DoJ Prevents Voting Section Chief from Testifying
By Paul Kiel – July 16, 2007, 5:20 PM
The House Judiciary Committee was set to hold a hearing on the Civil Rights Division’s voting rights section tomorrow, but no more. That’s because the Justice Department has refused to allow the chief of the section, John Tanner, to testify. The committee has postponed the hearing until the Department allows Tanner to appear.
A career employee at the Department, Tanner worked hand in hand with political appointees Bradley Schlozman and Hans von Spakovsky to ensure the passage of voter identification laws in Georgia and elsewhere — sometimes overruling the recommendations of staff analysts and attorneys, who found that the laws might discriminate against African American voters.
Both Schlozman and von Spakovsky endured hard questioning during testimony last month. Tanner would have gotten the same treatment.
Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) wrote to Alberto Gonzales today to request that he make Tanner available for testimony.
Read more.
Watch Out Bill O’Reilly!
There Are Roving Lesbian Gangs
By Tara Lohan
Posted on July 11, 2007, Printed on July 13, 2007
As if there wasn’t enough to worry about these days, apparently all over the country — from New York to California — the streets are being terrorized by lesbian gangs. At least, according to Bill O’Reilly and Fox’s “crime analyst” Rod Wheeler.
On a June 21 episode of the “O’Reilly Factor” on Fox, Wheeler claimed that as many as 150 lesbian gangs prowled the Washington DC area and across the country these gangs (some known as Gays Taking Over or Dykes Taking Over) were responsible for beating people, raping girls, and indoctrinating children as young at 10. Oh, and they also carry pink pistols. Of course.
At one point during the segment — which was as hilarious as it was painful to watch — O’Reilly asked incredulously, “Now, when they recruit the kids, are they indoctrinating them into homosexuality?”
To which Wheeler answered with the utmost certainty, “Yes. As a matter of fact, some of the kids have actually reported that they were forced into, you know, performing sex acts and doing sex acts with some of these people.”
Read more.
Long, but has an executive summary with details that follow
OpEdNews
July 13, 2007
HR811: A Technoelection Dream with a Crippling Cost
By Nancy Tobi
Big ticket items unaccounted for in the HR811 technoelection bill
Executive Summary
HR811 is being sold to the American people as a “paper trail” bill. But 811 (aka the Holt Bill) is nothing more than an e-voting vendor’s dream. This bill cements the use of high tech, low democracy, equipment in our voting systems, protects the “rights” of private corporate interests to “count” our votes using proprietary, trade secret software, so that only they and the White House know how or if our votes are being counted at all.
These costs are defined in detail below, but the summary is found here.
Removal of Safe Harbor
“a provision of a statute or a regulation that reduces or eliminates a party’s liability under the law, on the condition that the party performed its actions in good faith. Legislators include safe-harbor provisions to protect legitimate or excusable violations. An example of safe harbor is performance of a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment by a property purchasor: thus effecting due dilligence and a “safe harbor” outcome if future contamination is found caused by a prior owner.”
HR811, with its broad reaching and complex mandates for our state election systems, does not include any safe harbor language for its mandates. Unlike the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which it seeks to amend, the Holt Bill does not include a state planning process by which states can interpret the bill’s requirements. Additionally, it broadens citizen’s rights to sue a state for noncompliance.
Some folks may think this is a good thing, that we should be able to sue the pants off any electoral jurisdiction we feel is in violation of the law.
But the cost of lawsuits in electoral challenges is quite high both financially and in the incalculable costs to our democracy, as we all saw in Florida’s 2000 presidential election.
Read more
July 12, 2007
Religious Right Activists Want Government To Reflect Only Their Faith, Says AU’s Lynn
Americans United for Separation of Church and State today deplored the disruption by Religious Right activists of a Hindu chaplain’s prayer to open the U.S. Senate.
“This shows the intolerance of many Religious Right activists,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “They say they want more religion in the public square, but it’s clear they mean only their religion.
“America is a land of extraordinary religious diversity, and the Religious Right just can’t seem to accept that fact,” Lynn continued. “I don’t think the Senate should open with prayers, but if it’s going to happen, the invocations ought to reflect the diversity of the American people.”
Hindu Chaplain Rajan Zed, a Nevada resident, gave the opening prayer in the Senate at the invitation of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). As he began his remarks, two protestors interrupted the proceedings, asking for forgiveness from Jesus Christ for the “abomination” of failing to pray to the “one true God.” (The sergeant-at-arms had to restore order.)
Religious Right groups have been agitating against the Hindu leader’s prayer since it was announced. The Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association has asked his members to complain to their senators about the invitation. The group’s news service reported that “Christian nation” activist David Barton said that Hinduism has few followers in the United States and that prayer to a “non-monotheistic god” is “outside the American paradigm.”
Said AU’s Lynn, “The Religious Right promotes a deeply skewed version of American history. Our founders wanted separation of church and state and full religious liberty for all faith traditions. The episode today shows we still have a ways to go to achieve that goal.”
* * * *
Americans United is a religious liberty watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, the organization educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation in safeguarding religious freedom.
Friends,
Trustworthy sources tell me that Holt’s people plan to bring HR 811 up for a vote
as early as tomorrow or Friday. In face, they’d evidently hoped to do it today, but
something else came up and interfered.
Apparently it’s one day at a time. In any case, a vote seems to be imminent.
So please CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS, and urge him/her
(1) to call for a delay of HR 811, so there’ll be time to work the worst bugs out of it;
or (2), if it comes up to VOTE NO.
MCM
A first -rate overview, via Michael Collins:
In his summary of an open crime scene, Election 2004, Partridge does an excellent job drawing the right conclusions from Election 2004: The Urban Legend. and the other 2004 data. Dr. Partridge at his best (but then I’m biased).
Impeach Bush, Michael Collins
Ernest Partridge:
NEW: Election Fraud: Where’s the Outrage? The mainstream media have been virtually silent about the issue of election fraud. The Democratic Party, the principle victim of the fraud (apart, that is, from the American voters), won?t touch the issue, Instead, the issue has been kept alive through the internet and the independent and self-financed efforts of a few determined individuals and citizen-based organizations. And now, startling new evidence has been published, not in the US but in New Zealand, offering further proof that the 2004 Presidential Election was stolen.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95PyKMDioYY]
BRILLIANT AND EXHILARATING!
That KO said this on TV last night is thrilling news…
MCM
“Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign”
From Iraq to Scooter Libby, Bush and Cheney have broken America’s trust and stabbed this nation in the back. It is time for them to go. By Keith Olbermann
Jul. 04, 2007 | Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on what is, in everything but name, George Bush’s pardon of Scooter Libby.
“I didn’t vote for him,” an American once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.” That — on this eve of the Fourth of July — is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
The man who said those 17 words — improbably enough — was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of
his personal favorite, Richard Nixon, in 1960.
Read more.
From William Betz:
The president has the power of the pardon (and commutation) EXCEPT in cases of impeachment. Article 2, section 2 of the Constitution, provides, in part, “[The president] shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Because Bush pardoned Libby fearing the little worm’s anticipated cooperation in order to avoid prison time, and because that cooperation would have implicated Bush and Cheney, leading directly to their impeachment, it is plain that Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentence is unconstitutional and itself amounts to an impeachable offense. — WEB
She will discuss the Holt bill, etc.
MCM
From Nancy:
I am supposed to be on with Thom Hartmann around 1:30 or 1:40 EST
today–you can listen here:
I have eight minutes to make my case.
