Category Archives: Elections

Race RoboCop To The Rescue

No doubt you are as “grateful” as I am that race RoboCop Eric Holder sent his federales to election stations across the country to ensure that anyone who wants to vote can vote, and that if a voter is asked for an ID, informed of a citizenship requirement, hasn’t been provided with “bilingual assistance” or a ramp for a wheelchair—he can quickly call a hotline to register a complain of “intimidation, discrimination, obstruction,” and racism, naturally.

“Groups and individuals—including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder —are doing everything they can to prevent states from improving the integrity of the election process,” writes Hans von Spakovsky in the WSJ.

“How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections?” ask two professors of political science, writing in the Washington Post. And they reply:

More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.
… Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin. …

The coda to yesterday’s election post was, “Tomorrow, Americans decide who will do the distributing: Republican social democrats or Democratic social democrats.”

It should have been:

“Tomorrow, non-citizen votes will decide who will do the distributing: Republican social democrats or Democratic social democrats.”

Elections: Who Will Do The Distributing?

Democracy, Elections

Every second year, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, America conducts “a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods,” which was how H. L. Mencken described elections. “Government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else,” observed Henry Hazlitt.

In “Does Democracy Promote Peace,” legal scholar and friend James Ostrowski does his bit to demolish democracy:

Democracy is nothing more than the numerous and their manipulators bullying the less numerous. It is an elaborate and deceptive rationalization for the strong in numbers to impose their will on the electorally weak by means of centralized state coercion … Both forms of government feature voting by the people to select officials. The primary difference between them is that while republican voting is done for the purpose of choosing officials to administer the government in the pursuit of its narrowly defined functions, democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government … The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.

Tomorrow, Americans decide who will do the distributing: Republican social democrats or Democratic social democrats.

Women Go For Government Giganticism

Democrats, Elections, Gender, Liberty, Republicans

No thinking person equates the GOP with liberty. That debate has been settled among liberty loving people. The Republican and Democrat Parties are both “partners in government giganticism.” However, in as much as voters mistake the Republican Party with smaller government—a vote for or against the GOP is a good proxy for statism. (No, Mark Levin did not invent the statism term; Ludwig von Mises did, and libertarians have used it forever).

What the “silly sex’s” political proclivities mean for freedom lovers is that Republicans will seek to become even more like Democrats, if at all possible. The convergence will be almost complete. Fittingly, National Journal is rejoicing in women’s statism.

Why “Republicans are nervously watching the gender gap widen as Democrats press their advantage with female voters”:

The “gender gap”—the difference between Republicans’ usual margin of victory among men and Democrats’ usual margin of victory among women—is nothing new. It has been evident for years in almost every election up and down the ballot. But a National Journal analysis of public polls, and interviews with strategists from both parties, suggests that the gap has ballooned to historic proportions across 2014’s battleground states. Democrats are running campaigns designed to press an advantage among women that is helping the party compete in a number of races despite an unfriendly political climate and steep GOP advantages among men. Meanwhile, Republicans are searching for issues to combat the trend with female voters.

“I think the gender gaps are growing compared to past election cycles,” said Matt Canter, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s deputy executive director. “We’ll see how that turns out, but that’s certainly what the public and internal polling shows, in every race across the board.”

It’s a trend several Republicans privately admitted they are watching nervously …

MORE.

Jim Webb, Salt-Of-The-Earth Democrat

Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, States' Rights

I think it’s fair to call Jim Webb the last of the Southern Democrats (propaganda from both parties, notwithstanding, Southern Democrats were salt of the earth, states’ rights advocates). Another who’d qualify as such is the late great Robert Byrd, an old Southern gentleman, and an admirable and “stern constitutional scholar.”

Webb, formerly a senator from Virginia, “is genuinely thinking about a White House bid in 2016”: “I’m seriously looking at the possibility of running for president,” he said in a speech last week.

I have a soft spot for Sen. Webb. [In 2007], he was a junior senator and a defecting Republican who had served in the Reagan administration as Secretary of the Navy. When I first began writing against [W’s] war for WorldNetDaily.com, he had e-mailed me in approval and sent along some of his own anti-war editorials. Sen. Webb’s motives for safeguarding [the military] were always beyond reproach: love of country and kin. The Senator comes from a military family; he himself is a Vietnam veteran, son of a World War II warrior, and father to a marine who fought in Iraq. According to “ThinkProgress,” Webb’s son had a brush with death in Iraq in 2006.

It’s a shame that dumb Democrats will not give Webb the time of day and will, instead, cleave to dynastic nominee Mrs. Clinton.

Read:

* Webb on “‘The Myth of White Privilege.”

* Wonkette against The Webb.

* How Webb Walloped ‘W.’