Voting Rights

Watch Seth Meyers Hilariously Skewer The GOP’s Voter Suppression Campaign

Posted by on March 18, 2016 at 2:01 pm. NO Comments :

Seth Meyers is proving to be one of the smartest and funniest of the late-night, political comedians. He has taken his mock-news anchor persona from Saturday Night Live and made it a central feature of his NBC Late, Late Show. And last night’s outing is one of the best examples of why it’s working so well.

Seth Meyers

Meyers “A Closer Look” segment took on the subject of voter ID (video below) with the opening premise that “Voting levels in the U.S. are already among the lowest in the industrialized world,” with slightly more than half of eligible Americans participating in the democratic process. That compares to some other democracies like Sweden where the participation rate is over eighty percent.

The problem, as Meyers sees it, is that rather than trying to improve things many states are passing laws that make it “harder, not easier” to vote. It is not coincidental that those states are run by Republican governors and/or legislatures that have clear partisan agendas. And the impact of these laws can result in the difference “between President Hillary Clinton and glorious beloved leader, Donald Trump, all praise to him and his magnificent hands.”

The segment spelled out how these laws specifically make it harder for low-income residents and people of color to obtain the newly required photo IDs. He cited as an example a 94 year old North Carolina woman who was put through an absurd obstacle course that included ten trips to the DMV and over 200 miles of commuting. All of this to allegedly prevent a suspicious nonagenarian from scamming a North Carolinian whistle-stop out of a single vote.

Meyers correctly observes that the only fraud associated with the anti-voting laws is the purported reason for their existence. The law’s defenders say they are trying to stop voter impersonation – a crime that nobody is committing. Enacting laws to prohibit crimes that aren’t occurring is, as Meyers said, like saying “We’re not sure you’re gonna be on The Batchelor, but you should start taking Valtrex anyway.” Had the law been in effect since 2000 it would have prevented thirty-one possibly improper voters out of more than two billion cast. However, at the same time, it would have kept hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters from casting ballots.

In one particularly egregious example of voter disenfranchisement, Meyers cited an Alabama law that resulted in the closure of DMV offices in mostly rural counties. The secretary of state promised that he would offset that loss of access by dispatching a mobile unit to provide IDs and register the estimated 250,000 voters that didn’t have the IDs made necessary by the new law. He said that the mobile unit would be sent to festivals, schools, churches, and even Walmarts. But when asked how many IDs the unit issued last year he answered, “only twenty-nine.” Out of 250,000. To which Meyers quipped that the unit must actually have been sent to empty lots, swamps, abandoned mineshafts, and Radio Shacks.

The issue of voter suppression is one that is too often ignored by the so-called liberal media. But it is one of the most harmful initiatives being carried out by conservative politicians with the support of right-wing media. Fox News, of course, is leading the way in promoting the false narrative of imaginary voter fraud. For instance, Bill O’Reilly has been fear mongering for years that lax rules for registration are threatening to let “illegal aliens” take over the country. It’s a lie that he and others at Fox are continuing to push on their dimwitted cult of viewers.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Fear Mongering Racists At Fox News Promote Voter Fraud Lies – Again

Posted by on February 23, 2016 at 1:43 pm. 2 Comments :

The American media obsession with hair-raising tabloid journalism is responsible for lowering the political IQ of the nation. As an example, the wholly manufactured debate over voter fraud keeps popping up whenever there is a lull in stories about Hillary Clinton murdering U.S. ambassadors or if Donald Trump goes a couple of hours without saying something pitifully stupid.

Yesterday at the Fox News community website, Fox Nation, they linked to a story from the National Review that once again raised allegations of non-existent illegal voters invading polling places across the nation. This zombie myth has been debunked repeatedly but continues to surface in the conservative press that doesn’t have anything better to do than lie about fearsome minorities plotting to steal America away from its rightful, white Christianist owners. The headline blared that “The Obama Administration Wants To Make Sure Non-Citizens Vote In The Upcoming Election.”

Fox Nation

This goes somewhat beyond the run of the mill dishonesty where they merely complain that President Obama opposes unnecessary voter ID laws. In this article, by long-time voting fraud alarmist Hans von Spakovsky, the President is accused of wanting to “make sure” that illegal votes are cast by nefarious foreigners. This would make him an accomplice to the crime. Spakovsky wades into the weeds of arcane legalistic rhetoric containing baseless allegations of conflict of interest from unnamed sources. The crux of his argument centers around a wingnut lawsuit…

“…seeking to reverse a recent decision by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The Commission’s decision allows Kansas and other states, including Arizona and Georgia, to enforce state laws ensuring that only citizens register to vote when they use a federally designed registration form.”

Spakovsky characterizes the dispute as an effort to prevent non-citizens from voting illegally (something that virtually never happens) by imposing identification requirements for prospective registrants. In fact, what the lawsuit aims to achieve is to prevent Democrats from voting. What the article leaves out entirely are the specific requirements proposed in Kansas by their ultra-rightist Secretary of State Kris Kobach and other GOP-led states. The consequences of the policies advocated by Spakovsky and his ilk resulted in some 40,000 voters being removed from the voting rolls in Kansas. They justified this on the basis of having found seven names of undocumented residents on those rolls, none of whom ever cast a vote. And guess who most of those 40,000 disenfranchised voters were: minorities, students, low-income workers, and other Democratic leaning constituents.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

In addition to having no documented evidence of voter registration fraud or illegal voting, even after pouring through hundreds of thousands of votes, the voter suppressors themselves were found to be fraudulent. Both Spakovsky and Kobach were called out in a PolitiFact analysis as falsely representing data on illegal voting. This is the sort hypocrisy we are dealing with. And this is something they have been doing for years in an attempt to put up roadblocks for voters they don’t happen to like. Be watchful as November approaches because they aren’t through with this yet.

Common Shaky Ground: Left And Right Agree To Let The Red States Secede

Posted by on August 14, 2014 at 3:28 pm. 5 Comments :

Very few political observers would argue that our current system of government in Washington isn’t broken, or at least in a state of serious disrepair. The House of Representatives is being bullied by a minority faction of Tea Party dimwits who have utterly dominated the pathetically weak Speaker, John Boehner. The Senate is floundering under rules that allow the minority to obstruct any legislative progress through filibusters that redefine a majority as sixty senators. But a solution is being proposed that has found supporters on both ends of the political divide.

To Secede Or Not To Secede

Fred Jackson, news director of the uber-rightist American Family Association, told his radio audience that he thought a caller had a “good idea” when he said that secession is “the only solution that we have because voting doesn’t work.” The idea called for the red states to separate from the union. Jackson lamented that the American people may not be ready for such a measure, but that’s only because they haven’t yet realized “that we are about to hit that wall.”

The day before this broadcast the right-wing pseudo-news wire, Washington Free Beacon, published a story on the same theme but with a geographic limiter. They wrote that “A major Democratic donor said he supports Southern secession because the South is ‘dumbing down national politics.” It’s hard to argue with his reasoning while derps like Louie Gohmert and Ted Cruz are wandering the halls of Congress.

There is some real merit to this idea. After all, both sides would agree that neither is being particularly well represented when the legislative branch of government is so divided. By jettisoning the South the rest of the nation would be relieved of bible-belters who want to invoke a theocracy that believes Jesus rode a dinosaur to his sermons against gay marriage and climate change science. The South would be free to abolish all taxes and prohibit African-Americans from voting. This is not to say that establishing the Mason-Dixon line as the new border would automatically correct the problem. After all, Michele Bachmann would still be up in Minnesota and Darrell Issa would still be out in California. But a large chunk of the causes of division would be resolved.

There are, of course, some drawbacks as well. First among them is the fact that there are a lot of decent, thoughtful people in red and Southern states that would be horrified to find themselves sequestered in a new country that would rank at the bottom of the intelligence scale. A report published by (of all places) Fox Business, surveyed the nation’s academic profile and found that the ten states with the best educated citizens were all “blue” states, while nine of the ten worst educated were “red” states (and eight of those were in the south).

foxbusiness-education

There is also an economic issue since the South is comprised of the states with the highest percentage of people living below the poverty line (31%). And that number reflects an increase of nearly 50% since 2000. The South is currently a net receiver of federal assistance, meaning that it gets more from the government than it contributes in taxes. That would bode ill for a new nation that couldn’t support itself, particularly if it implements the low-tax strategy that it wants to impose on the whole of the United States.

The better educated and financially secure Blue/Northern states would have a distinct post-separation advantage. However, the Red States of America would be a non-starter from the outset because too much of its population would be too stupid and too financially inept to be sustainable. These variances could not be resolved simply by having people relocate to the region they prefer. That would be too great a burden that would involve uprooting families and businesses, finding new jobs and schools and friends, and very likely overcrowding the Blue states, while draining the Reds of their smartest and economically savviest residents. The Blues would be well positioned to compete with international rivals in Europe and Asia. The Reds would be closer to Libertarian Utopias like Somalia.

There is a far better solution than secession. However, it requires the American people to participate in their democracy. First of all, they have to become informed. And that means venturing beyond the increasingly biased mainstream media to find sources that are diverse and independent. Then they have to actually vote. The U.S. has one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any industrialized country. That is a slap in the face to the Founders who were optimistic enough to believe that future generations would appreciate the gift that was left to them.

With their voting power, the people need to demand an end to the anti-democratic gerrymandering that allows representatives to choose their voters rather than the other way around. And part and parcel to that, judicial atrocities like Citizen’s United must be overturned. The people must demand that only real, human, citizens can vote and contribute to campaigns. Corporations, unions, and all other wealthy special interests should not be electing our representatives. Corporations are not people, and money is not speech.

Shameless self-promotion…
Get Fox Nation vs. Reality. Available now at Amazon.

A final suggestion for reform is a tad more radical, but still far short of secession. The Senate should become a representative body. There is no reasonable justification for Wyoming’s half million residents to have the same political clout as the 38 million residents of California. Two senators per state is an anachronistic solution to a problem that ceased to exist shortly after the Constitution was ratified. Today it permits a tiny minority of sparsely populated, unrepresentative states to hold the rest of the nation hostage. In fact, it is mathematically possible for just 35 million residents (10% of the population) to dictate the national agenda for all 350 million Americans. That is a perversion of democracy.

So it isn’t necessary to dissolve the United States to find a more perfect union. It just requires civic commitment and the will to make substantive reforms. And it wouldn’t hurt if the media stopped deliberately making their audience stupider.

Where’s The Outrage? On The Tenth Anniversary Of Ronald Reagan’s Death

Posted by on June 5, 2014 at 3:41 pm. 1 Comments :

Ten years ago, on June 5, 2004, former president Ronald Reagan died after a long illness including severe Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a curious fluke of timing that this anniversary should occur just as some prominent events have sprung up in the news that parallel notable capstones of his term in office. And while many of these affairs have erupted into frenzied allegations of high crimes and misdemeanors on the part of President Obama, they generated a far more sedate reaction from Republicans of that era.

Ronald Reagan

Shameless self-promotion…
Get Fox Nation vs. Reality. Available now at Amazon.

Embassy Attacks

For almost two years now, the GOP has been furiously scratching at the walls to find something incriminating with regard to the tragic attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. In all that time, and after numerous congressional hearings and independent investigations, they have turned up nothing. So of course they decided to launch a new Select Committee on the Politicization of Benghazi in order to continue their fruitless and frivolous charade.

Perhaps on this day of remembrance, Republicans might take into consideration the fact that there were more embassy attacks, with greater loss of life, during the Reagan administration. And yet, there was never the degree of vitriol directed at Reagan for such deadly serious incidents as this:

“In April 1983, radical Shiite suicide bombers blew up the US embassy in Beirut, killing 63. Reagan did nothing to prevent this attack, and his ultimate response to it and a later deadly attack on US Marines in Beirut was to quietly withdraw from Lebanon.”

Climate Change

Last week President Obama announced an initiative to address the persistent problem of Climate Change that threatens to cause profound damage to our environment and our economy, while triggering profound national security risks. The Republican response to that was typically hostile, with rants about unlawfully overstepping his authority and deliberately attempting to sabotage the economy. However, no such rants were ever issued when Reagan said this in a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate requesting increased funding of nearly $500 million:

“Because changes in the earth’s natural systems can have tremendous economic and social effects, global climate change is becoming a critical concern.”

Voting Rights

A constant burr in the right’s britches has been their faulty analysis of alleged election fraud. Despite years of complaints, they have failed to turn up anything but trivial evidence of a handful of infractions, which they use to deny voting rights to tens of millions of citizens. Obama’s support for reform has yielded accusations of tyranny and advocacy of fraud. Recently the conservative-dominated Supreme Court drastically scaled back the scope of the seminal Voting Rights Act of 1965. Reagan opposed the legislation at the time, but during his presidency he had a somewhat different view that failed to garner the insults that Obama has suffered:

“To protect all our citizens, I believe the Voting Rights Act should and must be extended. […] The Voting Rights Act is important to the sense of trust many Americans place in their government’s commitment to equal rights.”

Veterans Administration

Another hot topic on the GOP outrage agenda is the news that some of the Veterans Administration facilities have badly failed the soldiers they are intended to serve. While most of the veteran community report that they are “highly satisfied” with the service they receive, the disclosures of malfeasance are serious and unforgivable. The problems appear to be locally based, yet that hasn’t stopped Republicans from placing the blame directly at the feet of the President. Funny, they never did that to Reagan when these VA fiascoes plagued his term:

In 1981 a former Marine committed suicide after claiming the VA had failed to attend to his service-related disabilities. In 1982 VA director Robert Nimmo was “criticized for wasteful spending, including use of a chauffeured car and an expensive office redecorating project,” after failing to address veterans problems with Agent Orange. in 1984 “Congressional investigators find evidence that VA officials had diverted or refused to spend more than $40 million that Congress approved to help Vietnam veterans with readjustment problems.”

Negotiating With Terrorists

More recently, Obama’s decision to rescue Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from five years of captivity by agreeing to release some aging former Taliban leaders has resulted in political attacks against the soldier, his family, and calls for Obama’s impeachment. Right-wingers complain that there is no justification for negotiating with terrorists and that Obama has violated a long-standing policy not to do so. That, however, is totally false, as proven by Reagan himself. The notorious Iran-Contra scandal was centered around Reagan’s initiative to free hostages in Iran by agreeing to sell the terrorist nation over 1,500 missiles. The proceeds from that deal were then illegally funneled to anti-Sandinista death squads in Nicaragua. Reagan’s surreal confession to these acts continues to strain credulity:

“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

2016

Special Bonus Outrage: Setting up a future political battle, Republicans are going after presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Their fear of her is palpable as they struggle to bring down her popularity with the American people. A new survey shows her handily beating every GOP candidate she is matched against. Consequently, the right has gone all in to cast Clinton as “old and stale” (as Karl Rove said). Rove also suggested that Clinton was suffering from brain damage. Then the Drudge Report hilariously misinterpreted a People Magazine cover of Clinton leaning on a chair, which Drudge imagined was a walker.

All of this ignores the reality that Clinton is, by all credible accounts, in good health. But more to the point, she would be younger at inauguration than GOP pols like John McCain, Bob Dole, and, yes, you guessed it, Ronald Reagan, who still stands as the nation’s oldest president. This might be a good time to recall Reagan’s retort to rival Walter Mondale, who made some sly references to Reagan’s age:

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

While remembering the legacy of Ronald Reagan, which is fraught with disagreement and controversy, on this, the anniversary of his death, it would worthwhile to recognize the hypocrisy of contemporary Republicans who seem to have forgotten history entirely.

Late Additions

Immigration: Reagan granted amnesty to three million undocumented residents.
Al Qaeda: Reagan funded the Mujaheddin, from whom sprung the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.
Gun Control: Reagan signed the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act that banned fully automatic rifles.

Congenital Liar James O’Keefe Makes False Charges Of Illegality Against Battleground Texas

Posted by on February 20, 2014 at 3:45 am. 11 Comments :

James O’Keefe has just released the latest of his long-running series of intentionally deceitful videos. In this episode O’Keefe returns to one of his favorite themes: harassing civic-minded volunteers who commit their time to registering voters and honoring America’s tradition of democracy. If there is one thing that extremist conservatives like O’Keefe hate, it’s people participating in the electoral process or helping others to do so. Especially if they are minorities, the poor, and other disenfranchised citizens.

James O'Keefe

Read the acclaimed ebook Fox Nation vs. Reality. Available at Amazon.

The new video purports to have captured illegal activity engaged in by volunteers for Battleground Texas, a local organization that promotes voter participation. O’Keefe’s hidden camera records a volunteer named Jennifer Longoria describing a part of the process for engaging voters and encouraging them to turn out on election day. Longoria explains that Battleground Texas keeps contact information gathered from the voter registration forms they collect. It is this practice of saving names and phone numbers that O’Keefe alleges is illegal.

The only problem with O’Keefe’s allegation is that it is utterly false. What O’Keefe did was to clip a portion of the Texas election code that says “The registrar may not transcribe, copy, or otherwise record a telephone number furnished on a registration application.” What he either fails to understand, or is deliberately misrepresenting, is that this section of the law applies only to the Registrar of Voters and other county officials. It does not apply to the volunteers or organizations that distribute and collect voter registration forms. In fact, the Texas Secretary of State website addresses this matter directly in their “Frequently Asked Questions” for volunteers:

Q: May I photocopy a completed application before turning it in to the county voter registrar?

A: No. Section 13.004(c-1) of the Code requires the county voter registrar to ensure that certain information, such as the telephone number, on a registration application is redacted from photocopies of voter registration applications from her office. In our opinion, this means that a photocopy of an application must come directly from the county voter registrar’s office, so that he or she may ensure the required information has been blacked out or otherwise obscured. With that said, we believe that a volunteer deputy registrar may photocopy the receipt. You may also copy the relevant information from the application in writing just as you would be able to do if you went to the registrar’s office and pulled a copy of the original application.

So actual photocopies are not allowed, but manually recording the data is expressly permitted. And that’s all that Battleground Texas is doing. The purpose of the applicable code is to prohibit confidential voter information from being published or otherwise made public by people on the government payroll who could have motive and opportunity to abuse their power. But Battleground Texas is not a government agency, nor are they publishing any of the data. Also, the information defined as confidential is specified in the code and includes things like the social security number and driver’s license number, but not the phone number.

The fact that James O’Keefe is thoroughly shredding the most basic standards of ethical journalism should not surprise anyone. His previous escapades have resulted in his arrest and conviction in a Louisiana senator’s office, and a legal order to pay a $100,000 settlement to a former ACORN employee he defamed. He himself has broken voter registration laws in a failed attempt to defend suppressive voter ID legislation. And let’s not forget his sleazy plot to seduce a CNN reporter aboard his “Love Boat,” or harassment allegations by a former associate that he tried to drug and kidnap her. His videos have been criticized by a broad array of media analysts for editing that blatantly misrepresents reality. Even Glenn Beck condemned his deceptive tactics.

However, what is truly disturbing is that, after having established a reputation as a shameless scam artist, there are still media outlets that provide a platform for his lies. Almost as soon as O’Keefe posted the new video it was picked up by Fox News on their Fox Nation website. From there it was swept up into the conservative media vortex that includes National Review, Breitbart News, WorldNetDaily, NewsBusters, FreedomWorks, The Daily Caller, Townhall, Human Events, TeaPartyOrg, and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones’ Infowars.

Despite sensationalistic headlines about “Busted Dems,” none of these so-called news enterprises bothered to actually look into the law and ascertain whether a violation had occurred. They have simply taken the word of a known purveyor of falsehoods. That’s because their role is to distort and confuse rather than to inform. And that’s why O’Keefe can always find an outlet through the wingnut-o-sphere to peddle his phony investigations that invariably attack disadvantaged Americans and are a coordinated part of the Republican war on voting. The state of Texas has one of the lowest rates of voter participation in the nation, and O’Keefe and his GOP allies want to keep it that way.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Voter ID Photo Fallacy

Posted by on February 9, 2014 at 7:15 pm. 2 Comments :

With a weekend full of legitimate news stories like the Olympics or immigration reform, Fox Nation reserved the top spot on their web page to post a blatant lie: “NAACP Requires Marchers Protesting Voter ID Law To Show Photo ID.”

Fox Nation

Read the acclaimed ebook Fox Nation vs. Reality for more of Fox’s blatant lies.

One of the favorite tactics of propagandists is to expose alleged hypocrisy on the part of their foes. And when they can’t find any actual hypocrisy, the more unscrupulous among them will simply invent some. That’s the case with this article on Fox Nation. Sourcing the information from the Daily Caller, a right-wing webloid run by Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, the article states flatly that…

“North Carolinians marching to protest voter-ID laws must present a valid photo ID to participate in an NAACP-hosted protest against voter-ID laws in Raleigh on Saturday.”

The evidence of what would be an embarrassing misstep is a tweet by a conservative blogger that showed a portion of a flyer promoting the protest. The flyer had a list of “do’s and don’t’s” for the marchers. One of the “do’s” said to “bring a photo identification (driver’s license, passport or other valid photo ID) with you and keep it on your person at all times.” So there you have it. Except that what you have is something completely different than what the headline and story alleged.

There was absolutely no requirement by the NAACP, or anyone else, that a photo ID be shown in order to participate in the march. No one would be checking for them, and no one would be refused without one. The Fox Nationalists apparently can’t tell the difference between a requirement and a suggestion. The advice to carry a valid ID is one that is commonly given to people who participate in public protests. Occasionally such events encounter police interventions, and having your ID handy can smooth the process. That is the only reason that the flyer recommended that participants carry an ID. It was in no way a prerequisite for participating.

Even if there were a requirement to have an ID for the protest, there still wouldn’t have been any hypocrisy. Conservatives like to make irrelevant analogies when defending their voter suppression plans. They point to the need to show an ID when boarding a plane or buying alcohol. However, flying and drinking are not in the same category as voting, which is regarded as right and a duty in our democracy. Any attempt to depress turnout, particularly in a way that is so transparently prejudicial, is undemocratic.

What’s more, the incidence of fraudulent voting is practically nil, so they are proposing to disenfranchise thousands of citizens in order to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. But that’s how they operate. And they don’t care any more about fair elections than they do about honestly representing the facts in a story like this one.

FYI: The “Moral Mondays” protest march, that Fox was so brazenly lying about, drew upwards of 80,000 people – in North Carolina!It was the largest civil rights march in the South since 1965.

Fox News May Be Anti Voting Rights, But At Least They’re Pro Election Fraud

Posted by on February 2, 2014 at 9:57 am. 1 Comments :

The Republican Party has been engaged in a prolonged and determined campaign to suppress the votes of citizens whom they believe are inclined to vote for Democrats. Their disingenuous claims to be battling voter fraud are exposed as lies by the fact that they cannot certify any significant incidence of unlawful voting, and the solutions they propose to the non-problem all seem to serve as impediments to voting by youth, minorities, seniors, and the poor. These are all commonly regarded as Democratic constituents, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Conservative media, and especially Fox News, has been a full partner in this voter suppression effort. They have openly taken positions in support of the GOP’s discriminatory initiatives and given a platform to right-wing partisans who advocate for purging the electorate of Democratic voters. The issue has become a near obsession for the rightist media machine as it seeks support for restrictions that require photo IDs, reduce polling places and hours of operation, and limit the ability of independent organizations to register voters.

All of this is done in the name of cracking down on illegal election activities. Which makes it all the more ironic that Fox News is now defending someone who has been indicted for actual election fraud, Dinesh D’Souza. As a veteran of right-wing punditry, D’Souza is a frequent guest on Fox News and is the writer and producer of the anti-Obama crocumentary, “2016: Obama’s America,” based on his own widely debunked book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”

D’Souza was recently indicted for felony violations of election finance laws. He is alleged to have solicited people to make donations to a candidate for the senate and then reimbursing the donors as a scheme to exceed contribution limits. The response to this by D’Souza’s pals at Fox News was to assert that the prosecution is all a part of a plot by President Obama to silence his critics. It’s an absurd and unsupported claim that doesn’t explain why Obama would go after a minor figure like D’Souza, whom few Americans have heard of, while allowing more prominent critics like Rush Limbaugh to remain free. Nor does it account for the fact that the same Justice Department that indicted D’Souza also convicted a Democrat for the same crime.

Fox News - D'Souza

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The attempt to whitewash D’Souza’s criminal activity included a guest spot on Sean Hannity’s program. Hannity called D’Souza “the latest victim to be targeted by the Obama White House,” without any evidence of White House involvement. Then Hannity gave D’Souza an opportunity to rebut the charges made against him. D’Souza said…

“Well, as you can imagine, it’s been quite a week. I can’t really talk about the case but I will say that I’m determined to continue my work. I’m making a big film called “America,” which is about the greatness of America that’s gonna come out for July 4th this year. So I just want to say that I’m undeterred and I’m marching full speed ahead.”

The notable thing about that response, other than its shameless self-promotion of a future project, is that D’Souza never once denied the charges against him. While he may not be able to discuss the details of the case, there is no prohibition on proclaiming his innocence. It is curious, to say the least, that when given the opportunity to do so in a friendly environment, he would so conspicuously refuse. Then when Hannity inquired whether D’Souza considered the indictment to be political retribution, D’Souza said…

“Well, I will say that “2016” was a film that does seem to have gotten under President Obama’s skin. And the reason for this is that it wasn’t just a critique of ObamaCare or his policies, but I, in a sense, went into Obama’s world and also into Obama’s mind. There I was at the Obama family homestead in Kenya. I interviewed his brother. And, of course, we advanced the thesis that here is a traumatized, and somewhat of a messed up guy who is, in a way, haunted by the dreams of his father, the topic of his own biography. There was a rant against the film on Obama’s own website, that is BarackObama.com, so we know the film rattled him. We know that it upset him. And whether this is some kind of payback remains to be seen.”

Once again, there is no denial guilt. But there is speculation about payback that is not backed up by any facts. There are also some rather ego-drenched assertions that his cinematic screed had a prodigious impact on the President’s state of mind, when in all likelihood Obama never saw it or cared about it. He’s a little too busy being the leader of the free world to be concerned about an amateurish hit piece by a disreputable hack.

Over at Fox’s community website, Fox Nation [see the ebook Fox Nation vs. Reality for documentation of their brazen dishonesty], they posted a link to an article by Charles Hurt on Breitbart News that went even further in defense of the criminal activities alleged against D’Souza. Hurt even conceded the question of D’Souza’s guilt and still excused him saying that he “very well may be guilty of a few winks and nods that wound up violating limits on campaign contributions’ The “few winks and nods” added up to more than $20,000 dollars in fraudulent donations. But the central theme of Hurt’s article is that the prosecutor, Preet Bharara, is some sort of White House enforcer assigned to rubbing out the President’s enemies. The article’s title calls Bharara a “hatchet man,” and Hurt’s first paragraph ominously intones that…

“Mr. Bharara is the snapping jaws of Attorney General Eric H. Holder’s junkyard attack dog and the velvet fixer of President Obama’s thorniest political problems.”

Bharara is the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and supervises over 200 lawyers who handle hundreds of cases. He has presided over the recovery of a half-billion dollars in civil fraud cases. He has locked up numerous terrorists, narcotics traffickers, and violent gang members. Yet Hurt’s article cites only a couple of cases that he deems relevant to his theory that Bharara is Obama’s hit man. Neither of these cases were political in nature, nor did they involve any personal interest of the President. One case involved an Indian diplomat who allegedly lied about her employment and payment of a nanny. The other was a case where forty-nine Russians were charged with defrauding Medicare. In both cases Hurt seemed to imply that all of these lawbreakers should have been set free despite their crimes. And having made no logical connection to Obama, Hurt just seems to be praying that his readers are dumb enough not to notice what a laughably insipid argument he is struggling to construct. Since his readers are on Breitbart News, he doesn’t have to pray very hard. Hurt concluded by saying that…

“Certainly, Mr. D’Souza very well may be guilty. Same with the Russian diplomats – and perhaps the Indian attache really needed to be strip-searched. However, a filmmaker skirting campaign donation limits does not tear at the fabric of this nation of laws. Russians cheating our welfare system is not a constitutional crisis. A constitutional crisis that tears the fabric of this nation of laws is a federal prosecutor who uses his office to advance political vendettas.”

Hurt’s argument seems to be that any crime that he doesn’t regard as upending the Constitution should be dismissed. Therefore we should let all the murderers and drug dealers and embezzlers off the hook. Just think how much money we would save by shutting down the federal courts and virtually emptying the nation’s prisons.

Conservatives often portray themselves as being the party of law and order. However, the truth is that they only embrace the law when it serves their purposes, and they abhor it when it gets in their way. That’s why they advocate more laws that would deny a ninety year old citizen the right to vote if she doesn’t have a driver’s license. But they forgive, and even praise, a political crony who breaks the law in order to funnel money to right-wing candidates. It’s a perverse concept of justice that favors elitists and the corporations that they believe are people.

War On Voting: Fox News Exposes Voter “Fraud” In Ohio

Posted by on December 18, 2013 at 3:30 pm. 2 Comments :

The intrepid investigative journalism team at Fox News has uncovered a scandalous trend of voter fraud in the state of Ohio. Led by Fox News reporter Eric Shawn, the team delved into data provided by Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted. Here is what they found.

Fox News

Husted revealed that records indicate that seventeen undocumented immigrants actually voted in the 2012 election. In a swing state like Ohio that translates to about 0.0003% of the more than five million votes cast. Since President Obama won the state by 449,000 votes, the seventeen “fraudulent” votes would have had a negligible effect on the outcome.

It also needs to be considered that the votes deemed fraudulent may have been inadvertent or not even fraudulent at all. In prior assertions of fraud of this nature, it later turned out that there was merely a discrepancy between the status of the voter at the time of their registration and the actual voting day. In other words, the voter registered prior to officially becoming a citizen, but whose citizenship was complete by election day. That is perfectly acceptable and is not fraud. There were other cases where an undocumented resident simply misunderstood the technicalities of election law and overstepped his privileges. That is not fraud either because there was no intent to deceive.

In any case, Fox News failed to disclose any of the details of the seventeen cases they discovered. So it is difficult to draw a conclusion as to whether there was any fraud. But even if there was, it was at a level so low that it could not have possibly affected the outcome of any race. Since the whole controversy over the new laws proposed and passed by Republicans in the past few years is centered on preventing tainted election outcomes, these revelations of a handful of disputed cases don’t come close to justifying measures that result in thousands of legitimate citizens being denied their right to vote.

However, as we know, these voter suppression laws are not meant to prevent fraud, but to prevent Democrats from getting elected. It is a brazen effort to stack the deck in favor of Republicans under the guise of voter integrity. But you can hardly call it vindication when the best the advocates of voter suppression can do is scrape up a measly seventeen instances of fraud that might not actually be fraud. Nevertheless, Fox News can be counted on to hype the story to help their ideological allies on the right.

OBAMA SCARE: Fox News Mortified That ObamaCare Web Site Links To Voter Registration Form

Posted by on October 14, 2013 at 9:31 pm. 1 Comments :

Fox News has been engaged in a massive disinformation campaign against ObamaCare for going on three years now. After all that time, and having exhausted the considerable creative resources that came up with twelve “Pants on Fire” lies about the program, Fox’s desperation is showing. Just last week they went apoplectic over a phony allegation that millions of Americans will be victimized by hackers if they try to enroll in a new health care plan. This week they are testing another absurdity intended to rattle consumers.

Fox News

Once again, Real Story host Gretchen Carlson is carrying the water for the Tea-Publican extremists with a segment that reveals the shocking news that the “ObamaCare Exchange Website Asks Folks To Register To Vote.” This startling revelation is met with foreboding by Carlson’s guest, Dr. Marc Siegel (a member of the Fox News Medical A-Team along with this quack):

“I have a problem with it because it seems like more salesmanship. Like, here, go to the state exchange and now, by the way, vote. Vote for who? Vote for a Democrat who’s supporting this? Or maybe if you can’t get through to the exchange, Gretchen, then maybe you vote for a Republican, right?”

Right! Except that no one is ever directed to vote. They are merely given the opportunity to register. And they may register however they wish, just as Siegel himself pointed out. But the core of the right’s trepidation is rooted in a more fundamental aversion to the act of voting itself. It is why they are continually erecting new barriers to voting, such as unreasonably stringent identification requirements, shorter early voting periods, wholesale purges of voter rolls, and of course, brazenly discriminatory gerrymandering.

Republicans simply hate it when people participate in democracy, particularly when Democrats are doing it. To be fair, Democrats would be happy if fewer Republicans voted also, but unlike the GOP, Democrats have not tried to legislate away the right of Republicans to vote. To the contrary, they have sought to expand voter turnout with bills like the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (aka Motor Voter) that mandates that certain government agencies provide people with access to voter registration. In fact, it is that twenty year old law that requires the ObamaCare administrators to make voter registration available. Fox News, and their similarly mortified conservative comrades, are either unaware of this, or are deliberately feigning ignorance in order to rile up their dimwitted base.

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The icing on the top of this manufactured controversy is that it appears to have been cooked up by the right-wing MacIver Institute, a think tank funded by the Koch brothers and the neo-fascist John Birch Society. The story appeared first on Fox’s community web site and Fib Factory, Fox Nation, where it was sourced to MacIver. It traveled from there to a flurry of right-wing sites including National Review, Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, Breitbart News, the Daily Caller, and eventually, the Fox News mothership. This is yet another means that the Koch brothers use to funnel their propaganda into Fox News in the guise of journalism.

Fox News (Not Very) Alert: The Voter Fraud Story That Fox News Ignored

Posted by on September 7, 2013 at 1:50 pm. 5 Comments :

For a network that has devoted hundreds of hours to baseless allegations of voter fraud in order to advance their voter suppression agenda, it’s interesting to note that a confirmed case of unlawful voting was completely ignored by Fox News.

The Union Leader of New Hampshire reported Thursday that Sebastian Bradley registered to vote in his home state of New Hampshire, as well as the state of Colorado where he was attending college. Authorities confirmed that he also voted in both locations. Sebastian is the son of Republican state Senate Majority Leader Jeb Bradley, who was running for a seat in the U.S. congress when Sebastian decided to help his dad out with an extra vote.

Fox News apparently found nothing newsworthy in this story of Republican voter fraud, so they avoided any mention of it. First and foremost, it reflects badly on their GOP pals, given the culprit was the son of a powerful Republican politician. Fox is only interested in electoral malfeasance if it can be blamed on Democrats. Secondly, the type of fraud committed would not have been prevented by the onerous voter ID laws that Fox and the Republican Party have been advocating. The voting reforms sought by the right have been carefully concocted to burden mainly citizens who tend to vote for Democrats.

This isn’t the first time that Fox has tailored their reporting to whitewash GOP criminality. Last November Fox reported on a case of voting fraud in Nevada. Unfortunately, they managed to run the whole segment without ever mentioning the fact that the woman arrested for the crime was a registered Republican. That omission resulted in some noxious comments on Fox’s web site by their openly racist audience who simply assumed that the woman was an Obama supporter.

Fox News
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This is further evidence of the hypocrisy and bias that is employed by Fox in their attempts to suppress the votes of legitimate citizens. They will shamelessly hype any allegation of voter misconduct if it involves a Democrat – even if there was never any actual wrongdoing (as in the ACORN debacle). And they will ignore or misreport any crimes committed by Republicans. Then they will continue to promote reforms that unfairly burden seniors, students, minorities, and the poor, in their efforts to steal elections they would otherwise lose. It’s a coordinated campaign to deny citizens of their right to vote, and it is proudly sponsored by Fox News and enacted by the Republican Party.