Republican Staffers Charged With 36 Counts of Election Fraud

http://lawsonry.com/2012/09/republican-staffers-charged-with-36-counts-of-election-fraud/

It turns out that the Republican Party’s obsession with voter fraud may be yet another case of projection. Four former staffers for resigned House Rep. Thaddeus McCotter have been charged with 36 counts of misdemeanor and felony election fraud. Yesterday one of those staffers, Lorianne O’Brady, pled not guilty to five misdemeanor counts of submitting fraudulent signatures on a ballot petition. O’Brady is the last of the four staffers to be arraigned; the other three, Don Yowchuang, Mary Melissa Turnbull, and Paul Seewald, were arraigned on similar charges on August 10th.

So what happened? It all started last May, when the Michigan Congressman announced that he was considering running for the Republican nomination for president. McCotter, who had served in the US House of Representatives for nine years, officially announced his candidacy in July of 2011, but was unsuccessful due to his relatively unknown status. In September of 2011, McCotter officially withdrew from the race and endorsed Mitt Romney.

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And this is the truth about so many Republican policies: rules and regulations are put in place to scapegoat people who aren’t causing problems. In Florida, drug testing welfare recipients showed that less than 3% of those receiving welfare were using drugs illegally, while that discriminatory testing cost the state nearly $120,000. Mitt Romney has evoked the “47% of people pay no income tax,” conveniently ignoring that collecting income tax from all of those households would bring in less than than the president’s Buffett Rule which would slightly raise taxes for the country’s wealthiest. Reagan’s racist welfare queen myth still looms large in the conservative narrative, despite the fact that the Bush-era bailout for corrupt and irresponsible banks cost far more than years of welfare programs.

The cognitive dissonance bordering on willful delusion has become the hallmark of Republican policies and rhetoric. Expecting this heinous fraud to bring the GOP back to reality would be wishful thinking at this point, but at least one corrupt Congressman is now out of a job.