Maggie's Farm

A commenter, Tina Trent, offered this informed comment to the Pajamas Complete Guide to ACORN voter fraud:

Some answers on how and why ACORN does what it does:

First, false registrations serve several purposes. On the smallest scale, they provide opportunities to acquire one or more registration cards to be used for illegal votes. You can have them sent to a community center, a homeless shelter, or someplace else where the cards can be picked up and used. And remember, you can also vote without your card, so long as you present yourself as somebody on the rolls and have some other (fake) form of I.D., so you can register people you know aren’t going to vote (ie. dead people) or vote for those dead people you know are registered. At this level of fraud, of course, requiring photo I.D. would make everything harder. Guess who opposes requiring picture I.D. for voter registration and voting?

You can also make up people, get them on the rolls, and then send in absentee ballots. You don’t need a body to do this, or a person to show up at the polls, so this is a major source of fraudulent voting.

You can also register people too young to vote and have them vote, along with felons and illegal aliens. The key to all of these things is to keep the laws about identification, both for registration and for casting votes, as lax as possible.

Voter registration drives also spread around money — donated by wealthy non-profits, or subsidized by taxpayers, and disseminated around to people (unsurprisingly, often welfare recipients and others with lots of time on their hands, while you have to work for a living) who will happily show up to “protest” various causes for a few bucks or bigger kickbacks, or register non-existent voters so the organization can go back to their donors (or the feds) and show that they’ve “met their goals.”

So another important purpose served is as an income stream for activism infrastructure, a way to pay the people you need for heads at a demonstration or a press conference, or to disrupt City Hall (If you’ve ever been involved in city or state politics, you’ve probably noticed that the same usual suspects show up to protest wildly disparate causes. At the Capitol where I worked, the annual “Poor People’s Day” was a good day to get your purse stolen).

Growing activism infrastructure doesn’t always translate directly into fraudulent votes cast (though it’s still fraud to file false registrations). But when you get enough money to stage large-scale efforts, then pay lots of people to get registrations, then swamp registration offices at the last possible moment with real and fake ballots, then start screaming about people being denied the right to vote, abetted by a complacent media that starts imagining itself back in “the day” — you’ve disrupted the system and laid the groundwork to whinge on endlessly about disenfranchisement, a complaint that many well-meaning Americans take at face value.

And then the loop is complete: it’s “stop the presses: voters are being disenfranchised!” time. Elected officials grandstand and get tax dollars to pay for registration drives. The money gets divvied out by elected officials to organizations like ACORN. And that money and infrastructure get used to lobby against any laws that would “make it harder to vote” by requiring things like registration in person, photo I.D., and other things required in all other industrialized countries (you know, the ones that are gleefully pointing at us right now and j’accusing us of preventing poor minorities from getting to the polls).

How does an Obama rise out of this? Easy. First you become the guy who gives out the grants (check). Then you make sure the block captains who support your election to lower-office are the ones who get in on the next grant gravy-train (check). Then you get into office and get more grants to give out to your guys on the ground (check), who re-elect you, sending your further and further up the electoral ladder. Check. Check. Check. (I am not suggesting that Republicans don’t have their own closed loops of corruption, but they don’t do this, and they don’t accuse the rest of us of being racists who suppress votes).

The one thing that must NEVER happen is “solving the problem” of poverty, or “disenfranchisement, or any other social ill, because then the gravy train dries up. The argument that “ACORN helps poor people all year long” is risible, unless by “help” you mean getting the most corruptible people from public housing onto public boards in order to open up new avenues of kickbacks and expand political power.

So it is all done at the price of keeping the poor actually poor. And that’s the cherry on top.

What an Obama presidency plus a Dem filibuster-proof Congress could mean for you. Fred Barnes.

But Scott at Powerline says that Barnes only scratches the surface.

I thought we were a center-right country. What happened?

"Viva McCain," says Bill Kristol. He begins:

It's been a dopey campaign. But they usually are. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt ran on balancing the budget and cutting government spending. In 1940, it was preserving U.S. neutrality in the European war. In 1960, on the cusp of a decade of fundamental change in race relations and the size and scope of the government, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon spent a lot of time debating a nonexistent missile gap and Quemoy and Matsu. In 2000, the issue of Islamic terrorism was barely mentioned by George W. Bush or Al Gore.

This isn't a criticism of America or of its democracy. Other countries are no better. And it's not as if our elites are any more far-seeing than our politicians. Election campaigns--like intellectual debates--tend to be past- and present-oriented. But sometimes the past and present are of limited use as guides to the future.

I am sure that many readers dislike Krugman for his relentless - and often deceptive and hysterical -political partisanship in the NYT. However, he has apparently made some genuine contributions to economics.

The NJ's link to Marginal Revolution on Krugman's Nobel led me to this somewhat technical essay by Krugman on The Role of Geography in Development. Quite fascinating, whether you agree with his assumptions or not.

They said that Louis XlV had two baths in his life: one when he was born, and the second one killed him.

Interesting review of two books on the history of cleanliness at Wilson Quarterly, but it does not explain why gals like baths and guys like showers.

Our ancestors must have smelled ripe.

In Switzerland, it's about Plant Dignity. But I think psychosis has been going mainstream for quite a while, mainly because psychotics are noisier than the rest of us.

Fortunately, I use a compassionate and humane chainsaw when I murder and dismember innocent trees. 

The Stihl Farm Boss is the Official Maggie's Farm Humane Chainsaw. It is so good that the plants don't feel anything.