Should Voting Be Made Harder?

The large rusted-on vote that Democrats get from most of America's large minority population certainly undercuts the vote as a considered evaluation of parties and policies   -- and the result is an America that is steadily losing liberties and prosperity in ceaseless small bites.  So some reform should be thought about.  A once-common idea was for the vote to be limited to property owners but a more plausible idea these days would be to limit the vote to those who pay Federal income tax.  That only those who put in should have a say in what is paid out seems only fair -- JR

 By David Bozeman

In what could be a harbinger of the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton recently slammed North Carolina’s new voter ID law, saying that it reads like a “greatest hits of voter suppression.”  Aside from requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote, the law’s other provisions cut early voting to — gasp! — ten days and end same-day registration during the early-voting period.

One can certainly debate the necessity of crafting new legislation, but the ensuing hysteria, including lawsuits by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the ACLU, misses the larger point.  Conservatives and Republicans believe that the endless attempts to make voting easier (motor voter registration, for instance) are, in the words of National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg, synonymous with making it cheaper.

Simply, if voting requires a degree of effort or even inconvenience and a moment of deliberation, then maybe we are a better people because of it.  Here in North Carolina (and a handful of other states), those only slightly interested in public affairs can be roused out of their apathy by a polished but ineffectual orator, register to vote and then cast their votes all in the same day.  American Idol winners are chosen with more contemplation.

Early voting, likewise, once reserved for the military and hardship cases, has degenerated, if not into a circus, then into a cushy vehicle of convenience to those for whom standing in line is a bother.  Whatever the advantages of early voting, surely our founders envisioned all citizens voting pretty much together, sorting out the same facts.  With voting becoming not a day but a season, how many news cycles and debates affect one vote but not another?

When the media (barely) revealed candidate Barack Obama’s expressed goal of targeting big energy (particularly the coal industry) literally days before the election in 2008, how many already-cast votes did not reflect knowledge of Obama’s radical agenda?  Furthermore, how much greater leeway is granted for corruption as more days and weeks are added to election season?

Whether or not corruption exists, however, is not really the point.  Not that Democrats care — as long as they keep winning national races, they don’t give a whit about any preventive measures aimed at ensuring fair elections.  Let them lose a nail-biter or two (like in 2000) and election reform will be all the rage.  Till then, they take refuge in the claim that Republicans just want to keep black people away from the polls.

Bottom line — and most of us know this, but few will dare say it — maybe not everyone should vote.  If you have to be induced by convenience to vote, then maybe you shouldn’t.  If your preference is based on your narrow self interest and not the overall good of your country, then maybe you shouldn’t vote.  If you have no idea who your senators are or who the vice president is, then maybe you shouldn’t vote.

The idea that voting should be rational and contemplative, as much a rite as a right, is no doubt the impetus behind North Carolina’s harmless little measures.  Only modern liberals believe that large masses of poor and black Americans are somehow incapable of procuring photo IDs!  But the only way for Hillary Clinton to gain power is to convince you that you are powerless.  Voting, while a precious right born of toil, revolution and blood, is hardly, unto itself, a shield against tyranny.  Merely the right to vote will not protect one citizen from the passions of the mob.  That requires a culture that embraces individual spirit, purpose and rationality.  The fact that demagogues derive their power from the vote is the strongest argument that voting should enjoy a very limited, deliberative time period.

SOURCE

******************************

Big Brother has arrived

“Clearly, any family may be visited by federally paid agents for almost any reason.”

According to an Obamacare provision millions of Americans will be targeted.

The Health and Human Services’ website states that your family will be targeted if you fall under the “high-risk” categories below:

* Families where mom is not yet 21.

* Families where someone is a tobacco user.

* Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities.

* Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States.

There is no reference to Medicaid being the determinant for a family to be “eligible.”

In 2011, the HHS announced $224 million will be given to support evidence-based home visiting programs to “help parents and children.” Individuals from the state will implement these leveraging strategies to “enhance program sustainability.”

Constitutional attorney and author Kent Masterson Brown states:

“This is not a “voluntary” program. The eligible entity receiving the grant for performing the home visits is to identify the individuals to be visited and intervene so as to meet the improvement benchmarks. A homeschooling family, for instance, may be subject to “intervention” in “school readiness” and “social-emotional developmental indicators.” A farm family may be subject to “intervention” in order to “prevent child injuries.” The sky is the limit.

Although the Obama administration would claim the provision applies only to Medicaid families, the new statute, by its own definition, has no such limitation. Intervention may be with any family for any reason. It may also result in the child or children being required to go to certain schools or taking certain medications and vaccines and even having more limited – or no – interaction with parents. The federal government will now set the standards for raising children and will enforce them by home visits.”

Part of the program will require massive data collecting of private information including all sources of income and the amount gathered from each source.

A manual called Child Neglect: A Guide for Prevention, Assessment, and Intervention includes firearms as potential safety hazard  and will require inspectors to verify safety compliance and record each inspection into a database.

SOURCE

*****************************

RACISM CARD LOOKING A LITTLE DOG-EARED

Ann Coulter

Do liberals have any arguments for their idiotic ideas besides calling their opponents "racist"?

The two big public policies under attack by the left this week are "stop-and-frisk" policing and voter ID laws. Democrats denounce both policies as racist. I'm beginning to suspect they're getting lazy in their arguments.

Stop-and-frisk was a crucial part of the package of law enforcement measures implemented by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani that saved the city. Under David Dinkins, who preceded Giuliani, murders averaged about 2,000 a year. There were 714 murders in New York the year Giuliani left office. Continuing Giuliani's policing techniques, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York had only 419 murders last year.

Just during his first year in office, Giuliani's policies cut the murder rate an astonishing 20 percent. That first year of his administration was responsible for 35 percent of the crime drop nationwide from 1993 to 1995. The New York Times hailed this remarkable achievement with an article headlined, "New York City Crime Falls but Just Why Is a Mystery."

It was mostly black lives that were saved by Giuliani's crime policies. By the end of his administration, the Rev. Calvin Butts, liberal pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, was comparing Giuliani to King Josiah of the Bible, who "brought order, peace, the law back to the land." The black minister told The New York Times, "I really think that without Giuliani, we would have been overrun."

About the same time as the Rev. Butts was comparing Giuliani to King Josiah, Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice claimed he felt less safe in New York under Giuliani. It was the ravings of a madman, like saying winter is warmer than summer. But now, Goldstein's ideas are being delivered from the federal bench by Judge Shira Scheindlin, who recently held New York City's stop-and-frisk policies unconstitutional.

Yes, Democrat Bob Filner can pat down his female employees, but cops can't pat down suspected criminals.

Liberals wail about guns, but how do they imagine police get guns off the street without going to high-crime neighborhoods and stopping young men acting suspiciously? Giuliani's policing policies, including stop-and-frisk, reduced gun homicides in New York by 75 percent within five years.

It is precisely the fear of being caught with a gun that induces young hoodlums not to carry them. The word gets out: Don't carry a gun! It's not worth the risk.

Of course cops don't find many guns anymore! That's because they're doing stop-and-frisk.

By liberals' logic, the government should stop doing meat inspections because it turns up so few cases of contamination these days, anyway. We can also drop the metal detectors at airports. How many people does the TSA actually catch trying to sneak guns onto airplanes?

Have liberals polled the elderly black residents of high-crime neighborhoods on stop-and-frisk? As soon as the word gets out that it's now safe to carry weapons, spray paint, drugs and stolen goods again, criminals will rule the streets and the elderly will, once more, be confined to their homes. As Martin Luther King said, crime is "the nightmare of the slum family."

But liberals don't care about the innocent black victims of crime. They don't care about citizens being prisoners in their own homes -- as long as it's not in their neighborhoods. The important thing is to self-righteously preen about racism.

When a policy that has saved thousands of black lives is attacked as "racist," the word has no meaning. At this rate, liberals will be claiming that peanut butter sandwiches are racist -- except that wouldn't be as crazy.

Voter ID laws don't actually save black lives the way stop-and-frisk policies do, but it's not clear how such laws hurt them. I suppose the argument is that by allowing Democrats to steal elections, they can pass all those laws that improve black lives immeasurably, like promoting trial lawyers, gay marriage, abortion and amnesty for illegals. You know, the Democratic policies that really enhance black lives.

The claim that modern voter ID laws are a racist Republican plot to prevent minorities from voting is complicated by the fact that, in 2011, such a law was enacted by the overwhelmingly Democratic Rhode Island legislature and, in fact, was pushed through by black Democrats.

Despite the pleas of national Democrats who realized their cover was being blown, the state senate's only black member, Democrat Harold Metts, sponsored a voted ID bill. He said he'd heard complaints about voter fraud for years, telling the story of one poll worker who encountered a voter who couldn't spell his own last name.

A black legislator in the House, Anastasia Williams, complained that when she showed up to vote in 2006, she was told she had already voted. Another time, she saw a Hispanic man vote, go to the parking lot and change his clothes, then go back in and vote again.

If white liberals are so concerned about black votes counting, why don't they ever vote for black representatives in their own congressional districts? Black Republicans are always elected from majority white districts: Gary Franks, J.C. Watts, Tim Scott and Allen West.

But black Democrats apparently can get elected to Congress only from specially designated minority districts. How come white liberals won't vote for a black representative? Can't a black person represent Nita Lowey's district?

Democrats do nothing for black Americans except mine them for votes, which they do by telling tall tales about racist Republicans.

SOURCE

*****************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

****************************