begin-airing-wednesday-in-ky/ ].
"Clearly, our main goal is to cause Obama's defeat," Beacham said. "But if I were to get elected, that would be great."
Instead, Beacham, an Indiana resident and cohort of anti-abortion crusader Randall Terry, can use his infeasible candidacy to skirt the Federal Communications Commission's indecency regulations and run graphic ads depicting such things as dismembered fetuses.
And that's not all. Beacham's spot compares Obama to Hitler and Bundy, as well as Al Capone, and shows photos of slain Christians and Jews. Beacham claims that the president is akin to these notorious historical figures because he allows federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions along with a large number of other health services.
“If you vote for Obama, the real question is, what are you smoking?” a bearded Beacham says, puffing a cigar.
(Watch the ad here [ http://www.mrctv.org/videos/andrew-beacham-congress-what-are-you-smoking ], if you really feel like you need to see it for yourself)
And while his ad seems extreme, there's not much local stations do to stop it from airing. The AP reports that it cost about $5,000 to purchase airtime for to run the spot about 22 times in three Kentucky markets. Bowling Green's WKBO has said it can't refuse to show it. The station is instead looking into including a disclaimer about the offensive nature of the content.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/andrew-beacham-kentucky_n_1923409.html [with comments]
===
The Separation of Satan and State
By James Moore
Posted: 09/25/2012 7:02 pm
Maybe it's time for the comedy writers in New York and Los Angeles to move to Texas. They need to be closer to their source material because Texas Governor Rick Perry is making it easy for everyone to be a comic. Of course, it might not be Perry; it could just be Satan making Perry look like a clown, assuming, of course, you think Satan exists. (And if he does, is Satan important enough to be capitalized?)
Regardless of whether you believe Perry's assertion [ http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Perry-discusses-tuition-freeze-budget-3885035.php ] that the horned one stalks the universe, the governor's arguments about faith and government are even funnier than him insisting the devil is trying to make politics the province of only evil types. Hell, look at what Perry's administration has done to Texas in recent years with regards to making health care unobtainable for the poor, cutting school budgets so he could run for president, and forcing women to get sonograms before abortion procedures; he's a case study in the evil nature of politics. Perry appears to have given Satan a blowtorch and made taxpayers put on gasoline suits.
"I believe in Satan," the governor said at the Texas Tribune Festival. "And I hope most of the people in here do, too. The great trick that Satan pulls is making people believe that he didn't (sic) exist. It's a very interesting discussion we need to have as a country."
Yes, of course, one out of every four people living in Texas is without health care [ http://www.texastribune.org/texas-health-resources/health-reform-and-texas/texas-reacts-health-care-ruling/ ], we have the highest number of people over age 25 without high school diplomas [ http://www.literacytexas.org/index.php/Resources/literacy_facts/ ], we are firing teachers, our roads are being turned into cash machines for corporations because the Perry administration won't fight to have the state fund them, and he wants to talk about Satan. Perry believes that there is no doubt Satan is trying to keep people of faith out of government. Satan appears to be about as competent as Perry, however, since our political stages continue to be tread by Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, and others who make their Christian faith a part of what informs their politics, though the interpretations of what is Christian vary wildly in political parties.
Satan can't be all that smart if he has Rick Perry doing his PR.
"If you don't want to think there's forces of darkness and spiritual forces at work that's your call," Perry told his interviewer [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/09/24/rick_perry_s_sleep_apnea_destroyed_his_presidential_run_was_satan_involved_.html ]. He noted:
My Christian faith teaches me that. The idea that you believe that Satan could be involved in every act and decision in the world, it's not out of the ordinary for those of us of the Christian faith, and if he's trying to keep people out of the public arena any way he can by hook or crook or lying or whatever you wanna put out there. I believe he's certainly capable of that. That's my belief and I don't apologize for it.
Perry has too many other things he needs to apologize for. But his misdirection call is, "Hey look, Bub, it's Beelzebub." Nobody's ever asked him to abandon his faith. What's annoying and destructive is when he tries to force his faith into the institutions of government because he thinks it's what best for Texas and the rest of the country. It's easy to figure out what his opinion on that idea would be if we had a Jewish or Muslim governor. Perry's not talking about people of faith, he's referring to people of his Christian religion, and he thinks the law is virtually persecuting Christians and keeping them from practicing their religion in the U.S.
"When there's a directive that comes down from a federal court that says you can't pray at a public event," he explained, "that's basically saying people of faith should not be involved in the public arena. There's case after case where folks have been pushed back on from standpoint of being engaged in prayer."
Those of us who believe in the separation of church and state will continue to hope that the court will keep prayer away from public institutions. If you are Jewish or Muslim or Hindu and pay taxes, why would you want to pay for buildings and public venues where Christians pray and you don't? Perry is no different than other Christian evangelicals and wants his belief system adopted by, not just all Americans, but the entire world. At a political event in San Antonio several years ago, he was asked by a Jewish reporter about the pastor's claim from the pulpit that anyone who didn't believe in Jesus Christ as their savior was "bound to burn in hell." Perry, less than subtle, let the Jewish journalist know he didn't have much of a future.
"I believe that no one goes to heaven unless they have Jesus Christ as their savior," he said.
That same Jewish reporter and I had traveled on many presidential and gubernatorial campaigns together and I always winced when we were in taxpayer-funded buildings, like schools, and he had to tolerate Christian invocations before he then tolerated the political rally.
Perry, like many others who are religiously intolerant of different belief systems, constantly refers to America's Founding Fathers as his argument for prayer in schools and public places, oblivious, of course, to the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson. In his letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut, who complained to the president that they were not being allowed to practice their brand of Christianity, Jefferson made clear that faith and government ought not ever be wed, and he cast the phrase that has guided our country on this matter for more than two centuries.
'I contemplate with sovereign reverence," Jefferson wrote, "that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."
The line is hardly subject to misinterpretation but it suffers an abundance of distortions. Both the Constitution and one of its designers wanted to prevent the government from doing anything that promotes any religion, and praying, especially organized prayer, in a public institution, or at a high school football game, or before convening a legislative body in a taxpayer funded capitol, is offering sustenance to a belief system that is not held by everyone who submits to the tax laws. It is, therefore, wrong.
But it's possible I forgot to sign off my computer and Satan wrote this while I was runnin' around sinnin' somewhere.
Also at www.moorethink.com [ http://www.moorethink.com/2012/09/25/the-separation-of-satan-and-state/ (with comments; image above from]
Copyright (C) 2012 Moore Think
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/separation-satan-and-state_b_1914267.html [with comments]
===
Fighting Over God’s Image
Mark Pernice
By EDWARD J. BLUM and PAUL HARVEY
Published: September 26, 2012
THE murders of four Americans over an amateurish online video about Muhammad, like the attempted murder of a Danish cartoonist who in 2005 had depicted the prophet with a bomb in his turban, have left many Americans confused, angry and fearful about the rage that some Muslims feel about visual representations of their sacred figures.
The confusion stems, in part, from the ubiquity of sacred images in American culture. God, Jesus, Moses, Buddha and other holy figures are displayed in movies, cartoons and churches and on living room walls. We place them on T-shirts and bumper stickers — and even tattoo them on our skin.
But Americans have had their own history of conflict, some of it deadly, over displays of the sacred. The path toward civil debate over such representation is neither short nor easy.
The United States was settled, in part, by radical Protestant iconoclasts from Britain who considered the creation and use of sacred imagery to be a violation of the Second Commandment against graven images. The anti-Catholic colonists at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay refused to put images of Jesus in their churches and meetinghouses. They scratched out crosses in books. In the early 1740s, English officials even marched on an Indian community in western Connecticut, where they cross-examined Moravian missionaries who reportedly had a book with “the picture of our Saviour in it.”
The colonists feared Catholic infiltration from British-controlled Canada. Shortly after the Boston Tea Party, a Connecticut pastor warned that if the British succeeded, the colonists would have their Bibles taken from them and be compelled to “pray to the Virgin Mary, worship images, believe the doctrine of Purgatory, and the Pope’s infallibility.”
It was not only Protestants who opposed sacred imagery. In the Southwest, Pueblo Indians who waged war against Spanish colonizers not only burned and dismembered some crucifixes, but even defecated on them.
In the early Republic, many Americans avoided depicting Jesus or God in any form. The painter Washington Allston spoke for many artists of the 1810s when he said, “I think his character too holy and sacred to be attempted by the pencil.” A visiting Russian diplomat, Pavel Svinin, was amazed at the prevalence of a different image: George Washington’s. “Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home,” he wrote, “just as we have images of God’s saints.”
Only in the late 19th century did images of God and Jesus become commonplace in churches, Sunday school books, Bibles and homes. There were many forces at work: steam printing presses; new canals and railroads; and, not least, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Catholics who brought with them an array of crucifixes, Madonnas and busts of saints. Protestants began producing their own images — often, to appeal to children — and gradually became more comfortable with holy images. In the 20th century, the United States began exporting such images, most notably Warner Sallman’s 1941 “Head of Christ,” which is one of the most reproduced images [ http://www.warnersallman.com/collection/images/head-of-christ/ ] in world history.
But there was also resistance. When Hollywood first started portraying Jesus in films, one fundamentalist Christian fumed, “The picturing of the life and sufferings of our Savior by these institutions falls nothing short of blasphemy.” Vernon E. Jordan Jr., an African-American who was later president of the National Urban League and an adviser to President Bill Clinton, recalled that white audience members gasped when he played Jesus as an undergraduate at DePauw University in Indiana in the 1950s.
In fact, race has been a constant source of conflict over American depictions of Jesus. In Philadelphia in the 1930s, the black street preacher F. S. Cherry stormed into African-American churches and pointed at paintings or prints of white Christs, shouting, as one observer recounted, “Who in the hell is this? Nobody knows! They say it is Jesus. That’s a damned lie!”
During the civil rights era, black-power advocates and liberation theologians excoriated white images of the sacred. A 1967 “Declaration of Black Churchmen” demanded “the removal of all images which suggest that God is white.” As racial violence enveloped Detroit that year, African-American residents painted the white faces of Catholic icons black.
More recently, there have been uproars over the Nigerian-British painter Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” and the New York artist and photographer Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Mr. Serrano’s image of Jesus on the crucifix, submerged in the artist’s own urine, roused a crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts in the late 1980s. Mr. Ofili’s painting of a dark-skinned Madonna with photographs of vaginas surrounding her enraged Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The mayor, who mistakenly claimed that elephant dung was smeared on the image when it in fact was used at the base to hold the painting up, tried to ban it [ http://blogs.artinfo.com/culturalaffairs/2012/09/12/after-attacks-in-egypt-and-libya-what-the-state-department-can-learn-from-the-art-world/ ] from being displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in 1999. (One upset Christian smeared [ http://artcrimes.net/holy-virgin-mary ] white paint over it.)
Images of the sacred haven’t caused mass violence in the United States, but they have generated intense conflict. Our ability to sustain a culture supersaturated with visual displays of the divine, largely without violence, came only after massive technological change, centuries of immigration and social movements that forced Americans to reckon with differences of race, ethnicity and religion.
Edward J. Blum [ http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/histweb/faculty_and_staff/faculty_bios/e_blum.htm ], an associate professor of history at San Diego State University, and Paul Harvey [ http://paulharvey.org/about/ ], a professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, are the authors of “The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Color-Christ-Saga-America/dp/product-description/0807835722 ].”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/opinion/fighting-over-gods-image.html
===
Voter ID Laws Could Delay Outcome Of Close Election
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R), says his office is trying to reduce the number of provisional ballots.
(AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
09/26/12 12:22 PM ET EDT
WASHINGTON — New voting laws in key states could force a lot more voters to cast provisional ballots this election, delaying results in close races for days while election officials scrutinize ballots and campaigns wage legal battles over which ones should get counted.
New laws in competitive states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could leave the outcome of the presidential election in doubt – if the vote is close – while new laws in Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee could delay results in state or local elections.
Some new laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls are still being challenged in court, adding to the uncertainty as the Nov. 6 election nears.
"It's a possibility of a complete meltdown for the election," said Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida.
Voters cast provisional ballots for a variety of reasons: They don't bring proper ID to the polls; they fail to update their voter registration after moving; they try to vote at the wrong precinct; or their right to vote is challenged by someone.
These voters may have their votes counted, but only if election officials can verify that they were eligible to vote, a process that can take days or weeks. Adding to the potential for chaos: Many states won't even know how many provisional ballots have been cast until sometime after Election Day.
Voters cast nearly 2.1 million provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election. About 69 percent were eventually counted, according to election results compiled by The Associated Press.
Provisional ballots don't get much attention if an election is a landslide. But what if the vote is close, as the polls suggest in the race between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney?
Most of today's voting nightmares go back to Florida in 2000, when the results of balloting and thus the winner of the presidential contest were not known for weeks after Election Day. Questions about recount irregularities and the validity of ballots with hanging chads – paper fragments still attached to punch-card ballots – preceded the eventual declaration that George W. Bush had won the state by 537 votes and was the next president.
"In a close election, all eyes are going to be on those provisional ballots, and those same canvassing boards that were looking at pregnant chads and hanging chads back in 2000," Smith said. "It's a potential mess."
The federal election law passed in response to the 2000 presidential election gives voters the option to cast a provisional ballot, if poll workers deny them a regular one. Voter ID laws could slow the count even more.
In Virginia and Wisconsin, voters who don't bring an ID to the polls can still have their votes counted if they produce an ID by the Friday following Election Day. Pennsylvania's law gives voters six days to produce an ID. The Wisconsin and Pennsylvania laws are being challenged in court.
In Ohio, which has competitive races for both president and the Senate, provisional voters have up to 10 days following the election to bring an ID to the county board of elections.
If voters in Florida don't bring an ID to the polls, they must sign a provisional ballot envelope. Canvassing boards then will try to match the signatures with those in voter registration records, a process that conjures up images of the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
"Americans have gotten used to the expectation that you could turn on the TV and you would know that night who won the election, even after Florida in 2000," said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. "But this could be an election in which we don't know the answer for several days."
Florida could see a big increase in provisional ballots because the state has tightened its change-of-address requirements. This year, voters who move from one county to another in Florida without updating their voter registration will have to cast provisional ballots. In previous elections, they could change their address on Election Day and cast a regular ballot.
Four years ago, Florida voters cast about 36,000 provisional ballots. About half of them were eventually counted, though the percentages varied greatly from county to county.
This year, Florida could have 300,000 provisional ballots, said Michael McDonald, an election expert at George Mason University.
"You want to see chaos in Florida? There it is," McDonald said.
In Ohio, address changes were the biggest reason voters cast provisional ballots in 2008, said Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted. Ohio voters cast about 207,000 provisional ballots in the 2008 presidential election – second only to California. About 130,000 of them were cast because voters moved and didn't update their voter registration, Husted said.
In 2004, the number of provisional ballots cast in Ohio was larger than Bush's margin of victory over Democrat John Kerry. Kerry didn't concede until the following morning, when the provisional ballot picture became clear.
In 2008, the number of provisional ballots cast in North Carolina was larger than Obama's margin of victory over Republican John McCain. The Associated Press didn't declare the state for Obama until the day after Election Day, though Obama had already won enough states to claim the presidency.
Husted said his office is trying to reduce the number of provisional ballots in Ohio by using change-of-address information from the Postal Service to send out more than 300,000 postcards to Ohio voters, reminding them to update their registration.
"If we can potentially reduce the number of ballots cast provisionally, then you lessen the likelihood that there will have to be a prolonged process as it relates to those ballots," Husted said. "Understand, a provisional ballot is a second chance because you didn't do it right the first time, meaning that you didn't update your address, you didn't bring in the proper form of ID, there's something that the voter didn't do at the onset that prevented them from voting a regular ballot."
Associated Press writer Connie Cass and AP election research coordinator Christina Bryant contributed to this report.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/26/voter-id-laws-elections_n_1915571.html [with comments]
===
Voter Harassment, Circa 2012
Editorial
Published: September 21, 2012
This is how voter intimidation worked in 1966 [ http://www.pfaw.org/sites/default/files/thelongshadowofjimcrow.pdf ]: White teenagers in Americus, Ga., harassed black citizens in line to vote, and the police refused to intervene. Black plantation workers in Mississippi had to vote in plantation stores, overseen by their bosses. Black voters in Choctaw County, Ala., had to hand their ballots directly to white election officials for inspection.
This is how it works today: In an ostensible hunt for voter fraud, a Tea Party group, True the Vote, descends on a largely minority precinct and combs the registration records for the slightest misspelling or address error. It uses this information to challenge voters at the polls, and though almost every challenge is baseless, the arguments and delays frustrate those in line and reduce turnout.
The thing that’s different from the days of overt discrimination is the phony pretext of combating voter fraud. Voter identity fraud is all but nonexistent, but the assertion that it might exist is used as an excuse to reduce the political rights of minorities, the poor, students, older Americans and other groups that tend to vote Democratic.
In The Times on Monday [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-true-the-vote-are-looking-very-closely-for-voter-fraud.html?pagewanted=all (about 70% of the way down at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79762375 )], Stephanie Saul described how the plan works. True the Vote grew out of a Tea Party group in Texas, the King Street Patriots, with the assistance of Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Koch brothers that works to elect conservative Republicans [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhcGeEUwWmo ]. It has developed its own software to check voter registration lists against driver’s license and property records. Those kinds of database matches are notoriously unreliable because names and addresses are often slightly different in various databases, but the group uses this technique to challenge more voters.
In 2009 and 2010, for example, the group focused on the Houston Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a black Democrat. After poring over the records for five months, True the Vote came up with a list of 500 names it considered suspicious and challenged them with election authorities. Officials put these voters on “suspense,” requiring additional proof of address, but in most cases voters had simply changed addresses. That didn’t stop the group from sending dozens of white “poll watchers” to precincts in the district during the 2010 elections, deliberately creating friction with black voters.
On the day of the recall election of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, the group used inaccurate lists to slow down student voting at Lawrence University in Appleton with intrusive identity checks. Three election “observers,” including one from True the Vote, were so disruptive that a clerk gave them two warnings, but the ploy was effective: many students gave up waiting in line and didn’t vote.
True the Vote, now active in 30 states, hopes to train hundreds of thousands of poll watchers to make the experience of voting like “driving and seeing the police following you [ http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/08/true_the_votes_large_and_growing_far-right_network.html ],” as one of the group’s leaders put it. (Not surprisingly, the group is also active in the voter ID movement, with similar goals.) These activities “present a real danger to the fair administration of elections and to the fundamental freedom to vote,” as a recent report by Common Cause and Demos [ http://www.demos.org/publication/bullies-ballot-box-protecting-freedom-vote-against-wrongful-challenges-and-intimidation ] put it.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits intimidation or interference in the act of voting, but the penalties are fairly light. Many states have tougher laws, but they won’t work unless law enforcement officials use them to crack down on the illegal activities — handed down from Jim Crow days — of True the Vote and similar groups.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/opinion/voter-harassment-circa-2012.html [with comments]
===
Voter Law In New Hampshire Sparks William O'Brien, New Hampshire House Speaker, To Challenge Attorney General
The New Hampshire capitol dome in Concord.
By John Celock
Posted: 09/29/2012 12:16 pm EDT Updated: 09/29/2012 12:26 pm EDT
The Tea Party speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, William O'Brien (R-Mont Vernon), is asking a state court to force the state attorney general to accept his interpretation of a new voter registration law relating to college students.
Legislators passed the law -- over the veto of Gov. John Lynch (D) -- earlier this year to require those registering to vote to obtain residency in the state, including a driver's license and car registration. The previous law said that living in the state -- including living in a dorm room -- was sufficient to vote.
O'Brien is objecting [ http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120929/GJNEWS_01/709299896 ] to a state judge's ruling -- and state Attorney General Michael Delaney's view -- on the law the Legislature passed because the ruling does not change the state's definition of "residency' and "domicile" in the Granite State, Foster's Daily Democrat reports. The law was challenged in court with Delaney arguing that O'Brien's interpretation is not included in the version of the law passed.
Foster's Daily Democrat reports [id.]:
The judge ruled New Hampshire law continues to distinguish between having a "domicile" and being a "resident." He called the new wording on the voter registration form an "inaccurate and confusing expression of the law," and said it "does not pass constitutional muster."
Associate Attorney General Richard Head, who handled the court case for the state, did not attempt to persuade [the judge that] O'Brien's interpretation of the law is correct, nor did he advance it in court.
"My office is only able to defend the law that the Legislature actually passed, not the law that the Speaker wishes had been passed," Delaney said in a prepared statement. "The law that the Legislature passed did not, in any way, modify the definition of residency in New Hampshire. The Speaker's position is simply not supported by the law and will weaken our position in defending the law. We will not present it in court."
O'Brien accused Delaney of constitutional harm [ http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/statenewengland/977322-469/court-dispute-over-nh-voter-registration-law.html ] in a statement, the Nashua Telegraph reported.
"The attorney general's office is turning the Constitution on its head in order to compel the court to gag the Legislature from providing a defense that the people deserve for a duly passed law either because the attorney general is unable or unwilling to provide that defense," O'Brien said. "The people of New Hampshire deserve not to have non-residents wandering around diluting their votes."
O'Brien and the Tea Party-controlled House have been pushing stronger voter identification laws and other conservative leaning laws since taking office in 2011. In May, the Legislature overturned Lynch's veto of O'Brien's voter ID law in a contentious debate that included state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt (R-Manchester) giving O'Brien a Nazi salute [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/15/steve-vaillancourt-new-hampshire-lawmaker-voter-id_n_1518432.html ] on the House floor after O'Brien blocked him from opposing the bill.
In July, O'Brien barred the Concord Monitor from his press conferences after the paper ran a cartoon of him with a Hitler-style mustache [ http://concord-nh.patch.com/articles/nhgop-calls-on-newspaper-to-retract-insulting-cartoon ]
following the Vaillancourt incident.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/29/voting-law-bill-obrien-new-hampshire_n_1925235.html [with comments]
===
More Suspicious Voter Forms Are Found
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
Published: September 29, 2012
MIAMI — The number of Florida counties reporting suspicious voter registration forms connected to Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm hired by the state Republican Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html ] to sign up new voters, has grown to 10, officials said, as local election supervisors continue to search their forms for questionable signatures, addresses or other identifiers.
After reports of suspicious forms [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/us/politics/florida-gop-reports-suspect-voter-registration-forms.html ] surfaced in Florida, the company — owned by Nathan Sproul, who has been involved in voter registration efforts since at least the 2004 presidential election — was fired last week by the state Republican Party and the Republican National Committee [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_national_committee/index.html ]. The party had hired it to conduct drives in Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia.
In Colorado, a young woman employed by Strategic Allied was shown on a video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdk55dLsFhc (next below)]
outside a store in Colorado Springs recently telling a potential voter that she wanted to register only Republicans and that she worked for the county clerk’s office. The woman was fired, said Ryan Call, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party.
The Florida Division of Elections [ http://election.dos.state.fl.us/ ] has forwarded the reports of possible fraud to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation. Prosecutors in some affected counties are also investigating. It is unclear how many forms have been forwarded, in all: in Palm Beach County, the election supervisor found 106 suspicious forms, but the number in several other counties is far lower.
Bay County has found eight suspicious forms with the Republican Party registration code connected to Strategic Allied. In Pasco County, three have been found.
The state Republican Party, which paid the company $1.3 million to register voters here, said it would file an elections fraud complaint against Strategic Allied, which is based in Tempe, Ariz.
Mr. Sproul was once the executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. In 2004, his voter registration project was investigated by the Justice Department and the attorneys general in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon after widespread allegations of fraud surfaced, but no charges were brought.
Questions are now being raised about how the company’s employees were paid to register voters.
Mary Blackwell, a volunteer for the League of Women Voters [ http://www.lwvokaloosa.org/ ] in Okaloosa County, said she was registering voters this month at Northwest Florida State College. Sitting nearby was a man who said he was registering voters for the Republican Party of Florida. The man told her he received $12 an hour but had to bring in at least 10 forms to get paid.
Paul Lux, the election supervisor for Okaloosa County, a Republican who is still combing through registration forms in his office, said he was told by several “concerned citizens,” including Ms. Blackwell, that the employees were being paid for the number of forms they brought back.
In Florida, it is illegal to pay someone per registration form.
“I told my friends in the party then that paying people to do this was a bad idea, and it almost inevitably leads to problems,” Mr. Lux said. “Unfortunately, I was not proven wrong.”
Fred Petti, a lawyer for Strategic Allied, said the employees were paid only by the hour, with no quota attached. He added that they also were instructed to register anyone from any political party, not just the Republican Party.
Previous investigations of Mr. Sproul’s operations focused on efforts to register only Republicans or allegations that Democratic forms were torn up. Mr. Petti also said that Mr. Sproul cooperated with the Palm Beach County election supervisor to find out who was at fault and has offered to do the same with other election supervisors.
In Palm Beach County, one person was responsible for the fraudulent forms, officials said. Mr. Petti said he does not yet know how widespread the problem is in other counties.
Election supervisors said they have come across forms with handwriting that did not match previous registration forms, bogus addresses and other identifiers like driver’s license numbers that appeared to be invalid. But in other cases, the forms were just incomplete, which does not constitute fraud.
“Until we see what the cards are, it’s hard for us to comment,” Mr. Petti said.
Mark Anderson, the Bay County supervisor, said he has found eight questionable forms in his county, but he is looking for more. The forms had either unchecked boxes for party affiliation or signatures that looked different from previous ones. He said he had also received calls from voters who said they had not changed their party affiliation, although it appeared they had. “I don’t believe there is going to be massive numbers,” Mr. Anderson said.
Election supervisors are able to pinpoint the group responsible for the questionable forms because of a 2011 state law that tightened rules on voter registration groups. The law, which sparked lawsuits and controversy, requires groups to register with the state and have their registration number on the forms they distribute.
A provision that required groups to turn in registration forms within 48 hours was struck down in court this year. “The Republican Legislature was beaten up pretty badly, partially by myself,” Mr. Lux said. “But they seem to have been doing something to improve the process.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/us/politics/suspicious-voter-forms-found-in-10-florida-counties.html
===
Colo. girl registering ‘only Romney’ voters tied to firm dumped by RNC over fraud
September 28, 2012
[...]
And FOX31 Denver has confirmed that the young woman seen registering voters outside a Colorado Springs grocery store in a YouTube video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdk55dLsFhc (embedded in the preceding item)], in which she admits to trying to only register voters who support Mitt Romney, was indeed a contract employee of Sproul’s company.
[...]
http://kwgn.com/2012/09/28/colo-girl-registering-only-romney-voters-tied-to-firm-dumped-by-rnc-over-fraud-2/ [no comments yet]
===
RNC cuts ties to firm after voter fraud allegations
Voters mark their ballots in Hialeah, Fla, during primary elections.
(Alan Diaz / Associated Press)
By Joseph Tanfani, Melanie Mason and Matea Gold
September 27, 2012, 4:02 p.m.
WASHINGTON – The Republican National Committee has abruptly cut ties to a consulting firm hired for get-out-the-vote efforts in seven presidential election swing states after Florida prosecutors launched an investigation into possible fraud in voter registration forms.
Working through state parties, the RNC has sent more than $3.1 million this year to Strategic Allied Consulting, a company formed in June by Nathan Sproul, an Arizona voting consultant. Sproul has operated other firms that have been accused in past elections of improprieties designed to help Republican candidates, including dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/parties-movements/democratic-party-ORGOV0000005.topic ], but none of those allegations led to any criminal charges.
Sean Spicer, spokesman for the RNC, said the party, has “zero tolerance” for voter fraud and cut ties to the firm on Wednesday, urging state parties to do the same. The forms in question in Florida were all submitted by one worker and were not the result of an effort to suppress votes, he said.
“If you don’t do it right, it doesn’t assist us in any way,” he said.“When the allegations yesterday were brought to our attention, we severed our relationship. We acted swiftly and boldly.”
Strategic Allied Consulting was hired to do voter registration drives in Florida, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada, and had been planning get-out-the-vote drives in Ohio and Wisconsin, according to Sproul.
Sproul owns another company, Lincoln Strategy Group, that was paid about $70,000 by the Mitt Romney [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/government/mitt-romney-PEPLT007376.topic ] campaign during the primaries to gather signatures. He said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the request of the Republican National Committee because of the bad publicity stemming from the past allegations. In 2004, there were allegations in states such as Nevada and Oregon that employees of his firm -- which had a similar contract with the RNC -- registered Democratic voters and then destroyed their forms. (Sproul noted that no criminal charges were ever filed.)
Strategic Allied was set up at an address in Glen Allen, Va., and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.
“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.
Sproul said his company has a vigorous quality control system that includes running criminal background checks on all employees, requiring viewing instructional videos on registration laws (an example of which can be seen here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7yHJhQjNaY ]) and cataloging voter cards with serial numbers that identify who collected each registration. That quality check, Sproul said, enabled the company to quickly determine the individual who submitted the problematic cards in Palm Beach County.
The RNC’s rapid decision to distance itself from the company derailed a major voter registration drive just six weeks before the presidential election, which could hinge on voter turnout in about eight battleground states. It also comes as Republicans [ http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics/parties-movements/republican-party-ORGOV0000004.topic ] around the country have sought to make voter fraud an issue, in part by pressing for voter identification laws.
In Florida, the state party fired the firm on Tuesday after election workers in Palm Beach County discovered numerous registration forms that appeared to be filled out in the same handwriting, some including wrong addresses and birthdays. Some of the forms switched addresses and party registrations, including changes from Democratic or independent to Republican, said county elections supervisor Susan Bucher.
The company helped identify 106 forms submitted by the same worker. Bucher turned them over to Palm Beach County prosecutors, who have begun a criminal investigation.
Five Republican state parties, all in key battleground states, recorded payments to the firm, often soon after large transfers from the national Republican Party.
In Nevada, for example, the RNC transferred $167,000 to the state party on July 25. The next day, the state party made a nearly identical payment -- $166,665— to Strategic Allied Consulting.
A similar pattern occurred in Florida. On July 12, the same day the Florida GOP received $667,000 from the national Republican party, it paid Strategic Allied Consulting $667,597.
In all, the consulting firm received at least $3.1 million in July and August from the Republican parties of Florida, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado. No payments in Ohio or Wisconsin have yet shown up on reports.
“The Colorado Republican Party takes any threat to the voting process very seriously,” said Justin Miller, a spokesman for the Colorado GOP.
joseph.tanfani@latimes.com
melanie.mason@latimes.com
matea.gold@latimes.com
*
Related
Tea party groups work to remove names from Ohio voter rolls
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ohio-voting-fight-20120927,0,811761.story
Federal court strikes down Texas voter identification law
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-texas-voter-id-law-20120830,0,6674365.story
John Lewis exhorts Americans to fight voter ID laws
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-voter-id-john-lewis-20120906,0,5760337.story
Pennsylvania Supreme Court casts doubt on voter ID law
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-pennsylvania-supreme-court-voter-id-20120918,0,5216422.story
*
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-republicans-voter-fraud-florida-20120927,0,5472858.story [with comments]
===
In Election 2012, Game-Change Is Status Quo, Senators Say
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) say that if Democrats maintain control of the Senate and White House in the 2012 election, it will be a game-change.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
By Michael McAuliff
Posted: 09/25/2012 12:01 am EDT Updated: 09/25/2012 11:21 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- Before U.S. senators fled the Capitol for the campaign trail early Saturday, members of each party made an unusual prediction: If this year's election changes nothing in the alignment of national elected offices, it will be a game-changer.
Their takes on whether that would be good varied, but they agreed it would be better for Democrats.
On the Republican side, outspoken South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that by every economic standard, Mitt Romney should be headed for a win over President Barack Obama, with coattails for down-ticket offices.
But in acknowledging a trend in the polls [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/2012-polls-obama-bounce_n_1910146.html ] against the GOP standard-bearer, Graham said it would show that America's demographics have so changed -- in Democrats' favor -- that a president's stewardship of the economy no longer is a deciding factor.
"If we lose this election, performance as president doesn't matter like it used to," Graham said in a discussion with The Huffington Post and several other reporters outside the Senate chamber last week.
"There's a reason no president has ever been reelected with an economy like this," Graham said. "It would tell me that it's more of a demographic race for president than it is a performance-based race. And that may be where we're at as a nation, and maybe where we are as a party, and we just don't know it."
Graham, who said earlier that the country wasn't "generating enough angry, white guys" to keep the GOP in business, was referring to the growing trend of Republicans depending on white voters [ http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2012/08/30/from-lindsey-graham-startling-honesty-on-race-and-politics/ ] to win elections.
It's a startling admission from a Southern white politician, but one he stood by. "If he's able to do this, President Obama's rewritten history," Graham said. "If we lose as Republicans, we're going to have to ask ourselves, who are we going to be? If we don't beat this guy, who are we going to be?"
Democrats also agreed that keeping both the White House and the Senate in Democratic hands -- even without taking back the House -- would mark a turn in the nation's political makeup.
But they argued it would be for the better, signaling what they predicted would be a return to a more bipartisan, compromising style of politics that became anathema to the Tea Party movement that swept the GOP to control of the House in 2010.
"You have two groups of Republicans in House and Senate -- there are no moderates left," said Sen. Chuck Schumer in a late-week news conference. "Half of them are hard-right Tea Party types. Half of them are what I call mainstream conservatives."
Schumer argued that the Tea Party has essentially outflanked the mainstream for the last two years. That would change if Democrats keep what they have. "If we keep the Senate and the president wins -- and even better if we take the House -- the mainstream Republicans are going to be strengthened -- they've told me that," Schumer said.
Schumer predicted that "they're going to want to reach out and work with us because the embrace of the Tea Party that Mitt Romney has done -- that is in my view dragging down all of their candidates -- will have failed."
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), said the Tea Party argument has become so unpopular that the name of its movement has gotten to be a dirty word.
"The Tea Party candidates never use the word Tea Party anymore," Durbin told reporters. "They can't get elected that way. They're running as bipartisan candidates. [If] they come back, do you think they're going to revert to Tea Party roots? Go ahead and test the 'Tea Party' phrase across America. People despise it. It is just the symbol of obstruction."
Indeed, even Senate candidates such as Indiana's Republican state treasurer Richard Mourdock -- who ran in his primary promising against compromise [ http://www.indystar.com/article/20120411/NEWS08/204110323 ] -- have begun running ads promising [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/paul-ryan-richard-mourdock_n_1857097.html ] bipartisanship.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) speculated that once Democrats hold the Senate -- a prospect that is looking more likely than it did half a year ago -- then the Senate Republican leader -- who Reid suggested might not be current Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- would work much more readily with Democrats to head off things like the looming fiscal cliff and to come up with mutually agreeable deficit-cutting plans.
"Maybe whoever is the Republican leader will want to legislate for the good of the country, not try to defeat Obama again," Reid said.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/25/election-2012-game-change_n_1903327.html [with comments]
===
Mitt Romney Arms Race: Obama Fundraising Forcing Frantic Pace, Tough Choices
09/21/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/mitt-romney-race-obama-fundraising_n_1902191.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
===
Mitt Romney Fundraising Efforts Focus On California
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a fundraiser at the Grand Del Mar Court resort September 22, 2012 in San Diego, California.
(MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GettyImages)
By STEVE PEOPLES
09/22/12 11:07 PM ET EDT
DEL MAR, Calif. — Facing criticism that he's too focused on raising campaign cash, Mitt Romney is about to launch what advisers call an "intense battleground state schedule." But on Saturday, the Republican presidential nominee focused exclusively on courting donors in a state that hasn't supported a Republican presidential candidate in almost a quarter century.
Speaking to roughly 650 supporters gathered at Grand Del Mar, a luxury hotel north of San Diego, Romney said his campaign schedule has been hectic.
"I'm not even going to be able to go home today," he said of his second home in nearby La Jolla. "We're just coming to town to see you and keep the campaign going. It's nonstop."
Later at fundraising event in the Los Angeles-area, Romney criticized President Barack Obama for failing to "fix Washington."
"The truth is, he has proven he cannot fix Washington from the inside," Romney said at an event at the Beverly Hilton Hotel that his campaign said raised about $6 million.
The former Massachusetts governor's schedule, particularly his focus on fundraising over campaigning in battleground states with voters, has drawn criticism from some Republicans who fear the campaign is moving in the wrong direction less than seven weeks before Election Day. President Barack Obama on Saturday campaigned in Wisconsin, which has emerged as a swing state, where he also raised money. Polls suggest that Obama has a narrow lead in several key states.
Romney adviser Kevin Madden defended the fundraising focus, while highlighting a shift in the coming days
"We're here raising the resources we're going to need to compete in all those battleground states through Election Day," Madden said. "That's also been matched with a really intense battle ground state schedule that's going to be coming up starting Sunday night. We're keeping very busy."
Over the last week, Romney has attended five public events and at least a dozen fundraisers.
Cognizant of the criticism, his campaign added a Colorado rally to his Sunday night schedule ahead of a three-day bus tour in Ohio. He'll also campaign in Virginia next week. All three states are considered highly competitive.
The shift comes as Romney works to get his campaign back on track.
Already facing reports of campaign infighting, Romney suffered another setback early in the week after his remarks surfaced in an unauthorized video declaring that almost half of Americans are dependent upon government and believe they are victims. On Friday, Romney released his 2011 tax returns showing income of $13.6 million, largely from investment income.
Romney seemed to be trying to move past his video-taped remarks on Saturday.
"This is a tough time," he told donors. "These are our brothers and sisters. These are not statistics. These are people. The president's policies -- these big-government, big-tax monolithic policies -- are not working."
Earlier in the week, conservative columnist Peggy Noonan called Romney's campaign "incompetent."
"Romney doesn't seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems_in this he is exactly like the president_to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events," wrote the former Ronald Reagan speechwriter.
Romney's California fundraising chairman sought to ease donors' concerns that the GOP nominee's campaign was headed in the wrong direction. Thomas Tellefsen told the crowd at the Beverly Hilton he understood they are "probably feeling a bit worried" and frustrated by coverage of the 2012 race.
"I wanted to share some thoughts with you tonight. They can provide you with some comfort," he said. "Polls are not elections. The voters have not yet spoken."
Romney, who would be among the wealthiest presidents ever elected, has struggled to shed the image of an out-of-touch millionaire.
At the Saturday fundraiser in the San Diego-area, where donors paid as much as $25,000 to attend, Romney did little to help that image. He told the audience he spent the night before raising money at a San Francisco area mansion.
"Property up there is, I'm sure, very, very expensive. And we got to her driveway – it was at least a mile long, up and up, it's like, Oh my goodness, how in the world?" Romney said. "And then we came to the home, and it was like San Simeon, you know, the Hearst castle. It was this beautiful home with gardens, manicured gardens, and a pool and a topiary and so forth."
Romney charged that the president is taking America on a "pathway to become like Europe," adding a jab at his audience's home state.
"Europe doesn't work there. It's never going to work here," Romney said. "It's even possible we could be on a pathway to become California – I don't want that either."
He later said he was joking.
And before promising that he was done raising money in the San Diego area, Romney encouraged his California donors to help him reach voters in more competitive states.
"I need you to find someone who voted for Barack Obama, maybe in a swing state, and give him a call, and tell him to go to the polls and support this effort," he said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/22/mitt-romney-fundraising_n_1906566.html [with comments]
===
My white male millionaire friend is voting for WHO!?!
by 4democracyFollow
Mon Sep 17, 2012 at 08:19 AM PDT
I got a call from my buddy last night to come watch Sunday Football, drink a couple beers, and just catch up. We talk politics like we watch football: We mutually respect each other's right to be who we are, but also take great pleasure in giving each other crap about our teams, our candidates, and our economic philosophies.
On my way over last night, I was smiling to myself while coming up with my top ten list of reasons why he should vote for Obama. Not to change his vote, mind you, but just to get him riled up and fire something back over beers. Deep down, I knew he was going to vote for Romney. His business ventures put him in the top one percent, income-wise; He is a big critic of the welfare state; He's a socially-moderate, fiscally conservative Catholic (rarely attending, though); He thinks and works hard to fulfill his own self-interest in his business and personal life, and feels no need to apologize for that.
So, I got to his place and settled into my beer, passed a round of chewing tobacco over to him (you can take the boy out of Missouri, but you can't take the Missouri out of the boy), smiled a smartass smile, and asked him the question I had been waiting for.
"So, who are you voting for for president?"
"I'm not sure," he said completely seriously, "but I think I'm going to vote for Obama."
I nearly choked on my Skoal.
If there's a slam dunk vote for Romney, I thought, this guy was it. I even half-heartedly tried to talk him out of it (I wasn't going to give up easily on having at least SOME sort of debate), telling him that his income bracket would seem to lend itself to Romney's economic promises just as much as his business management needs would find relevance with Romney's promises to ease the regulations governing short-term lending or whether he provided his employees with health-care. I talked about how critics of Obama's economic policies say that all of this uncertainty about government intervention/regulation makes banks/investors more skeptical about investment and has slowed the recovery. As devoid of legitimate talking points as the (R) platform is, there's enough nuggets there when, turned over the right way, are worthy of debate. I mean, who did he think he was, ruining my sparring match by freaking agreeing with me?
But, aside from not really liking that Romney is a Mormon, he said that his decision was based on, of all things, economics and prospects for his business. Without revealing too much personal information about him, his business caters to low to middle class families in an area with a large (nearly 50%) Latino population. He just said matter of factly (to paraphrase) - "I'm a numbers guy - and my numbers have been better under Obama, just like they were under Clinton. If those guys keep my customers coming through the door, I'll pay the 35% tax and not blink."
He added that a big part of it was that he can take (the equivalent of) food stamps for his business as well, so in a way the artificially-expanded middle class as a result of low-income entitlements is a big help to his bottom line. As long as a government is committed to maintaining a certain level of support for low income people, he will maintain the volume he needs to succeed as a business. In addition, he provides health care voluntarily anyway for all of his full-time employees ("It's just smart", he says, "because it allows me to find the right people, keep them healthy and happy, and keep them around."), so he's really not worried about Obamacare running him out of business - it will actually save him money to the extent that it makes health care cheaper.
On the Latino population, he also worried about what the immigration crusade mentality will do to his customer and employee base. This includes losing business from undocumented, poorly documented, or even legally documented families depending on how far the anti-immigration people (which includes Romney and more prominently Ryan) take that. In an area with a 50% latino base, this could devastate him. He also related a story to me of one of his regular employees, a green card holder who is paying the $800 to get her citizenship process dealt with. She was really nervous about the test and figuring out where to get the cash to go through the process, but she was more nervous about what people who advise that community are saying will likely happen if Romney is elected. Though most people think Obama is going to win, she didn't want to take the chance of being too far back in the line for citizenship that would rapidly form if Romney is elected and the Republicans start trying to get rid of Mexicans.
Life is Interesting.
Vote for Obama.
© Kos Media, LLC
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/17/1132739/-My-white-male-millionaire-friend-is-voting-for-WHO [with comments]
===
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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