Friday, January 20, 2012

California Doesn't Need Dead Voters

While Eric Holder is blocking voter ID requirements in South Carolina, Rahm Emmanuel is registering dead people in Chicago, and ACORN's successors are registering people randomly selected from the phone book or the Baseball Hall of Fame, California Democrats are guaranteeing their success the old-fashioned way. Redistricting.

While Holder in the DOJ is protecting “minority and poor” voters in South Carolina from the onerous burden of having to obtain a [free] state photo ID, he is perfectly fine with photo ID being required to get on an airplane, to buy cigarettes and booze, some OTC medications and to obtain a “get your food free” electronic debit card. Meanwhile, the Chicago mayor is working furiously to protect the additional right to vote guaranteed in the Constitution to the deceased. In St. Louis, Indianapolis and other places, persons with the same name as famous sports figures and cartoon characters must be protected from the racists who want them to prove who they are before voting. It makes me wonder if in Chicago dead sports figures or Mickey Mouse get two votes.

California, being the most creative of all the states in guaranteeing Democratic victories, has avoided such common methods of adding extra votes. In fact, given their current plan, they don’t even need to add phony votes. And why, you ask? Because the state has been so carefully gerrymandered that it makes strong Democratic majorities almost inevitable.

That’s nothing new, you say. Well, I mentioned that California is übercreative. Unlike other states where the majority political machine draws electoral districts, Democratic Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown and the entire Democratic Party are the beneficiaries of a “people’s initiative” which took the power to redistrict away from the legislature and placed it in the hands of a “non-partisan” commission comprised of five Democrats, five Republicans, and four independents.

The result is a redistricting map for Congressional and state elections which favors Democrats even more than the previous Democratic legislature’s gerrymander. The public was sold on the non-partisan nature of the commission, and Republicans cooperated because all indications were that they would pick up a few seats in the conservative Central Valley if the lines were drawn fairly. The road to electoral disaster is paved with good intentions.

Unknown to the public, various left wing and Democratic (redundancy?) organizations were preparing well in advance to skew the results of the commission hearings. ProPublica is the whistleblower that is now bringing the matter to the public’s attention and participating in a new initiative drive to abolish the commission and put redistricting into the hands of the courts. You might think that this is just sour grapes from the Republicans. But ResPublica is a non-profit investigative journalism group formed by liberal Democrats, even getting funding from George Soros surrogates. The only person in the watchdog journalism group who is not a Democrat or Independent is former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger. They obviously took their duty to be more important than their funding.

The commission held hearings throughout the state, not realizing that facts and opinions thought to be from “average citizens” were actually heavily-infiltrated by Democratic operatives. Each witness was, for obvious reasons, supposed to be a member of the local community where each successive hearing was held. ProPublica found a secret memo outlining the results of an earlier meeting of prominent California Democrats mapping out a strategy for misinforming the commission.

Part of the plan was to get Democratic and leftist allies to show up to testify in swing and weakly-Republican districts, purporting to be local citizens. The enabling legislation which pretended to put the voter initiative into operation fairly was written by the Democrat-controlled legislature. Oddly (?) it contained no requirements that those testifying before the commission prove that they were residents of the locale in which the hearing was being held. I wonder how that happened. Maybe they should have required valid state-issued photo ID.

The most egregious of the scams uncovered by ProPublica was a female witness who claimed to be a lifelong member of the Asian community in the San Gabriel Valley. In fact, ProPublica investigated and found that she is a paid Democratic lobbyist who spent most of her life in rural Idaho and at the time of the hearings lived (and still lives) in Sacramento.

As you can see, California is exceptionally creative. Why register dead people, convicted felons, names drawn from the telephone book, and sports figures when you can obtain electoral victories by meddling with an independent commission and producing what appears to be a nonpartisan, fairly-drawn electoral map? The result of the commission’s redistricting, even if drawn in good faith, was weighted far more heavily toward preserving or creating Democratic districts and breaking up Republican-leaning districts, all with a cover of non-partisanship and fairness. And it was based largely on false input from the “public.”

31 comments:

Joel Farnham said...

Oh, so that is why it is so hard to get conservatives elected in California.

CrisD said...

...politics...this stuff is a real turn off to responsible young adults. My kids would rather go to the dentist than deal with this. They just want to drop out from the process.

Tehachapi Tom said...

Hawk
That explains why the district I live in here in the central part of Kern County connects to the coastal area of San Luis Obispo county. when looking up the area of my district I could not believe a 100 foot wide strip that runs straight across unpopulated ranch country for more than fifty miles. Obviously that is in order to link two population centers even though they are miles apart and in two different counties.
Forest Gump said it best "stupid is what stupid gets".
Evidently we are doomed in the name of the Dems.

rlaWTX said...

the terrifying part is how unsurprised I am...

Anonymous said...

Joel: I guess I'd have to say that it's one of many ways that conservatives are prevented from winning. Right now, it happens to be the biggest reason.

Anonymous said...

CrisD: I can understand that. It's frustrating to want to do the right thing, knowing there are forces which will prevent it under color of law. It was bad enough when it was straight-up political maneuvering on its face, but now it hides behind "non-partisanship" and "fairness." Just tell the kids that dropping out of the process is just the ultimate victory the statists want.

Anonymous said...

Tehachapi Tom: That was under the old legislature's lines. Wait 'til you see the new ones created by the "non-partisan" commission. My old friend Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) is retiring from Congress this round because it will be impossible for him to win with the new lines. That comes after 25 years of honorable, conservative service in the House. He has seen his district go from the 21st (heavily Republican) to the 23rd (evenly Republican) to the 24th (moderately Democrat). His new district, if he had stayed, will have a strong Democratic edge. That's the way they get rid of conservatives.

Tennessee Jed said...

Had this fantasy which, unfortunately, would require another move. Basically, the U.S.A. in kind of a reverse of the southern secession precipitating the civil war, amends the constitution, kicking out Kahl-lee-fourn--ee-yah, New York City, and Massachusetts. Border patrols and electrified fencing are erected afterwards to keep Californians, etc. from illegally entering the country. After exhausitive vetting of conservative credentials, folks like yourself are permitted to emmigrate to a state of your choice, and costs will be born by the bankrupt states you leave.

Oh, wake up, Dorothy or Jed or whomever.

Anonymous said...

rlaWTX: I'm surprised by the result, but not the Democrat maneuvering behind the scenes. I was in the final regional round to be on the commission as a Bay Area member of it. But I moved to Caliente and had to withdraw. Still, given the way the Democrats rigged the hearings, I probably wouldn't have made any difference anyway.

AndrewPrice said...

I don't see a problem with the dead voting in California. They can't do any worse than the living are doing out there!

tryanmax said...

That's probably why small states like mine have a tendency to be red states. It's a little difficult to gerrymander only a handful of districts. Sure, there are some funny-shaped districts around Omaha (the 10th--mine--being one of the weirdest) but nothing like the jigsaw puzzle that is California. I like to think the Unicam helps, too. Less call for districting overall.

Also, it's even harder to gerrymander only three congressional districts!

Individualist said...

Lawhawk

Since the Zombie population is a huge minority in California it is racist to not allow the dead to vote.

Anonymous said...

Tennessee: With that much land between the East Coast and the Left Coast, their forces would end up divided by more than mere geography. Separation makes the heart grow blacker. And we "Middleists" would still have the Gulf for our major ports of entry, though we'd probably have to occupy New Orleans for a few decades. Rather than emigrate, after a brief armed rebellion against California,we Anti-Californians could carve out a new state of Cornucopia, including the San Joaquin Valley from the lower Delta to the southern Tehachapi Mountains and stretching to the Nevada and Arizona borders. Then we could join the newly-formed Central States of America following my election as the first Governor of Cornucopia. I have dreams too, Tennessee and Dorothy. LOL

Anonymous said...

Andrew: There are still some of us alive and well in the Central Valley. It looks like there's a good chance we'll stop the Bullet Train to Nowhere in its tracks (pun intended). The initiative to turn the redistricting process over to the courts is off to a good start, and California's Supreme Court is solidly conservative but even-handed, which would give Republicans a fair shot at picking up seats. The big cities of the coast are collapsing under the weight of their deficits, and there's a good chance the Jerry Brown-proposed tax increase to bail them out will fail at the ballot box. The tail may yet stop wagging the dog. To paraphrase John Paul Jones: "We have not yet begun to fight."

Anonymous said...

tryanmax: California is a big state with a bigger population, and you're absolutely right about it being easier to cheat when there are so many people who either don't notice or don't care. Having a bicameral legislature where the Senate districts are just larger versions of the Assembly districts also allows for more cheating. As for the Congressional districts, the bicameral system doesn't have much affect, though it has some because of the organizational abilities of the party in power in most of those districts. California is gasping, but we're not yet ready to roll over and play dead.

Anonymous said...

Indi: My bad. You're right. I take it all back. LOL

Joel Farnham said...

Anonymous Strikes Again

DOJ website is down. I say again. DOJ website is down.

BevfromNYC said...

Joel - On one hand, I think what Anonymous is very destructive and should be stopped. I think pirating others works (music/movies) is wrong.

On the otherhand - I'm glad this happened to Holder...

Anonymous said...

Joel: It looks like they took down MPAA and Universal Music as well. It's back up now, but if they can get to the DOJ, they can get to the Department of Defense.

Anonymous said...

Bev: It couldn't happen to a nicer shyster.

Joel Farnham said...

HUGE, HUGE NO.

DOJ and Dept of Defense are entirely two different styles of computer systems. DOJ must have access to the Public. DOD doesn't. In fact, DOD has two sets of computers. One for the Public and one for the actual work.

The only computers Hackers have access, unless they are in the DOD buildings, are the ones hooked up to the internet.

So far, Hackers have only succeeded in shutting down Public Websites. Also, they have only managed to shutdown the websites for a few hours at a time.

It is more of a symbolic gesture than anything else. Scary only to people who aren't geeky.

One other thing, DOJ is and has been operating outside of the LAW ever since Obama got in. This shutdown of Megaupload is illegal.

tryanmax said...

Joel, I agree. The DOJ and other Fed entities have used most people's lack of knowledge about the internet to stretch the law to grotesque proportions. Shutting down MegaUpload over the activity of it's users would be akin to shutting down Louisville Slugger because their bat was used in an assault. Extrapolate it to any good or service that might get used in a crime. Unfortunately, there has been angling for this exact thing for some time.

Anonymous said...

Joel: I understand the difference between the DOJ and DOD systems, I'm just not as confident as you that the DOD is immune from cyber-attack. These guys, along with the Chinese and the jihadists, are honing their skills. Still, I can hope they fail and that DOD remains secure.

Anonymous said...

tryanmax: You and Joel have thought this out. I guess I'm just nervous about our main line of defense which is currently run by a commander-in-chief who doesn't really care much about the safety of most Americans. I'm hoping the old pros are ignoring his indifference and continuing to keep us secure.

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

The internet is a wonderful device. In actuality, the limitations are far more numerous.

Megaupload does a great service. It's users down load and up load information that helps everyone. Some do abuse it, but it is like try said, it is akin to shutting down the people who make baseball bats because a bat was used in crime. Stupid and idiotic.

You may have used Megaupload and didn't know it.

The hackers have not done anything really bad... Just shut down a few websites... For a few hours...How does that compare to the government shutting down a website/service permanently because of a complaint from Hollywood?

And they shut it down.

tryanmax said...

LawHawk, I can't claim Joel's level of knowledge, but I have certainly pondered the implications that activities in the cyber world bear on the real world. The internet is an amazing thing because it blurs the line between information (speech) and property. It makes very stark the conundrum of how one can "own" speech once it has been publicly uttered.

The industries that are built speech, verily, have crafted the definition of it in the 20th and 21st centuries are found in a corner between a desire to have their statements received by as wide an audience as possible but also to make that audience pay for the privilege. The two aims have always been at odds but the internet makes those odds more apparent.

And frankly, there is an argument to be made in counter to the one that states "billions of dollars are lost to content piracy" which retorts "what sort of an economy is built on such ethereal things as words and ideas?"

Anonymous said...

Joel: My son Chris is a computer consultant and a senior software engineer on contract with Google. He tries to explain these things to me, and sometimes it seems like he's speaking Greek. But I sorta understand what you and tryanmax are saying. I just wish he could walk over to the Blogger department and slug someone in the jaw!

Anonymous said...

tryanmax: Very good oppositional thinking. It's not an easy subject. As we say, the law is both a sword and a shield, and the trick is knowing which armament you're wielding at any particular moment in time. The current proposed law is way, way too far-reaching and draconian, so let's hope Congress can figure out something that ultimately serves both the public's need to know and the artist/writer's right to make a profit from his own work. It's a thin tightrope.

Joel Farnham said...

Think of it this way. MegaUpLoad transfers large files from one computer to another. It you compare it to a large filing cabinet in your office and you need to get it to another office downtown. You hire a mover. The mover says have those files put into a container we put on your lot. You do. They move it to the other lot.

What the DOJ is saying is the Mover you hired also moves dead bodies from a Mafioso's safe house to another safe house. Therefor your mover is racketeering and must be shutdown. Never mind that the mover has no knowledge of what is being moved. He just moves large containers.

Anonymous said...

Joel: Thanks. That's a good way of looking at it.

Individualist said...

Joel and Lawhawk

There are several compamies that sell services that allow people to send emails with links to servers on the web. The links are encrypted and allow the receiver to downlaod any amount of data from the site for a fewe days. YouSendIt is one that I have in mind.

Seems to me that sites that offer this service free are a competition in a way. I wonder how much of Holder's fire to go after megaupload comes from pressures from more mainstream web sites and tech companies in trying to find a "for pay" model for thge internet.

Just a thought

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