2010

The Grave Danger of Sharia Law

ArchPundit October 14, 2010 No Comments

The woman is completely nuts.

Whether it be just affecting a segment of the population, a demographic, certainly not in its entirety all over our country, Americans will not stand for this because Americans are smart enough to know Sharia law, if that were to be adopted — allowed to govern in our country, it will be the downfall of America. And too many Americans are onto this already and are starting to rise up and send that message to our federal officials and say, no, we will not put up with any hint of Sharia law being any sort of law of the land.

One might note the First Amendment if some wingnut brings up Sharia Law.

Or one might point out that is a ridiculous idea and that danger of Sharia Law being imposed in the United States is far down the worry list around alien invasion with Galactus showing up to gobble the planet up.

Eddie asked me to be a part of it, so I went out there to meet with them

ArchPundit October 14, 2010 No Comments

The appropriate answer when Eddie Vrdolyak asks you to do anything is to flip him the bird.

Joe Berrios doesn’t think so, however.

Cook County Democratic Party Chairman Joe Berrios, who also attended the luncheon, said he distributed coats at two sites in the city for the charity.

“Eddie asked me to be a part of it, so I went out there to meet with them,” said Berrios, who is running for Cook County assessor.

Whitey

ArchPundit October 14, 2010 No Comments

It’s awful and stupid:

SPRINGFIELD — The last name of Green Party gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney is misspelled as “Whitey” on electronic-voting machines in nearly two dozen wards — about half in predominantly African-American areas — and election officials said Wednesday the problem cannot be corrected by Election Day.

The misspelling turned up on touch-screen machines in 23 wards overall. Whitney’s name is spelled correctly on the machines’ initial screens showing all of the candidates’ names, but it is misspelled on review screens that later show a voter his or her choices, said Jim Allen, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Elections.

“This is a difficult situation. We’ll make the best of it. But the important thing is the name is spelled correctly where it counts, and that’s where people are making the selection,” Allen said.

Allen said there is not adequate time to reprogram and test machines before Nov. 2. He predicted about 90 percent of the ballots cast that day will be on paper ballots, where Whitney’s name is spelled properly.

The city election board plans to post a “candidate-neutral” list at polling places, showing the correctly spelled names of all candidates on the ballot, Allen said.

The snafu, however, has Whitney contemplating legal action to force a fix.

“I don’t want to be identified as ‘Whitey.’ If this is happening in primarily African-American wards, that’s an even bigger concern,” Whitney told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I don’t know if this is machine politics at play or why this happened.”

“In any event, whether it is or not, this has to be disconcerting to a voter, and I wonder how this will impact the vote.”

But Rich, you aren’t getting a whole lot of black votes anyway.

And it really shouldn’t be that hard to reprogram the machines.

And St Clair County Prepares for a New County Clerk in Two Years

ArchPundit October 14, 2010 No Comments

Rich has the overblown story on military ballots not going out in time in Illinois.

It appears that some local offices did not send out military ballots on time with a 45 day deadline for them before the day of the election.

Rich takes issue with the way the story is explained by WLS, specifically this bit:

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the state of Illinois missed the deadline for mailing absentee ballots to members of the military and other overseas American voters as part of a new federal overseas voting law.

Rich rightly points out that the County election authorities (County Clerks) are responsible for sending the ballots out so the State Board of Elections (and yes, they have the worst web site in the world) is not at fault and pointedly critiques both Kirk and Brady overreacting and blaming the state for screwing up.

Most of that I agree with, but part of the issue is how the Justice Department addresses the issue which is a fairly fine, but important legal point.  When the federal government is concerned about a federal right and has to address whether a state or locality is at fault, the state and local governments are unitary in nature and in terms of Constitutional Law, the state is responsible for political subdivisions established under it.  So in federal lawsuits over voting rights, it may be the state delegates the responsibility to the local government, but the state is still the responsible party.

That may seem a bit pedantic, but it explains the language from the Justice Department.  That does not give WLS a pass though because they should have added the local context and how the State of Illinois is addressing the problem and how limited it is to local County Clerks.

All that said, Bob Delaney is a moron.

St. Clair County Clerk Bob Delaney said 1,297 overseas military ballots — many of them connected with Scott Air Force Base — didn’t get sent out until Oct. 4, primarily because he was waiting for a decision on whether the Constitution Party would be allowed on the ballot.

Under the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) act, ballots are supposed to be sent 45 days before the election in order to give troops time to fill them out and return them for counting.

Delaney said it wouldn’t have made financial sense to send out two versions of the ballot if the Constitution Party had won its case.

“This is not just like sending out your grocery list,” Delaney said. “I really don’t care what the Department of Justice thinks.”

It’s especially problematic because there Scott in St. Clair.  There’s no excuse given he’s not dealing with a small issue or something surprising, he should have been prepared for this for months.  It’s inexcusable. If the Constitution Party had won, then the Courts would have had to establish the  correct remedies, but that doesn’t mean Delaney can simply ignore federal law.  He’s up for election in 2 years, but if he doesn’t get an attitude change and quick, he may not want to stick around given what the Department of Justice is likely to do to him.

Republican National Lawyer’s Association Training In Chicago–TPM Follows Up

ArchPundit October 14, 2010 No Comments

Excellent follow-up on the Kirk story regarding his voter ‘integrity’ progject.

And another conservative group with a strong interest in voter fraud efforts was set to host a training meeting for Republican lawyers in Chicago on Tuesday night. The Republican National Lawyers Association, a group closely aligned with the Republican National Committee, hosted an event at the Union League in Chicago, where they provided training to “ensure that the elections are open, fair and honest.” The training focused on “early voting, grace period voting, absentee ballots, Election Day legal issues, canvassing, and recounts” according to an online invitation to the event. Last night, they were scheduled to host another event at the Doubletree Hotel & Conference Center in Bloomington, IL.

The Illinois GOP website also noted the RNLA events on their website, which Brady wrote that the state GOP was “hosting.” In a tweet, Brady connected the voter integrity program with the Kirk campaign. There’s another event scheduled for this upcoming Monday, which will also take place at the Union League Club, according to the website.

TPM is doing great coverage and showing what good investigative journalism can do.  One problem with blogger triumphalism is that  most of us cannot do this all of the time and a professional organization like TPM can do some real digging.

Voter fraud issues — along with the fallout over the controversy of the Justice Department’s handling of the civil voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party — have been the RNLA’s bread and butter. The group sends out Vote Fraud Alerts, a member of the organization recently wrote about America’s “voter fraud epidemic,” and the organization has taken a critical view of the community organizing group ACORN, a now-defunct organization that was a piñata for voter fraud issues.

The problem is there isn’t an epidemic, as I’ve discussed before. There are areas that are problems–but even the ACORN example misses the mark because ACORN was notorious for running voter registration drivers with a quota system for the people they hired to register voters.  ACORN didn’t vet the signatures until, ironically, the last couple years before it collapsed this year and there was a relatively high rate of registration fraud as employees made up fake people to register.  There’s no evidence that these people voted–in fact many of the names were laughably stupid along the lines of Mickey Mouse and were often caught because the addresses didn’t match or conflicted with other people.

Dear David Kidwell of the Tribune

ArchPundit October 13, 2010 No Comments

For this article

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfYJsQAhl0[/youtube]

Let me suggest you go look at Baxter’s work in Ohio for John Edwards and his crack work in getting the Coffee Party off the ground.  There is no worry about Baxter Swilley.  Don’t believe me–find a Democrat to actually support your story.

The More the Merrier

ArchPundit October 13, 2010 No Comments

Seriously don’t know how I missed this:

“The more the merrier,” said Brady when asked his stand on guns. He said he “strongly supports” the 2nd Amendment and concealed-carry provisions in regard to firearms.

“I think law-abiding citizens should be able to protect themselves,” said the senator.

I tend to not go into gun laws much because there’s a lot more nuance than it’s easy to get through in the typical blog post.

This, however, deserves a simple response.  What a dumbass.

Hat tip Shady Bill Brady

Bill Brady’s Campaign To Claim To Be a Non-Culture Warrior

ArchPundit October 13, 2010 No Comments

To the Daily Herald:

“I don’t think we’ve laid out an agenda in this campaign that deals with that, the Bloomington state senator said at a Daily Herald editorial endorsement interview.

“Parental notification is the only thing we think immediately on the books that needs to be done.

He said he is focused almost entirely on the economy.

“I have my personal beliefs. … We all have our personal beliefs, Brady said. “My agenda is about rebuilding Illinois’ economy and bringing integrity back to the government.

But here’s the thing. One of the items Brady has on bills he has cosponsored is what I call the Christian Science Jobs bill.  It would allow pharmacists to individually decide whether to dispense medications they may be personally offended by.  So you go into Target wanting Plan-B–simply a large dose of birth control pills or for that matter birth control pills and the pharmacist could refuse to provide the pills that the pharmacy stocks even if you have a legal and safe prescription because it personally offends them.

The problem is Bill Brady won’t need a law to enact such a thing, the only thing barring pharmacists from doing this now is a rule made under the Blagojevich administration that simply required that pharmacies dispense prescriptions for pharmaceuticals they carry in stock.  Bill Brady can initiate and would likely be able to repeal that rule with no action from the General Assembly.

He won’t ‘concentrate’ on it, but he will be able to make whether you can get your prescription a crap shoot depending on which pharmacist you get on any given day.

Bill Brady:  It’s Not Your Uterus Anymore!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74UGks-6w2w[/youtube]

Some Moderately Good News for Debbie Halvorson

ArchPundit October 13, 2010 No Comments

Rich pointed out yesterday her internal polling is at odds with The Hill poll and her polling has her 4 points behind.

* Adam Kinzinger leads, but only by a small 45% to 41% margin. This is an extremely close race, and the momentum seems to be on Halvorson’s side after her strong early buy on Chicago broadcast television.

* Halvorson is getting movement with key subgroups. She leads with women and she leads with union households in one of the heaviest union districts in the country. Even though independents are breaking against Democrats in many districts, Halvorson and Kinzinger are in a virtual dead heat among them (40% Kinzinger / 37% Halvorson).

No incumbent wants to be 4 points down this close to the election, but it’s not nearly as bad as being down double digits. One of the criticisms of the Hill poll was that the voters claiming to have voted for McCain were much higher than the 2008 performance in the Districct and Obama voters’ much lower. That is a concern about a poll, but it’s also true that often retrospective reporting of who someone voted for can be wrong. Recall that Ross Perot was around 20 percent in 1992, but only 5 percent admitted that later. That said, Weller’s opponents had 41 percent for Tari Renner and 45 percent for John Pavich. Now take an incumbent who just ran and without major scandal she is not likely to be polling under those two even if you take an Obama bump into consideration (she outperformed Obama significantly though).  This race is going to be tough, but it’s still a race.

Seals Up! & Congressional Round-up

ArchPundit October 13, 2010 4 Comments

Apparently Bob Dold is just that bad of a candidate that he’s not even close right now.

A new Democratic poll showed Democrat Dan Seals ahead of Republican Bob Dold by 13 points in the open-seat race to succeed GOP Rep. Mark Kirk. Seals led 46 percent to 38 percent in the poll taken for Seals’ campaign, a larger margin than a poll taken by the same firm in May found.

“We are encouraged by this recent poll because it means that voters trust Dan to provide independent leadership and fiscal responsibility,” Seals’ Communications Director Aviva Gibbs said in a release. “Dan will continue to focus on creating jobs and keeping taxes low, while ensuring that we protect our values and reduce the national debt in the years ahead.”

The Anzalone Liszt Research poll of 500 voters was conducted Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 and had a margin of error 4.4 points. It also showed Seals leading by 5 points among independents and earning 22 percent of voters who supported Kirk in 2008.

It’s the campaign’s poll and so all of the caveats apply to partisan polling.  It’s also a bit old, but if anything the dynamic keeps getting worse for Dold.  No Democrat should take anything for granted in a year like this, but Dold shows no sign of catching on.

Via Rich

SEIU has gone on the air against Bobby Schilling

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYZq79o-mJw[/youtube]

Local Douchebag (meaning Saint Louis local) Adam Sharp shouts stupid questions at Member of Congress and wonders why she doesn’t take him seriously. Then he tries to act like he’s being assaulted as he did with Charles Jaco when Alex Armour lightly touches his arm.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6PEQ5Q2yZ0[/youtube]

The video claims they asked tough questions by asking where in the Constitution is a health care mandate allowed.  Of course, that would be the commerce clause as has been settled law since the 1930s.

Sharp is a weird guy. He constantly harps that some conspiratorial group of liberals and Democrats are getting into Tea Party events and trying to make them look bad.  He then shows up at events where SEIU has a presence in an SEIU jacket.  He’s not very smart, but he is really good at annoying people.