Larry Flynt's Blog, page 15

Time to be Active Citizens

by Nat Hentoff

In years to come, no matter who’s President, if America is to remain a self-governing republic, more of us have to be directly engaged in civic life. For example, by working with neighbors to improve and strengthen our communities. But preoccupied by the sorry state of the economy and fear of terrorism that has lingered since 9/11, too many Americans have shirked their responsibility to be active citizens. It’s a shortcoming that must be remedied.

How many of you have heard of the Corporation for National & Community Service or the National Conference on Citizenship? I’m supposed to be a nut on civics but wasn’t aware of those organizations until I read about their disturbing report “Civic Life in America: Key Findings on the Civic Health of the Nation” in a recent Judges’ Journal article by Jason L. S. Raia. He’s vice-president of education at Freedoms Foundation and also serves as Pennsylvania State Coordinator for We The People and Project Citizen.

According to “Civic Life in America,” less than 20% of Americans—aside from voting in elections—participate “in political activities” all the rest of the time. What especially depresses me is that just 3.1% participate “in a protest or demonstration.” Bush, Cheney and Obama have given us so much to protest.

I’ve often asked where the hell are the organized demonstrations in the streets and anywhere else that the Founders expected when they made a point of adding to First Amendment rights “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

More from “Civic Life in America”: “Nearly 60% of suburban and rural residents voted in 2008, while only 53% of urban residents voted.” (I expect those percentages were somewhat higher in the 2010 elections but sank back in 2012.) More surprising to me—considering myself, a lifelong city-dweller, to be hipper than those inhabiting the quiet areas of the country— is this finding: “Rural residents were also more likely to overcome the distance and join [political groups] than urban residents were.” Trying to explain these declines in engaged, participatory civic life, the report’s reasons include: “With stagnation in wages, more people are working longer hours and second or even third jobs to make ends meet, leaving little time for civics engagement.”

“Civic Life in America” makes a useful point that legislatures can do something to increase citizens’ involvement in the electoral process: “The fact that we still vote on a workday instead of Sunday, like many industrialized democracies around the world, makes voting inconvenient and, for some, nearly impossible.”

Ah, finally, the report gets back to a crucial distinction between many voters and non-voters: “More education equates to more likely civics behaviors that benefit our democracy. More than 73% of those who have received a bachelor’s degree voted in 2008 compared to 31% of those who did not complete high school.”

There’s another significant gap in the “Civic Life in America” report: “52% [of the educated] compared to 17% [without a degree] participated in organizations; 42% compared to 9% volunteered and participated in non-electoral political activities, and 14% compared to just 3% worked with a neighbor to fix a community problem.”

Jason L. S. Raia’s valuable article ends too gently: “Further research might discover whether those who demonstrate greater civics engagement are the product of more intensive civics learning in school.”

How could they not? Therefore, it’s imperative that school-board members and principals— some of whom may have flunked a civics class, if indeed such a course was ever offered—uphold a quintessential responsibility of educators. As Supreme Court Justice William Brennan personally told me, to make the Constitution part of the very lives of all students of whatever age. Otherwise, if many more Americans neglect to engage in civic life, the Fourth of July will be commemorated only by a few sadly appreciative citizens mourning the authors of our nation’s most cherished document.

——————-

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America and Living the Bill of Rights .

Larry Flynt on Larry King Now

Or watch at Hulu.com: http://www.hulu.com/watch/431977

Military’s Invasion of Privacy

With more and more unmanned drones flying overhead, has the President or Congress told you that the U.S. Air Force, like the CIA, does not have the authority to conduct domestic “nonconsensual surveillance” unless the spying (so it says) is “accidental”? Secrecy scholar Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists dug up an Air Force rule you may never have heard of.

Thanks to a Pentagon directive permitting limited domestic surveillance, when this lawless snooping takes place, the Air Force has up to 90 days to bury the results while it decides whether to keep and share that data. In a Wired.com article titled “Oops! Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You,” Spencer Ackerman sheds light on Aftergood’s discovery: “Acceptable surveillance includes flying drones over natural disasters; studying environmental changes; or keeping tabs above a domestic military base.”

Here comes the curveball the government doesn’t want you to see: “once the drones’ powerful sensors and cameras sweep up imagery and other data from Americans nearby, the Air Force won’t simply erase the tapes. It’ll start analyzing whether the people it’s recorded are, among other things, ‘persons or organizations reasonably believed to be engaged or about to engage in international terrorist or international narcotics activities.’” But you could unwittingly be nearby!

But how does the government “reasonably” believe who’s a criminal suspect? Ah, adds trenchant reporter Ackerman, “It doesn’t stop with the Air Force. ‘U.S. person information in the possession of an Air Force intelligence component may be disseminated pursuant to law, a court order’” or—now dig this— “the Pentagon directive that governs acceptable domestic surveillance.”

Ackerman provides a plausible example of what dragnet surveillance fosters: “So what begins as a drone flight over, say, a national park to spot forest fires could end up with a dossier on campers passed on to law enforcement.”

Loaded with sophisticated cameras and eavesdropping equipment, drones can document all sorts of information. What are those campers reading and talking about? Are they making furtive movements?

To make you feel a little more uneasy as you look skyward, Ackerman points out that “police departments across the country are beginning to buy and fly drones from the military. Now the Air Force’s powerful spy tools could creep into your backyard in a different way.”

So this is where we are in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. With deadly calm, the American Civil Liberties Union’s “Surveillance & Privacy” declaration lays out what will become of American values unless the spirit of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine inspires future firebrand patriots to take to the streets while also becoming digital Paul Reveres as they strive to save our republic.

Like all the Bush-Obama unbounded spying on We the People, the ACLU reminds us, drones are the responsibility of the White House and Congress. What, if anything, will they do from January 2013 on—and what will we demand they do—to change the naked truth of the ACLU’s “Surveillance & Privacy” indictment of Bush and Obama?

As the ACLU warns, “the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people. The data sits indefinitely in government databases, and the names of many innocent Americans end up on bloated and inaccurate watch lists that affect whether we can fly on commercial airlines, whether we can renew our passports…and even whether we can open bank accounts. … Dragnet surveillance undermines the right to privacy and the freedom of speech, association and religion.”

Moreover, the ACLU stipulates, “The FBI, the intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies and even firemen and emergency medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of detailed information about us.”

When I talk to students, I ask if they can see that government agents secretly databasing what they say and think violates their freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. “Is there anything,” I inquire, “you’d rather the government doesn’t know?” More than ever before in our history, it’s the job of We the People to make sure the government is no longer allowed to spy on us.

Or don’t you give a damn?

Frank Luntz

Just look at that face. What does it tell you? When we at HUSTLER look at it, we see the kind of guy who was bullied in high school and a loner in college. No friends, male or female—especially not female. Actually, political consultant and Fox News commentator Frank Luntz looks gay. Not macho gay, more nebbish gay. It’s what we call the Karl Rove Syndrome: the need to pay back your former peers for all the shit you got while growing up.

Like Rove, Luntz has figured that one out. He’s intent on making life as miserable as possible for everyone in the 99%, and he can do it thanks to his gift for propaganda. Luntz is probably the Republican Party’s single most important strategist. That’s because he is a master at using language—or should we say perverting language?—to sway America’s voters. For example, he changed the term inheritance tax to death tax. Why? Because he recognized that the words death tax stirred resentment in people, unlike inheritance tax.

During a 2003 interview on the PBS program Frontline, Luntz declared, “Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20% is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think.” Of course he is. If people think about the issues, they’ll see that the Republicans are out to screw the average working-class American. The way around that is emotionally loaded words that obscure the truth. Can you say “Orwellian”? Luntz can.

In fact, Luntz actually redefined the word Orwellian, which traditionally describes pretty much the kind of thing that Luntz does: redefine reality, making what’s not real seem real. But Luntz, keying in on George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” has cooked up a totally different meaning: “To be Orwellian is to speak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening…and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.” Can you say “evil”?

Yes, Luntz is evil. If he’s not, then the word evil has no meaning at all. Luntz is the guy who convinced the George W. Bush Administration to use the term global climate change instead of global warming because it sounded less alarming. This was, you understand, all part of the GOP’s strategy to convince people that the issue of global warming was still being debated among scientists even though Luntz, the strategist, knew “the scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed.” In other words: Fuck the planet and obstruct climate science. That’s evil, isn’t it? It’s certainly dishonest.

Dishonesty adheres to Frank Luntz like dog shit to a shoe. In 1996, his dubious methodology caught the attention of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), which asked to see some of his polling data. Citing client confidentiality, Luntz refused.

Here’s how Diane Colasanto, then AAPOR president, responded: “We understand the need for confidentiality, but once a pollster makes results public, the information needs to be public. People need to be able to evaluate whether it was sound research.”

The National Council on Public Polls censured Luntz “for allegedly mischaracterizing on MSNBC the results of focus groups” he’d conducted during the 2000 Republican National Convention. In September 2004, MSNBC dropped Luntz from its planned coverage of that year’s Presidential debate when Media Matters released a letter outlining Luntz’s GOP ties and questionable polling methodology.

More recently, Luntz was given the 2010 PolitiFact Lie of the Year award for convincing Republicans to use the term government takeover when referring to healthcare reform. (FYI: PolitiFact is a Pulitzer Prize-winning factchecking Web site.) Luntz knew that in the public’s mind, government takeovers are evil— something dictators do. By applying that pejorative term to Obamacare, Republican lawmakers were reasonably successful in avoiding a discussion about what the bill really sought to accomplish: health insurance for all. (The healthcare program wasn’t to be run by the government in any case; the insurance companies would retain control but be better regulated.)

In a memo to the GOP discussing Obama’s plan to create jobs, Luntz wrote: “It is tempting to counterattack using facts and figures. Resist the temptation. … The President’s language works because it speaks to a series of individual proposals that common sense suggests will lead to job creation.” In other words, deceive the public. Stay away from those pesky facts. Lie.

Today Luntz, through deception and lies, continues his efforts to help the GOP wield power in Washington. One of his main targets is the Occupy Wall Street movement, which he’s admitted has him “so scared” that he’s “frightened to death. They’re having an impact on what the American people think about capitalism.” So Luntz has coined some new terms with which to frame—or should we say obfuscate—the Republicans’ argument.

Here are some of the most glaring examples: Instead of government spending, Republicans refer to government waste. Instead of rich, they say job creator. Instead of Wall Street, they say Washington. This last switcheroo is very instructive. It’s actually Wall Street that controls our government, but Luntz and his fellow pro-Big Business right-wingers would have you believe the precise opposite is true.

So what more can we say about someone who makes his living by deceiving people? That Luntz is a pathetic excuse for a human being? Yes, without a doubt. That he is responsible for the corruption of our political process? He’s certainly one of the people responsible. That he’s a douchebag? Absolutely. Most of all, however, we see Frank Luntz as a man who has betrayed the very precepts of the democracy he lives in.

We see him as a traitor.

Bill O’Reilly

from HUSTLER Magazine October 2012

Hey, Billy boy, it’s been a while. The last time you graced this page was in 2003. We’re shocked that we let so much time go by. After all, you still have your show on the Fox News Channel. And it’s not as if you stopped being an asshole. In fact, you are clearly a bigger asshole than ever. Still, it might have taken us a bit longer to get back to you if it weren’t for your idiotic position regarding the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Florida resident Trayvon Martin.

First you complained about the public outcry that it took so long for the shooter, George Zimmerman, to be arrested. Then you attacked the victim by asking, “Is there anything wrong with knowing that he was suspended three times from school?” Really, Bill?! Using Martin’s scholastic records as possible justification for his shooting? Just how stupid are you?

The facts are clear: An unarmed African- American kid was gunned down by a selfappointed neighborhood watchman who pursued his quarry despite being instructed not to do so by a police dispatcher. Zimmerman shot and killed an innocent person. Nothing changes that, not even if Martin had burned down his school.

Then, Bill, there was your defense of Geraldo Rivera’s statement that “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman.” We’ve searched our files, and we can find no record of a hoodie ever being indicted for murder. Of course we get your Fox News colleague’s point: Black people shouldn’t wear hoodies—ever!—because they’re black! Only white people can get away with wearing them because, according to you and Rivera, white people don’t look like “wannabe gangsters” when they wear hoodies. That’s not just stupid, Bill. That’s downright racist.

But enough about your pathetic comments on the Trayvon Martin tragedy. We have ten years’ worth of O’Reilly stupidity to catch up on, starting with Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who was called a “slut” and “prostitute” by Rush Limbaugh (another stupid asshole).

Fluke originally made the news by testifying at a House Democrats’ steering committee hearing, where she expressed her support of mandatory health insurance coverage for contraceptives.

Republicans, on the other hand, were arguing that employers should not have to include contraception as part of their health insurance policies.

That’s where you came in, Bill. You (falsely) surmised that Fluke was advocating the government should pay for her birth control so she could have sex. (Full disclosure: HUSTLER believes the government should pay for women’s contraception so they will have sex with us.) You went on to suggest that if the government pays for a woman’s birth control, it should also pay for a man’s football equipment and gym membership…because they both ultimately relate to health.

That’s too ridiculous to comment on. In 2005, you first stated that Dr. George Tiller, who provided legal abortions at a clinic in Kansas, was “guilty of Nazi stuff.” You also referred to him as “Tiller the Baby Killer”—over and over. At the time, we thought you were inciting your loony audience to commit murder. Indeed, the gunman who ultimately assassinated Dr. Tiller in 2009 was exactly the kind of right-wing loon your show appeals to. Like many across the land, we blame you for his death, Bill.

You want to challenge that? Well, here’s another incendiary remark you made regarding the pro-choice doctor: “If the state of Kansas doesn’t stop this man [Tiller], then anybody who prevents that from happening has blood on their hands, as the Governor [Kathleen Sebelius] does right now.”

Remember that quote? Or how about this one? “No question Dr. Tiller has blood on his hands, but now so does Governor Sebelius. She is not fit to serve, nor is any Kansas politician who supports Tiller’s business of destruction. I wouldn’t want to be these people if there is a Judgment Day.”

In our opinion, that sure sounds like inciting violence. But if you think we’re wrong, let us give you an example of how an audience can be indirectly encouraged to take action.

We know you are paranoid about your wife having affairs with other men. In fact, you have been accused of pressuring the Nassau County [New York] Police Department into investigating whether or not she was cheating on you. We are therefore encouraging any of our readers who come across Mrs. O’Reilly to give her a friendly smile. Apparently she could use a relationship outside a marriage that, we assume, she finds unfulfilling.

Get our point, Bill?

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention your 2004 mix-up with former Fox News associate producer Andrea Mackris, who sued you for sexual harassment. She claimed that your repeated sexual overtures and numerous phone calls to her home created a hostile work environment.

Here is a portion of your remarks, which were allegedly caught on tape: “So anyway, I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda kissing your neck from behind…and then I would take the other hand with the falalfel [sic] thing, and I’d put it in your pussy.”

To top things off, according to Mackris, you even threatened her, warning, “If any woman breathed a word, I’ll make her pay so dearly that she’ll wish she’d never been born. I’ll rake her through the mud, bring up things in her life and make her so miserable that she’ll be destroyed.” Since it’s widely believed you settled with Mackris (some say to the tune of $20 million), we have to assume her accusations were true. If so, that makes you a pig as well as an asshole.

Wow! You know what, Bill? Given all of the foregoing, we’re the real assholes for having waited so long to take another shot at you.

The Morom Moments

LESSONS FROM THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

In the beginning was the Word…of one Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the controversial religious denomination commonly known as the Mormon Church. To this day, adherents revere Smith as a prophet who formulated The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ from ancient text inscribed on golden plates.

When 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney avows, “My faith is the faith of my fathers; I will be true to them,” the fathers he invokes are Joseph Smith and Smith’s successors.

In many authoritative biographies—namely those not written with the blessing of the Mormon establishment—Smith comes off as both a goodnatured grifter and a dangerous sociopath. According to ex-Mormon Kay Burningham—author of An American Fraud: One Lawyer’s Case Against Mormonism -the religion “was founded on deception and continues to build upon that deception.” She also asserts that Mormonism’s founders— Joseph Smith Jr. and family—“were opportunists driven to create an organization where they could acquire the social status and financial resources that they lacked.”

The story starts in 1823 when, as Joseph Smith Jr. proclaimed, an angel told him where to find sacred golden plates buried in a hill in upstate New York. However, according to Smith, it wasn’t until 1827 that he was allowed to extract the plates and begin translating what was engraved on them: a chronicle of God’s dealings with the descendants of a lost tribe of Israelites inhabiting the Americas from 2200 B.C. to 421 A.D.

Smith was mighty pleased: He had discovered God’s word, and he would bring the good news to the world. Witnesses say the religious zealot used seer stones to translate what was inscribed on the golden plates. However, skeptics suggest that Smith—a semiliterate farm boy schooled in the soaring language of the Bible—concocted The Book of Mormon out of his own fervid imagination.

This was no small achievement. Smith was a smart guy, and he had a family schooling in the art of cheating the gullible. His father, Joseph Sr., had been repeatedly charged with currency counterfeiting in Vermont in the 1820s. Joseph Jr. himself was hauled into court in the northeastern United States on multiple occasions. He was described in an 1826 New York legal proceeding as “a disorderly person and an impostor.”

According to historian Fawn Brodie, one of his preferred cons involved the help of his brother Hyrum. While visiting a neighboring household, Hyrum would secretly hide a valuable heirloom. When, days later, the victim complained that the prized object was missing, Hyrum came to the rescue. He volunteered his brother Joe Jr. to show up— for a small fee—and put “magic stones” into a hat. Joe would then put the hat over his face and stare into the stone-filled darkness to see where the lost item was—the location of which his faithful brother had already provided.

Smith said his ethical rule was, When the Lord commands, do it. This was convenient, as it was decreed by Joseph Smith that the Lord would only communicate with—you guessed it—Joseph Smith. Early on, he spoke of receiving a divine message about “plural marriage.” The Lord commanded that all Mormon men should take multiple wives and establish the tradition of polygamy. Smith’s wife at the time was skeptical.

The Mormon sect grew throughout the 1830s and 1840s, and so did the controversy. Land theft, bank fraud and cattle rustling were alleged. Historian Will Bagley describes what happened when the Mormons were forced to flee westward and resettle: “After stirring up a religious civil war in Missouri and being exiled to Illinois, Smith founded a kingdom on the Mississippi at Nauvoo, Illinois. Having secured a charter that made him ruler of a city-state and a wealthy land developer, Smith raised a private army, made himself

America’s first lieutenant general since George Washington and began seducing women and barely pubescent girls with an abandon that would make Bill Clinton blush.” Mormon converts began to look askance at sainted Joe, and today their accounts read like those of cult escapees. “When I embraced Mormonism, I conscientiously believed it to be of God,” a disaffected convert wrote in 1831. “I now know Mormonism to be a delusion.”

Mostly what the Mormon Church coveted was the property of converts and their free labor. Joseph Smith’s own personal secretary concluded that Smith and other Mormon leaders were “confirmed infidels who have not the fear of God before their eyes. They lie by revelation, swindle by revelation, cheat and defraud by revelation.”

Jailed on charges of treason, Smith—along with his brother Hyrum—ended up murdered by a lynch mob in Illinois in 1844. It’s not a surprising turn given the level of animosity that Mormons’ criminality had evoked among their preferred targets— the “filthy Gentiles” who disdained the upstart religion.

The Mormons fled still further west, looking for the Holy Land, their Zion, the paradise where they could settle without interference from the Gentiles. They discovered Zion in the sunblasted wilderness of Utah. That’s where the new prophet, Brigham Young, was presiding when 120 men, women and children traveling across Mormon territory by wagon train were slaughtered. This was the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, which historians believe was sparked by an apocalyptic hysteria that the federal government was planning to invade Utah and destroy Young’s people. The apocalypse never came to pass.

By the mid-1850s,W.M.F.Magraw—a personal friend of U.S. President Franklin Pierce—would conclude that civil law in Mormon territory was “overshadowed and neutralized [by an] ecclesiastical organization as despotic, dangerous and damnable as has ever been known to exist in any country…all alike are set upon by the self-constituted theocracy, whose laws, or rather whose conspiracies, are framed in dark corners.”

Years earlier, John Corrill—a onetime prominent Mormon official and a member of the Missouri legislature—authored A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints. Corrill, who was excommunicated in 1839, accused the Mormon leadership of “bad management, selfishness, seeking for riches, honor and dominion, tyrannizing over the people, and striving constantly after power and property.”

Laws undermined by conspiracies and outrageous privilege coupled with unbounded greed and power-maddened mismanagement: This sounds a lot like a description of Corporate America today. Perhaps this explains why our current Mormon Moment is really about the Mormon Church’s engagement and success in the corporatocracy.

In this context, think about Mitt Romney: Here is a man who, while heading the leveraged buyout firm Bain Capital, got rich as an opportunistic “vulture capitalist” by exploiting and plundering companies built on the hard work of others. Romney indeed keeps the faith of his fathers.

———————————-

Christopher Ketcham is a New York City-based freelance reporter who has written for Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, Salon.com and many other publications and Web sites. He can be reached at CKetcham99@MindSpring.com. More of his work can be found at ChristopherKetcham.com.

Politics Are Us

You may not think of holiday shopping as a political act. Think again.

I often hear people say they just don’t care about politics, that they’re not political at all. I say to them: You live in a capitalist democracy; just about everything you do is a political act. When you voice your opinions without fear, that’s a political act. When you freely explore your sexuality, that’s a political act. When you read this magazine, that’s a political act. And when you exercise the power of the consumer, that’s a political act. These days, corporate fortunes hold more power than ever over our country’s future. As you do your holiday shopping, be aware of the power that you hold. Does the store, manufacturer or producer you’re buying from share your concern about the welfare of workers, economic fairness and the future of the planet? If not, find one that does.

American capitalism is about competition. Make sure the companies that participate in our marketplace deserve your hard-earned dollars.

$1 MILLION CASH REWARD TO RICHARD MOURDOCK

As posted in Indianapolis Star

Dear Mr. Mourdock,

I am offering you $1 million in cash, to be deposited in any bank you designate in the United States, Cayman Islands or Switzerland, for proof to substantiate your statement on Tuesday, October 23, 2012, that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Please be kind enough to verify your claim for a wondering nation. I will accept for purposes of this reward any verifiable transcript of your personal conversations with God; letters, email, text messages or videos from God, or messages addressed to you from God transmitted by any third party, including the Republican National Committee or the Romney/Ryan campaign.

I assume that you would not have made this statement unless you had been authorized by God. No one who believes in God would ever use the Almighty’s name in vain. That would be blasphemy. I am eager to receive your proof and pay my $1 million reward to you. Please send evidence immediately to me.

This offer is valid until 8 P.M. (ET) on November 5, 2012.

Sincerely yours,

Why You Should Vote the Democratic Ticket

If the Republicans have their way during this election cycle, here’s what you will lose:

1. Your job: Assuming that Mitt Romney sticks with the GOP’s austerity program—the drastic cutting of government spending—our economy will head back into a recession if not a depression. Want proof of that? Look at the mess Europe is in. Spain, Italy

Greece and other countries are imposing the same kind of austerity measures on their citizens the GOP wants to impose on you. Plus the GOP wants to gut your Social Security.

2. Your civil rights: The Republicans are against gay marriage, equal pay for women, collective bargaining, legal abortions and contraceptives, not to mention your right to vote. If you doubt me, Google it.

There’s more, of course, but just the foregoing should be enough to convince you to vote straight Democratic this Election Day.

The GOP “Voter Fraud” (2012 Edition)

By Brad Friedman

The Republican Party is once again pretending that Democrats are committing “voter fraud”—meaning people, perhaps tens of thousands, are voting illegally for Democratic candidates. At the same time, ironically, the GOP’s own nominee for President—Mitt Romney—appears to have committed voter fraud. And he’s not the only high-profile Republican to defraud the very system the GOP claims Democrats are violating. I have evidence of Romney’s real voter-fraud crimes. Republicans, on the other hand, are just making shit up.

Democrats should have seen the “legalization” of voter suppression by the GOP coming long ago. During a 1980 speech to thousands of Baptist preachers in Dallas, right alongside Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, one of the founding fathers of the modern conservative movement was caught on videotape revealing the entire point of today’s new polling-place photo ID restrictions instituted in state after state by Republicans over the past year.

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich admitted to the crowd of supposedly moral, Christian men. “Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now.”

Weyrich, a cofounder of the Moral Majority and neoconservative Heritage Foundation, continued: “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Got that? For Republicans to win elections, they need to reduce voter turnout. And this year, they’ve legalized their plan to do it.

Here’s how: Weyrich also cofounded the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This right-wing, billionaire-funded nonprofit brings together corporate lobbyists, advocacy groups and state lawmakers to secretly draft “model legislation” that is then pushed through statehouses around the country. One such model is the vote-suppressing polling-place photo ID restriction bills passed by more than a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures and signed by GOP governors in the wake of their party’s 2010 “wave election.”

The intent of the new restrictions on voting rights is clear. They are meant to keep African-Americans, Hispanics, urban dwellers, the elderly and students—all constituencies that vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, yet who disproportionately lack the type of state-issued photo ID now required under these new laws—from being able to cast their once-legal vote.

Republicans pretend the new laws are meant to curb a Democratic “voter fraud” epidemic, but they’re lying. To date, proponents of the laws have been unable to show any historic examples of polling-place voter impersonation—the only type of voter fraud that can possibly be deterred by photo ID requirements.

Advocates of the restrictions point instead to a handful of ACORN’s tens of thousands of low-level registration workers who committed voter-registration fraud. But mandatory photo IDs do nothing to stop that type of fraud. [For more on ACORN, see companion article.] Republicans also point to absentee-ballot fraud. But again, photo IDs do nothing to stop that kind of fraud.

Indiana was the first state in the Union where Republicans successfully instituted photo ID restrictions. During the first election under that new law, legally registered college students, elderly nuns and even World War II veterans were turned away from the polls without being allowed to vote. Recent surveys indicate that a majority of Americans are misinformed enough to support restrictive electoral laws. But that’s likely because they don’t realize some 21 million of their fellow, legally registered voters do not possess the type of ID now mandated under the new restrictions.

Proponents argue: “You need a photo ID to buy cigarettes or alcoholic beverages or to get on an airplane! So why not to vote?!” However, the truth is you don’t need a photo ID to buy cigs or booze. I’ve been doing both for years and can’t remember the last time I was carded. Neither is one needed to board a commercial airplane. Yes, it might make your life a bit easier, but airlines aren’t dumb enough to turn away some 21 million potential customers. They’ve found ways to accommodate those millions who do not have a photo ID.

More to the point, all of those things are privileges—unlike voting, which is a Constitutional right. Republicans, on the other hand, are hoping you’re dumb enough to fall for their anti-American, antidemocratic scam. They also hope you don’t hear about voters like 84-year-old Ruthelle Frank, an elected town official in Brokaw, Wisconsin. She was born at home and therefore never had a birth certificate, which is now required to receive a so-called free voter ID at Wisconsin’s Division of Motor Vehicles. Frank, disabled, has never had a driver’s license. She is listed in the state registry, however, so for $20 (an unconstitutional “poll tax”), she’s been told, she can have a birth certificate issued. That will, in turn, allow her to qualify for a “free” ID.

Sadly, Frank’s name is misspelled in the state registry. So it would take an additional $200 to have that correction made. Thus, for a mere $220, Frank—who voted without problem for 63 years—may receive her “free” ID required by Wisconsin’s new law…assuming she finds someone to drive her to the DMV.

It’s also impossible for Wisconsin resident Bettye Jones, who was born in Tennessee, to get her “free” ID. The 77-year-old African-American recently moved to Wisconsin from Ohio, where she had a valid driver’s license. But Wisconsin officials won’t accept an out-of-state driver’s license for voting, and despite a “thorough search,” Tennessee officials were unable to locate her birth certificate, according to the lawsuit Jones has filed. Without that birth certificate, she cannot vote in Wisconsin. Two court cases have found that the voter-suppression law violates Wisconsin’s constitution. We’ll see if the state’s Republican-majority Supreme Court agrees.

Then there’s Dorothy Cooper, a 96-year-old African-American in Tennessee. Nothing in her state’s constitution seems to disallow the new GOP law. So Cooper, who says she voted without any problems throughout the Jim Crow era in the South, is now facing one for the first time. Cooper doesn’t drive, but she does have a birth certificate. However, she was denied a “free” ID at the DMV because her itself—who had manufactured fraudulent voter registrations instead of doing the hard work of signing up genuine voters. Nobody ever cast a single vote in any election via an inappropriate registration by an ACORN worker.

In early 2011, Virginia’s Gingrich for President campaign submitted a large number of fraudulent petition signatures in its futile effort to get the candidate on the state’s 2012 Presidential primary ballot. In a statement aired by CNN in December 2011, Gingrich admitted that “1,500 of them were by one guy who, frankly, committed fraud.”

Gingrich, whose tally of bogus signatures was far worse than that of the now-defunct ACORN, failed to turn in the “one guy” who he claimed was responsible. An official at the Virginia State Board of Elections told me that, if true, what Gingrich described is “definitely an illegal act.” And earlier this year, an official at the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia confirmed to me “that there is an investigation underway.”

Here’s a quick summary of other recent serious fraud allegations and convictions against high-profile Republicans:

•In February 2012, Indiana’s Republican Secretary of State Charlie White was declared guilty of having registered and voted from a residence where he did not actually live. In a separate civil case, White was ordered removed from office by a circuit court judge, who ruled that the defendant’s fraudulent registration made him ineligible to be on the 2010 ballot. It was the felony convictions, however, that forced White out of office. Other than that, he received a slap on the wrist: one year of home detention.

•In March 2011, then-GOP Presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman was also identified as having committed apparent voter fraud. The former governor of Utah remained registered to vote in that state well over a year after he had been appointed U.S. ambassador to China. As the Salt Lake Tribune noted: “Huntsman voted by absentee ballot for last year’s [2010] general election using the state-owned mansion on South Temple as his Utah residence— months after Governor Gary Herbert settled into the historic building and Huntsman purchased a home in Washington, D.C.”

•In February 2012, Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana)—who, like Charlie White, hails from the first state in the nation to implement voter-suppressing photo ID laws—was accused by a group of Tea Partiers (who find him too moderate) of having committed voter fraud. It seems Lugar had been registered to vote at the address of the Indianapolis house he reportedly sold decades ago. Lugar hasn’t resided in the Hoosier State since moving to the Washington, D.C., area after first winning a Senate seat in 1976.

•Representative Todd Akin (R-Missouri), who is vying for the U.S. Senate this year, has been voting for years, according to the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, from a house in an electoral district where he does not actually reside. The property, the newspaper found, is vacant and has been long scheduled for suburban redevelopment. Nevertheless, Akin has continued to use it as his voting address for some seven elections, ever since the congressman and his family moved to their new house 18 miles away. BTW: Akin supports polling-place photo IDs for everyone else.

•In a ham-handed attempt to demonstrate that polling-place voter fraud exists in New Hampshire, despite election officials’ assertions to the contrary, GOP propagandist and federally convicted criminal James O’Keefe led a videotaped conspiracy to commit just such a fraud during the Granite State’s “First in the Nation” primary last January. Unamused, a Republican mayor called for O’Keefe and his coconspirators to be “arrested and prosecuted.” New Hampshire’s attorney general is investigating O’Keefe on charges of voter fraud.

•In what appears to have been an attempt at massive election fraud, Charlie Webster—chair of the Maine Republican Party—publicly announced Mitt Romney the winner of the state’s 2012 GOP caucuses (by just 194 votes) before hundreds of voters in two different counties had even convened. Moreover, dozens of towns that had already held caucuses were fraudulently reported by the party as having had no voters at all. Several months earlier, Webster had named hundreds of student voters as having committed fraud when they hadn’t. An investigation by Maine’s Republican secretary of state determined that the students were, in fact, all legal voters. Apparently hoping to dissuade them from voting, he nonetheless sent them threatening letters.

•In a hilarious turn of events, religious supporters of Newt Gingrich charged that religious supporters of then- Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum rigged an informal election during a secret meeting near Austin, Texas, last January. The confab had been called by “religious conservative leaders” to coalesce their support around a single GOP alternative to Mitt Romney.

Other examples of high-profile GOP voter fraud include, among others, the 156-year sentences imposed on eight top election officials in Clay County, Kentucky, who had changed the votes tallied by electronic voting systems; the guilty plea of a registration firm’s owner accused of hoodwinking registered California Democratic voters into switching their allegiance to the GOP in 2008; and neocon superstar Ann Coulter’s alleged multiple cases of demonstrated wrongdoing, including falsifying her address in Florida.

Not a single one of the above instances of election fraud would have been deterred or prevented by the polling-place photo ID restrictions Republicans have instituted, or are attempting to institute, in at least a dozen states across the country prior to the 2012 Presidential election. Meanwhile, the epidemic of election fraud by prominent GOP figures continues unabated.