It is very obvious that some Republican leadership members have figured out that they are being beaten demographically, and the solution is to repress the votes of those who make up those demographics. That’s what voter ID is about. That’s what the recent Supreme Court decision by the conservative majority was about. Everything else is bullshit designed to cover their true aims. Some Republicans may believe it, but the reality-based community knows better.
adaher, I don’t expect you to understand or agree with the following points but I’m going to make it anyway
Your constant appeal to population is rubbish, but not for the reasons you think. Some ideas are valid because a lot of people believe in them, like, for example, our stance against pedophilia. Had we all grown up in a society that were much more lax on then issue of adults having sex with children, or in a time when the lifespan of the average person was 30, we’d have a different position on pedophilia and THAT would be the correct belief.
No, your opinion on what 40% of Americans believe is rubbish because that’s all you’re using to justify your position. Often time, 40%, or 60%, or 80% of Americans are dead wrong, and history has plenty of examples in which that is true. Slavery, for instance. In those cases, it doesn’t matter what any number of Americans believe, the law should still be changed.
What people are saying now is that the GOP is having one of those slavery moments. In issues like voter ID, gay marriage, women’s rights, it matters abso-fucking-loutely what the GOP believes, they are wrong. And they are wrong not because liberals say so, but because of evidence. There is evidence that gay marriage doesn’t harm anyone. There is evidence that global warming is real. There is evidence that there’s no Voter ID and thus no need for laws restricting voting. The GOP is consistently at the opposite end of what evidence shows and it is NOT close.
Now the challenge for an educated mind is to try to figure out what beliefs are relative, and what beliefs should be objective. That is where the GOP is failing. Maybe they are ignorant, stupid, or just liars, but many of us believe that the GOP, in the face of overwhelming evidence, are liars or stupid, that they are NOT simply misguided and lack information. Therefore, all your appeals to 40% of the people or whatever is utterly useless. There is evidence the GOP is wrong and evidence the Democrats are right. Like they say, reality has a liberal bias. You might not like it, deplore it even, but don’t try to BS this board about how many people believe what. It doesn’t matter. I don’t give a shit of 100% of the GOP base believes gays shouldn’t be marriage, the GOP should STILL change their platform to support gay marriage. Every argument against gay marriage is wrong or hilariously bigoted, there is no comparison.
So don’t support voter ID laws or whatever with “40% of the base believes it”. That’s an indictment on how stupid the GOP base is, not an argument supporting voter ID or whatever stupid law Michele Bachmann thinks is necessary to “save America”.
Maybe. But in the spirit of this thread, that’s a place Democrats won’t go, and when they get caught going there it hurts them. We’re trying to figure out why Republicans lose. This is one issue they’ve often used to win, especially in 2002 and 2004, and Democrats were pretty darn bitter about it and protested, “We’re patriotic too! We believe America is the awesomest too!”
But thanks for that, at least it doesn’t make me feel bad about Democrats’ protests that “They are questioning our patriotism! How dare they?!”
You really don’t live on the Earth with the blue sky, do you?
No, it’s not. Voter ID laws have been an issue for a very long time, ever since people realized that you could vote without ID, but can’t do anything else without ID, even exercise fundamental rights like petition your representatives. Apparently, the 1st amendment is less important than voting to Democrats, which is understandable, since the 1st amendment doesn’t swing elections for them. Fraud does. Opponents of voter ID disingenously point to the low number of convictions as evidence that voter fraud isn’t a problem. I could do the same thing with tax fraud to say we don’t need the IRS to look at tax returns, rather we should just use the honor system.
Where voter ID laws have been upheld, and they are actually quite constitutional, there has been no significant disenfranchisement.
I understand where you’re coming from on some points. On gay marriage, the GOP should support it even though 45% of Americans don’t, because sometimes doing the right thing matters more than representing people. However, I wouldn’t want to take that concept too far, because then you just get rule by elites instead of democracy. As a general rule, any position held by a large percentage of the public should be represented in our system, unless that view is unconstitutional or morally reprehensible. If it’s merely “wrong”, I’d say it’s first arrogant to assume that, and doubly hubristic to think that the elites should ignore the public on the issue merely because they are wrong about it.
As far as the suggestion that Democrats are more empirical, that’s just funny and demonstrates that the GOP doesn’t have a monopoly on lack of self-awareness. I’ve found that the biggest problem Democrats have to get over is the assumption that they have the answers, and those who disagree are not merely wrong, but idiot, liars, and evildoers.
The problem here is ignoring that when the polls do ask if then the lack of ID should be reason enough to prevent voting then your point is the one that is missing the whole to get a misleading conclusion, the majority of the people then think it should be ok to allow people to fill up a provisional ballot to check if the person was able to vote.
You’ll find this clip has much, much broader appeal than to the crazier fringes of the left.
And sure enough, the voter ID laws that have been upheld allow the use of a provisional ballot contingent on the voter proving his or her identity.
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Let me get this straight, so that I don’t needlessly insult you. You are stating, here…
that organized voter fraud, people voting who have no right to vote, is a substantial and even determining factor in our elections? Democrats are winning elections that otherwise they would not win because of voter fraud?
You’be made a major mistake here. Usually, you employ more artful wording in an effort to imply what you cannot prove, but here you’ve been a bit too obvious. You are much better off insinuating , it offers you that all-important “wiggle room”.
Well, all right. Which elections have been so decided? And are you willing to flatly state that suppressing an unfriendly voting bloc plays no part, none whatsoever, in Republican efforts to restrict voting?
That’s because it’s an extremely well made argument by the most talented entertainment industry writers. It’s still wrong, but it shows that reasonableness and talent can get you far when presenting your arguments.
There are two elections where the margin was slim enough that fraud decided them: The 2004 WA governors’ election. Rossi led, there was a recount, Gregoire won by a small margin. There was a ton of felon voting in that election. In the end, Rossi was able to get five votes thrown out, but that’s because the standard of proof is so high in these cases.
In Minnesota in 2006, Al Franken won by a small margin after recounts. 340 felons voted in that one.
Here’s where the lack of voter ID problem comes in: you can’t prove they voted if there’s no voter ID.
Well, suppressing the felon vote is probably motivated in part by partisanship, but so is encouraging felons to vote.
In your haste to defend the Republic from scofflaws and ne’er do wells, you neglected citation. I’m sure you will rush to provide reliable and non-partisan sources for your claims. As a resident of Minnesota and a close observer of elections, I found your revelations on Sen Franken noteworthy, in that I had not heard any such from a reliable and non-partisan source, so I look forward to your astonishing news with bated breath.
Further, various states have various rules on the voting rights of convicted felons, as you probably know. As you also probably know or could have found out, precise definitions are often lacking, allowing for the unfortunate possibility that a convicted felon may sincerely believe that his voting rights are restored, when they are not. To define such as “fraud” is artful dodging, to pretend that such minor occasions represent some massive program on the part of Democrats is ludicrous and deserves more scorn and derision than I have at hand.
If this is all you got for voter fraud, you ain’t got shit, and are hoping to exaggerate a Japanese condom into the Hindenburg.
And what would checking ID have done to prevent those felons from voting? Presumably (and it’s all presumably, considering this story sounds like so much horse shit) they gave their name, were checked off the list of registered voters, and voted. Do convicted felons get FELON stamped across their drivers licenses in big red stenciled letters?*
*semi-legitimate question
If you are a resident of Minnesota, then you already know that many felons voted. That’s why I purposely didn’t make any claims beyond that, such as claiming that felons primarily benefitted Franken, nor did I mention the other cases of voter fraud which are harder to prove, in large part due to the lack of voter ID laws or other prudent ways to guarantee the integrity of the system. We have little fraud because the system doesn’t allow for the detection of fraud. If we weren’t looking for tax fraud and no one had to prove their income, voila! there’d be no tax fraud.
http://www.kare11.com/news/article/959567/391/Voting-rights-for-released-felons-debated-in-Minn
That’s just one source, a quick Google can get you dozens if not hundreds. Every election has felons voting illegally, but few get charged. In Minnesota, a conservative group had to pressure the authorities to actually prosecute cases, and 38 people were charged with voter fraud. But again, only because an organization took it upon itself to find evidence. Sometimes news organizations will look into voter fraud on their own, and find it easily, but nothing is ever done about it.
“The Minnesota Majority presented us with 1,500 cases that they felt there were problems with voting. Our own election bureau gave us 100. At the end of the day, we charged 38 cases. And all but one of them are felons voting who were still under the penalty [of not legally applying to regain individual voting rights]. There was no fraud.”
And that’s the minimalist version of the story. But I say it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I agree, voter ID will not prevent much voter fraud. The real fraud is in registration and absentee ballots. However, voter ID is low hanging fruit.
I’d ask, if voting is too important a right to be burdened with an ID requirement, then aren’t there other examples of things we should abolish the need to present ID for? I’m just trying to find a principle somewhere in here. If we shouldn’t burden the practice of constitutional rights with ID requirements, then that should apply across the board, should it not?
And before we get too deep in the woods on yet another voter ID thread, let’s try to get this back on track. My argument about voter ID is that it’s a popular issue and it is NOT why the GOP lost.
This raises the question of what, precisely, “uncontroversial” means.
Personally, I’d hate to have to explain this “uncontroversial” concept to a BEM who just stepped out of a flying saucer.
To a Kentuckian who just stepped out of a Winnebago, not so hard.
I can explain the concept quite easily. There are two things that make America exceptional, aside from the obvious that we’re the most powerful, which is a temporary condition:
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Our liberties have more robust protections than anywhere else. If you look at all 10 of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, they are closer to being untouchable, and go further, than any other nation’s. Now people often dispute this by talking about rights that other countries recognize but we don’t. Fair enough, but even those rights are GRANTED, and can be taken away fairly easily. Ours our given to us by God or nature and we have a robust judiciary that strikes down attempts to infringe these rights frequently.
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What is an American? An American is anyone who has chosen to become an American. I didn’t realize the significance of this, being born here, until an immigrant from Bulgaria explained it to me. He’d lived in Germany with relatives who were German citizens. But in Germany, even if you’re a citizen, you’re not a German unless you’re well, a German. Because a German is a very specific thing, as is an Irishman, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Frenchman, or Italian. America is the only place he ever lived where he was regarded as an American and not a Bulgarian. Now of course we aren’t perfect in this ideal, but it’s part of what makes America different from Europe or Asia. We aren’t a nationality like they are. We are an idea.
From here:
To here:
In a matter of minutes.
So what you offered was unsupported and unsupportable insinuation and slander. Called upon it, you backpedaled at near light speed and finally decide that you never said any such thing to begin with.
My dog sniffs at your posts and growls, a habit he has when he detects a faint scent of attorney. Or when he’s out of beer. Its early yet, and he’s still fairly sober. Is he right?
Well done. Now do the one that explains why it means socialized medicine wouldn’t work here. 