Keep Out the Vote

[babylonsister]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/05/15/keep_out_the_vote.php

Keep Out the Vote
Michael Winship
May 15, 2007

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes a weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York where this article first appeared.



It’s a John Grisham novel, this whole scandal swirling about the Justice Department. Like “The Pelican Brief” maybe, in which the motive for the murder of two Supreme Court judges of disparate ideologies remains mysterious until a plucky law student turns up an obscure case on appeal that would ravage protected wetlands for oil and gas development. Mayhem ensues.

snip//

Federal prosecutors in four jurisdictions deemed voter fraud trouble spots by the administration (New Mexico, Missouri, Washington State and Nevada) were let go. A fifth, Steven Biskupic in Milwaukee, was kept on for fear of offending Wisconsin Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, who at the time was chair of the House Judiciary Committee. (A similar concern may have protected Philadelphia federal prosecutor Pat Meehan, a protege of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, now ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

At least two of the terminated Feds—John McKay, former U.S. attorney for western Washington State, and David Iglesias, former U.S. attorney for New Mexico—are on record as believing that Karl Rove and other White House aides were directly behind the dismissals. “That would explain why the wagons are so tightly circled,” Iglesias told a Seattle Times editorial meeting that he and McKay attended last week. (McKay noted, “I think there will be a criminal case that will come out of this. This is going to get worse, not better.”)

But the real motive for all this chasing of phantoms in the polling booths may be far more than a diversion. Note, for example, that the aforementioned Tim Griffin, Rove’s choice to take over as U.S. attorney in eastern Arkansas, has been the focus of accusations that in 2004, while research director of the Republican National Committee, he was involved in “caging” minority voters—unfairly, and possibly illegally, making challenge lists of African- and Hispanic-Americans registered in Democratic districts.

All signs point to a continuing, concentrated GOP campaign to curtail voting rights, to intimidate impoverished and elderly citizens, to suppress voter turnout in minority neighborhoods that would lean Democratic, to take control of who gets to vote. Hence the upswing in punitive state voter ID laws, attempts to restrict registration, purge voter rolls and other legislation allegedly aimed at quashing illegal voting. And the U.S. attorney firings.

“We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today,” Rove told the Republican National Lawyers Association last spring. “We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses.”

Rove and his gang would do well to look at the reflection in those sunglasses to see who the real perpetrators of fraud are. Hey, Karl, is cheating the only way left to achieve your “permanent majority?”

[Demeter]

1. It's the Appearance of a Permanent Majority he Wanted

Much cheaper that way, spend the money on cronies, instead of buying votes.

[IndyOp]

2. Gosh. It is really a shame that DU didn't pick up on this sort of thing earlier --

Like back in 2000, 2002, 2004...

:eyes:

:sarcasm: