US Election: 2016

[a_majoor]

War talk is probably more aimed at the mid terms than 2016:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/1/curl-obamas-2014-calculation-lets-have-war/print/

CURL: Obama’s 2014 calculation: Let’s have a war

By Joseph Curl Sunday, September 1, 2013

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The first rule for President Obama: It's all about 2014. The second rule for President Obama: See Rule No. 1.

Make no mistake: The president couldn't care less about the plight of Syrians, the 1,500 gassed to death — including nearly 500 children. It's all about 2014. Win the House, reign supreme.

Consider this: Mr. Obama made his dramatic Rose Garden statement Saturday — then headed to the golf course. Congress has no plans to cut short its 30-day vacation, and the president did not call lawmakers back. So much for urgency.

The conventional wisdom is, as usual, wrong. Losing the congressional vote won't be an embarrassment for the president, as all the talking heads are still parroting. A loss would be a double win. First, because a "No" vote would allow the foreign policy neophyte to walk away from his blundering "red line" declaration on chemical weapons ("I wanted to go in, but Congress said no"). And second, should Republicans who voted for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars now oppose Syria, the president would be armed with clear "evidence" that their opposition is purely political.

Keep in mind: This president knows no way to campaign other than to blame others. He'll batter Republicans for all of 2014 as obstructionists should they be the reason the effort fails.

But the bloviating politicos are also wrong that the "Republican-controlled House" could reject the plan for partisan reasons. It is Democrats who seem most squeamish — and they were the most vocal in demanding their say before intervention in Syria. Remember, two years ago, as the president prepared to bomb Libya, 70 Democrats joined Republicans in voting against military operations. Mr. Obama bombed anyway.

Still, the entire fiasco has been hard to watch, "Amateur Hour" indeed. The president declares a "red line," then sees the Syrian dictator cross it again and again. The Nobel Peace Prize winner declares he'll take America to war — but only then does he seek partners and only to find a "Coalition of the Unwilling." The United Nations says no, the Arab League says no, China and Russia say no — even the United Kingdom says no (mainly because Brits did not want to have another U.S.-led war jammed down their throats).

Back home, polls find 80 percent of Americans want Congress to decide, and nearly half oppose intervention. So the president — hoping to appear magnanimous — declares he'll seek authorization (read: share the blame).

Still, the president and his secretary of state are absolutely right. "The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity," John F. Kerry said. Mr. Obama, in his most powerful passage, said: "Here's my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?"

Of course a firm response is the correct action. And Mr. Obama doesn't need authority to do so in Syria, just as he didn't in Libya. While Republican support on the Hill now would help Mr. Obama save face after his "red line" throw-down, striking Syria with a few cruise missiles — however fleeting and ineffectual that would be to the course of its 2-year-old civil war — also would send a signal to the real target: Iran. That's why, most likely, Republicans will support the president after rewriting the White House's draft resolution.

Now, it is up to Mr. Obama's own party: Does he still hold sway over Democrats? Will they bend to his will? Many already seem to be running for the hills. And if they don't, will the president have the temerity to order strikes anyway?

Whatever happens, this much is clear: We're no longer talking about the IRS targeting tea party groups, the Justice Department tapping reporters' phone lines, the NSA's surveillance programs, Benghazi. The president has smartly changed the subject to the most important decision a commander in chief makes: war.

And the most presidential. That, he knows, will play better in the midterm elections, whichever way Congress votes.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times and is now editor of the Drudge Report. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/1/curl-obamas-2014-calculation-lets-have-war/#ixzz2dnPngmbl
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

 

[a_majoor]

A look at some of the internal stresses that are working in the Democrat Party. The comment is quite interesting as well; with the party silently struggling between the Obama and Clinton wings, who is being groomed to move into the top ranks for 2016 and beyond?

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/09/21/hillary-losing-stings-for-bill/

How Much Does Hillary Losing to Obama in ’08 Still Sting for Bill?

September 21st, 2013 - 1:44 pm
   
A lot. That’s the subtext I’m taking away from this quote from Bill Clinton’s interview with Obama sycophant Fareed Zakaria on CNN, aside from the boilerplate leftwing bitching (from a guy who ran to the right, on several issues, of George H.W. Bush in ’92, no less):

FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: You’re not worried about the Democratic Party?

BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No. We’ve got a lot of good people in the Party. We’ve got a lot of good ideas.

But I think you’ve got to give it the Republicans. They have a much more reliable media base. And they just say no. They know what they want. They want power to cut taxes, eliminate regulations, take government down except for what they like. And they can fill the atmosphere with a lot of static.

When you’re trying to get something done, it requires a much more deft strategy because you have to explain what you’re trying to do, and it’s a little tougher for us.

In the fall of 2006, Bill told John F. Harris, then with the Washington Post, now with Politico, that “There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies — and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.”

So it must have really stung a year and a half later when those old media organizations he and his wife viewed as “de facto allies” turned around and accused the Clintons of racism* in order to advance the Democrat candidate they much preferred over Hillary.

And could very possibly devour the Clintons once again if a fresh face who’s “clean and neat,” to coin a Biden-esque phrase, “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” ”an exotic who says nothing,” to coin a couple of others, shows up to take on someone who carries as much baggage to exploit as Hillary does.

* Which was nothing compared to the drubbing that Hillary received in some of the fever swamp regions of the leftwing media back then.

and the comment:

Jon1979
While the left side of the Democratic Party would love to spurn Hillary again in 2016, the Democratic Party's presidential playbook has been set in that the hierarchy plans to dig up a candidate from every one of the party's special interest groups then can find and (in their mind) run them in eight-year intervals through the middle of the century, while working with the media to endow each new face with the God-like powers they promoted for Obama in 2008.

The problem is while they would love to run a Latino, an Asian, an LGBTmember, or whatever other special interest group they can find or create, they haven't prepped anyone yet the way they did with Obama in the 2004 DNC convention (San Antonio Mayor Joaquin Castro was showcased at last year's DNC convention as a quick response to Ted Cruz's Texas Senate primary win, but both Castro and his twin brother -- who won election to one of the state's new House seats in 2012 -- are checkmated from advancing higher at the state level at least until 2018).

So Hillary's the only option for the playbook in 2016. But after what happened in 2008, if she does run and get the nomination, you can be sure there will be a wholesale purge of the Obama types from the levers of power within the party as part of payback time, as soon as Hill and Bill decide it won't hurt them in the general election.

 

[a_majoor]

If nothing else, this is a very creative way to sell an essential economic truth to the voters. Of course, once elected on a platform like this, you also have to "walk the walk", something neither party seems very good at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2013/09/22/republicans-will-win-the-government-shutdown-pr-battle-if-they-promise-voters-private-jets/

Republicans Will Win The Government Shutdown PR Battle If They Promise Voters Private Jets

Assuming a federal government shutdown come October, there’s a surefire way for the Republicans to win the ensuing war of words. Without a hint of hyperbole, they should promise voters a future of widespread private jet ownership.

The above proclamation is easy to laugh at, many surely will, but when Karl Friedrich Benz created the first gasoline powered car in 1885, it was exponentially crazier to contend then that cars would be a middle class good within 25 years. But by the 2nd decade of the 20th century the once inconceivable to own luxury that was the automobile had become rather commonplace. Thanks to Henry Ford’s aggressive investment and reinvestment of profits into perfecting mass production of the auto, gasoline-powered cars rather quickly became ubiquitous.

Just the same, if someone had said in 1903 (when the Wright brothers first took flight) that flying would within the 20th century become a pedestrian and often bothersome necessity, that person too would have been laughed out of the room.  But with government on all levels consuming exponentially less capital in the early part of the 20th century, huge technological leaps were taking place thanks to extra capital in the private sector funding all manner of commercial experimentation.  To deny the correlation between small government and big private sector advances is to ignore basic economics.

More on private flying in a little bit, but first it should be said that the Republicans, even though Obamacare is dying before our eyes of its own myriad contradictions, must stand firm on defunding it anyway. They must do this even if it means a shutdown of the federal government.

Wise political minds have made very apparent their view that a GOP-authored shutdown would amount to political suicide, but it seems the thinkers inside the Establishment have misread the electorate. Put plainly, a Republican Party that deserved rebuke after the George W. Bush economic disaster was given a very probationary second chance in 2010.

The second chance was rooted in voter discomfort not just with the growing size and scope of government, but also in fear of Obamacare’s implications for the quality and cost of healthcare. If voters had desired the status quo, they would have left the Democrats in control.

To be blunt, if the Republicans aren’t willing to do everything in their power to defund, delay, or repeal Obamacare, what’s the point of voting them majority status to begin with? Just the same, if the cost of government is going to continue to grow no matter the Party in control of the purse strings, why vote Republican at all?

The allegedly wise thinkers of the GOP Establishment will respond that a ‘defund, shutdown and shrink’ strategy will just make things worse for those who want smaller government, and who similarly want freedom over their healthcare choices. The thinking seems to be that absent the Republicans, full-throated national healthcare and expansive government are just around the corner. It’s an argument that has merit on its face, but it’s also one that is no longer credible.

Indeed, going back to 1994 the Republican base was sold a similar line about GOP parsimony with the money of others. To see how well that worked out, readers might compare federal spending in ’94 to 2000, not to mention spending in 2000 vs. 2006 when a disgusted base finally – and very correctly – helped return the Republican Party to much-deserved minority status. To state the obvious, Republicans have historically talked a good game about limited, less expensive government, but the expense of it always seems to grow on their watch. (interpolation. Sadly, the spending record after 2006 was far, far worse...)

They probably don’t deserve it, but Republicans have been given yet another chance to match policy with their bold rhetoric. Even better, and contrary to some of the more established consensus, good policy will in this case be good politics for the Republicans. The House of Representatives is where spending originates, and Republicans were handed control to delay, defund or repeal Obamacare in concert with serious shrinkage of the size of the federal government itself. Assuming what’s likely true, that President Obama and the Senate won’t go along with GOP plans, a Republican House in control of spending will get to starve Obama’s signature legislation, and then with a government shutdown that decidedly does not mean a shutdown of the federal government (Social Security checks will go out, the military will be funded, the IRS will for good or bad remain functional), it will force a happy realization on the citizenry that life goes on rather swimmingly without Leviathan running on all cylinders.

Assuming the opposite, as in assuming that voters make Republicans pay for a ‘defund, shutdown and shrink’ strategy in 2014 and beyond, well, that must be a risk the Party’s leaders are willing to take. That’s the case because in addition to talking a good game about limited government, Republicans almost to a man talk big about the dangers wrought by lifelong politicians, not to mention how ‘alien’ to them is the ‘corrupt’ Washington culture. Since they do, they should be very eager to give up their privileged perches in Washington in order to ‘stand athwart’ an ever expanding federal government. Furthermore, for a Party that talks a lot about the very real horrors of dependency, why should its political leadership in Congress expect the base to sacrifice their principles in order to save the cushy jobs of GOP Congressmen?

Further on with the alleged political risks, since GOP voters decidedly did not send the Republicans to Washington in order to do that which would get them re-elected, it’s fair to contend that the presumed risks associated with ‘defund, shutdown and shrink’ are well overdone. Indeed, wouldn’t it be more risky for the Republicans’ electoral chances if Obamacare were in full flower and the cost of government even greater come November 2014?

It’s worth mentioning that in pursuing ‘defund, shutdown and shrink,’ the Republicans needn’t do this in angry fashion. Obamacare is inimical to quality healthcare outcomes given its focus on non-market cost controls, so Republicans should talk about the heart, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and ACL cures that will more quickly reach all of us if the government’s role in healthcare is substantially reduced.

And then rather than talk about deficits, Greece, entitlements, and how the size of government is unsustainable, Republicans should go the optimistic route; talking about how the federal government’s loss is the private sector’s certain gain. Indeed, they should talk about how much more we’ll have, including many more Microsofts, Intels, and Apple products that will make the iPad seem dated, if the size and cost of government shrinks. They should talk about how Henry Ford’s quite speedy ability to mass produce the once unimaginable luxury that was the automobile was directly related to his being able to retain Ford Motor Company’s profits in order to re-invest in the perfection of car manufacture. They should talk about how Jeff Bezos, Fred Smith and Warren Buffett are much better allocators of capital than are John Boehner, Harry Reid and Barack Obama.

To state what’s obvious, Republicans should talk about how much better our lives will be, how much more we’ll earn, and how much more often we’ll be blown away by staggering technological innovations if the federal government is consuming much less of our hard-earned money. In short, Republicans should talk about the private jets we’ll all eventually own if the economy-suffocating growth of government is reversed by the Republican Party.

 

[CougarKing]

Here we go...seems Hillary Clinton just began campaigning again...

Yahoo News

Did Hillary Clinton tip her hand on 2016 presidential run?
By Jay Hart | Yahoo News – Tue, 15 Oct, 2013.

Hillary Clinton may have tipped her hand on Tuesday about her plans for a 2016 presidential run.

Speaking in Atlanta at a convention that was closed to the media, Clinton spent 25 minutes talking about the 2011 raid on the Osama bin Laden compound, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The crux of that discussion: that she was for the 2011 raid in which al Qaida leader bin Laden was killed ― and Vice President Joe Biden did not support the military action.

State Representative Tom Taylor, a Republican, told the AJC that Clinton went to great lengths to paint herself and former CIA director Leon Panetta as the raid's fiercest advocates, while at the same time highlighting Biden's opposition.

"Without turning the knife too deeply, she put it to Biden," Taylor told the AJC.

(...)

 

[a_majoor]

Why polls are becoming even less reliable than usual: polling firms are radically manipulating the data. This isn't just the usual skewed questioning or oversampling/undersampling, which are generally subtle and sometimes difficult to detect. Polling firm PPP, in developing a poll for a "progressive" group, adjusted the racial composition of Georgia from 71% White voters in an August poll to 62% in the September poll.

Now if the group that comissioned the poll was looking to get a snapshot of what the electorate was thinking, they should sue for fraud. If, on the other hand, the desired result was to release poll numbers showing radical changes in voter intentions and support to embolden firends and demoralize enemies, then that is what they got. Since most news organizations, bloggers etc. do not look at or release the methodology (amd the vast majority of voters never ask), I would suspect the second reason was the real reason for these polls.

http://georgiatipsheet.com/2013/10/18/ppp-criticized-for-gaming-ga-poll-results/

(formatting issue: go to the link to read the article)

 

[cupper]

A poll just out by NBC / Esquire Magazine shows that Americans are moderate / centerist in their views.

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/14/20960588-the-new-american-center-why-our-nation-isnt-as-divided-as-we-think

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/new-american-center-1113

55% of Americans fall in the center or moderate part of the spectrum, with 20% falling on the left, 25% falling on the right.

Therefore, the Tea Party policies don't represent the views of most Americans beyond their base, which is not sufficient to win control of the legislative branch or the White House. Same with progressives on the left end of the spectrum. In order to win, either party needs to win the center.

It seems that the Dems know this well, but the GOP still hasn't figured it out.

And if you don't believe that, look at the rhetoric that is starting to come out after the shutdown ended this week. The push to move on Immigration reform is flailing for traction within the GOP conservative caucus.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/raul-labrador-budget-immigration-reform-98404.html

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/marco-rubio-obamacare-2014-98457.html

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/laura-ingraham-debt-ceiling-amnesty-push-98392.html

 

[Haletown]

Here we go...seems Hillary Clinton just began campaigning again...

Yahoo News

Watch how she reacts to the ObamaCare rollout/impending GCF.  If it continues to tank and she throws it under t he bus, them more indication she is in.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

I was going to post this in the funnies thread, but thought may be posting here was better:

 

[cupper]

We have winners declared.

Chris Christy had a cake walk in his race which came as no surprise to anyone. Took 60% of the vote over his Democratic opponent.

But more to the point, FOX News and NBC are calling the Virginia race for Terry McAuliffe over Ken Cuccinelli in a very tight race. 47% to 46% with about 4% of the vote left to be reported.

And this is a definitive defeat of the extreme right social conservative policy. The GOP candicate for Lt. Governor is a hard right evangelical pastor with some extreme views on social issues. He lost in counties that went overwhelmingly for Cuccinelli. He even lost in Lynchburg City, home of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

The race for Attorney General is also close, and no call has been made as of yet. The GOP candidate is leading 51 to 49.

About the only real takeaway from this is:

A) Virginia is solidly a purple state, and depending on the ticket in 2016, it could go either way.

and

B) This was the GOP's election to lose, and they did because of the slate of candidates they put up.

My early prediction is Christy will be the GOP nominee in 2016, and Virginia will go for him over the Dem ticket.

 

[cupper]

More early analysis of the results from The Washington Post:

6 takeaways from Election Night 2013

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/11/05/6-takeaways-from-election-night-2013/?hpid=z3

* Virginia isn’t for social conservatives. Ken Cuccinelli beat McAuliffe among voters who said the economy was the most important issue and among those who named healthcare as the biggest priority.  But, among those who said abortion was their most important voting issue — roughly one in five voters — McAulliffe crushed Cuccinelli by something close to a two-to-one margin. (Worth noting: Virginia voters were given four options to choose as their most important issue, only one of which — abortion — involved a social issue.) Half of Virginia voters said that Cuccinelli’s position on issues was “too conservative”  while just more than one in three said he was “about right” on the issues. What those numbers tell us is that McAuliffe’s efforts — primarily through a blitz of campaign ads in northern Virginia — to paint Cuccinelli as a warrior for the social conservative movement worked . Even though “economy”  and “healthcare” voters sided with Cuccinelli, it wasn’t by anywhere close to a large enough margin to offset his losses among voters who prized social issues.

* The Republicans’ un-married people problem: Cuccinelli carried married men and married women by single digits. But, he lost among unmarried people by massive margins.  Unmarried men favored McAuliffe over Cuccinelli by almost two dozen points and unmarried women by more than forty.  The only solace Republicans can take — and it’s not much of one — is that Cuccinelli’s dreadful performance among unmarried voters was significantly worse than that of Mitt Romney in Virginia in the 2012 presidential election; Romney lost single men by 16 points and single women by 29. The lesson for Republicans is that while they don’t need to win unmarried voters, who are still heavily outnumbered by married ones, they can’t lose anywhere close to as badly as Cuccinelli did and hope to win a statewide election in Virginia.

* The Virginia white vote is eroding, rapidly: In 2009, 78 percent of the Virginia electorate was white — and Republican Bob McDonnell rolled up a 35 point win over Democrat Creigh Deeds. Four years later, the electorate was only 72 percent white and Cuccinelli led McAuliffe by 21 points, according to exit poll results. That trend of white voter erosion is nothing new. In the 2012 election, it was on stark display.

* Republicans don’t need independents; they need moderates: Despite Cuccinelli’s loss, he actually won among self-described independents. At the same time, he lost by more than 20 points about self-described “moderates” — further proof that these two categories are hardly the same thing. The fact is that and increasing number of conservatives identify as “independent” these days even as they continue to reliably vote Republicans. That’s why Mitt Romney won independents by clear margins in states like Ohio but still lost the state. We would all be better served switching our focus to “moderate” voters rather than independents — as would Republicans searching for the way forward.

* The path forward is clear for Republicans. They just have to convince their base: Christie’s win, contrasted with Cuccinelli’s loss, could hardly provide a starker contrast for the GOP and a clearer message about how it wins in the future. Exit polls showed Christie winning among women and running even with his Democratic opponent among Latinos. If Republicans could emulate that in other states, they would win just about all of them. Christie is a pragmatic conservative politician who won a massive victory in a blue state; Cuccinelli was a very conservative tea party-esque candidate who lost to an unheralded opponent in one of the nation’s premier swing states. Tea partiers often argue that Republicans can only win presidential races with a true conservative on the ballot. The problem for the broader GOP is the definition of a true conservative has become increasingly stringent. As Tuesday’s elections demonstrate, the GOP — at least in places like Virginia and New Jersey — would be much better served nominating a Chris Christie conservative than a Ken Cuccinelli or Ted Cruz conservative. Of course, this message has often fallen upon the GOP base’s deaf ears (think Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Christine O’Donnell, Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin) and it likely will again.

* And/but…Chris Christie ran as the un-Republican: Christie’s victory was much more about the Chris Christie brand than the Republican brand.  He spent very little time talking about his Republican credentials and much more time talking about his own accomplishments in the state. And the data in the exit polls proved that while New Jersey voters liked (loved?) Christie, they didn’t like his party much. Just 38 percent of Garden State voters had a favorable view of the GOP while 58 percent had an unfavorable one. Christie and his allies will argue that his victory is evidence that a Republican can win in a blue state. But, did Christie really run as a “Republican”?

 

[cupper]

But the best thing about tonight's results:

NO MORE POLITICAL ADS!!!!!!!!!

at least for the next 6 months.

 

[a_majoor]

Since it is all about the money (and remember that in Organizational Theory, Politics is defined as a means of allocating scarce resources), this might further weaken the Administration as the House and Senate seek to preserve their own powers. (The Foundeers were geneii, after all). This has implications into the future, as the Legislative branch seeks to limit or undo the drift of power to the Executive branch. While it may not be a direct election issue, look for lots of undercurrents. Republicans, especially from the TEA Party movement may indeed latch onto Executive power as an issue:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/11/14/weakened-obamas-trade-initiatives-in-trouble/

Weakened Obama’s Trade Initiatives In Trouble

President Obama is facing some stiff opposition from members of his own party over the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement currently being negotiated. Reuters:

In a letter to President Barack Obama, 151 House Democrats said there had not been enough consultation between the administration and Congress over the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP pact.

“Given our concerns, we will oppose ‘fast track’ Trade Promotion Authority or any other mechanism delegating Congress’ constitutional authority over trade policy that continues to exclude us from having a meaningful role in the formative stages of trade agreements and throughout negotiating and approval processes,” the lawmakers said.

Trade deals these days are less about traditional business of free trade—lowering tariffs—than about getting rid of “non-tariff barriers” to trade. Essentially, that means moving towards common regulations so that goods produced under the rules of one country can be consumed in others. For example, EU-US negotiations would try to establish a common framework over car safety so that any cars produced under EU rules could be legally sold anywhere in the US.

This quickly gets complicated. Think about pharmaceuticals. Could drugs approved by Japanese or European regulators be made available in the US? How about vice versa? Think about issues like intellectual property—harmonization of these rules across the area of the proposed trade agreements could involve serious changes.

As a result, these days trade talks don’t just involve international policies—tariffs are a tax collected at the frontier, and an international agreement to reduce tariffs is conceptually simple and its domestic ramifications are usually fairly limited. But new style trade talks involve much broader commitments and often involve changing a raft of domestic laws—and challenging a raft of domestic interests. They often have very broad policy consequences—like the intellectual property rules proposed as part of the Trans-Pacific trade agreement.

Here’s where the debate over the “fast track” Trade Promotion Authority comes in. TPA means that Congress agrees to debate any given trade agreement under special rules—the agreements have to be considered as a package deal and cannot be amended. Congress votes them up or down as a package.

This is important in giving the US the ability to negotiate trade agreements. Other countries don’t want Congress to get in there and essentially rewrite any trade deal by amending the treaties or adopting them with reservations. They won’t make concessions of their own unless they believe that the US will stand by the concessions it makes in negotiations.

This was one thing in the old days when trade talks were mostly about tariffs. But now that the emphasis has shifted to non-tariff barriers, TPA is a much bigger deal. Congress is essentially giving trade negotiators a license to make commitments that involve substantial changes in US domestic policy. TPA does more than facilitate trade negotiations; it transfers power from the legislative to the executive branch.

That is problematic for Constitutional theoreticians. And in a very practical sense this is a problem for Congressional representatives. Laws that affect important industries are Congress’ bread and butter. Literally. Laws like that attract lobbyists and campaign contributions. Industry desperately wants influence over bills that affect the basic regulations of their business, so a nice juicy regulatory bill is a kind of ATM for Congressional representatives yielding lots of campaign contributions. TPA shifts all the discretionary power to the White House, however. All those lobbyists that want to influence the content of a trade deal that covers hundreds of industries and issues, will ignore Congress and descend on the executive branch.

The move by two-thirds of House Democrats to oppose giving Obama TPA is a revolt against this surrender of power and money to the White House, and it is a sign that the Obamacare rollout among other things has weakened the President’s hold on his own party. Just as we are seeing Democratic senators looking for ways to repeal or amend important features of the health care law, we are seeing House Democrats turning on a key element of the President’s second term agenda.

It’s too soon to tell whether these challenges signal a permanently weakened White House, but they are a sign that even as the President slips in the polls, his authority within the political system is being challenged. (Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog this morning declared “a new low for the Obama administration.”)  The White House still has some time to reverse these trends and regain momentum in Washington, but as time goes by the danger increases that the inevitable decline in the power of a second term president will combine with unfavorable political developments to relegate the President to lame duck status relatively early in his second term.

 

[CougarKing]

;D

Former President George W. Bush to appear on 'Tonight Show'

Former President George W. Bush will appear on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" on Nov. 19, his first visit to the show since his 2010 book tour, NBC announced Tuesday.

He'll be discussing life after the White House. Bush's spokesman Freddy Ford told The Hill, “President Bush is going to be in the area next week so he was happy to accept Jay Leno’s invitation to drop by the show one last time."

Bush's visit next week will mark his fourth appearance on Leno's show.

More at...

NBC News

An even bigger picture for those who didn't see Baden Guy's graphic above:

 

[a_majoor]

One thing I have found very impressive about the President George W Bush is that he has never publicly spoken against the current administration on his many speaking engagements, even when offered the opportunity by eager (and supportive) hosts on various TV shows. Dr Rice has also shown equal restraint on the few appearances that I have seen as well.

Considering the verbal abuse he has been given by the legacy media and even the current President (blaming every bad thing that happens on the previous administration may be good politics for your base, but is essentially running away from your own responsibilities), this shows remarkable character and integrity.

 

[a_majoor]

This is going to be a huge issue in the mid terms, and possibly the killer issue in 2016 as well. The many other scandals of the Obama Administration (Bengazi, Fast and Furious, The IRS's harrassment of political groups, crony capitalism, inept foreign policy, massive overspending and debt increase, the GM bailout etc. ) have been ignored by the media, but getting your health insurance cancelled, being forced to leavce your existing healthcare network, seeing premiums double or more and (starting in Jan) getting their work healthcare cancelled isn't something that people will overlook, and certainly something that is impossible to hide:

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/12/12/potus-wins-lie-of-the-year/?singlepage=true

POTUS Wins ‘Lie of the Year’
December 12th, 2013 - 4:52 pm   

As spotted by Bryan Preston at the PJ Tatler, Politifact, the leftwing “fact” “checking” organization, awards Mr. Obama their “Lie of the Year” today for his repeated claims that “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan”:

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.

But the promise was impossible to keep.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief. Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.

And a rare admission from Politifact that the president has been lying, since they’ve been working very hard at dissembling on his behalf since 2008, by smearing his critics on the right:

In 2009, [Politifact's Lie of the Year] was “death panels.” In 2010, the Affordable Care Act was a “government takeover of health care.” In 2011, the GOP supported a budget which would “end Medicare.” Finally, in 2012, the Politifact “Lie of the Year” was a claim by Mitt Romney that Chrysler had moved Jeep production to China.

Last month, Time-Warner-CNN-HBO’s Mark Halperin came clean on the death panels; “Chrysler moves closer to restarting Jeep production in China,” the Detroit Free Press reported in April of this past year.

As Alllahpundit writes today at Hot Air:

The fact that it took until 2013 for them to identify “if you like your plan” as a mammoth lie is proof that the media’s collectively either out of its depth in analyzing policy — even when scores of conservative policy experts were willing and able to help them identify problems with the law — or uninterested for political reasons in recognizing the law’s flaws until they’re so glaring that they can’t plausibly be ignored. This really is the Lie of the Year, and outfits like PolitiFact are entirely complicit in it.

And so is CNN, ABC, CBS, and the Washington Post. “Exit quotation via Guy Benson: “‘Keep your doctor. Period’ has to be the early favorite for 2014 ‘lie of the year,’ right?”,  Allahpundit adds.

The speed at which the coordination between the leftwing White House and its complicit palace guard in the MSM steamrollered the country played a huge role in the creation of this moment, which was made immediately clear to the nation once the cancellation notices started arriving in the mail (not to mention the occasional audit as well). Coupled with the right’s repeated warnings that Obamacare would be a disaster upon implementation, and the left plugging their ears as they moved forward constructing the Krell Machine.

In January of 2009, the left looked at the first Democrat presidential candidate to win over 50 percent of the vote since 1976, and internalized into groupthink the notion that as Newsweek (then-owned by the Washington Post) exclaimed, “We Are All Socialists Now,” and the country would remain that way for the next 40 years, as James Carville also boasted at the time.

But in the mid-1960s, at what the left viewed as a similar moment, after JFK’s assassination helped Lyndon Johnson to clock Barry Goldwater in 1964 by a 22 percent majority, LBJ was no amateur, as Bill Clinton reportedly dubbed Mr. Obama. In the past, broad sweeping bills that dramatically changed the warp and woof of the land didn’t make it to the floor of Congress unless they had bipartisan support, if only to provide cover if things went pear-shaped. As PJM’s Rick Moran wrote back in August at the American Thinker, even at the zenith of the Great Society, “There was a national consensus for Medicare in 1965, but LBJ still made a supreme effort to make the program a bi-partisan undertaking”:

But at least one veteran of the launch of Medicare — Joseph Califano, one of LBJ’s top domestic aides at the time — isn’t too surprised with the fallout of the decision to move ahead on Obamacare without GOP support.

Even though LBJ had huge Democratic majorities in 1965, he insisted that “we have to shoot for half the Republican votes, because if we don’t, they’ll drive us crazy — they’ll kill us on appropriations, they’ll kill us with the Republican governors,” recalls Califano, now the founder and chairman emeritus of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. It was a different GOP back then, but LBJ still managed to win half of the House Republicans and nearly half of the Senate Republicans.

“I don’t know if Obama’s problem was the incalcitrance of the Republicans or his inexperience — probably both,” said Califano. But whatever the reason for the failure to get Republican buy-in, he said, “they’ve got a hell of a difficult couple of years ahead.”

“I won,” said Obama. The implication of that statement was that he didn’t need Republicans to govern. He has proven that time and time again over the years, refusing to compromise with those few Republicans who were willing to go along with some of his agenda.

Now he’s in trouble and he needs the GOP to have a successful roll out of Obamacare. Why on earth should they accommodate him? He insulted them, belittled them, called them crazy and extreme. What kind of arrogant person would expect the opposition to help after all that?

“Obama and the Democrats have sown the wind. Now let them reap the hurricane,” Rick presciently concluded back in late August, foreshadowing the horrors to come just a couple of months later.  And it really has been a storm of that magnitude, the speed of which has astonished the far left, both in DC and in the MSM.  “It used to be it took a decade or more for the results of bad social policy to manifest — which gave big government elites & their media allies plenty of time to put out plausible sounding excuses to paper over the failure and deflect any fallout onto others,” Brian Cates writes at his Draw and Strike blog. Not this time around:

The difference with ObamaCare is that Obama & his administration have gone about passing & implementing this disastrous new policy so quickly with such a high level of deception and such abject incompetence that there isn’t any gap in time of a few years in which to spin the increasingly evident bad results.

Never before have the progressives driving for social change gone for it with the speed – and the outright deceptions — that the Obama administration has. Which means the bad results are cropping up immediately and in a way that it’s impossible to paper them over or shift the blame onto others.

Those who tried to warn the country what ObamaCare would actually do had to endure almost 5 years of ridicule, mocking and name calling for trying to sound the alarm. They were called racists and far worse. And now it’s evident they were right all along.

Progressives have done more to destroy their carefully crafted illusion of competency with this ObamaCare trainwreck than the GOP establishment ever did.

Tech writer Bruce Webster adds that “I believe what we are witnessing will turn out to be the single largest and most catastrophic government policy failure in US history, as well as the most public IT failure in world history”:

I believe that over the next several weeks, the ‘cold equations’ of Obamacare as it actually exists and is currently implemented – as opposed to the magic thinking version on the Left — are going to lead to more and more unavoidable disasters — train wrecks, in the metaphor that Jim Geraghty has been using since before Healthcare.gov went live. Vastly more Americans will have both their bank accounts and their personal health damaged than those that will benefit under Obamacare.

This did not need to happen. There have been multiple points all the way back to 2009 when a different course could have been pursued, one founded in reality-based reasoning about math, software, and social change. Instead, we are witnessing the mother of all train wrecks. To paraphrase a famous passage from the Reagan Administration’s famous scathing report on the US educational system issued 30 years ago (A Nation at Risk, 1983):

If an unfriendly foreign power attempted to impose on America the disastrous health care system that is unfolding today, we might well view it as an act of war.

I fear the worse is yet to come.
[/quote]

 

[Jed]

This is going to be a huge issue in the mid terms, and possibly the killer issue in 2016 as well. The many other scandals of the Obama Administration (Bengazi, Fast and Furious, The IRS's harrassment of political groups, crony capitalism, inept foreign policy, massive overspending and debt increase, the GM bailout etc. ) have been ignored by the media, but getting your health insurance cancelled, being forced to leavce your existing healthcare network, seeing premiums double or more and (starting in Jan) getting their work healthcare cancelled isn't something that people will overlook, and certainly something that is impossible to hide:

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/12/12/potus-wins-lie-of-the-year/?singlepage=true

POTUS Wins ‘Lie of the Year’
December 12th, 2013 - 4:52 pm   

As spotted by Bryan Preston at the PJ Tatler, Politifact, the leftwing “fact” “checking” organization, awards Mr. Obama their “Lie of the Year” today for his repeated claims that “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan”:

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.

But the promise was impossible to keep.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief. Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.

And a rare admission from Politifact that the president has been lying, since they’ve been working very hard at dissembling on his behalf since 2008, by smearing his critics on the right:

In 2009, [Politifact's Lie of the Year] was “death panels.” In 2010, the Affordable Care Act was a “government takeover of health care.” In 2011, the GOP supported a budget which would “end Medicare.” Finally, in 2012, the Politifact “Lie of the Year” was a claim by Mitt Romney that Chrysler had moved Jeep production to China.

Last month, Time-Warner-CNN-HBO’s Mark Halperin came clean on the death panels; “Chrysler moves closer to restarting Jeep production in China,” the Detroit Free Press reported in April of this past year.

As Alllahpundit writes today at Hot Air:

The fact that it took until 2013 for them to identify “if you like your plan” as a mammoth lie is proof that the media’s collectively either out of its depth in analyzing policy — even when scores of conservative policy experts were willing and able to help them identify problems with the law — or uninterested for political reasons in recognizing the law’s flaws until they’re so glaring that they can’t plausibly be ignored. This really is the Lie of the Year, and outfits like PolitiFact are entirely complicit in it.

And so is CNN, ABC, CBS, and the Washington Post. “Exit quotation via Guy Benson: “‘Keep your doctor. Period’ has to be the early favorite for 2014 ‘lie of the year,’ right?”,  Allahpundit adds.

The speed at which the coordination between the leftwing White House and its complicit palace guard in the MSM steamrollered the country played a huge role in the creation of this moment, which was made immediately clear to the nation once the cancellation notices started arriving in the mail (not to mention the occasional audit as well). Coupled with the right’s repeated warnings that Obamacare would be a disaster upon implementation, and the left plugging their ears as they moved forward constructing the Krell Machine.

In January of 2009, the left looked at the first Democrat presidential candidate to win over 50 percent of the vote since 1976, and internalized into groupthink the notion that as Newsweek (then-owned by the Washington Post) exclaimed, “We Are All Socialists Now,” and the country would remain that way for the next 40 years, as James Carville also boasted at the time.

But in the mid-1960s, at what the left viewed as a similar moment, after JFK’s assassination helped Lyndon Johnson to clock Barry Goldwater in 1964 by a 22 percent majority, LBJ was no amateur, as Bill Clinton reportedly dubbed Mr. Obama. In the past, broad sweeping bills that dramatically changed the warp and woof of the land didn’t make it to the floor of Congress unless they had bipartisan support, if only to provide cover if things went pear-shaped. As PJM’s Rick Moran wrote back in August at the American Thinker, even at the zenith of the Great Society, “There was a national consensus for Medicare in 1965, but LBJ still made a supreme effort to make the program a bi-partisan undertaking”:

But at least one veteran of the launch of Medicare — Joseph Califano, one of LBJ’s top domestic aides at the time — isn’t too surprised with the fallout of the decision to move ahead on Obamacare without GOP support.

Even though LBJ had huge Democratic majorities in 1965, he insisted that “we have to shoot for half the Republican votes, because if we don’t, they’ll drive us crazy — they’ll kill us on appropriations, they’ll kill us with the Republican governors,” recalls Califano, now the founder and chairman emeritus of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. It was a different GOP back then, but LBJ still managed to win half of the House Republicans and nearly half of the Senate Republicans.

“I don’t know if Obama’s problem was the incalcitrance of the Republicans or his inexperience — probably both,” said Califano. But whatever the reason for the failure to get Republican buy-in, he said, “they’ve got a hell of a difficult couple of years ahead.”

“I won,” said Obama. The implication of that statement was that he didn’t need Republicans to govern. He has proven that time and time again over the years, refusing to compromise with those few Republicans who were willing to go along with some of his agenda.

Now he’s in trouble and he needs the GOP to have a successful roll out of Obamacare. Why on earth should they accommodate him? He insulted them, belittled them, called them crazy and extreme. What kind of arrogant person would expect the opposition to help after all that?

“Obama and the Democrats have sown the wind. Now let them reap the hurricane,” Rick presciently concluded back in late August, foreshadowing the horrors to come just a couple of months later.  And it really has been a storm of that magnitude, the speed of which has astonished the far left, both in DC and in the MSM.  “It used to be it took a decade or more for the results of bad social policy to manifest — which gave big government elites & their media allies plenty of time to put out plausible sounding excuses to paper over the failure and deflect any fallout onto others,” Brian Cates writes at his Draw and Strike blog. Not this time around:

The difference with ObamaCare is that Obama & his administration have gone about passing & implementing this disastrous new policy so quickly with such a high level of deception and such abject incompetence that there isn’t any gap in time of a few years in which to spin the increasingly evident bad results.

Never before have the progressives driving for social change gone for it with the speed – and the outright deceptions — that the Obama administration has. Which means the bad results are cropping up immediately and in a way that it’s impossible to paper them over or shift the blame onto others.

Those who tried to warn the country what ObamaCare would actually do had to endure almost 5 years of ridicule, mocking and name calling for trying to sound the alarm. They were called racists and far worse. And now it’s evident they were right all along.

Progressives have done more to destroy their carefully crafted illusion of competency with this ObamaCare trainwreck than the GOP establishment ever did.

Tech writer Bruce Webster adds that “I believe what we are witnessing will turn out to be the single largest and most catastrophic government policy failure in US history, as well as the most public IT failure in world history”:

I believe that over the next several weeks, the ‘cold equations’ of Obamacare as it actually exists and is currently implemented – as opposed to the magic thinking version on the Left — are going to lead to more and more unavoidable disasters — train wrecks, in the metaphor that Jim Geraghty has been using since before Healthcare.gov went live. Vastly more Americans will have both their bank accounts and their personal health damaged than those that will benefit under Obamacare.

This did not need to happen. There have been multiple points all the way back to 2009 when a different course could have been pursued, one founded in reality-based reasoning about math, software, and social change. Instead, we are witnessing the mother of all train wrecks. To paraphrase a famous passage from the Reagan Administration’s famous scathing report on the US educational system issued 30 years ago (A Nation at Risk, 1983):

If an unfriendly foreign power attempted to impose on America the disastrous health care system that is unfolding today, we might well view it as an act of war.

I fear the worse is yet to come.

You can take that to the bank.

 

[a_majoor]

Even people notionally supportive of the Democrat party are getting fed up with the political class (and since the Dems took over the House and Senate in 2006, and the White House in 2008, it is increasingly clear that the economic, mdiplomatic and policy failures are no longer the legacy of the previous Administration....). While Blue Dog Democrats share similar interests to the TEA Party movement, I'm inclined to think the so called "Centerist Democrats" do not. While some sort of an alliance would probably be beneficial, the most probable end result will be a further fracturing of the American political landscape, with the old political class (Dem and Republican) fighting to maintain the status quo and their hold on the perques and power it gives them, while the new political movements build thier strength and try to make inroads. Look for much more movement at the municipal and State levels than the Federal level:

http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/01/could-2014-be-the-year-of-the-tea-party-democrat/

Could 2014 be the “Year of the Tea Party Democrat”?

Posted by Leslie Eastman     Saturday, January 4, 2014 at 3:56pm
Democratic Party heads would explode if the rank and file went Tea Party in protest

At the start of the New Year, Legal Insurrection reader Nicholas wrote to ask Professor Jacobson the following question: Could 2014 be the year of the Tea Party Democrats? The political climate certainly seems appropriate.

As Legal Insurrection’s designated “Tea Party Democrat,” I would like to answer this: Yes and No.

Yes: Democrats are becoming as frustrated with their establishment leaders and failed policies as “Tea Party Republicans” have been with theirs. Exhibit 1: A townhall meeting in Chicago a hosted by Al Sharpton transformed into a “tea party” against “Chicago Machine” politics, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and the aldermen in City Hall.

“This was a historic event,” Paul McKinley of V.O.T.E. (Voices of the Ex-Offender) and former 2nd Congressional District GOP nominee to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. told Breitbart News…..

McKinley told the room, “Stop blaming just anybody for the violence in the city of Chicago. Blame the right people, not just white people, but the right people. Because it’s not just white folks a part of this, but it is on the fifth floor. The fifth floor took your schools, the fifth floor just took your jobs that he said that he gave to the ex-offender… and every single alderman was a part of this criminal process.”

The video will delight fans of schadenfreude:

To paraphrase Frank Sinatra: If a revolt can make it here, it can make it anywhere.

Exhibit 2: Another core constituency is showing signs of open rebellion. Last month, it was reported that Obama’s approval numbers had tanked in 2013 among Hispanics — the biggest plunge for any core group.

Now, comes word that Eric Holder’s Justice Department is disputing as unfounded the religious challenge that led a Supreme Court justice to partially block the provision from taking effect this week. Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor, was the one who signed the eleventh-hour order in response to a plea from the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged, a Colorado-based order of nuns, that is now being challenged.

I suspect this will not enhance the popularity of the Obama administration.

And as many Americans trusted Obama’s healthcare promises, the fact that frustrated patients (some of them Hispanic) are walking out of hospitals without treatment:

‘They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!’ a coughing Maria Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the town of Springfield.

She was leaving the building without getting a needed chest x-ray.

‘The people in there told me that since I didn’t have an insurance card, I would be billed for the whole cost of the x-ray,’ Galvez said, her young daughter in tow. ‘It’s not fair – you know, I signed up last week like I was supposed to.’

Legal Insurrection readers now may be asking, “Then, Leslie, why do you also say NO?“

Because “Tea Party” has been so derided and mocked in the mainstream media and comedy shows…which is still the main source of news for the less politically engaged. Cue Jon Stewart:

It is also not terribly helpful when conservative luminaries like Charles Krauthammer refer to Tea Partiers as the “Suicide Caucus” and Republicans name “top generals in the War Against Tea Party“.  Also, GOP guru Karl Rove further derided grassroots activists recently by saying this of his new group: “Our object is to avoid having stupid candidates who can’t win general elections.”

While all of this is unfair, sensible activists deal with “conditions on the ground”.

As a Democrat, I offer this hopeful forecast related to my party for 2014: Democrats around the country will begin pushing back on government in their own way under a different label.  It was done in 1992 by Bill Clinton and his team’s concept of “centrist Democrats“.

More recently, a Blue Dog Coalition of “fiscally conservative Democrats” has this to say:

I am a Blue Dog Democrat because I believe that a fiscally conservative government and being committed to the security and safety of the United States are two principles our founding fathers supported and should continue to be the core principles upon which our leaders govern.

So, 2014 will probably not be the “Year of the Tea Party Democrat”, but of the “Blue Dog” (or some other trendy moniker).

Same concept. Different label. And probably not entirely the same set of goals.

 

[a_majoor]

Well, more proof (as if any is needed) that in America it's "Vote Early, Vote Often":

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368234/print

Voter Fraud: We’ve Got Proof It’s Easy
Undercover agents were able to vote as dead people, but election officials are attacking the agents.
By John Fund

Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud — or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls.

But New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a “John Test” so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures.

The Board of Elections, which has a $750 million annual budget and a work force of 350 people, reacted in classic bureaucratic fashion, which prompted one city paper to deride it as “a 21st-century survivor of Boss Tweed–style politics.” The Board approved a resolution referring the DOI’s investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Normally, I wouldn’t think de Blasio would give the BOE the time of day, but New York’s new mayor has long been a close ally of former leaders of ACORN, the now-disgraced “community organizing” group that saw its employees convicted of voter-registration fraud all over the country during and after the 2008 election.

Greg Soumas, president of New York’s BOE, offered a justification for calling in the prosecutors: “If something was done in an untoward fashion, it was only done by DOI. We [are] unaware of any color of authority on the part of [DOI] to vote in the identity of any person other than themselves — and our reading of the election law is that such an act constitutes a felony.” The Board is bipartisan, and all but two of its members voted with Soumas. The sole exceptions were Democrat Jose Araujo, who abstained because the DOI report implicated him in hiring his wife and sister-and-law for Board jobs, and Republican Simon Shamoun.

Good-government groups are gobsmacked at Soumas’s refusal to smell the stench of corruption in his patronage-riddled empire. “They should focus not on assigning blame to others, but on taking responsibility for solving the problems themselves,” Dick Dadey of the watchdog group Citizens Union told the Daily News. “It’s a case of the Board of Elections passing the buck.” DOI officials respond that the use of undercover agents is routine in anti-corruption probes and that people should carefully read the 70-page report they’ve filed before criticizing it. They are surprised how little media attention their report has received.

You’d think more media outlets would have been interested, because the sloppiness revealed in the DOI report is mind-boggling. Young undercover agents were able to vote using the names of people three times their age, people who in fact were dead. In one example, a 24-year female agent gave the name of  someone who had died in 2012 at age 87; the workers at the Manhattan polling site gave her a ballot, no questions asked. Even the two cases where poll workers turned away an investigator raise eyebrows. In the first case, a poll worker on Staten Island walked outside with the undercover investigator who had just been refused a ballot; the “voter” was advised to go to the polling place near where he used to live and “play dumb” in order to vote. In the second case, the investigator was stopped from voting only because the felon whose name he was using was the son of the election official at the polling place.

Shooting the messenger has been a typical reaction in other states when people have demonstrated just how easy it is to commit voter fraud. Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe had three of his assistants visit precincts during New Hampshire’s January 2012 presidential primary. They asked poll workers whether their books listed the names of several voters, all deceased individuals still listed on voter-registration rolls. Poll workers handed out ten ballots, never once asking for a photo ID. O’Keefe’s team immediately gave back the ballots, unmarked, to precinct workers. Debbie Lane, a ballot inspector at one of the Manchester polling sites, later said: “I wasn’t sure what I was allowed to do. . . . I can’t tell someone not to vote, I suppose.” The only precinct in which O’Keefe or his crew did not obtain a ballot was one in which the local precinct officer had personally known the dead “voter.”

New Hampshire’s Democratic governor, John Lynch, sputtered when asked about O’Keefe’s video, and he condemned the effort to test the election system even though no actual votes were cast. “They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they’re found guilty of some criminal act,” he roared. But cooler heads eventually prevailed, and the GOP state legislature later approved a voter-ID bill, with enough votes to override the governor’s veto. Despite an exhaustive and intrusive investigation, no charges were ever filed against any of O’Keefe’s associates.

Later in 2012, in Washington, D.C., one of O’Keefe’s assistants was able to obtain Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot even though Holder is 62 years old and bears no resemblance to the 22-year-old white man who obtained it merely by asking if Eric Holder was on the rolls. But the Department of Justice, which is currently suing Texas to block that state’s photo-ID law, dismissed the Holder ballot incident as “manufactured.” The irony was lost on the DOJ that Holder, a staunch opponent of voter-ID laws, could have himself been disenfranchised by a white man because Washington, D.C., has no voter-ID law. Polls consistently show that more than 70 percent of Americans — including clear majorities of African Americans and Hispanics — support such laws.

Liberals who oppose ballot-security measures claim that there are few prosecutions for voter fraud, which they take to mean that fraud doesn’t happen. But as the New York DOI report demonstrates, it is comically easy, given the sloppy-voter registration records often kept in America, to commit voter fraud in person. (A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that nationwide, at least 1.8 million deceased voters are still registered to vote.) And unless someone confesses, in-person voter fraud is very difficult to detect — or stop. New York’s Gothamist news service reported last September that four poll workers in Brooklyn reported they believed people were trying to vote in the name of other registered voters. Police officers observed the problems but did nothing because voter fraud isn’t under the police department’s purview.

What the DOI investigators were able to do was eerily similar to actual fraud that has occurred in New York before. In 1984, Brooklyn’s Democratic district attorney, Elizabeth Holtzman, released a state grand-jury report on a successful 14-year conspiracy that cast thousands of fraudulent votes in local, state, and congressional elections. Just like the DOI undercover operatives, the conspirators cast votes at precincts in the names of dead, moved, and bogus voters. The grand jury recommended voter ID, a basic election-integrity measure that New York has steadfastly refused to implement.

In states where non-photo ID is required, it’s also all too easy to manufacture records that allow people to vote. In 2012, the son of Congressman Jim Moran, the Democrat who represents Virginia’s Washington suburbs, had to resign as field director for his father’s campaign after it became clear that he had encouraged voter fraud. Patrick Moran was caught advising an O’Keefe videographer on how to commit in-person voter fraud. The scheme involved using a personal computer to forge utility bills that would satisfy Virginia’s voter-ID law and then relying on the assistance of Democratic lawyers stationed at the polls to make sure the fraudulent votes were counted. Last year, Virginia tightened its voter-ID law and ruled that showing a utility bill was no longer sufficient to obtain a ballot.

Given that someone who is dead, is in jail, or has moved isn’t likely to complain if someone votes in his name, how do we know that voter fraud at the polls isn’t a problem? An ounce of prevention — in the form of voter ID and better training of poll workers — should be among the minimum precautions taken to prevent an electoral miscarriage or meltdown in a close race.

After all, even a small number of votes can have sweeping consequences. Al Franken’s 312-vote victory in 2008 over Minnesota senator Norm Coleman gave Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority of 60 votes, which allowed them to pass Obamacare. Months after the Obamacare vote, a conservative group called Minnesota Majority finished comparing criminal records with voting rolls and identified 1,099 felons — all ineligible to vote — who had voted in the Franken–Coleman race. Fox News random interviews with ten of those felons found that nine had voted for Franken, backing up national academic studies that show felons tend to vote strongly for Democrats.

Minnesota Majority took its findings to prosecutors across the state, but very few showed any interest in pursuing the issue. Some did, though, and 177 people have been convicted as of mid 2012 — not just “accused” but actually convicted — of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. Probably the only reason the number of convictions isn’t higher is that the standard for convicting someone of voter fraud in Minnesota is that the person must have been both ineligible and must have “knowingly” voted unlawfully. Anyone accused of fraud is apt to get off by claiming he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong.

Given that we now know for certain how easy it is to commit undetectable voter fraud and how serious the consequences can be, it’s truly bizarre to have officials at the New York City Board of Elections and elsewhere savage those who shine a light on the fact that their modus operandi invites fraud. One might even think that they’re covering up their incompetence or that they don’t want to pay attention to what crimes could be occurring behind the curtains at their polling places. Or both.

— John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online. Along with Hans von Spakovsky, he is the author of Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk​.

 

[cupper]

It may be easy, but the instances of it actually happening are still rare, as in 40 voters out of 197 million votes cast between 2002 and 2005.

Voter Fraud Is 'Rare,' Presidential Election Commission Finds

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/voter-fraud-is-rare-presidential-election-commission

Voter fraud is "rare" and mostly occurs by absentee ballot, concluded a report Wednesday by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

"Fraud is rare, but when it does occur, absentee ballots are often the method of choice," the report said, proposing expanded access to early voting as a measure to ease the sorts of long lines seen at the polls in the 2012 election.

The finding is likely to fuel an ongoing partisan debate across the country about the extent of voter fraud and the appropriate measures to deal with it. It is backed by other studies showing that fraud occurs but is extremely uncommon. A Justice Department study found that between 2002 and 2005, just 40 voters (out of 197 million votes cast for federal candidates) were indicted for voter fraud, and just 26 resulted in convictions or guilty pleas.

"That's my conclusion too," wrote election scholar Rick Hasen, commenting on the commission's finding about the rarity of fraud, "but it is not the typical line of hard line Republicans like [Kansas Secretary of State] Kris Kobach."

The 10-member bipartisan commission was set up by President Barack Obama last year and tasked with recommending steps to streamline voting. It proposed a series of measures such as expanding online voter registration, allowing early voting in polling facilities such as schools, better management at polling places and overhauling the certification process for new voting technologies.

Link to the Commission's report:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/201461207/PCEA-Report

 

[a_majoor]

No cupper, what is rare is investigation, prosecution and conviction. Reread the article upthread and see how easy it is to commit voter fraud in a small sample of jurisdictions. Now multiply by the literally tens of thousands of jurisdictions and you see the true scale of the problem.

Voter fraud in the United States is a common occurance, and the fight against proper voter ID, "cleaning" electoral rolls and other measures to limit the ability to commit fraud can only be seen as machinization by the political class to enable manipulating elections for their benefit.