Federal Court Rules Against Liberals, Decimates Voter Fraud with Historic Ruling

A New Orleans-based federal court ruled Friday that a Texas law that requires proper identification to vote was constitutional, Reuters reports.

The 2-1 ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court decision that found that the voter ID law was discriminatory against minorities.

Reuters described the current law as being “designed as a fix for previous voter ID legislation struck down for being discriminatory,” with the three-judge panel noting that the new law has “improvements for disadvantaged minority voters.”

In a statement, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton praised the court’s decision.

“The court rightly recognized that when the Legislature passed Senate Bill 5 last session, it complied with every change the 5th Circuit ordered to the original voter ID law,” the statement read.

“Safeguarding the integrity of our elections is essential to preserving our democracy. The revised voter ID law removes any burden on voters who cannot obtain a photo ID.”

“Senate Bill 5 allows registered voters without one of the seven state-approved forms of photo identification to cast an in-person ballot by signing a sworn declaration of reasonable impediment stating why they couldn’t obtain photo ID,” the statement noted.

Liberal groups have predictably decried the ruling as discriminatory.

“No law should be allowed to stand that is merely built on the back of a plainly discriminatory law,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

I’ve never quite understood the idea that liberals think minorities who are legally entitled to vote are somehow biologically or socially unable to get identification but it’s those proposing voter ID laws who are the racists. The logic here eludes me.

Of course, perhaps it’s the specter of voter fraud. Democrats insist that it’s so rare as to be negligible, although few studies have been done on the matter. One — widely attacked by liberals after the election — found that the percentage of non-citizens who could have voted in the 2008 presidential election could be as high as 6.4 percent.

This probably doesn’t even include the biggest instance of voter fraud, however, which are people who are ineligible to vote because they’re registered in more than one state or locality.

A Judicial Watch study in Virginia found that at least 57,000 voters were illegally registered in two states just in the swing state of Virginia, compared with a little over 1,000 illegal aliens on voter rolls.

When you consider how few votes can decide elections these days, that’s not negligible.

Remember — back in 2000, the presidential election was decided by 537 votes in the state of Florida. Even if you disregard non-citizen voting, protecting the system from voters who are ineligible to vote in a certain district or state is vital to our national interest. It’s not discriminatory, and it’s not fighting a phantom problem. Voter ID ought to be a national issue, but Texas is certainly a start.

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Ben Carson Attacks Welfare Leeches, Moves Against Millions Living on Taxpayer Dime

Ben Carson just gave liberals one more reason to hate him.  The man who achieved world fame as a gifted neurosurgeon before entering politics already had a target on his back for being a black man with the courage to espouse conservative beliefs.

And now, the secretary for Housing and Urban Development is putting those beliefs into practice.

In an announcement this week, Carson proposed sweeping changes in the country’s subsidized housing program that would raise the percentage of their income housing assistance recipients pay toward rent from 30 percent to 35 percent. The proposal would also raise the minimum rent payment from $50 to $150.

In an interview with the Townhall website Friday, Carson said it was a way of “moving people along to a position of self-sufficiency.”

And naturally, liberals are screaming.

With the mainstream media giving the idea scathing headlines like “HUD Secretary Ben Carson Wants to raise rents on the poorest of the poor” (Los Angeles Times) and predicting — of course — that it would “hurt single mothers the most” (Washington Post), Carson had to reach out to a conservative-leaning site like Townhall to get his point out to Americans.

The proposal is called the “Making Affordable Housing Work Act,” and it would require congressional action because HUD can’t change rent rules on its own authority, according to CNN Money.

That means it’s already getting hammered by Democrats in Congress — who love nothing more than keeping poor people poor and voting Democrat — but Carson told Townhall he was expecting the resistance.

That doesn’t mean the ideas are bad, he said. With the economic improvements under President Donald Trump, with the nation’s unemployment rate is at an historic low, now is the time to overhaul the system, he said.

“I would only be shocked if someone said yes, please increase my rent,” he told Townhall. “No one’s ever going to say that, but you know we have exemptions for anybody for whom this is going to be a great hardship.” “For the vast, vast majority of cases it is not going to be.”

But for those who do find themselves kicking in more of their own money to pay for a roof over their own heads, only a liberal Democrat (or a mainstream media reporter) could treat Carson like he just stole Tiny Tim’s crutch.

First of all, the proposals don’t apply to the elderly or physically handicapped, only to able-bodied adults, according to CNN. Americans as a rule have a pretty low tolerance for able-bodied adults who would rather sponge off the taxpayers than provide for their own needs.

Second, as Carson said, the idea of subsidized housing isn’t supposed to be using taxpayer dollars to support families for generations of poverty, but that’s what it’s become.

“If you look at HUD over the last couple decades it’s been mostly about just putting people under a roof and sort of keeping them there,” Carson told Townhall.

“Instead of it being a stepladder it’s become a mode of life and, in many cases, for generation after generation of individuals and I don’t think it’s their fault. I think it’s the fault of the system that has basically sapped the incentive for people to work.”

Finally, the move is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration and Republican governors to tie the receipt of public assistance — like food stamps — to recipients being willing to work.

There’s going to be plenty of shrieking from the left as the proposal makes its way through Congress (and if Democrats win either the House or Senate in November it’s probably as good as dead), but Carson clearly thinks the time to act is now.

“Obviously we’re sensitive to people who have exceptional situations,” he told Townhall. “Obviously, we’re going to take care of those people in an appropriate way but the key thing for people to understand is that doing nothing simply is not an option.”

Liberal Democrats have had a lot of reasons to hate Ben Carson before this: His intelligence, his work ethic, his phenomenal success against the odds make him living evidence that the eternal victimhood preached by progressives is simply a lie.

With this proposal, he just gave them one more.

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More scientific deceit from the Left

Leftist ideologues couldn't lie straight in bed. 

Gary Kleck, a criminologist now retired from Florida State University, was likely astonished to learn that his controversial study, The National Self-Defense Survey, was accurate after all. He and FSU fellow professor Marc Gertz concluded, based on their carefully-crafted surveys conducted in 1993, that there were more than 2.2 million defensive gun uses (DGU) each year in the United States. The results were presented in 1994, published in 1995, and have been incessantly attacked by the anti-gun movement ever since. His conclusions didn’t fit the anti-gun narrative that guns are used in crimes far more than in self-defense and therefore private ownership must be abolished.

Kleck just learned that almost immediately after the publication of his study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a federal agency that receives more than $11 billion of taxpayer money every year, conducted its own study of the matter. It conducted three separate studies, in fact, and each of them came to the same conclusion as Kleck and Gertz: Indeed, about 2.5 million Americans use guns to defend themselves or their families every year.

But the CDC studies were never published. It would have infuriated the powers-that-be in the Clinton administration, and so the results were buried.

After reviewing the newly-discovered/recovered studies, Kleck — in his best professorial manner — wrote:

The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% [of the population experiencing a DGU in the past twelve months] therefore implies that in an average year during 1996-1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained [by me and Marc] Gertz in 1995 … CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.

Kleck added, “CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.”

In other words, the CDC got caught hiding information damaging to the anti-gun narrative then prevalent during the Clinton administration. But they didn’t bury it deeply enough.

Dean Weingarten, recently retired from the Department of Defense after a 30-year career in Army research, development, testing, and evaluation, knew exactly what the CDC was up to, calling “the timing and size of the surveys done by the CDC … fascinating. They were done immediately after Kleck and Gertz published their paper.”

Weingarten noted that

"Gary Kleck, as a scientist, a Democrat, and a proponent of a number of gun control measures, is careful not to cast aspersions on the CDC. He does not accuse anyone of malfeasance. He notes the surveys were done during the Clinton administration, and these findings would have worked against the gun control agenda of the administration."

Someone at the CDC made the decision not to publish these results.

Does any of this matter? It’s common knowledge that operatives supportive of the gun-control narrative have infiltrated various government agencies. These studies took place more than 20 years ago. There’s been a lot of water under that bridge since then. Private ownership of guns has skyrocketed, while overall gun violence has fallen by half. National reciprocity has already passed one branch of Congress. Americans own more weaponry than any other country on Earth.

It matters because first, it removes one more “talking point” used by anti-gunners to defend their intention to remove firearms from every law-abiding gun owner in the country. Second, it confirms that government agencies cannot be trusted without verification. Third, it is one more argument in the arsenal of those promoting private gun ownership to those who haven’t yet made up their minds.

That means that the real battlefield isn’t between Kleck’s study and the the CDC’s failure to admit the truth. Anti-gunners aren’t likely to change sides merely because of deceit committed by one of their own 25 years ago. The real battle is in the hearts and minds of Americans who will one day have to take a stand on the issue, one way or the other.

This obvious example of deceit on the part of the CDC is just one more reason why education is of paramount importance. Educating the American populace is key on the issues involving gun control and gun ownership. And it’s precisely there where the educational programs of organizations such as the John Birch Society come into play — programs such as Support Your Local Police, Stop a Con Con, Get US Out! Of the United Nations, Get US Out! of NAFTA to stop the North American Union, and others.

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Fishing



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