More Voter ID Fraud

Yesterday, this hit the news:

Commonwealth Court has refused to revisit its decision striking down Pennsylvania’s controversial voter ID law.

That means the law requiring voters to show ID cards is dead unless the Pennsylvania Supreme Court steps in.

In a 29-page ruling, Commonwealth Court judge Bernard McGinley wrote that the voter ID law failed to provide voters “liberal access” to valid forms of photo ID cards. He wrote that the law therefore potentially deprives thousands of voters of their fundamental right to cast a ballot, and so the ruling rendering the law unconstitutional must stand.

As did this:

A federal judge struck down Wisconsin's voter identification law on Tuesday, declaring that a requirement that voters show a state-issued photo ID at the polls imposes an unfair burden on poor and minority voters.

And so I found it intensely interesting that today, I find this on the pages of Scaife's Tribune-Review:

With looming midterm elections strengthening its politics-first propensity, the Obama administration denies the very real problem that is voting fraud based on a worthless 2012 study and a narrow 2005 Justice Department release.

Judicial Watch senior attorney Robert D. Popper, a former deputy chief of Justice's voting rights section, writes in The Wall Street Journal that President Obama, preaching to Al Sharpton's National Action Network choir, said a study “found only 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation in 12 years.” But Mr. Popper says that 2012 Arizona State University study admits so many gaps in its data that it's “hard to believe any valid conclusions ... can be drawn from” it.

I guess it's not too early to point out the financial entanglements connecting Scaife's paper with Judicial Watch.  According to Bridgeproject, about 94% of all the foundational support received by JW, came from the three foundations controlled by the Tribune-Review's owner, Richard Mellon Scaife.

That alone should skew the skeptic's eye regarding how credible this information is.

But let's go further.  What's up with that Arizona State University Study?  Here it is.  While they admit some limitations to the data, they do bring up an interesting little piece of information that I am sure would be of interest to Scaife's braintrust:

What about the highly publicized list of voter fraud cases gathered by the Republican National Lawyers Association?

News21 began its data-gathering effort in January 2012 by reviewing the more than 300 cases of alleged voter fraud collected by the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA). For years, the RNLA has been urging strict voter-identification laws on the grounds of massive amounts of voter fraud, and in 2011 the organization released a survey of voter fraud cases in America. However, the News21 analysis showed that the RNLA cases, now totaling about 375 cases, consisted mainly of newspaper articles about a range of election issues, with little supporting evidence of actual in-person voter fraud.

And here are the limitations:

Is this database complete?

No. Despite the huge News21 public-records request effort, the team received no useful responses from several states — for instance, the lone cases in the database from Massachusetts, Oklahoma , South Carolina and South Dakota all came from the RNLA survey. Even in states where some local jurisdictions responded, others didn’t. In addition, it is possible that some jurisdictions which did respond failed to include some cases. Another problem is that some responses News21 received were missing important details about each case — from whether the person was convicted or charged to the circumstances of the alleged fraud to the names of those involved. Still, with those caveats, News21 is confident this database is substantially complete and is the largest such collection of election fraud cases gathered by anyone in the United States.

But still the editorial in Scaife's paper quotes the attorney from the Scaife-funded organization who found fault.  Go figure.  Then there's this from the editorial:

And the 2005 Justice “analysis” that Mr. Obama said showed only 40 voters indicted for fraud in 2002-05? It's actually a news release that ignored state-level cases and didn't claim to cover all federal voter-fraud cases, Popper says.

Here's the release.  You can judge for yourself whether it's credible.  I mean it is from the Justice Department and all.  The Bush Justice Department.  Here's what the Times said back then:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

And the braintrust's evidence for voter fraud?  Take a look:

Valid research — such as a 2012 Pew report about 1.8 million dead registered voters and 2.75 million voters registered in more than one state or a cross-check involving Virginia and 21 other states that found 17,000 voters registered in three or more states — doesn't fit Obama's agenda.

Yea and so think about it, if you live in one state and you move to another and register to vote there, or if you happen to pass away between the time you registered to vote and your name is taken off the voter rolls because you're dead, that's evidence that there's voter fraud.  VOTER FRAUD!!!

This wasn't even a good try.

The Right Wing Web. Again.

Mediamatters has an interesting piece up on the latest "blistering new report" on the Benghazi "scandal.

In it they look at the birthers, anti-muslim activists and conspiracy theorists who put together the report.  Who are they?  The Dailymail has some info on that:

The commission, part of the center-right Accuracy In Media group, concluded that the Benghazi attack was a failed kidnapping plot

Ah, Accuracy in Media.  That would be the media watchdog that receives, according to the bridgeproject, 93% of its foundation funding from foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife ($2,640,000 from Sarah Scaife and $1,720,000 from Carthage foundations divided by a total of $4,665,200).

Then there's this from Newsmax:

Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton says that had Benghazi happened during the administration of President George W. Bush, the mainstream media "would have been all over him."

Bolton told J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV that he marvels at how the Democratic slant on major news stories, like Benghazi, by network news outlets in this country is accepted as the norm.

And:

Bolton's comments come on the eve of the Citizens Commission on Benghazi's announcing its interim findings and new leads on the Sept. 11, 2011, attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that left four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, dead.

Yea, Newsmax would be the "news" service owned by Clinton Conspiracist Christopher Ruddy and Richard Mellon Scaife.

And of course Bolton has a regular column in Scaife's newspaper.  Here's how he's described at the bottom of a recent column.

John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

American Enterprise Institute?  Oh, yea.  They've received $9,811,000 in Scaife money over the years.

Would any of this exist without Scaife's largess?

Teh (Latest) Birther Crazie

Of course it's from World Net Daily and of course OF COURSE it's from Jerome Corsi.  (Either point, let us remember) is enough to undermine its credibility.  But here we go - let's go take a look at teh latest Corsi Crazie.

From WND:

Self-proclaimed international intelligence expert Michael Shrimpton plans to launch a vigorous defense on charges of making false claims to British government officials that a terrorist nuclear attack was under way during the 2012 Olympics in London, raising the possibility documents and testimony he plans to subpoena will embarrass the U.K., German and U.S. governments.

As WND reported, Shrimpton, who faces a Nov. 10 trial, also appears in a 2008 video that began re-circulating earlier this year on the Internet in which he claims to have been privy to shocking intelligence information on Obama’s origins. Shrimpton contends to this day that the CIA collected DNA from then-Sen. Obama and a grandparent establishes that Stanley Ann Dunham was not Obama’s biological mother. He intends to subpoena from the CIA and British intelligence any records either agency may have on Obama’s DNA. [Emphasis added so you can more clearly see teh crazie.]

Yea, you remember the nuclear attack at the 2012 Olympics, right?  Here's what Shrimpton contends:

Meanwhile, Shrimpton has been indicted for having telephoned in 2012 the secretary of state for defense in London and declaring that a nuclear weapon stolen from the Russian submarine Kursk that sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, 2000, had been smuggled into Britain.

Shrimpton said the smugglers were agents of a top-secret German intelligence agency that intended to detonate the weapon to cause massive damage and murder members of the Royal family and top government officials attending the London Olympics.

As part of his defense, for some reason, he's claiming the CIA knows that President Obama's mother wasn't actually his mother.  And according to the 2008 video linked above, Obama's father WAS his actual father (and not Frank Marshall Davis, as Corsi has reported here) but that his mother was one of his many mistresses.

Oh and some of the Presidential campaigns in 2008 (Giuliani, Clinton and so on) also knew that Obama's mother wasn't his mother.

Yea, you remember when that hit the news, too.  Right?

Does Shrimpton have any credibility?  No.  Does Corsi have any credibility by reporting on him?  No, again.

Trackin' teh crazie.

A History Lesson

An astute reader emailed me the other day with a link to this Mother Jones piece.  It begins thusly:

In a 1995 internal memo, President Bill Clinton's White House Counsel's Office offered an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media mill that Hillary Clinton had dubbed the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Portions of the report, which was reported on by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets at the time, were included in a new trove of documents released to the public by the Clinton presidential library on Friday.

The report traced the evolution of various Clinton scandals, such as Whitewater and the Gennifer Flowers affair allegations, from their origins at conservative think tanks or in British tabloids, until the point in which they entered the mainstream news ecosystem.

They (the White House staffers) even had a name for it: "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce."

Not a big fan of the forced alliteration, but before we get the conspiratorial content, there was something about the fancy phrase that caught my eye.  Chop off the detailing nouns and you get "stream of commerce."
Here's how USLegal.com defines the phrase:

As used in tort law, stream of commerce theory refers to a principle that a person who participates in placing a defective product in the general marketplace is strictly liable for harm caused by the product.

The important part is the phrase "placing a defective product in the general marketplace."

Guess just guess who's prominently featured on that memo from nearly 20 years ago.  Take a look:

Richard Mellon Scaife is in the vanguard of this aforementioned form of this media age political organizing. Scaife uses the $800 million Mellon fortune which he inherited to fund a virtual empire of rightwing newspapers and foundations.These newspapers and foundations, in turn, propagate Scaife's extremist views. Scaife along with a handful of other wealthy individuals and foundations use their power to control the Republican Party's agenda and viewpoints.

And:

The controversy surrounding the death of Vince Foster has been, in large part, the product of a well-financed rightwing conspiracy industry operation. The "Wizard of Oz" figure orchestrating the machinations of the conspiracy industry is a little-known recluse, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife uses his $800 million dollar inherited Mellon fortune to underwrite the Foster conspiracy industry. Scaife promotes the industry through his ownership of a small Pittsburgh newspaper, the Tribune-Review. Scaife's paper, under the direction of reporter Chris Ruddy, continually publishes stories regarding Foster's death.The articles are then reprinted in major newspapers all over the country in the form of paid advertisements.The Western Journalism Center (WJC), a nonprofit conservative think tank, places the stories in these newspapers.The WJC receives much of its financial backing from Scaife.

Scaife is in the vanguard of a new form of political organizing. Wealthy right wing foundations and individuals finance conservative think tanks and non-profits. The think tanks and non-profits promote their benefactor's agendas and viewpoints. The think tanks and non-profits are able to spin their backer's agenda and viewpoints back into the mainstream and control the agenda of the Republican Party.

Scaife uses his financing of the fringe, right wing publications and non-profits to create a communications stream of conspiracy commerce.The stream effectively conveys the rantings of the fringe into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media.Here is how Scaife does it: 1) The right wing publications he owns or helps finance such as the Tribune-Review or American Spectator will do a Foster conspiracy story; 2) The story will then be picked up on the internet; 3) From the internet the story will bounce back into the mainstream media; and 4) From the mainstream media, a Congressional investigatory committee will follow up on the story which, in turn, gives the story even more undeserved legitimacy.

That was true in 1995 and it's just as true today.

And it's interesting to note that reporting of this story has found its way onto the pages of Scaife's Tribune-Review.  But look at the byline: Bloomberg News. Take a look:

Scaife, the newspaper publisher and Mellon fortune heir, is the central player identified in the dossier. He is singled out for sowing doubt about whether White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster committed suicide and for his financial backing of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Republican organizations.

“Scaife uses his financing of the fringe, right-wing publications and non-profits to create a communications stream of conspiracy commerce,” the author, who isn't identified, wrote. “The stream effectively conveys the rantings of the fringe into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media.”

 Yea, if Scaife was signing my checks, I wouldn't want to write that either.

By the way, Vince Foster committed suicide.  No less a screaming liberal than Ken Starr said so:

An exhaustive three-year investigation by the office of Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr has reaffirmed previous findings that White House deputy counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr. commited suicide.

The report concludes that Foster was severely depressed about his work at the White House, took a revolver from a closet in his home, placed it in an oven mitt, and on the afternoon of July 20, 1993, drove to a Virginia park and shot himself. And it contains new forensic details that refute the conspiracy theories that have long surrounded his death – that Foster was a victim of foul play, or that his body was moved to Fort Marcy Park after his death at another location, perhaps the White House.

And where did many of those conspiracy theories come from?  Scaife's communication stream of conspiracy commerce.

But don't delude yourself that the stream's dried up (to continue the riverly metaphor).  For example, The Western Journalism Center is reporting on the recent Bundy lawlessness in Nevada:

After the federal Bureau of Land Management agents backed down from their intimidating stance at the Bundy Ranch last weekend, ample evidence has surfaced indicating the standoff between the government and the Nevada ranching family is far from over. Throughout the weeklong stalemate, members of the Bundy family were physically assaulted by armed officers, numerous cows were shot dead, and protesters faced threats of gunfire for merely expressing their outrage.

Immediately after what many considered a victory against a tyrannical federal agency, a number of leftist voices – most notably, Sen. Harry Reid – indicated the action against this family will continue.

In response, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman sent a letter to Barack Obama, Department of the Interior Sec. Sally Jewell, and BLM Director Neil Kornze, laying out his position that any such action by the agency would violate the U.S. Constitution.

So one rancher in Nevada effectively steals a million dollars worth of grazing time from the guv'ment, refuses to pay up when caught, threatens the guv'ment agents sent to implement a court order and they're the ones violating the Constitution.

Only in the Scaife' funded fringe.

Thanks, Dick.

Born On This Date...

Every now and then I peruse the "who was born on this date" lists that can be found here and there across the internets and sometimes I find some interesting (and completely coincidental) musical pairings.

Today is just such a day - with two very important individuals from the history of music in 20th century America.

First, Leopold Stokowski, born this date in 1882 in London.  Here he is conducting The Petrushka Suite in 1967:


And then, Pigmeat Markham, born this day in 1904. Here he is rapping a decade or so before the Sugarhill Gang:

More Voter ID Hysteria From The Trib

Take a look at today's Tribune-Review:

Speaking of grove-variety pecans, “progressives” are in a tizzy-fit over a finding by Kim Strach, North Carolina's director of elections, that suggests nearly 36,000 people with the same names, birth dates and Social Security numbers voted both in the Tar Heel State and other states in 2012. Another 81 North Carolinians voted after they died, reports The Washington Times. But remember, voter fraud is a figment of the conservative imagination. [Bolding in original.]

Still is.

Here's the story:

This week, officials at the North Carolina State Board of Elections announced they had discovered possible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the battleground state.

By cross-checking North Carolina voter rolls with those in 28 other states, leaders of the board told state lawmakers they had found 35,750 records of people who voted in North Carolina and whose first name, last name and date of birth matched people who had voted in other states. More surprisingly, it also revealed 765 North Carolina voters in 2012 whose last four Social Security digits also matched those of people who voted in other states that year.

You might ask, where did they get this information? Did they generate it themselves? Is the source partisan or non-partisan?  And how reliable is it?

All good questions.  Here are some answers:

The cross-check of North Carolina voters was conducted by the office of Kris Kobach, the controversial Secretary of State in Kansas. A long-time Republican political operative, Kobach is known nationally as the architect of legislation cracking down on immigrants in Arizona and elsewhere, as well as severe voting restrictions.

Kobach launched the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program in 2005 as a free service to states — almost exclusively those led by Republican lawmakers — to flag voters who may be casting ballots in multiple states in the same election, which is a felony. In a traveling PowerPoint presentation Kobach’s office uses to pitch the program (for example, this recent presentation [PPT] in Indiana), they say it’s grown from four Midwestern states sharing 9 million voter records in 2005 to more than two dozen states states sharing 110 million files today.

Here’s how it works: A participating state sends its voter file to Kobach’s office, which compares it — free of charge — against the records from the other states. In 2013, the program flagged a staggering 5 million records of people whose names and date of birth appeared to match.

Wow.  Five million?  Is that evidence of five million double (and therefore felonious) votes?

No.  Did you know that the same Kris Kobach did the same sort of "research" for the State of Pennsylvania?  And did you know that they admitted a high number of "false positives"?  I'll let Vic Walczak of the Pennsylvania ACLU explain:

But the same materials, produced by the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office, candidly acknowledge that many of those potential duplicates are false positives: “Experience in the crosscheck program indicates that a significant number of apparent double votes are false positives and not double votes. Many are the result of errors voters sign the wrong line in the poll book, election clerks scan the wrong line with a barcode scanner, or there is confusion over the father/son voters (Sr. and Jr.).” The program thus flags a huge number of voters as potential duplicates, but admits a high error rate, elevating the ACLU’s concerns about how precisely Pennsylvania will handle voter-registration cancellations.

But that's not all, my friends.  No no.  There is more.

In hearing of this report Dick Morris wrote about the "widespread voter fraud" in North Carolina based on this research (or better, "research").  And doncha know, Politifact rated it false.

Their ruling?  Take a look:

Morris said that the large number of North Carolina voters matched with records in other states was proof that over 1 million people voted twice in the 2012 election. While Morris admittedly was extrapolating from the North Carolina data, his conclusion is flawed on several fronts.

The head of North Carolina’s board of elections did not claim that even the closest matches on name, birth date and Social Security numbers was conclusive evidence. She said more investigation was needed. The track record of the Interstate Crosscheck project shows that a tiny fraction of all potential matches represents any kind of voting fraud. In Kansas, out of more than 850,000 votes cast, only 14 names were recommended for prosecution and the Kansas Secretary of State reported no convictions.

In other states, database quirks, human error and the statistics of large numbers have been shown to trim the initial reports of widespread fraud down to the barest sliver of actual cases.

We rate the claim False.

False.  Scaife's braintrust really needs to do better than this.  But we all know they can't.

Yea...That Nevada Thing.

The Trib dutifully offers up it's confused editorial support.

Why do I say confused?

Oh where do I begin?  Let's start at where Scaife's braintrust ends its argument:

This dispute should be settled administratively, in court, not at gunpoint in the desert. The price of such government bullying, even if it stops short of another Waco-style catastrophe, is too high to risk paying — for those endangered, for liberty and for the rule of law. [Emphasis added.]

I might be getting ahead of myself - perhaps some of my readers don't know what's going on in Nevada.  Mother Jones has a good summary:

On Saturday, a large group of anti-government protesters converged on a Bureau of Land Management base camp in rural Nevada to protest the federal government's seizure of Bundy's cows. Bundy had for years grazed hundreds of cattle on protected lands controlled by the federal government and refused to pay the resulting court-ordered fines. This month, after nearly 20 years of consistently beating Bundy in court, the BLM moved to confiscate his cattle. 

The braintrust is still pushing the idea that this dispute should be settled in court.  But it already has been to court.  And Bundy has consistently lost.  Take a look at this from a recent court order:

This case arises out of Bundy’s unauthorized and unlawful grazing of his livestock on property owned by the United States and administered by the Department of the Interior (“the DOI”) through the Bureau of Land Management (“the BLM”) and the National Park Service (“the NPS”). On November 3, 1998, the Court issued an Order permanently enjoining Bundy from grazing his livestock on the former Bunkerville Allotment (“the Allotment”), and ordering him to remove his livestock from the Allotment by no later than November 30, 1998, and pay damages to the United States in the amount of $200 per day per head for any remaining livestock on the Allotment after November 30, 1998. On September 17, 1999, after Bundy failed to comply with the Court’s first Order, the Court issued a second Order directing Bundy to comply with the 1998 Permanent Injunction and modifying the trespass damages owed to the United States. Notwithstanding the Court’s Orders, Bundy continues to graze his cattle on the Allotment. Thus, the United States seeks a third Order as follows: (1) declaring that Bundy has placed or allowed his livestock to graze on the Allotment in violation of the Court’s Orders; (2) directing Bundy to remove his livestock from the Allotment within 45 days of the Court’s Order; (3) explicitly authorizing the United States to seize and impound Bundy’s livestock if they have not been removed as directed; (4) instructing Bundy that he may not physically interfere with an impoundment operation authorized by the Court’s Order; and (5) authorizing the United States to seize and impound Bundy’s livestock should he continue to violate the Court’s Permanent Injunction in the future.

And so I have to ask my friends on the Braintrust: What part of this don't you understand?  Bundy has been breaking the law for 20 some odd years, taking advantage of public property, and ignoring Federal Court orders.  The BLM was confiscating his cattle to pay the fines he accrued by doing all that illegal stuff.

How is that guv'ment bullying?