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Back to the subject of the Wisconsin prosecutor’s harassment of Gov. Scott Walker, Stuart Taylor reports some Democrats are becoming uneasy with the witch hunt.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. has accused District Attorney John Chisholm, a fellow Democrat, of “abuse of prosecutorial power” in the relentless criminal investigation of Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and 29 conservative groups.
Clarke’s forceful public criticism is of Chisholm and the so-called “John Doe” investigation that Chisholm has pursued since 2010 against Walker, his staff and virtually every conservative advocacy group in the state.
Clarke, who has been sheriff since 2002 and is running for re-election on Tuesday as the Democratic nominee, has been elected and re-elected with heavy support both from fellow African-Americans and from conservatives.
Clarke said that he agreed with a petition seeking appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Chisholm. The petition was filed on Sept. 26 by a major Chisholm target, conservative fundraiser Eric O’Keefe.
While Clarke and Chisholm are both Democrats, the iconoclastic sheriff has often clashed with the more liberal Democrats who dominate Milwaukee politics, including Chisholm.
“This will go down as one of the ugliest chapters in Wisconsin political history” Clarke told this reporter. “This is a witch-hunt by a hyper-partisan prosecutor’s office … to go after political adversaries they disagree with.” …
Jonathan Tobin posts on this year’s race baiting by Dems.
With the midterm campaign coming down to its last days, its been clear for weeks that the only way Democrats believe they can save some of their endangered red-state Senate incumbents is to play the race card. Both Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and North Carolina’s Kay Hagan have sought to identify Republicans with racism and even, in Hagan’s case, with the killing of Trayvon Martin or the Ferguson, Missouri shooting, in order to mobilize African-American voters. While these tactics are based on outrageous slanders, the decision to play the race card is logical if not scrupulous. …
… Waving the bloody shirt of Ferguson seems like a good idea to those who believe, not wrongly, that many African-Americans view such incidents as evidence of the enduring legacy of the nation’s history of racism. But the line between sending subtle hints about such issues and outright race baiting has clearly been crossed when, as Hagan did, Republicans are falsely accused of playing a role in killing young African-Americans. Nor did Landrieu do herself any favors by publicly complaining about the treatment of blacks and women in the contemporary south. …
… Thus, even if these tactics work to turn out blacks—and it is by no means clear that it will come anywhere close to the 2012 levels that Democrats desperately need—the party may be doing itself real damage with the public in ways that will harm their presidential candidate in 2016. As with other misleading memes they have beat to death, such as the spurious war on women that Republicans are supposed to be waging, Democrats are finding that they are fast exhausting the electorate’s patience and are running out of ideas. As much as playing the race card seems like a foolproof if unsavory tactic, it may not be as smart a move as they think it is.
How much has the president hurt the Democrats? Michael Barone has answers. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
Before the election results are in, and keeping in mind that there may be some unpleasant surprises for one party or the other — or both — it’s possible to assess how the Democratic Party has fared under the leadership of President Obama. To summarize the verdict: not so well.
By one metric it has done very badly indeed. When Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, there were 257 Democrats in the House of Representatives. Going into this election there are 201 (including two vacant Democratic seats).
Psephologists universally agree Democrats will suffer a net loss of House seats, for reasons explained in an earlier column in this space. That will leave them with a number probably somewhere in the 190s.
That means a loss of something like 60 seats — far more than the parties of George W. Bush after six years (19 seats), and slightly more than Bill Clinton at this stage (47 seats).
House race results are particularly meaningful because in the past two decades, much more than in the 1970s and 1980s, Americans are voting straight tickets. Party performance in House elections is a pretty good indicator of support of a party and (when it has one) its president. …
Thomas Sowell on voter fraud.
One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting.
Reporter John Fund has written three books on voter fraud and a recent survey by OldDominionUniversity indicates that there are more than a million registered voters who are not citizens, and who therefore are not legally entitled to vote.
The most devastating account of voter fraud may be in the book “Injustice” by J. Christian Adams. He was a Justice Department attorney, who detailed with inside knowledge the voter frauds known to the Justice Department, and ignored by Attorney General Holder and Company.
One of these frauds involved sending out absentee ballots to people who had never asked for them. Then a political operator would show up — uninvited — the day the ballots arrived and “help” the voter to fill them out. Sometimes the intruders simply took the ballots, filled them out and forged the signatures of the voters.
These were illegal votes for Democrats, which may well be why Eric Holder sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil. …
Ed Meese and Ken Blackwell with a column in USA Today on how to prevent election fraud.
Once upon a time, Americans got together on Election Day, went to the polls, and chose our leaders. Voting on the same day helped bind us together as self-governing citizens in a free republic. It even felt like a national holiday — Independence Day without the fireworks.
Except for those traveling or who are infirm and who can use absentee ballots, Election Day puts everyone in the same boat. As a civic exercise in equality, it is unparalleled. It has the added advantage of making vote fraud more difficult, since there is a very short window in which to commit it.
But over the past few decades, election laws have been relaxed in the name of convenience, with “reforms” such as early voting, same-day registration, Sunday and evening voting hours, no-excuse absentee voting and allowing out-of-precinct ballots. All of these increase the possibility of vote fraud.
At the same time, despite a clear mandate in the National Voter Registration Act (also known as the Motor Voter Law) to keep accurate registrations, the system has grown lax; election authorities have left millions on the voter rolls who should not be there.
A 2012 study by the PewCenter on the States found 1.8 million deceased people were registered to vote, and 24 million invalid or inaccurate registrations. An American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) review of voter rolls around the nation in 2013 found more than 200 counties with more voters registered than age-eligible, legal residents. The ACRU has won historic consent decrees in federal court requiring two Mississippi counties to clean up their voter rolls and is now litigating in Texas. …
Ilya Somin on the fact that liberal cities are the ones with less affordable housing.
… Why do liberal cities enact policies that often making housing unaffordable for the poor and much of the middle class? The cynical explanation is that “limousine liberal” voters only pretend to care about affordable housing for the poor and the middle class, but in reality adopt zoning restrictions to keep home prices up and prevent the riffraff from living near them. Such motives may be present in some cases. But, on most issues, there is little correlation between political views and measures of narrow self-interest. It is therefore likely that most voters in liberal cities do genuinely care about affordable housing and the interests of the poor.
The virus that plagues our body politic is not selfish voting, but ignorant voting. Like their conservative counterparts, most liberal voters don’t think carefully about the possible negative side effects of their preferred policies. Just as most of them do not realize that rent control diminishes the stock of housing, they also may not realize that zoning restrictions diminish it, and thereby increase housing costs.
Conservative voters have their own characteristic patterns of economic ignorance. Both sides tend to ignore or even blatantly misinterpret evidence that cuts against their preferred views – especially if the evidence or the reasoning behind it is counterintuitive. To a considerable extent, the high cost of housing in liberal cities is yet another negative effect of widespread political ignorance. …