Not-So Silent Majority?

Democrats, Elections, Race, Racism

“A lesson for Democrats in future midterms,” said one Bill Burton, a regular Democrat bobbing head on Fox News, “is to figure out how to talk to white voters.” Burton is a former White House deputy press secretary for the Obama administration and an Obama campaign veteran. Naturally, he has also parlayed his political connections into a “consulting” and strategizing business.

This admission from a Democrat (with a gig on Fox News) was quite a shocker. To me, at least. However, anchor Megyn Kelly thought nothing of it and failed to pick up on, and run with, the theme.

Race RoboCop To The Rescue

Democracy, Elections, Race, Racism

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.”

NASA And The Neocon National Greatness Agenda

Business, Free Markets, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Technology, The State

Hungry to sustain the National Greatness agenda, Republicans, who pose as the party of free-market capitalism, were furious when Barack Obama and his posse privatized aspects in the operation of NASA, the National Aeronautic Space Administration. Duly, neoconservative statist Chucky Krauthammer recently linked the so-called erosion of NASA under Obama to the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo crash. That’s what happens when you trust this kind of national greatness enterprise to the private sector is what Krauthammer seemed to be saying.

How many disasters has NASA (which, incidentally, has always been a private-public collaboration) weathered? Many. Which NASA official has been as devastated as Virgin founder Richard Branson, as quick to take responsibility for the failures, or as resolute about rectifying these?

Branson’s career in business has been spectacular. The test pilots, astronauts and scientists who work for him know the risks. They’ll get it done. The incentives to succeed are tremendous. Angelina Jolie and her brood will get to levitate above the earth more so than they already do, soon and safely.

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.