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.

Why Bother?

ArchPundit October 13, 2010 No Comments

GOP promotes Isaac Hayes:

GOP gains traction in Jesse Jackson Jr.’s district
10/12/2010 10:51:46 AM

By SOPHIA TAREEN
The Associated Press
Monday, October 11, 2010; 7:35 PM

SOUTH HOLLAND, Ill. — Isaac Hayes, a conservative Republican challenging U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., is getting more attention lately – and not just because he shares a name with the soul legend known for the “Shaft” theme.
More revelations about Jackson’s links to the corruption case of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and a relationship he had with a female “social acquaintance” have given Hayes an opening in the reliably Democratic and largely black district that Jackson won with nearly 90 percent of the vote two years ago.
Hayes suddenly is getting notice from national Republicans and is being mentioned often on black radio stations. While political experts see him as unlikely to score an upset in November, he could benefit from voter sentiment about Jackson’s troubles.
“There has to be a change,” Hayes said. “People are saying ‘enough is enough.'”
Emma Pouncy, a 66-year-old retiree in the 2nd Congressional District, which covers Chicago’s South Side and south suburbs, voted for Jackson over the years because of his work for a third area airport and because of his family’s civil rights legacy, namely his father the Rev. Jesse Jackson. But now she says she won’t vote at all, citing the Blagojevich corruption allegations and affair.
“He was dependable, everybody thought he was a nice guy,” she said. “But things change. We can only take so much.”

The AP reporter needs to be asked to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

A new poll conducted in Illinois 2nd Congressional District finds that incumbent Democratic Congressman Jesse Jackson has a 47-point lead over his closest challenger, and 48 percent of the voters view him unfavorably.

According to the poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners, and paid for by Jackson’s reelection campaign, 58 percent of voters support Jackson, compared to 11 percent supporting Republican Isaac Hayes and 6 percent supporting Green Party candidate Anthony Williams. Twenty-five percent of the voters were undecided a month before the election.

According to the poll, 67 percent of the voters believe Jackson cares about people like them; 63 percent say he gets things done; 58 percent say he has worked hard to make the economy stronger in the district and 54 percent say he shares their values.

If I lived in the District, I’d vote Green for the record.  However, this let’s write a story about how some crappy candidate has a chance against  an incumbent who is in every reasonable mind going to crush the opponent is bad journalism.  See also, too, Jonathan Pollack.

Terry Cosgrove Points Out Bill Brady’s Plans for the Uteruses of Illinois

ArchPundit October 13, 2010 No Comments

At HuffPo Chicago (HuffPo is still on the shit list)

In my 30 years in Illinois politics, I have never seen a nominee for Governor who is more anti-woman and more anti-family than Bill Brady. Bill Brady is not your garden-variety downstate conservative. He is an extreme right-wing candidate and an activist leader in the fight to make abortion illegal, even in the case of rape or incest. He aims to set back women’s rights not just one generation, but several generations.

Where does Bill Brady stand on women’s issues?

• Brady supports a law in Illinois to ban abortion, even in cases of rape or incest.
• Brady supports amending the U.S. Constitution to make abortion illegal with no exceptions.
• Brady supports a law allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions based on moral or religious objections, denying patients medicine for birth control, emergency contraception, HIV medications, anti-depressants for post-partum-depression, etc.
• Brady was one of only two legislators to vote against stopping “Drive-Thru Deliveries,” when HMOs were throwing women out of hospitals, against their doctors’ advice, less than 24 hours after delivering a baby.
• Brady was one of only four legislators to vote against the voluntary check-off on the Illinois income tax form for cervical and breast cancer research.
• Brady voted against requiring insurance companies to pay for prescription contraceptive drugs, even when these same companies cover male enhancement drugs.
• Brady has voted against Family Medical Leave, equal pay for equal work for women, and stem cell research.

Brady likes to talk about limited government and small government. Is outlawing abortion for a rape victim, or any woman, limited government intrusion? Is regulating our personal lives, limiting our access to birth control (or to any medication), and dictating under what circumstances we have children limited government? Not in my book, Senator Brady.

Personal PAC is running great commercials as well:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeKThixxYS4[/youtube]

DNC Counsel on Kirk’s Effort

ArchPundit October 13, 2010 No Comments

Exactly:

A ‘voter integrity’ program? However he tries to dress it up, it sounds to me like Mark Kirk is talking about a coordinated campaign of voter suppression in some of Illinois’ best known African American neighborhoods. Indeed, although Republicans continually claim that such voter suppression campaigns are merely intended to prevent voter fraud, conclusive evidence of any systemic fraud in any recent American election has never been found. In fact, a five-year investigation by the Bush Administration into the matter found “virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections.”

The simple truth is this: in Illinois’ neck and neck Senate race, Republicans are trying to pull out a victory not by bringing their supporters to the polls, but by preventing Democratic voters from casting their ballots. The climate may be a little cooler, but this could be Florida 2000 all over again.

The tactics that George Bush and Karl Rove used to steal that election were devastating – not just to our country’s future but also to every voter who cast their ballot in good faith that their voice would be heard, only to have that voice silenced. That a candidate for Senate would explicitly embrace Rove’s brand of dirty politics, and would go so far as to openly endorse and fund the largest voter suppression effort in Illinois in 15 years is shockingly despicable.

The goal of American elections is not to send the candidates who are most willing to play dirty to Washington – it is to enable the American people to exercise their political will by choosing their own leaders. When Republican candidates set out to prevent that from happening, it is not only a perversion of the democratic process, it is an explicit threat to our democracy.  We cannot allow Mark Kirk to profit by undermining our Democratic process. And the way to ensure that he does not is to guarantee that every vote is counted in Illinois.

Unfortunately, Mark Kirk’s attempt at voter suppression is not the first since Florida – there are documented accounts of Republican intimidation of African American voters in Virginia and Hispanic voters in New Mexico, and Republicans illegally removed thousands of qualified minority voters from registration rolls in Ohio, Colorado, and Montana, among other states – but we can help to thwart their attempts at voter suppression by bringing their shady tactics into the light of day.