Rule of Law

By J. Christian Adams

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Now we know why civil rights groups like the NAACP, ACLU, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights are so upset about election integrity groups like True the Vote monitoring the polls on November 6. Pat Moran gave us a clue yesterday.

Moran revealed on James O’Keefe’s undercover video why these groups have been so dishonest, ugly, and desperate to smear True the Vote and keep them out of the polls.

Simply, the “election protection” operation of these civil rights groups was seen, at least to Moran, as the final step in committing voter fraud.

Moran was the field director of his father’s reelection campaign and worked out of the joint campaign office for President Obama and Democrat Senate candidate Tim Kaine in Virginia.

Let’s look at the full video of Moran that led to his firing from the campaign.

In the video, O’Keefe’s plant tells Moran that he has a pile of names of inactive voters. The plant wants to drive a van around and vote for them. Because Virginia’s voter ID law is a joke, and a utility bill will suffice, the plant intends to use phony utility bills. Moran suggests ways to advance the scheme, including forgery using Microsoft Word.

Enter the “election protection” efforts of the civil rights groups. In case these phony utility bills create a stir inside the polls, Moran has the solution – the army of left-wing lawyers who will be embedded inside the polls from groups like the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

The plant doubts Virginia “will be really strict about enforcing” the new pseudo-voter ID law.

Moran has just the ticket for questionable phony utility bills – the “election protection” lawyers from the left:

Moran: I think the poll will be pretty trained up on it because they’ll be ready for all the voter protection. They’ll be cracking down.  You’ll have somebody in house that if they feel that what you have is legitimate they’ll argue for you.  And I imagine that…

Plant:   The OFA lawyer?

Moran: The OFA lawyer, yeah, or provided by the communities or the committees. 

Take note – Moran explicitly says the lawyers from Obama’s Organizing for America, the communities, or the committees would be in the polls who will “argue for” the phony utility bill to be counted. “Voter protection” refers to the efforts by civil rights groups to place lawyers at the polls to push through and advocate for voters with questionable eligibility.

If we ever saw a reason why states should enact real photo-identification requirements, Pat Moran just gave it to us. Not only is the system vulnerable, but top Democrat field operatives understand how the civil rights groups in the polls combined with criminal behavior could result in illegal voting.

O’Keefe’s plant also says “there’s a law and then there’s enforcement.”

Moran lets loose:

And there will be a lot of voter protection.  So if they just have the utility bill or a statement  … but they can fake a utility bill with ease.

And

But it has to be like a utility bill or something like that.  So you have to forge it.

To make sure that the voters don’t actually vote, Moran urges the plant to call them ahead of time. “And then identify.  I think that first sweep, just call, hey, I’m calling up … you can even just call and be like a pollster.”

Now we know why these civil rights groups don’t want True the Vote and Tea Party groups in the polls on Election Day.

Moran’s suggestion ensures the criminal only votes for voters who never planned to vote.

There is no way, of course, to know if the civil rights groups consider themselves cogs in a voter fraud machine. But one thing we do know for sure is that a top Democrat Party field operative does consider them so. We know for sure that this top field operative saw poll monitors from groups like the NAACP and the Lawyers’ Committee as the final component to ensure that voters possessing utility bills forged on Microsoft Word would cast a ballot in a key swing state.

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6 Films to Watch Before Election Day

October 23rd, 2012 - 8:05 pm

Two weekends remain before election day – just enough time for movie fans to pop in a couple of flicks. These suggestions aren’t obvious election-related films like 2016, or Occupy Unmasked.  For starters, these movies aren’t necessarily as depressing. They can instead be hilarious, uplifting, and fascinating. But each one has something to say.

1. Avalon 

Avalon is the gorgeous Barry Levinson story of Russian-Jewish immigrants who came to America, and who came to love America. They proudly sought America’s material promise and spiritual freedom. They built things, they raised families, they dreamed. They realized that no place on Earth offered the same life to those determined to work hard. Sometimes they failed, but that didn’t stop them. Sometimes they made mistakes, but they learned. Avalon is the story of what happens when the goodness of a nation is matched with good people. It is a story of what makes our nation great and what Americans have treasured for generations.

2. Idiocracy

If Avalon is poetic and beautiful, this Mike Judge comic farce is ugly and lowbrow, except it really isn’t. Idiocracy is the story of an “average” American who is frozen 500 years and awakens to a totally transformed America. Law, culture, morals, ambition, intelligence, initiative, thrift, industry and competence have all rotted away. The movie is a comic romp through the resulting society. Planes fall from the sky, government planning leads to near famine, and sugar drinks flow through tubes to millions watching TV on the couch.


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After a visit by Attorney General Eric Holder to the Justice Department Voting Section yesterday, a reporter attempting to ask Holder questions about the visit was threatened by one of Holder’s bodyguards. Holder was visiting the Voting Section of the DOJ to pose for photographs with the attorneys who will be enforcing federal election law over the last two weeks of the presidential campaign.

The photos are expected to be delivered to the staff with a personalized note from the attorney general.

Media Research Center reporter Joe Schoffstall identified himself as media and attempted to gain access to the photo session and conversations between Holder and the DOJ election attorneys in the  7th floor conference room at 1800 G Street in Washington, D.C. This satellite office is located in a non-governmental building in northwest D.C.

Schoffstall was denied entry to the event by a Justice Department employee.

After the event, the reporter asked Holder questions as the attorney general left the building.

“Mr. Attorney General, do you think is appropriate to be taking pictures with DOJ lawyers who will be enforcing election laws during President Obama’s reelection?” Schoffstall asks Holder, who was just inches away.  “Do you think that is appropriate Mr. Holder?”

Holder does not answer, and instead turns his head away from the reporter as he heads to a waiting black SUV.

After Schoffstall’s questions are ignored, and Holder is in the SUV, an unidentified uniformed security officer in Holder’s detail aggressively confronts and threatens Schoffstall.

“Hey sir, they gonna be nice to you, I’m not,” says the officer, as he shunts Schoffstalll backwards across the public sidewalk on G Street. The officer refers to the bodyguards wearing suits as being “nice,” while he expresses the contrary intention.

Schoffstall replies that “this is public sidewalk,” as the uniformed officer continues to confront the reporter and push him backwards.

“The man is ushering you on to a different direction, that’s what I’m gonna make sure you do,” says the officer, now in Schoffstall’s face.

“This is a public sidewalk,” Schoffstall insists. After shunting Schoffstall backwards off the sidewalk, the officer says, “It’s not a public sidewalk now; you’re standing on federal government property.”

Schoffstall responds, “You pushed me back on federal government property.  This is a public sidewalk, I can ask him a question.” The officer’s bluster was also factually inaccurate. The building at 1800 G Street is not federal government property and is instead owned by a private entity. The federal agencies merely lease space there. No federal agency leases the space where Schoffstall was standing when the officer incorrectly said he was standing on federal government property.

Apparently Attorney General Holder doesn’t like questions, especially unexpected ones.

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Few organizations are as skilled at spending billions of dollars while accomplishing little as the federal government is. The Obama administration’s failure to protect military voters demonstrates this — across America, ballots have failed to mail on time to overseas service members. It is a mistake that keeps repeating every two years, and Americans should demand it never happens again.

When you learn more about the rogue’s gallery the Obama administration counts as engaged, you’ll understand the administration’s failures better.

But let’s start with our old friend Eric Holder. Sadly, multiple states failed to send military ballots by the September 22 deadline established by federal law. In the subsequent 26 days, his Justice Department filed precisely one lawsuit against offending states and counties to protect military voters.

Holder’s lone target? The hotly contested state of Vermont.

Federal law gives Eric Holder monopoly power to sue states or counties that fail to mail military ballots on time. Some, including the Military Voter Protection Project, want to give soldiers a right to sue, instead of just Eric Holder. A stuck-on-stupid policy in the DOJ Voting Section, where I used to work, refuses to sue the county election officials who are chiefly to blame for disenfranchising military voters. This dumb, stubborn policy means that the Justice Department only sues states — which have attorneys general with well-stocked offices of lawyers. Vermont, for example, is fiercely fighting Eric Holder’s lone lawsuit.

Others stuck in the civil justice wars of the 1990s oppose giving service members the right to sue. They prefer that only Washington bureaucrats have the power to protect military voters, because they don’t want to create a new federal tort.

But DOJ’s abdication of effective enforcement is so bad that Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson sued her own counties to stop disenfranchisement, because the DOJ would not.

Meanwhile, multiple states have failed to mail military ballots on time, and Eric Holder doesn’t act. Take Massachusetts: the Bay State has grossly violated federal law. Dozens of towns never sent military ballots on time, but Holder has done nothing. After all, GOP Senator Scott Brown is up for reelection.

Unfortunately, Massachusetts is not alone. Other states have failed to mail military ballots on time, including Wisconsin, where recent polls show a slim lead for Mitt Romney.

If Mitt Romney becomes the next president, it will be essential once and for all to remove the problems inside DOJ which have given us the bi-annual military ballot mess.

The Pentagon deserves even stronger criticism. An entire unit inside the Pentagon is tasked with helping service members vote — the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP). Naturally, FVAP is also failing to deliver.

Consider the bipartisan MOVE Act, passed in 2009. It required FVAP to open up voting assistance offices on every military installation worldwide. A recent DOD Inspector General report found that less than half of the mandated offices are actually open. To achieve this fail, the Pentagon blew through $75,000,000 that Congress allocated for the opening of the offices.

Internal FVAP sources tell me that before the legislation passed, the head of FVAP was opposed to opening the offices to help service members. After MOVE passed, FVAP bitterly slow-walked the unwanted voting offices.

Fewer than half were ever opened. Such are the priorities of the Obama presidency.

The most outrageous part of this saga is that those in leadership at FVAP genuinely don’t believe they screwed up. Current and former FVAP staff have been hawking the narrative that everything is rosy, despite the IG’s spanking and despite declining participation rates by military voters in 2012.

Pam Mitchell, the head of FVAP, actually says the number of service members who vote successfully isn’t a good measure of success.  “Participation rates alone are poor indicators of the effectiveness of voting assistance given that interest in voting fluctuates with each election,” Mitchell told the House last month.

Some on Capitol Hill who should know better have fallen for it.

But Defense Secretary Leon Panetta isn’t buying his underling’s spin. Panetta issued a statement demanding accountability at FVAP and wondering how officials there blew through 75-large but failed to get fewer than half of the required voting offices open.

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The Eric Holder Justice Department is repeating the military voting mistakes of 2010.  Yesterday Justice sued Vermont for not sending military ballots out in time under federal law.  The MOVE Act requires ballots to be mailed 45 days before the election.  The moment a state fails to do so, they are in violation and can be sued.

Naturally the swift and efficient DOJ Voting section waited nearly three weeks to bring the federal lawsuit.  To anyone who has worked in the Voting Section, the reasons it takes so long for military voting enforcement to activate are entirely obvious, and must be comprehensively overhauled in a Romney administration.

These lost 19 days will disenfranchise military voters.  DOJ should have filed a complaint within the first week of non-compliance, and demanded either a consent decree or TRO that forced Vermont to use express delivery of ballots from that moment forward.  Instead, DOJ’s current leadership thinks that a slow leisurely litigation schedule that tacks on extra days to return ballots after the election is already over is the solution.  That thinking needs to be removed from DOJ in 2013.

Here is the problem – because it takes so long to get the ballots overseas, many servicemembers from Vermont won’t get their ballot in time to even vote it before the election.  Some will assume there is no chance for it to be counted.  Consider the servicemember who receives it October 31. They know a week isn’t enough time to turn it around, and they just quit the process.

I’ve talked with scores of military voters in the last 2 years that describe a voting system that is so inefficient that large numbers of folks who wear the uniform simply bail out of the process.  This is a sickening tragedy that must be once and for all fixed by a new administration.  Fundamental changes must be made @FVAP (#IGReportsaysFAIL), where social media is seen as the solution to the problem.  (#wherearethevotingoffices  #PaddyMcGuireDemocrat #75milliondollarsblown)  Even more fundamental changes are needed to eliminate the DOJ bottleneck to speedy and effective UOCAVA enforcement.

One thing is certain, a second Obama term will preserve the failures in the system.

James O’Keefe has done it again — this time capturing video of a paid Obama Organizing for America director in Houston, Texas, assisting a double-voting scheme directed toward Florida. In the video, an undercover Obama “volunteer”  tells Organizing for America’s Stephanie Caballero that she wanted to vote twice to help reelect President Obama.

The undercover “volunteer” tells Caballero, “I’m going to vote by ballot and then I have mine here too.”

After the volunteer tells Caballero her plan, Caballero volunteers to help the double voter get the forms to request an absentee ballot in Florida. “I’ll print that out and you just have to mail it back,” Caballero says.

The undercover “volunteer” says, “I don’t want to get in any trouble, but like I said, if no one’s gonna know.”

The paid Obama Organizing for America director’s response: [Laughter] “Oh my God this is so funny! It’s cool though!”

The response from the campaign staffer should have been: “That’s illegal. I’ll have no part in it.” But alas, the video reveals otherwise.

Later, when the plan to vote twice is put into effect, Caballero coyly and laughingly asks: “Are you going to do what I think you are going to do?” — namely vote twice. When the volunteer says, “Well, if no one is going to know.” Caballero then prints out and gives the forms to the volunteer to vote twice.

Stephanie Caballero

Obama campaign attorney Robert Bauer should be emailing memos to every paid staffer detailing 42 USC 1973i(e) and 42 USC § 1973gg–10(2). The former federal law makes it illegal to vote twice. The latter law prohibits fraudulent voting in a federal election. 18 USC 2 makes it illegal to aid and abet election fraud.

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I have received the below announcement to “community leaders” from Al Sharpton.  In it, Sharpton announces that his race-baiting tour is coming to the Commonwealth of Virginia.  He plans on teaching people how to “combat” new “restrictive” voting requirements such as Virginia voter ID, which was approved by his allies in Eric Holder’s Justice Department.  One wonders how he plans to “combat” the law.

Sharpton probably won’t mention his role in the deaths of Angelina Marrero, Cynthia Martinez, Luz Ramos, Mayra Rentas, Olga Garcia, Garnette Ramautar and Kareem Brunner.  His allies and friends (like Eric Holder) don’t like to think about the time Sharpton’s race-baiting preceded the fiery murder of these people at Freddie’s Fashion Mart.  Fashion Mart?

Yes, for those of you who don’t know and don’t click the link, this says it all:

The Sharpton-led protests began in August and came to a head on the morning of Friday, December 8th when Roland James Smith, Jr., who had been part of the Sharpton’s protests, walked into Freddy’s Fashion Mart, pulled out a gun, ordered all the black customers to leave, spilled paint thinner on several bins of clothing and set them on fire.

Sharpton is a reprehensible race baiter who should never escape his past unless he publicly atones.  That Eric Holder associates with Sharpton’s sort tells us even more than that racialist quote Holder carries around in his wallet.

So Sharpton will arrive in Richmond on October 9. Danny Finnegan at the Richmond Times will dispatch a reporter to cover Sharpton’s appearance and not a whiff of his crazy race inciting past will appear on the pages of the paper on October 10.  The local media won’t make mention of Sharpton’s long history of racial demagoguery and will treat him like a respected figure instead of  how they would rightfully treat the public appearance of a Kleagle.

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The revelation in the Daily Caller that Senator Obama gave a racially charged speech in Hampton, Virginia, to a group of black pastors in an unrecognizable dialect was discouraging but hardly surprising. This wasn’t the only nutty speech full of dishonestly and racial incitement Obama gave to a largely black audience in 2007.

The usual first responders have answered the alarm to prevent mainstream media breakout of the Daily Caller story. The old standards play on: “the speech is old news; already been played; he has a record to run on now.” Anything to avert our eyes from more evidence we have a racially infused grievance radical running the country.

Why are they so desperate to have as few people as possible see video of President Obama sounding like Al Sharpton? Why are they so quick to tell us that espousing nutty racial conspiracy theories about New Orleans and structural racism isn’t worth our time?

Because they know if enough independent, casual, middle-class voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa saw the video, Obama would be finished.  Americans voted for Obama because they wanted to put race in the past. As Shelby Steele has described, Americans bargained with Obama: if Obama put race in the past, Americans were willing to put him in the White House.

Unfortunately, Obama’s racialist rant in Hampton, Virginia, wasn’t the only one. In my book Injustice, I document in great detail his appearance in Selma, Alabama, in March of 2007. At this event, he behaved and spoke in a similar way as he did in the Hampton video released yesterday. Selma was where Obama shared a podium with New Black Panther Party chief Malik Zulu Shabazz. It is where uniformed New Black Panthers traveled from across the country to march with candidate Barack Obama across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Selma in March 2007 was a critical time for Obama’s infant candidacy. He had just appeared on 60 Minutes, where he was questioned about being “authentically black.” So Obama went to a packed Brown Chapel AME Church, where he was greeted. From Injustice:

Then, a woman stepped forward and uttered a shocking welcome address. “My name is Pastor Estella Shabazz.… My husband, he’s stuck outside, he couldn’t get through the crowd, I bring greetings from him also, who is the National Spokesman of the New Black Panther Party, along with the Chief of the New Black Panther Party is outside also, they are also here in support of Senator Barack Obama.”

Sure enough, they were there. Malik Zulu Shabazz, the man who would later get a pass from Eric Holder’s Justice Department in the voter intimidation case, was there. So was “Field Marshal” Najee Muhammad, a man seen in a Panther video called “Training Day” in which he encourages blacks in DeKalb County, Georgia, to don ski masks, lie in wait behind shrubs, and kill police officers with AK-47s. Following that exhortation he mocks the hypothetical victims’ grieving widows.

Malik Zulu Shabazz flanked by Najee Muhammad

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PA Voter ID Battle Lost, War Won

October 2nd, 2012 - 11:54 am

In Pennsylvania, election-integrity advocates lost a battle but won the war. Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson today blocked implementation of Pennsylvania’s photo voter-identification law, but only for the upcoming election. The court rejected the request of voter ID opponents to find the Pennsylvania law to be held unconstitutional. Friction involving implementation, however, of the law in time for November’s election led the court to block the requirement.

Nevertheless, voters in Pennsylvania in the upcoming election will still be asked to show photo identification. If a voter, however, does not have photo identification, he or she will still be allowed to vote. In future elections, Pennsylvania voters must show valid photo identification.

Judge Simpson was constrained by the logic of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Two weeks ago, that court required Simpson to “make a present assessment of the actual availability of the alternative identification cards.” At issue was whether or not PennDOT was effectively distributing the free cards. The Supreme Court required Judge Simpson to find essentially either perfect PennDOT implementation or “to enter a preliminary injunction.”

Anyone who has experienced Pittsburgh potholes in springtime knows about PennDOT effectiveness. And thus, Judge Simmons could not allow the law to go into full effect.

That’s the end of the good news for the vote-fraud deniers who opposed the law.

Incidentally, the lead plaintiff, Viviette Applewhite, claimed that she was unable to get photo identification.  The day after Judge Simpson ruled against her last month, Applewhite went out and got a photo ID. Like every other challenge brought to photo ID in every other case, Applewhite’s claims of disenfranchisement were actually litigation bluster.

Viviette Applewhite gets her free ID

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Ever since PJ Media’s blockbuster Every Single One Series documented the radical partisan lawyers hired as career civil servants in the Obama DOJ, many have asked me how this is accomplished. One way is that only attorneys are hired who have resumes which have obvious ideological histories. The Every Single One series provided the public copies of these resumes. They are filled with cues that were used in the hiring process to exclude some and include others.

But Eric Holder is also personally furthering the cause of ideological hiring. One way Holder is accomplishing this goal is by recruiting from within identity politics organizations. PJ Media has obtained an announcement from the DOJ internal intranet stating:

“On August 23rd Attorney General Eric Holder deliverred [sic] remarks at the annual Lavender Law Conference in Washington D.C. The conference marked this year’s largest minority recruiting event in the nation, bringing together hundreds of legal practitioners and law students from across the country.

The event included multiple representatives from the Department of Justice, including five U.S. Attorneys, who were introduced by the Attorney General as ‘strong LGBT allies: Melinda Haag, from the Northern District of California; David Hickton, from the Western District of Pennsylvania; Amanda Marshall, from the District of Oregon; Steve Wiggington, from the Southern District of Illinois; and Robert Pitman, from the Western District of Texas.”

Here is the program for the Lavender Law conference Holder attended. Some events included “Building a Queer-Friendly Legal Academy: Accomplishments and the Road Ahead – Sponsored by Patton Boggs LLP,” “Religion-based Arguments Against Legal Protections for LGBT People” and ”LGBT Issues from an African-American Lens – Sponsored by Greenberg Trauig LLP.” Notable is the pervasive sponsorship of the event by large law firms.

Let’s get something straight, pun unintended: there is nothing wrong with hiring gay lawyers. The better question is whether the government should be actively recruiting people based on involvement in an identity politics group. Rest assured, there is no discrimination within the DOJ toward gay, black, or for that matter, transgender lawyers. So the standard excuse that pervasive discrimination demands such steps does not apply here. (See also the in-house version of Lavender Law, DOJ Pride.)

AAG Tom Perez and Holder at a DOJ Pride event. (DOJ photo).

Other high level Department of Justice officials have attended events from other left-leaning organizations to recruit. Each year the Civil Rights Division sends lawyers to other conferences  around the country, such as the NAACP conference, to recruit lawyers and law students.  These identity politics recruitment efforts have the intentional effect of funneling particular sorts of applicants toward DOJ jobs. Be assured that Holder and his gang aren’t recruiting at conferences sponsored by the NRA. So the ideological hiring program at Holder’s DOJ is done through recruitment at identity politics organizations combined with hiring people who include involvement with ideologically correct groups on their resumes.