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Banned
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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
ok, so you only have prejudices against christo fascists (whatever that entails), real estate holders, anyone that worked for reagan, townhall.com correspondents, and any WND journalists.
you do realize that the same could be said about you or any of the sources you cite as credible and believable, right?
If I were to post that all moveon.org columnists were batshiat crazy and that michael moore had zero credibility, or that cnn and msnbc were communistic news agencies who were bent on destroying personal freedoms and liberties, as well as stating that the UN, george soros, and the democratic party in general were nothing more than socialist ideologists bent on bushwacking the foolish and unsuspecting 'liberals' into believing that that they were for a classless society and only had your best interests at heart were in actuality a totalitarian regime bent on reforming society into a feudalist world with the elites and the serfs, and you are a serf.....would I be credible or batshiat crazy?  |
The problem for your side of this argument is that everything I have posted is easily supported. CNP's Weyrich illustrates an at least 27 year old disinformation campaign that was so successful, it swallowed the credibility of the republican party, the white house, the Pentagon, and the Justice Dept.:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051201740.html
Air Force Removes Chaplain From Post
Officer Decried Evangelicals' Influence
By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 13, 2005; Page A04
DENVER, May 12 -- An Air Force chaplain who complained that evangelical Christians were trying to "subvert the system" by winning converts among cadets at the Air Force Academy was removed from administrative duties last week, just as the Pentagon began an in-depth study of alleged religious intolerance among cadets and commanders at the school.
"They fired me," said Capt. MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran minister who was removed as executive officer of the chaplain unit on May 4. "They said I should be angry about these outside groups who reported on the strident evangelicalism at the academy. The problem is, I agreed with those reports."....
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Here's the co-founder of CNP the year before "the founding":
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http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=22222
The New Face of Jim Crow: Voter Suppression in America
Introduction
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
<h2>— Radical Right strategist Paul Weyrich</h2>, at a 1980 training session for 15,000 conservative preachers in Dallas.
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Quote:
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/weyrich/050222
Protecting America's vote
<h2>Paul Weyrich</h2>
February 22, 2005
Despite the fact that we were told that things went well in the 2004 elections, <h2>there was an unprecedented amount of voter fraud in various parts of the country.</h2> Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ.), the Chairman of the Republican Policy Committee and thus a Member of the Senate leadership, has issued a paper entitled "Putting an End to Voter Fraud" and its suggestions are surely worth considering. The Help America Vote Act, which was supposed to take care of a number of problems in the American election system when it was enacted in 2002, may have made matters worse. In any case, the Act comes up for renewal shortly and there are changes which ought to be made.
First, Congress should require that voters show a photo ID at the polls. I have to show a Photo ID at various stores. I even had to show a photo ID at a doctor's office. Senator Kyl says "without genuine, photographic identification, the avenues for manipulation and fraud by unscrupulous individuals will remain open to exploitation."
Second, Congress should examine the integrity of the voter registration process and the ongoing failure of states to maintain accurate voter lists. Senator Kyl points out that current federal laws governing registration list maintenance prevent local officials from taking a zero tolerance approach to voter fraud. In addition Kyl says that "Congress should make certain that non citizens are not illegally registering and voting: only Americans should decide the results of American elections."
Third, Congress should examine the extent to which early and absentee voting increases the likelihood of fraudulent votes being cast. The Arizona Senator said that alternative voting system should have at least as many fraud protection safeguards as are available on election day. He calls on Congress to examine how states conduct early and absentee voting (to) determine whether legislation is necessary to protect voters against vote dilution through others' fraud.
Kyl, the Policy Committee Chairman, says that no election related legislation should proceed in this Congress unless these issues receive a through examination. I could not agree more.....
Quote:
http://www.au.org/site/News2?page=Ne...qllvxdo1.app1b
Behind Closed Doors
Who Is The Council For National Policy And What Are They Up To? And Why Don’t They Want You To Know?
by Jeremy Leaming and Rob Boston
....How did this influential organization get its start? To find the answer, it’s necessary to go all the way back to 1981 and the early years of the Reagan presidency.
<h3>Excited by Reagan’s election, Tim LaHaye, Richard Viguerie, Weyrich</h3> and a number of far-right conservatives began meeting to discuss ways to maximize the power of the ultra-conservative movement and create an alternative to the more centrist Council on Foreign Relations. In mid May, about 50 of them met at the McLean, Va., home of Viguerie, owner of a conservative fund-raising company.
Viguerie had a knack for networking. Shortly before helping launch the CNP, Viguerie and Weyrich initiated the Moral Majority and tapped Falwell to run it, making the obscure Lynchburg pastor a major political figure overnight. Viguerie’s goal was to lead rural White voters in the South out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party by emphasizing divisive social issues such as abortion, gay rights and school prayer.
Back when the CNP was founded, it was a little less media shy. In the summer of 1981, Woody Jenkins, a former Louisiana state lawmaker who served as the group’s first executive director, told Newsweek bluntly, “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”
From the beginning, the CNP sought to merge two strains of far-right thought: the theocratic Religious Right with the low-tax, anti-government wing of the GOP. The theory was that the Religious Right would provide the grassroots activism and the muscle. The other faction would put up the money.
The CNP has always reflected this two-barreled approach. The group’s first president was LaHaye, then president of Family Life Seminars in El Cajon Calif. LaHaye, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher who went on in the 1990s to launch the popular “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic potboilers, was an early anti-gay crusader and frequent basher of public education and he still is today.
Alongside figures like LaHaye and leaders of the anti-abortion movement, the nascent CNP also included Joseph Coors, the wealthy beer magnate; Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt, two billionaire investors and energy company executives known for their advocacy of right-wing causes, and William Cies, another wealthy businessman.
Interestingly, the Hunts, Cies and LaHaye all were affiliated with the John Birch Society, the conspiracy-obsessed anti-communist group founded in 1959. LaHaye had lectured and conducted training seminars frequently for the Society during the 1960s and ’70s a time when the group was known for its campaign against the civil rights movement.
Bringing together the two strains of the far right gave the CNP enormous leverage. The group, for example, could pick a candidate for public office and ply him or her with individual donations and PAC money from its well-endowed, business wing.
The goals of the CNP, then, are similarly two-pronged. Activists like Noromgquist, who once said he wanted to shrink the federal government to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub, are drawn to the group for its exaltation of unfettered capitalism, hostility toward social-service spending and low (or no) tax ideology.
Dramatically scaling back the size of the federal government and abolishing the last remnants of the New Deal may be one goal of the CNP, but many of the foot soldiers of the Religious Right sign on for a different crusade: a desire to remake America in a Christian fundamentalist image.
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<h2>....and reality rears it's ugly head:</h2>
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/wa...pagewanted=all
<h2>In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud</h2>
By ERIC LIPTON and IAN URBINA
Published: April 12, 2007
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON, April 11 — Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.....
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/wa...=1&oref=slogin
April 11, 2007
Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud
By IAN URBINA
WASHINGTON, April 10 — A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.
Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.
The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states.
Democrats say the threat is overstated and have opposed voter identification laws, which they say disenfranchise the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs and are more likely to be Democrats.
Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”
The topic of voter fraud, usually defined as people misrepresenting themselves at the polls or improperly attempting to register voters, remains a lively division between the two parties. It has played a significant role in the current Congressional investigation into the Bush administration’s firing of eight United States attorneys, several of whom, documents now indicate, were dismissed for being insufficiently aggressive in pursuing voter fraud cases.
The report also addressed intimidation, which Democrats see as a more pervasive problem.
And two weeks ago, the panel faced criticism for refusing to release another report it commissioned concerning voter identification laws. That report, which was released after intense pressure from Congress, found that voter identification laws designed to fight fraud can reduce turnout, particularly among members of minorities. In releasing that report, which was conducted by a different set of scholars, the commission declined to endorse its findings, citing methodological concerns.
A number of election law experts, based on their own research, have concluded that the accusations regarding widespread fraud are unjustified. And in this case, one of the two experts hired to do the report was Job Serebrov, a Republican elections lawyer from Arkansas, who defended his research in an e-mail message obtained by The Times that was sent last October to Margaret Sims, a commission staff member.
“Tova and I worked hard to produce a correct, accurate and truthful report,” Mr. Serebrov wrote, referring to Tova Wang, a voting expert with liberal leanings from the Century Foundation and co-author of the report. “I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.”
He added: “Neither one of us was willing to conform results for political expediency.”
For contractual reasons, neither Ms. Wang nor Mr. Serebrov were at liberty to comment on their original report and the discrepancies with the final, edited version.
The original report on fraud cites “evidence of some continued outright intimidation and suppression” of voters by local officials, especially in some American Indian communities, while the final report says only that voter “intimidation is also a topic of some debate because there is little agreement concerning what constitutes actionable voter intimidation.”
<h3>The original report said most experts believe that “false registration forms have not resulted in polling place fraud,” but the final report cites “registration drives by nongovernmental groups as a source of fraud.”</h3>
Although Democrats accused the board of caving to political pressure, Donetta L. Davidson, the chairwoman of the commission, said that when the original report was submitted, the board’s legal and research staff decided there was not enough supporting data behind some of the claims. So, she said, the staff members revised the report and presented a final version in December for a vote by the commissioners.
“We were a small agency taking over a huge job,” said Ms. Davidson click to show , who was appointed to the agency by President Bush in 2005. “I think we may have tried to do more research than we were equipped to handle.” She added that the commission had “always stuck to being bipartisan.”
The commission, which was created by Congress in 2002 to conduct nonpartisan research on elections, consists of two Republicans and two Democrats. At the time of the report, one of the two Democrats had left for personal reasons and had not yet been replaced, but the final report was unanimously approved by the other commissioners.
Gracia Hillman, the Democratic commissioner who voted in favor of releasing the final report, said she did not believe that the editing of the report was politically motivated or overly extensive.
“As a federal agency, our responsibility is to ensure that the research we produce is fully verified,” Ms. Hillman said. “Some of the points made in the draft report made by the consultants went beyond what we felt comfortable with.”
<h3>The Republican Party’s interest in rooting out voter fraud has been encouraged by the White House. In a speech last April, Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s senior political adviser, told a group of Republican lawyers that election integrity issues were an “enormous and growing” problem.
“We’re, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” Mr. Rove said. “I mean, it’s a real problem.”</h3>
Several Democrats said they believed that politics were behind the commission’s decision to rewrite the report.
“This was the commission’s own study and it agreed in advance to how it would be done, but the most important part of it got dropped from the final version,” said Representative José E. Serrano, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees the commission. “I don’t see how you can conclude that politics were not involved.”
Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, another New York Democrat, who requested the draft report from Ms. Davidson during a subcommittee hearing last month, agreed.
“By attempting to sweep this draft report under the rug, the E.A.C. is throwing out important work, wasting taxpayer dollars and creating a cloud of suspicion as to why it is acting this way,” he said.
Some scholars and voting advocates said that the original report on fraud, for which the commission paid the authors more than $100,000, was less rigorous than it should have been. But they said they did not believe that was the reason for the changes.
“Had the researchers been able to go even further than they did, they would have come to same conclusions but they would have had more analysis backing them up,” said Lorraine C. Minnite, a political science professor at Barnard College who is writing a book on voter fraud. “Instead, the commission rewrote their report and changed the thrust of its conclusions.”
Ray Martinez III, the Democrat who left the commission for personal reasons, quit last August. He said in an interview that he was not present for any discussion or editing of the voter fraud report.
Mr. Martinez added, however, that he had argued strenuously that all reports, in draft or final editions, should be made public. But he said he lost that argument with other commissioners.
“Methodology concerns aside, we commissioned the reports with taxpayer funds, and I argued that they should be released,” he said, referring to the delay in the release of the voter ID report. “My view was that the public and the academics could determine whether it is rigorous and if it wasn’t then the egg was on our face for having commissioned it in the first place.”
In recent months, the commission has been criticized for failing to provide proper oversight of the technology laboratories that test electronic voting machines and software. The commission is also responsible for conducting research and advising policy makers on the implementation of the Help America Vote Act, the federal overhaul of election procedure prompted by the 2000 Florida debacle. |
These "folks" are a plague. While you downplay or dismiss the influence they wield and the damage that they do, they keep doing it....never missing a beat.... |