IIRC, here in the People’s Republic of Minnesota, you can also bring a registered voter to vouch for you.
These things last exactly as long as they’re useful to those who fund them and not a minute more.
Really, the whole ‘think tank’ concept is pretty foggy to those outside the beltway. Yes, there are some enormous ones. But many of them are one room in some cruddy office building. Or their set up on space leased by one of the big players and it’s really one guy who works there.
Back in the early 90s I worked in an old mansion on 18th Street. On the first floor and in the basement we also housed: The International Women’s Forum, Freedom House, and a couple of other one-room outfits.
So it’s not like there’s some sort of big thing when one goes away. Small shops disappear or are absorbed all the time.
It’s just Pubbies doing the cockroach scuttle now that the lights are on. They’re so good at it, and so used to it, that they’re more like an organized crime family than a political party nowadays.
No doubt, but, as Hasen points out:
I still think you’re making a mountain out of a blogger’s molehill (and you should learn from that).
First off, it’s a false comparison to compare pretty much ANYONE to the NRA or the other major lobbying firms. For one, the scale is entirely different. For the second, a single-issue think tank is much easier to shut down. For one thing, the NRA would have to pull a David Copperfield on a building off the Dulles Access Road. Best guess is that the ACVR probably had to pack some files into a paper box.
As for the domain and such, who cares? They shut down. They left.
And what do you (or anyone) expect the lawyer to do? The only proper answer to the question of ‘What’s the deal with client X?’ to any lawyer is ‘Screw off’.
It’s like you WANT it to be some sort of big conspiracy but it’s just one more single-issue, political think tank that was here when it was useful and now it’s not because its use is at an end. This is so damn routine (on both sides) that even discussing it makes me feel more naive.
I don’t see any evidence that it was a think tank. It was a Republican political activist group masquerading as a non-partisan think tank.
I disagree that a surpressed vote is necessarily as bad as a fraudulent vote. To a degree, it matters how that vote was supressed and what you mean by “surpressed”. If someone has to get an ID and doesn’t want to go through what they view as a hassle, I don’t have much sympathy for them or the notion that their vote was supressed. Aslo, I think we have a higher obligation to ensure that those votes that are cast matter. Every fraudulent vote cancels out the vote of a legitimate voter who did what he/she had to do to participate in the election process.
I don’t understand what I perceive as handwaving about individuals being disenfranchised by having their votes cancelled out.
That’s just what they want you to think.
You won’t think you’re so smart when the space aliens grab you. Some of us know better - and the dangerous ones are targetted first.
Regar
Of course it would be a big deal if the NRA, or Planned Parenthood, or NOW, or the Sierra Club, or heck, even the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute disappeared.
These organizations have thousands of members, hundreds of paid employees. They can’t shut down mysteriously because there are too many ideologically committed members and advocates, and they aren’t funded by one guy with a suitcase full of money but rather by thousands of individual donations.
Lots of these “groups” that appear in the news are really just one guy with a web page, a PO box, and a phone. That one guy might be a crank who sends out press releases because he’s compulsive, or he might be funded by some mysterious backer, which is usually some businessman with an agenda, or some religious group. Or they are funded by one of the big orgs who want to maintain a plausibly deniable arms-length relationship, to get things into the media that would damage the reputation of the big group if a spokesman for the big group said it. Or they are media pranksters like Joey Skaggs, the guy who created the “Gypsy Moth” protest.
What do you think, um, think tanks are? They’re essentially groups, funded by whomever is interested and usually leaning one way or the other, designed to produce reports that bolster political arguments.
If it’s in Washington it’s partisan. What’s so hard to grasp about that?
The only thing wrong is that they billed themselves as non-partisan. If they called themselves the American Center for Grossly Exaggerating Instances of Voter Fraud in Order to Disenfranchise People Who Might Vote Democratic, then that would be truth in advertising.
Well, the NRA is “non-partisan” too. You think they should be forced to rename themselves the National Association for the Promotion of Gun Violence?
[QUOTE=Jonathan Chance]
First off, it’s a false comparison to compare pretty much ANYONE to the NRA or the other major lobbying firms. For one, the scale is entirely different. For the second, a single-issue think tank is much easier to shut down. For one thing, the NRA would have to pull a David Copperfield on a building off the Dulles Access Road. Best guess is that the ACVR probably had to pack some files into a paper box.[/quiote]
But, the NRA is a single-issue think-tank/organization.
Read the SourceWatch article linked in the OP, and Google “Thor Hearne.” He’s a whole lot more than ACVR’s lawyer.
Which, if true, raises three obvious and very, very important questions:
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Who funded ACVR?
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Why?
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Why did they decide ACVR was no longer useful?
Nevertheless, and regardless of your sympathies, it is unjust for an American citizen to be turned away from the polls for that reason. That’s why poll taxes are illegal.
Many Washington think-tanks are not partisan – e.g., the New America Foundation.
Ideological != partisan. And not all Washington think-tanks are, strictly speaking, ideological, though the NAF certainly is.
No, it should be something more along the lines of National Association for the Promotion of the Murder of Innocents.
Come now, BrainGlutton, these questions are not important. The important question is, “What’s going on with Paris Hilton in jail?” She’s SOOOO brightnshiny y’know!