The Republicans are acting to suppress every anti-Republican voter in America

Since January the Republicans across the nation have been working to destroy Democratic Party institutions and to suppress the vote of anyone likely to vote Democratic. Digby has taken note and writes about it.

"I'm sure by now that everyone has noticed that since taking power across the country in November, the Republicans have concentrated on one specific thing, nearly across the board: defunding and dismantling any institutional support for Democrats from systematically attacking voting rights to specific constituencies to their most essential organizing institutions. This isn't Tea Party politics or social conservatism or even a direct result of plutocratic economics although they will all certainly benefit. This is a hard core partisan attack on the organizing and funding functions of the left.

They've never been shy about trying to do this before. Certainly vote suppression is a very old right wing tactic. But they seem to have taken all this to the next level in the last couple of years. The question is whether or not they launch a coordinated attack on every constituency but their own base and expect to continue to win elections. It looks like we're going to fund out."

It's been two months since the politicians elected last November took office, and I have never seen as much effort to suppress opposition vote. I did grow up in Texas and slowly grew aware of the many, many tricks used by Texas and Southern politicians to repress the African-American vote, but I have never seen anything like what is going on now. The effort by Scott Walker in Madison Wisconsin only highlights the issue.

There will be a backlash. Mark my words. There will be a backlash. And very properly so.

Government official registers voters by day, sells lists of voters names to Republican candidates by night

Republicans in Texas have an absolute abhorrence for voter fraud, but only one kind. They are focused on voter fraud by individuals impersonating other voters, a form of voter fraud there is almost no evidence of. Because of this obsession, the recently adjourned Texas biennial Legislative session adjourned without accomplishing much of anything on badly needed bills because the Republicans demanded that a voter picture ID law be passed over the objections of the Democrats. Democrats are aware that this unnecessary legal provision will reduce the number of individuals who can vote by about 3% without changing the chances for real voter fraud.

Because the Democrats prevented the passage of the Voter ID law in this last legislative session, the Texas Governor Perry is going to have to call the Legislature back into special session this year. Texas law has the provision that special sessions can consider only the issues the Governor lists when he calls for the session. This is going to be thirty more days of legislative session expense caused because of the Republican Party's obsession with suppressing the votes of people who legally vote but are unlikely to voter for Republicans.

Here's one reason why the Republican obsession with retaining power is just flat wrong. From the Houston Chronicle we get the news story of the Harris County associate voter registrar Ed Johnson who by day determines which individuals who request to register to vote are allowed on the voter rolls as well as which provisional ballots are considered valid after elections. By night he is a Republican consultant, selling copies of the County's registered voter list to Republican candidates for office.

Ed Johnson is associate voter registrar at the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office, where he’s worked since 1999. He’s also a paid director for Computer Data Systems, a venture started in 2003 with state Rep. Dwayne Bohac, R-Houston. The company sells the same voter information Johnson is paid by taxpayers to manage in a nonpolitical manner.

[...]

According to a recently dismantled Web site, CDS sells voter data to Republican candidates. No records indicating information was sold to Democrats could be found. Secretary of state records show Bohac as the registered agent and Johnson as a director.

Johnson’s party affiliation was not known on Wednesday, but he is known in political circles as a Republican consultant.

This stinks to high heaven. A related question is whether the voter suppression is occurring when individuals apply to be registered to vote in Harris County.

Last year, the Texas Democratic Party charged in a lawsuit that the Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office is rejecting voter applications at a much higher rate than any other Texas county elections office.

“Harris County had 70,000 voter registration applications rejected,” said Texas Democratic Party attorney Chad Dunn. “That’s exponentially higher than anywhere else in the state.”

Dunn said Dallas County rejected 1,800 for the same period, January 2006 through October 2008.

The two consultants also said they are concerned that Johnson’s role in the approval of provisional ballots may be tainted.

When voters show up at a polling place without their driver’s licenses or voter registration cards, but have proof of their addresses and insist they are registered to vote, they are asked to fill out provisional ballots. In close elections, provisional ballots are used. This past election, there were several close races in Harris County.

Cook said that while Johnson may not get the final say in deciding whether provisional ballots are used, “his office is one of the stops for provisional ballots.”

The threat of unauthorized individuals voting and swinging elections has never been documented to occur in any recent American election. Yet the problem of partisans who prevent their opponents from registering to vote or from getting to the polls in order vote have occurred frequently in recent years - actions by Republicans to suppress Democratic votes. [If there are cases of Democrats suppressing Republican votes, they are not reported in the media.]

What Johnson is doing is an example of a civil servant selling the products of his office for personal gain - pure corruption. He is also in the position to prevent people from registering to vote, which is suppression. The indication is that his office is acting to suppress votes (currently in litigation.) To this kind of fraud the Republicans are quite tone-deaf. But they know that if the public has the right to vote and is able to use it, they cannot win majorities of the votes for their programs. Pools show that the public rejects their policies. So that's why are working hard to limit the franchise to only conservative Republicans.

Hey! Why not? With Katherine Harris (Florida Secretary of State and simultaneously Co-Chair of the Bush for President campaign in Florida) scrubbing likely Democrats from the Florida voting rolls in 2000 they succeeded in holding the counted vote to such a narrow difference that the (Republican-dominated) U.S. Supreme Court was able to give the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush. The key was suppression of potential Democratic votes. They are still doing it as a policy of the party.

Remember those Republican threats of "vote fraud?" Nothing happened.

There were many fear expressed by before the election that there was going to be massive vote fraud to elect Barack Obama. The previously mostly unknown community action organization ACORN was declared to be threatening "massive vote fraud" even by John McCain. The election is over now, so what happened?

Remember those allegations by Republicans that there was going to be massive vote fraud in Ohio and Minnesota? From Zachary Roth at TPM Muckrake we get this report:

Ohio secretary of state Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, said in a statement released to TPMmuckraker the night of the election: "We have received no reports of election irregularities in Ohio today - and we have been on the lookout for any hint of illegal voting or voter suppression."

And her counterpart in Minnesota, Mark Ritchie, also a Democrat, told TPMmuckraker in an interview that his office had received no reports of voter fraud.

So what about that classic of election voting problems, Florida? We get this report from Kate Klonick also at TPM Muckraker:

"on Nov. 4, there were glitches at individual polling places, but no major problems

From the Miami Herald:

• The only scanner at Coral Ridge Mall in Fort Lauderdale broke and voters had to put ballots in a bin until it was replaced.

• In the David Park Community Center in Hollywood, the first 20 or so voters were handed misprinted ballots listing Amendment 3 twice.

• A poll worker in Sunny Isles Beach was dismissed for being ``rude and overzealous.''

• Two precincts in Palm Beach County opened late.

Statewide, voting went so smoothly that Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning called Election Day ''almost eerily quiet,'' despite an unofficial record turnout.

''It's been a great day for Florida,'' he said.

So all the fears expressed by Republicans of "massive vote fraud" were just hot air. So apparently were the Democratic concerns of vote stealing and vote suppression by Republicans.

At least according to reports so far.

Of course, Colorado Secretary of State apparently DID purge an estimated 35,000 voters from Colorado's voter rolls in direct violation of a court order.

Then there's Wisconsin. Wisconsin's Republican Attorney General, Van Hollern, warned of voter fraud before the election. Afterwards he is reported to have said: "'As far as voting, everything seems to be going very smoothly in the state,' Van Hollen told WTMJ radio."

In Pennsylvania, where Republicans filed several lawsuits alleging threatened voter fraud before the election, there were a few problems.

" Fox News showed footage of a man in Black Panther attire holding a nightstick at the doorway of a polling place. There were long lines at many other locations. And according to voting rights groups, some voters whose names were missing from registration books were sent away without being given provisional ballots, as required. But none of these problems related to voter fraud. "

In Nevada, the previously expressed GOP fears of voter fraud fizzled out. Noting happened.

Indiana? Again, expressed fears by Republican of vote fraud came to nothing.

The threats of vote fraud appear themselves to be the fraud. Had the election been closer, no doubt Republican lawyers would today be in court conjuring up further fantasies of phantom voters swinging elections towards Obama. The convincing repudiation of eight years of Republican Presidential rule made that a waste of time, as John McCain himself recognized when he conceded immediately after the polls closed in California.

No doubt the Republicans are placing the scripts they had intended to use back into storage for future elections. It could in other situations be an effective scam.

The right-wing fraud of "voter fraud" accusations

Josh Marshall explains the Republican fraud involved in accusations of voter fraud.

Rumors of "wide spread voter fraud" have invariably turned out to be exaggerated,administrative errors or flat out right wing lies designed to justify voter suppression efforts aimed to prevent Democrats from voting.

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Other posts on right wing voter suppression:

• McCain's really, really bad day May 25, 2008
• Texas (Republican) Attorney General practices voter suppression May 19, 2008
• How one Republican rigged elections for the RNC December 20, 2007
• Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression November 23, 2007
  
• Another great moment in voter suppression November 22, 2007
  
• Florida Republicans working hard to suppress minority voter registrations November 20, 2007
  
• Vote Suppression is the issue May 26, 2007
  
• "Caging" - an explanation of the term May 23, 2007
  
• Where is the REAL voter fraud? April 12, 2007
  
• More on the New Hampshire phone-jamming incident April 24, 2006
  
• More evidence that the 2004 election was hacked for Bush April 09, 2006

There is a pattern here. This should be enough evidence to demonstrate that the Republicans have a nationwide plan to prevent Democratic voters from casting ballots.

Veteran's Administration refuses to allow veterans to vote

Why won't the Secretary of the Veteran's Administration allow veteran's in his care to register to vote? From the New York Times

On May 5, the department led by James B. Peake issued a directive that bans nonpartisan voter registration drives at federally financed nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and shelters for homeless veterans. As a result, too many of our most patriotic American citizens — our injured and ill military veterans — may not be able to vote this November.

These are the guys who fought for our right to vote, and now the VA won't allow them to register to vote unless they are physically capable of escaping control of the Veteran's Administration.

This is more Republican voter suppression, but I thought that veterans were a Republican-oriented voter block? What are Karl Rove's disciples afraid of? Poor veterans?

McCain's really, really bad day

I don't know how accurate this is, but by the looks of it McCain has really pissed off the religious right. First by rejecting the influential Rev. John Hagee, then by adding to that his rejection of the very influential political operator (besides being an evangelist preacher) Ron Parsley.

Then McCain's appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show appears to "support the gay agenda."

Then look at who he is interviewing as VP candidates:

*Charlie Crist, a gay man;

* Bobby Jindal, not just of South Asian origin and 'darker than Obama' but also a conservative Catholic who has expressed support — in his campaign — for the idea that "outside the Church there is no salvation" and many of the other attitudes towards the Reformation I was taught in pre-Vatican II Catholic school; and

* Mitt Romney, a Mormon

I find these to be effective political suicide - if they are true.

But is it a McCain head fake?

There is a possibility that this is all a public pander to the independents, to be countered in the religious right by preachers explaining to their evangelistic flock that McCain doesn't mean any of it. That he's just doing what he needs to do to get elected in the face of a political season that really favors Democrats this year.

Hagee has already made strange sounds that resemble a statement that "I said it, but I didn't mean it to be a bad thing! Vote for McCain anyway."

Parsley is a strong Republican activist, and if the appearance that he is being thrown under the bus will permit the election of a Republican President in these times which are very trying for Republicans, then he would support that appearance, while depending on evangelist preachers to convince their flocks away from the eyes of reporters that McCain doesn't really mean it.

And it is clear that inviting Crist, Jindal, and Romney to the McCain lair in Sedona is not a serious effort to induce them to accept the Vice Presidency nomination. It is an effort by those individuals to signal to their Republican constituencies that they support McCain. McCain's VP is going to be someone else and any current public actions are aimed primarily at titillating the media so that he gets coverage he doesn't have to pay for.

This is a really bad year for Republicans. Political Scientists, studying what (public) factors lead to the election of a President, have concluded that when the economy is bad, the current President has low approval ratings and there is an on-going unpopular war all during election year then the Party in power loses no matter what positions the candidates take or what the media focuses on. But those are all surface public factors.

The Republicans have worked hard to develop under-the-surface methods of influencing the outcome of an election. Opposition Research has been one of those methods. Another is the art of planting underground rumors about the Democratic opposition. Karl Rove famously planted rumors in conservative East Texas that the very popular Texas Governor Ann Richards was appointing as many lesbians to public office as she could. Then there are the many efforts at voter suppression that have been used in the past and which are currently being worked up.

• Texas (Republican) Attorney General practices voter suppression
• How one Republican rigged elections for the RNC
• Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression
  
• Another great moment in voter suppression
  
• Florida Republicans working hard to suppress minority voter registrations
  
• Vote Suppression is the issue
  
• "Caging" - an explanation of the term
  
• Where is the REAL voter fraud?
  
• More on the New Hampshire phone-jamming incident
  
• More evidence that the 2004 election was hacked for Bush

McCain is himself positioned as the "maverick" Republican in spite of his extremely strong conservative voting record. This is already an effort to run publicly one way and conceal what he really stands for from independent voters, while depending on under the radar efforts to get the base to turn out for him. The appearance is one thing, but the real campaign by Republicans is going to be under the surface - viral email and rumors that carry the nastiest stories about Obama possible, extensive efforts to get the corporate media to support McCain augmented by the Republican noise machine of FOX, the American Standard and the right-wing think tanks, evangelistic preachers turning out the vote, and extensive efforts at voter suppression.

At least that's how I see this Presidential election shaping up on the Republican side.

Texas (Republican) Attorney General practices voter suppression

Gregg Abbot, Republican Attorney General of Texas, is prosecuting (only) Democrats for the "crime" of assisting elderly voters by dropping ballots into a mailbox for them. At the same time he refuses to act on a documented case of a Republican Precinct judge in Dallas County who handed out a hundred ballots without checking ID and counted the votes (ballot stuffing) in a highly Republican precinct.

This is documented in the Texas Observer and again in the Dallas Morning News. The Dallas Morning News points out that Abbot ran a two year investigation using $1.5 million grant and netted only 26 cases, all against Democrats and all against Blacks or Hispanics.

The cases his office pursued largely have involved mail-in ballots. In 18 of the 26 cases, the voters were eligible, votes were properly cast and no vote was changed – but the people who collected the ballots for mailing were prosecuted.

State law makes it a crime to carry someone else's filled-out ballot to the mailbox, unless the carrier puts his or her own name and address on the envelope.

Matt Angle of the Lone Star Project, a group that supports electing Democrats in Texas, said Mr. Abbott mostly has pursued "technical violations" against people who have assisted neighbors, often the elderly or disabled. He said the few ballots involved undercuts Mr. Abbott's claim that vote fraud is epidemic.

"Nobody is disputing that from time to time people in both parties, based on a desire to win, might cheat," Mr. Angle said. "But for these people to be prosecuted so aggressively is really just an exercise in intimidation. They are trying to send a message to a much larger community that voting is a risky business."

In short, Abbot's allegations of widespread voter fraud have been proven to be a lie and a fraud itself - a lie and fraud that is much larger than any identifiable problem of fraudulent voting. Yet Abbot is pushing hard for a voter picture ID to combat this "widespread (imaginary) voter fraud."

Yep. Because several individuals assisted elderly voters who were housebound by carrying their mail-in ballots to a nearby mail box, Gregg Abbot wants to also prevent elderly retired non-driving nuns from voting also.

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One ignorant idiot left a comment on the Think Progress report stating that the nuns refused to vote provisionally in the incident. He stated "These nuns were NOT TURNED AWAY, they REFUSED TO VOTE with a provisional ballot! To imply anything else is just a patent lie!" (comment #41)

This comment is listed very high on Google. It implies that the nuns who were refused the right to vote could actually have voted a provisional ballot and had it count. That's wrong.

The provisional vote would not have counted. Had they voted provisionally, they had 10 days to acquire the required picture ID and present it or the provisional vote would be canceled. Assuming that they could somehow have physically reached a driver's license bureau and met the documentary requirements for an ID card (expensive and acquiring the documents can be very slow), it could not have been provided within the 10 day required period.

Here in Texas the provisional ballot has a series of blocks on it that explain why a regular ballot could not be offered. One of those blocks must be checked for the provisional ballot to be valid. But if the block that states "Did not present valid ID" is checked, then the form specifically states that their "provisional" vote will not be counted. There is no further investigation and the vote is trash-canned by the committee that evaluates provisional ballots. The system is designed to prevent the ill or elderly from voting.

This is nothing more than a way of preventing the elderly and the poor from voting. It is the ignorant idiot who is wrong.

How one Republican rigged elections for the RNC

Allen Raymond, the former GOP consultant of New Hampshire phone jamming fame, is not happy about his fellow Republicans blaming the phone jamming on him. So he has written a tell-all book entitled How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Law Breaker. Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker has an advance copy and has published a few things from the book.

Allen Raymond was sent to prison for 90 days because the telephone firm he owned accepted a job from the New Hampshire GOP's executive director was hired to jam the telephone number that the Democratic party was using to arrange rides for voters who wanted to vote for the Democratic candidate for Senate.

To set the scene: Raymond got a call in 2000* from two former colleagues in New Jersey who ran a consulting shop called Jamestown Associates. They were working for Dick Zimmer, who was running against Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), the incumbent, and they were pulling out all the stops.

They'd already succeeded in getting a Green Party candidate on the ballot to drain liberal votes from Holt (a favorite GOP trick). And they had already put Raymond's firm to work calling Green-oriented households and urging them to support the Green candidate.

But what came next was "even better":

[Tom Blakely from Jamestown Associates] called me up and asked, "How do you guys find voice talent?"

"Well, I've got a whole catalog of different voices on CDs. I've got 'single Northeastern female,' I've got 'Southern belle' -- what are you looking for?"

"We're targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter."

"Oh," I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. "How about 'angry black man'?"

"Yeah, that sounds good. What's his voice sound like?"

So I cued up one particular actor's CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character.

After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, "That's the guy!"

So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, "I'm calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt."

I'm not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was "I'm ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don't vote for the Democrat I'm going to come to your house and take care of some business."

The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be "I'm not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house."

We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone's character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls.

Remember -- they were Democrats; they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.

Zimmer lost the election by 481 votes and the Green Party candidate picked up 2 percent in the polls.

This is Republican ethics.

Consider this along with the techniques of voter suppression they have practiced:

• Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression
  
• Another great moment in voter suppression
  
• Florida Republicans working hard to suppress minority voter registrations
  
• Vote Suppression is the issue
  
• "Caging" - an explanation of the term
  
• Where is the REAL voter fraud?
  
• More on the New Hampshire phone-jamming incident
  
• More evidence that the 2004 election was hacked for Bush

Two of three Americans believe officials were warned of 9/11 and ignored it

Nearly seven years into the Bush administration and nearly five years into the invasion and occupation of Iraq a majority of the American public has no confidence in the competence of the federal government and no belief that they have the best interests of the nation at heart. Surprise, surprise.

The first priority of government is to act so that society is largely stable and is protected from enemies, foreign and domestic. In a democracy, voters choose the individuals who lead the government based on whether their promises to deliver stability and protection are believable. Failure to deliver on those promises mixed with a great deal of self-centered corruption will destroy all trust in the government. 9/11 shook the American trust in capability of the Bush administration conservatives to deliver that protection and the 9/11 Commission report - stonewalled by the Bush administration until they were forced into the appearance of marginal grudging cooperation rather strongly suggest that the Bush administration knew enough in advance to have prevented the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. The bellicose statements by Dick Cheney, repeatedly proven to be untrue and excessive, together with the writings of his mostly NeoCon advisors who were strongly influenced by or members of the the Project for the new American Century strongly suggest that if the administration had known of an impending attack they would have preferred to let the terrorist incident happen to provide an excuse to achieve their long term dream of attacking Iraq.

Supporting this theory is the extreme secrecy the Bush administration has operated under, as well as the active repression of individuals who dare to question government statements. Further support is found in the refusal of the Bush administration to cooperate with Congressional oversight activities until forced to do so.

The only part of the theory not supported by the above evidence is whether the conservatives of the Bush administration, together with he Congressional Republicans who support them in lockstep manner, are working to benefit America or just themselves. The refusal of the Bush administration to even acknowledge that Enron had illegally manipulated power markets in California and intentionally ripped off consumers in those markets was a strong indication that the government was not going to protect Americans from predatory big business. The repeated tax cuts aimed specifically at the very wealthy (with fig leaves thrown to the middle class) gave similar evidence that the conservative motivation was to empower the predators and keep the rest of Americans powerless. But the most stark evidence that the Bush administration intended to hand America to predatory big business came when in early 2005 Bush announced his plans to dismantle the finest single program to come out of the New Deal, Social Security, and hand the money over to Wall Street vultures.

According to The free dictionary a conspiracy theory is "A theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act." Wikipedia adds that the common use of the term "conspiracy theory" suggests that the apparent plot offers an explanation for events as being caused by a secret alliance of powerful individuals working in collusion behind the scenes to deceive others using power, fame, money or sex for their own personal gain.

It is hard to read of the way Bush's close friend Alberto Gonzales worked to politicize the Justice Department, the various sex and bribery scandals by Randy "Duke" Cunningham (CA - R), Jack Abramoff (See particularly the People convicted in Abramoff probe (as of June 9, 2007)), Tom DeLay, and the various forms of "voter suppression" (click the label below for a series of reports) that the Republican Party has been and continues to practice and not see the corruption of government by an alliance of social and economic conservatives. And the list could continue for a number of pages.

It is easier to believe that the Republicans, with a history like this, is guilty of allowing the 9/11 terrorist attack to occur so they could use it to justify an attack on Iraq than it is to believe that O.J. Simpson murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994.

The Republican history explains this report from Scripps Howard News Service:

By KEVIN CROWE and GUIDO H. STEMPEL III
Scripps Howard News Service
Friday, November 23, 2007

Nearly two-thirds of Americans think it is possible that some federal officials had specific warnings of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but chose to ignore those warnings, according to a Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University poll.

A national survey of 811 adult residents of the United States conducted by Scripps and Ohio University found that more than a third believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories including the attacks, international plots to rig oil prices, the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the government's knowledge of intelligent life from other worlds.

The high percentage is a manifestation, some say, of an American public that increasingly distrusts the federal government.

"You wouldn't have gotten these numbers a year or two after the attacks themselves," said University of Florida law professor Mark Fenster. "You've got an increasingly disaffected public that is unhappy with the administration."

Fenster, author of the book "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture," attributed the high percentage in part to the findings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also called the 9/11 Commission), which concluded federal officials failed to prevent the attacks, but did not have specific knowledge of the date of the attacks.

An earlier Scripps Howard/Ohio University survey, conducted in July 2006, revealed that more than one-third of Americans thought federal officials assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East.

"What (the recent survey) could mean is that people are thinking that the Bush administration is incompetent, that there were warnings out there and they chose to put their attention on other things," Fenster said.

At a time when the price of crude oil has neared $100 per barrel, 81 percent of Americans also said it was "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that oil companies conspire to keep the price of gasoline high.

"It shows that the oil companies are not trusted by a lot of people," said Tyson Slocum, director of the Energy Program of Public Citizen, the consumer watchdog organization founded by Ralph Nader.

Record-breaking quarterly profits stir the pot, too.

"People look at the huge profits and put two and two together," he said. "'Those high prices I'm paying are fueling those profits.'"

It is clear that the conspiracy theories that the Bush administration had evidence that 9/11 was going to occur but simply didn't want to act on it because they could use if for their own purposes reflects an high level of distrust for the Republican government.

It is unfortunate that the Democratic Party leadership in Washington, D.C. refuses to confront the Republican incompetence, corruption and malfeasance in office directly for fear that they will be tarred with the same brush. Their refusal to act has led many of us to believe that they are part of the problem, much like the Republicans are. The Republicans in the Senate, using the threat of the filibuster, have literally paralyzed Congress, and Bush has used the veto to finish the job.

The result is that America now has a disastrously conducted occupation of Iraq which requires political action by the Shiite government of Iraq to achieve success, while that government refuses to act to unify their nation. That is a festering political wound that distracts some attention from the paralyzed and incompetent government in Washington, D.C. The public wants action, and sees that this already untrustworthy government cannot act and cannot even tell the truth because of White House censorship and refusal to provide accurate reports. This is compounded by the paralysis of Congress. The conservative-dominated federal courts have proven that they are generally a joke, again acting more to restrict government actions than to allow them. The only question about the Supreme Court is how long it will take them to lead the way back to the Gilded Age and the economy of the Robber Barons in a nation which has forgotten what Civil Rights are.

So why is it that nearly two-thirds of the American public believes that the federal government could have prevented 9/11 but decided not to?

Trust.

There is no longer a sane person in the U.S. that trusts our government. That's why.

[ h/t to Thers at Firedoglake. ]

Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression

Recently investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Jeff Leen participated in a question-and-answer session, and one participant asked them the extent of the voter suppression technique called “caging” is. Neither investigative reporter even understood what "caging" is. Think Progress offers this description of the important voter suppression technique for the rest of us.

Caging most recently gained attention in the U.S. attorney scandal. In 2004, BBC News published a report showing that Tim Griffin, the former Rove protege who was placed as a U.S. attorney in Arkansas, led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of African-American servicemembers in Florida.

On Nov. 5, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Caging Prohibition Act, a bill to outlaw this “long-recognized voter suppression tactic which has often been used to target minority voters.” Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to dismiss this as “direct-mail term.” But the charges are serious enough that earlier this year, several senators called for an investigation into the RNC’s use of this voter suppression tactic. Whitehouse and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) explained:

Caging is a voter suppression tactic whereby a political campaign sends mail marked “do not forward” to a targeted group of eligible voters. A more aggressive version involves sending mail to a targeted group of voters with instructions to sign and return an acknowledgment card. The campaign then creates a list of those whose mail was returned undelivered and challenges the right of those citizens to vote — on the ground that the voter does not live at the registered address.

This is a powerful tool in the Republicans' voter suppression arsenal. Unless they are in strongly gerrymandered pro-Republican districts, it is very difficult for Republicans to get the majority of the votes of those who are eligible to vote and want to vote in the election. Voter suppression techniques like "Caging" are powerful tools used to prevent minorities and Democrats from participating in the election process.

Republicans don't hesitate to use "Caging" just because it is illegal. They are, after all, Republicans.

Another great moment in voter suppression

Once again the conservatives prove that while they cannot run government and cannot get elected in fair elections where every valid voter votes, when they put their minds to it they can do an excellent job of keeping likely Democratic voters from casting their ballots. Mark Kleiman points out that:

"They've very skilfully arranged that hundreds of thousands of citizenship applications filed last summer won't be approved in time for the new citizens to vote. Remember, this crew makes no actual distinction between campaigning and governing: everything is geared toward winning the next election."

But if you know anyone going through the immigration/greencard/citizenship process or who is looking for fairness in the deportation process, you will recognize what the Republicans have been doing.

In Texas the busiest immigration office was and remains the one in Mesquite, TX. Back when Dick Armey was House Majority Leader, The Mesquite office of what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service had ten people processing paperwork for visas, Green cards and citizenship. Republican Congressman Armey very carefully cut six of those jobs from INS budget, creating the longest backlogs for processing the paperwork in the U.S.

That action had the dual effect of reducing the number of legal immigrants and reducing the number of new citizens (who mostly vote Democratic, since they know who to blame for their difficulties.)

The Washington Post's article presents the Bush administration's excuse:

Bush administration officials said yesterday that they had anticipated applicants would rush to file their paperwork to beat a widely publicized fee increase that took effect July 30, but did not expect the scale of the response. The backlog comes just months after U.S. officials failed to prepare for tougher border security requirements that triggered months-long delays for millions of Americans seeking passports.

Before the fee hike, citizenship cases typically took about seven months to complete. Now, immigration officials can take five months or more just to acknowledge receipt of applications from parts of the country and will take 16 to 18 months on average to process applications filed after June 1, according to officials from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS. Such a timeline would push many prospective citizens well past voter-registration deadlines for the 2008 primaries and the general elections.

That amounts to the Republican version of "The dog ate my homework." This backlog was planned. The conservatives then did what conservatives always do with government when a problem is anticipated: nothing.

In this case, doing nothing is very effective and well-planned voter suppression. It goes hand-in-glove with the effort by Florida Republicans to prevent likely Democratic voters from getting registered to vote.

They can't do anything else effective with government, but the Republicans are quite good at making sure that likely Democrats either aren't allowed to vote, or that their votes are not counted.

Florida Republicans working hard to suppress minority voter registrations

As predicted, the new Florida procedures of checking applications for voters registration against the Social Security database and the driver's license database have caused large numbers of registration applications to fail to be acted on. That's not rejected, just not acted on. The Florida News-Press presents the story:

County election officials say the number of voters lost through Florida's central registration system is small — 90 percent of applications get voter cards.

The result is applications from more than 43,000 Floridians hoping to become eligible voters over the past 21 months were rejected by state computer programs and kicked out for special review.

More than 14,000 initially rejected — three-quarters of them minorities — didn't make it through that last set of hoops.

Blacks were 6 1/2 times more likely than whites to be rejected at that step.

Hispanics were more than 7 times more likely to be failed.

Unaccepted but also not denied, they remain in limbo as "incomplete" or, often, sitting in Florida's new statewide voter registration system with no designation at all.

State law requires those "lost" voters to be notified; most contacted said they were unaware of the problem.
[Underlining mine - Editor, WTF-o]

Of course those "lost" voters aren't contacted. The Republicans will suppress 13 1/2 minority voters for every White voter they lose if they simply don't bother to find out what the problems are. That's a big edge for Republicans in a state where elections tend to be quite close. The current "problems" are intentional.

The issues began with the 2005 Florida Legislature, when lawmakers pushed through election law changes meant to bring the state into compliance with new federal laws that were a result — in part — of Florida's notorious electoral past.

Along with federal mandates to create a single statewide voter database and to check those names against drivers license and Social Security numbers, Florida added a requirement: Applicants who didn't pass the database test would not be registered to vote.

The provision was approved by the U.S. Justice Department in 2005, but further tinkering gave "lost" voters just two days after an election to prove the computers were wrong. That has raised new civil rights concerns and the Justice Department has asked Florida to prove its system is not discriminatory against minority voters.
[Underlining mine - Editor, WTF-o]

Because of the way computers match names, the system was expected to reject larger number of Hispanic and Black registration requests. That's exactly what happened. Most of the problem is built into the sytem.

The Florida match requires names, birthdates and drivers license or Social Security numbers all agree on the application and with information in computer databases. Applications that don't match are reviewed by the Department of State, fixed by hand if the problem is obvious, and forwarded to the county for its own determination of whether to fix the application or leave it in limbo.

By law, applicants must be told if their registrations are incomplete. Voting rights advocates complain those notices, when they are sent, often fail to explain the problem.

State records show more than 76,000 of the 830,157 applications received between January 2006 and September 2007 did not result in a new voter card.

And of course, the Republicans who are responsible for voter registration and for the suppression of minority votes (remember Katherine Harris and Choicepoint?) are delighted to fail to act on those registration requests which are in limbo.

[Editor's note: As an election worker myself I frequently hear from people who are not registered but who claim they registered when applying for a Texas driver's license under the Motor Voter Law. It is a frequent occurrence. I can't prove it, but I suspect that there are people who work in the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles in our Republican Party-dominated state who throw away applications that are made under the Motor Voter law.]

Republicans can't get elected if everyone who wants to vote for Democrats is allowed to vote. That's what this Voter Suppression activity is all about. Without voter suppression activities in Florida in 2000 Al Gore would have been elected President. Without voter suppression activities in Ohio in 2004, John Kerry would have been elected President.

The Republicans are working hard to steal Florida again in 2008.

---

The Florida law in question was passed with the advice of Hans Von Spakovsky who was Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Justice. (See also his wikipedia entry, Hans Von Spakofsky.) TPM Muckraker has a further story on Von Spakovsky's history of working for voter suppression while working in Alberto Gonzales' Department of Justice.

Bush has nominated Von Spakovsky to be on the Federal Election Commission. His nomination is being held up in the Senate - for good reason.

Republicans can't be honest and get voters to donate to them.

If you are a Republican and are having difficulty getting donations, what do you do? There are a lot of answers, but one that is characteristic of the Republican Party is that you lie to elderly people and try to frighten them into sending the Republicans money. Here is a report from Paul Keil at TPMMuckraker:

What 83 year-old William Sidwell of Queen City, Missouri found in his mailbox last week scared him. It was a letter from the Republican National Committee, but it seemed to bear grave news: "Our records show that you registered as a member of our Party in Schuyler County, MO," the letter said. "But a recent audit of your Party affiliation turned up some irregularities."

Audit? Irregularities? Was he in trouble? Were they threatening him? Sidwell went immediately to his ask his son, Dennis, a licensed public accountant, for advice. You can see the letter, and the accompanying "Voter Registration Verification and Audit Form," right here. Particularly puzzling to the both of them, Dennis told me, is that his father is a life-long Democrat.

[Go read the TPMMuckraker article to see an image of the letter.]

The letter, it turns out, is just a misleading pitch for a contribution to the RNC -- one of the "irregularities" cited in the letter is that "I cannot find a record of you taking a single action in support of the Republican Party -- not locally, not nationally!" A contribution, the letter suggests, would help set the record straight.

If this were a letter that frightened an elderly person into donating money to a religious organization it would legally be fraud. Legal or not, it is totally unethical.

Unethical as it is, it is also representative of the way the Republican Party of today operates.

DoJ official policy: Voting mistakes are federal crimes

Not sure you are eligible to vote after moving to a new address? Don't even try to register! If you get it wrong, the Republican Party's so-called 'Department of Justice' will prosecute you for any error, no matter what your intentions.

In fact, they will prosecute you even if you just register improperly and don't vote. Oh, and it is a crime to be registered twice, so if the voter administrators from your previous place of registration fail to cancel your registration, YOU will be prosecuted for vote fraud. It's all about suppressing Democratic voter turnout stopping Vote Fraud.

Bush and AG Gonzales fired former U.S. attorneys David Iglesias of New Mexico and John McKay of Seattle because they failed to respond to pressure from local Republican politicians to bring federal cases in alleged Democratic instances of voter fraud. That failure was especially heinous since both U.S. Attorneys actually had the gall to not bring such dubious cases to trial right before an election so that the election would be influenced. Those U.S. Attorneys actually tried to follow the guidelines written in the Justice Department's election crimes manual!

Of course they deserved to be fired! They weren't U.S. Attorneys! They were Republican Attorneys tasked with winning elections for Republican candidates! How DARE they refuse to bring political prosecutions and even act in accordance to their written guideline! Who were they working for? The American People or the Republican Party?

The Department of Justice has solved the problem of those pesky guidelines Iglesias and McKay were fired for following. They have rewritten the guidelines and eliminated those instructions. TPM Muckraker has the story. The instructions now say that every minor registration or voting error will be prosecuted, no matter what the registrant's or voter's intent was, or even who was at fault in the case of administrative error. From now on, all likely Democratic voters who can possibly be indicted errors in the process will be prosecuted, even if they are not related to any conspiracy to change an election.

No surprise there. The Republicans have been desperately searching for proof of Democratic conspiracies to steal elections and have not been successful.

We can expect a sharp increase in federal cases of voter fraud to be brought in late September and October of 2008 as Republican U.S. Attorneys like U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic's desperate attempt to keep his job.

---

See also

• Victim of Republican political prosecution demands reimbursement for costs
  June 17, 2007
• US attorney Biscupic (Eastern Wi.) again reversed by Appeals Court - can't convict for no crime.
  April 25, 2007
• White House working to limit voter turnout.
  April 19, 2007
• Georgia Thompson was convicted by right-wing media
  April 13, 2007
• NY Times gets it right! See editorial today.
  April 09, 2007
• Wisconsin US attorney rammed through fake corruption case of Democrat before last Governor's election.
  April 06, 2007

Office of Special Counsel investigating politization of Federal Civl Service

The U.S. Attorney purge was just the very tip of the program to totally politicize the federal government, using it to raise money and get Republicans elected everywhere. Once locked up, the machine that Rove was building would have left America as a one-party state in which elections mean nothing more than did the elections in the USSR or in Saddam's Iraq. Think Progress reports on the investigation now being conducted by the Office of Special Counsel into the politicization of the Federal Government.

Politicization of the federal government has been illegal for decades. The 1939 Hatch Act specifically prohibits partisan campaign or electoral activities on federal government property, including federal agencies. But in 2005, Ken Mehlman, formerly one of Bush’s top political advisers, outlined the White House’s strategy of utilizing government resources for partisan gain:

One of the things that can happen in Washington when you work in an agency is that you forget who sent you there. And it’s important to remind people that you’re George Bush people. … If there’s one empire I want built, it’s the George Bush empire. [One Party Country, p. 102]

With that imperial partisanship in mind, the Bush White House has engaged in an unprecedented quest to politicize the federal government, giving briefings and PowerPoint presentations everywhere from the Interior Department to NASA on how to secure Republican victories. Said one Interior Department manager, “We were constantly being reminded about how our decisions could affect electoral results” (One Party Country, p. 103). Bush loyalists in federal agencies have also helped generate millions for favored political candidates.

This was - and is - a coup-de-etate conducted by the American right-wing extremist conservatives, both economic and religious. It is beginning to be exposed, but the exposure is mostly surface so far.

Republicans in DoJ still working to suppress votes

The major reason why the Pearl Harbor Day eight were fired was that many of them would not go along with the DoJ in attempting to bring spurious charges of voter fraud in efforts to cause large numbers of Democratic-leaning voters to avoid registering or voting their own interests.

Here is the latest, from the Charlotte Observer.

State, feds say rolls out of date, push changes; official says no need

DAVID INGRAM
dingram@charlotteobserver.com

RALEIGH --
State and federal officials are mounting two broad challenges to the way North Carolina maintains its voter rolls, charging widespread irregularities that include votes cast under the names of dead people.

The accusations attempt to call into question the accuracy of registration records and election returns from 2004 to the present.

So far, though, the officials have not made public any evidence of irregularities, and N.C. election officials argue that the state's maintenance of voter rolls is among the most careful and comprehensive programs in the country.

The dispute comes amid growing national attention to suspected voter fraud. The U.S. Justice Department has devoted more resources to that area -- a decision that voting advocates say could disproportionately affect minorities and the poor ahead of the 2008 election.

In a letter two months ago, the Justice Department said it was reviewing North Carolina's voter rolls and that it found irregularities in the number of people registered to vote. Similar reviews have led to lawsuits against election officials in seven other states, including Georgia.

The second broad challenge is from State Auditor Les Merritt, whose office began a review of the state's voter rolls in January.

His staff presented preliminary findings to the State Board of Elections last week. According to the board, Merritt's staff cited 24,821 invalid driver's license numbers in the voter registration database, 380 people who appear to have voted after their dates of death and others who were under age 18 when they voted.

Gary Bartlett, executive director of the elections board, responded Wednesday with a stinging 10-page letter declaring many of the findings invalid. He accused Merritt's office of misleading the elections board and of rejecting its help.

"(Y)our office appears to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the data that was reviewed or about the federal and State laws governing the voter registration process," Bartlett wrote in the letter, which he provided to lawmakers Thursday.

For example, Bartlett said, many of the people who appear to have voted after their dates of death voted absentee and then died prior to Election Day. At least some people under 18 who voted did so legally, Bartlett said, because state law allows 17-year-olds to vote in a primary election if they will be 18 the day of the general election.

Sort of like stove piping Intelligence data. All you have to do is cherry-pick the data that supports what you want everyone to believe while suppressing all data that shows that there is no real problem. This is clear Republican practice, and they sure haven't stopped.

When more voters vote, fewer Republicans are elected. Solution? Stop people from voting. Ask Republicans.

Republicans can't win elections unless they suppress voter turn-out. Don't take my word for it. Here is Paul Weyrich, father of the right-wing movement and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and various other groups saying exactly that. Go on over to Crooks and Liars and listen to him.

That's what the entire business of politicizing the Department of Justice has been about.

[ h/t to Digby.]

Vote Suppression is the issue

The Republican Party has stolen the Presidential election in 2000 and in 2004, and Americans are dying because of it. So are Iraqis, for that matter. But it's not just a case of misprogrammed diebold voting machines. Mostly the vote is rigged by suppressing turnout of likely Democratic voters. Buzzflash interviewed Gregg Palast:

Greg Palast: 2004. And in 2006 and 2004, they challenged tens of thousands of black soldiers. They stopped their votes from being counted when they were mailed in from Baghdad. Go to Baghdad and lose your vote -- mission accomplished.

BuzzFlash: How did they do that?

Greg Palast: By sending letters to the homes of soldiers, marked "do not forward." When they came back undelivered, they said: Aha! Illegal voter registered from a false address. And when their ballot came in from Fallujah, it was challenged. The soldier didn’t know it. Their vote was lost. Over half a million votes were challenged and lost by the Republicans -- absentee ballots. Three million voters who went to the polls found themselves challenged by the Republicans. This was not a small operation. It was a multi-million dollar, wholesale theft operation.

I’m working with Bobby Kennedy, who is a voting rights attorney. He said, “This is not just an icky, horrible thing that people do wearing white sheets. This is a felony crime.” [paraphrase] And the guy they put in charge of this criminal ring to knock out voters is a guy named Tim Griffin. Today, Tim Griffin is -- badda-bing -- U.S. Attorney for Arkansas. When they fired the honest guys, they put in the Rove-bots to fix the 2008 election. That’s what I’m saying -- it’s already being stolen, as we speak. Tim Griffin is the perpetrator who’s become the prosecutor, and that’s what’s going down right now.

This is why Tim Griffin was sent to replace Bud Cummins, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Dud Cummings was apparently too law abiding for Rove to trust to kill any investigation of vote suppression or vote stealing in Arkansas.

Of course, the Republcans don't always conduct vote suppression. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to resort purely to good, old fashion vote stealing.

Greg Palast: I have it all in Armed Madhouse - Updated Edition, including in the three new chapters. First and foremost, is that it’s not one thing. It ain’t just electronic voting, guys. You go, oh, we have paper ballots, we’re saved, we’re saved. Bulls***! Wake up! Hello! Let’s remember that in Florida and Ohio, they didn’t have computer voting. So all the stuff about Diebold -- Ohio was not stolen by computers, because they didn’t have computers there. In fact, they were thrilled when people complained about computers because they could keep the junky punch cards in. That doesn’t mean that computers are safe. As I point out in the new chapter, the Republicans held on to Katherine Harris’ seat -- and we don’t want to think too carefully about that image -- they held onto Katherine Harris’ seat with 300 votes, while 18,000 votes disappeared in the computers. So they do use computers. That was a pure, straight-up, shoplift of the Congressional seat.

BuzzFlash: A House committee just voted not to pursue an investigation of that election, despite the disappearance of 18,000 votes.

Greg Palast: That’s sick -- deeply, deviously sick. First of all, in New York and other states, when votes are in question, they simply redo them. People talk about recount -- forget it. Redo the vote. When the machines collapse, then there’s no question that there was monkey business.

BuzzFlash: Then why do you think --

Greg Palast: -- why don’t Democrats stand up?

BuzzFlash: The U.S. House of Representatives is controlled by Democrats. It’s like saying, well, $320 million is missing from a bank but we’re not going to investigate that.

Greg Palast: You’re forgetting it’s not about the two parties. Vote theft is mainly a racial issue in America, and it’s a class issue. The white caucus is a lot bigger than the black caucus. They don’t call the Congress a millionaire’s club for nothing. There aren’t many guys in there -- or women -- who are not millionaires. So it’s the millionaires versus us. It’s the white caucus versus the black caucus, which is of great concern. So the vote is along racial class and economic lines, not along party lines. Party lines are pretty much meaningless. There’s pretty much one party -- the party of the cash. But I’m not one of these people that says there’s no difference between the Democratic and Republican Party. The question is: is the difference meaningful? That’s all. When it comes down to voter issues, remember that the Democrats in power there were elected under the racist, broken, classist system. If you fix the voting system, a third of those Democrats could never win a primary. The last thing that they want is poor people to vote.

The USA is the oldest Republic existing on Earth today. It has been a two century plus experiment, and my reading of twentieth century history has suggested to me that powerful industrial societies are forced to adopt many of the characteristics of a Republic. But Bush and the conservative Republicans have been proving that the dangers to a Republic that are inherent in a powerful Chief Executive who is also Commander in Chief are very real. The five decades of WW II and the Cold War allowed the forces opposing democracy to gain a great deal of power, and the end of the Cold War did not make them want to give it up.

We are seeing the backlash against the end of the Cold War, augmented by 9/11. Terrorism is a major problem, but it is not a war, nor is it an inherent characteristic of Islamic societies. But they want to define it that way because it allows the non-democratic American nationalists to throw out the freedoms from an autocratic government that we Americans have gotten used to.

That's what this vote changing, voter suppression, vote stealing and election stealing is all about. Those given power to deal with a nuclear-armed USSR will not give up that power just because the threat is gone. They are fighting the loss of that power, but it must be taken from them. That is the lesson provided by the Bush/Cheney administration.

---

See also:

• Rudi Guiliani - an example of the "new" GOP.

Goodling gave us the crime. Caging. Who will take it from here?

Greg Palast has pointed out that Monica Goodling gave up the real crime at the core of Department of Justice antics. (See Bradblog.) The key is "Caging." The following is from a letter from Greg Palast published in Bradblog:

Goodling testified that Gonzales' Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin's "involvement in 'caging' voters" in 2004.

Huh?? Tim Griffin? "Caging"??? [Snip]

...what's 'caging' and why is it such a dreadful secret that lawyer Sampson put his license to practice and his freedom on the line to cover Tim Griffin's involvement in it? Because it's a felony. And a big one.

Here's how caging worked, and along with Griffin's thoughtful emails themselves you'll understand it all in no time.

The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked "Do not forward" to voters' homes. Letters returned ("caged") were used as evidence to block these voters' right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and --- you got to love this --- American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.

Why weren't these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation --- and the soldiers were overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Mission Accomplished.

How do I know? I have the caging lists...

I have them because they are attached to the emails Rove insists can't be found. I have the emails. 500 of them --- sent to our team at BBC after the Rove-bots accidentally sent them to a web domain owned by our friend John Wooden.

Here's what you need to know --- and the Committee would have discovered, if only they'd asked:

1. 'Caging' voters is a crime, a go-to-jail felony.
2. Griffin wasn't "involved" in the caging, Ms. Goodling. Griffin, Rove's right-hand man (right-hand claw), was directing the illegal purge and challenge campaign. How do I know? It's in the email I got. Thanks. And it's posted below. [Note: go to Bradblog for this. Editor, PPS.]
3. On December 7, 2006, the ragin', cagin' Griffin was named, on Rove's personal demand, US Attorney for Arkansas. Perpetrator became prosecutor.

The committee was perplexed about Monica's panicked admission and accusations about the caging list because the US press never covered it. That's because, as Griffin wrote to Goodling in yet another email (dated February 6 of this year, and also posted below), their caging operation only made the news on BBC London: busted open, Griffin bitched, by that "British reporter," Greg Palast.

This is the next step in opening up the "caging" issue. It's not over by a long shot.

But why have the American media not picked up on it? Too complicated for them?

---

Prior related posts.

• "Caging" in Republican practice
  May 24, 2007


• "Caging" - an explanation of the term
  May 23, 2007

"Caging" in Republican practice

Greg Palast describes the way Republicans have used "Caging Lists" to challenge voters and suppress the vote of minorities and the poor. The trick is that if they discourage a hundred Black voters from voting, they may have lost 10 votes but their opponents will have lost 90.

Palast's article is a bit dated, having been published June 23, 2006. The VRA was reauthorized and signed into law by Bush on July 27, 2006 for another 25 years, so it remains effective for those jurisdictions it previously applied to. That means that it remains illegal to identify voters by race in order to challenge their right to vote.

That includes targeting districts with a high concentration of African-American voters, sending out registered letters to the registered voters in that district, then challenging those who do not respond or who do not pick up their letters. Registered letters are often used by bill collectors, so people behind on their bills rarely pick up registered letters from unknown addresses. This is not a reliable way to find who has moved, nor is that the purpose. It is just a way of challenging voters who are likely to vote Democratic.

Such practices are going to be quite common in November 2008, illegal or not. Unfortunately, such practices are not nearly as effective for likely Republican voters. It works when used on those minority voters who the Republicans are clearly out to get, such as African-Americans, immigrants, Hispanics, and homosexuals. Except for Republicans in general, there are no such minority groups actively threatened by Democrats.