Republican Lies category archive

When the rather hysterically-phrased stories broke last week that the latest gut-out-the-vote efforts in Texas might disproportionately affect women (for example) because of differences in documents occasioned by marital name changes, much skepticism was exhibited.

Take this, skeptics:

A new voter ID law requiring strict uniformity across all forms of identification nearly kept a Texas district judge from being able to cast her ballot in the state’s early voting session. According to Think Progress, Judge Sandra Watts was challenged at the poll when she presented her usual ID.

(snip)

Watts said she has voted in every election for the last 49 years and that her name on her driver’s license has remained the same for the last 52. The address on her license and voter registration card have been the same for more than two decades. However, on Tuesday, at the outset of early voting for the Nov. 5 election, the judge was asked to sign a “voter’s affidavit” saying that she is who she says she is before she would be allowed to vote.

The problem was that her maiden name was listed as her middle name on her driver’s license, whereas on her voter registration card, her actual middle name is listed.

Bill Maxwell has been reading his son’s history assignments and has discovered something about teabaggery: Its willful misreading of history.

A nugget:

And not surprisingly, considering how many other misstatements come from the mouths of people waving around pocket-sized copies of the Constitution, their take on it is mostly wrong.

More history at the link.

Chauncey Devega tries to understand the Republican Party’s threat to shoot the economy. A nugget:

Outside observers are unable to grasp the Republican Party’s political logic because they are not among its true believers and faithful. The Republican Party is now a cult. Here, faith, as in religion, is a belief in that which cannot be proven by ordinary means. As such, how can we as a society resolve political disputes if one group of people is committed to magical thinking, and is therefore immune from appeals to empirical truth?

“It is true because we believe it to be so” is a logic that has brought down many societies and governments. Unfortunately, such a slogan is also the motto of the contemporary Tea Party GOP.

Read the rest.

Gutting out the vote, because Republicans know they can’t win a fair election . . . .

Ebony Wright, a 37-year-old paralegal from Suffolk, has voted in the past three Virginia general elections and in two Democratic primaries.

Yet on Sept. 27, Suffolk Registrar Susan Saunders sent Wright a letter saying her name had been stricken from the voting rolls because she’d moved to another state.

Wright’s was one of 57,293 names on a list sent by the state Board of Elections to voter registrars across Virginia 10 weeks before the Nov. 5 election for governor, House of Delegates and city offices.

State officials told registrars that simply being on the list was sufficient grounds for removal from the voting rolls.

Gory details at the link.

Gutting out the vote in Virginia:

Under the guise of cleaning up the voter rolls, the Virginia Board of Elections, which is comprised of two Republicans and one Democrat, sent a list of approximately 57,000 voters to county election officials in August and directed these officials to cancel their registrations. The board is claiming that all of these voters have registered in other states, and must therefore be removed to prevent them from voting in two states.

Every state periodically cleans their lists to remove duplicate registrations. However, unlike most states, Virginia officials are sending notices to voters stating that their registrations have already been cancelled, with no prior notice, only weeks before the October 14th deadline to register for the November election. If a legitimate Virginia voter’s registration is cancelled by mistake and that voter doesn’t see the notice in time to re-register, they’ll be effectively disenfranchised.

Follow the link. Sign the petition.

It likely will not stop this, but do not sit by quietly. Remember, Republicans do this stuff because they know that cheating is their best strategy.

There is virtue in protesting the detestable.

Afterthought:

For all I know, I’m one of the 57,000. I don’t know whether I’m still on Delaware’s or possibly even Pennsylvania’s roles.

I expect the great majority, perhaps almost all, are persons who have moved, registered legally in their new locations, and have no intention of gaming the system.

System-gaming is a Republican thing.

In Republican World, democracy is all well and good, as long as it votes Republican.

A clear and present danger to the Republic:

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Read Chait on Jim Crow, Jr.

He’s right, you know.

Peter St. Onge tells the story of a voter who passed literacy tests, an earlier gut-out-the-vote tactic, to voter ID, the current rage amongst the oligarchs.

Eaton first voted more than seven decades ago, when doing so was a more difficult thing for blacks in the South. How difficult? When she was 18, she recalls, Eaton rode with her mother on her brother’s mule wagon to the county courthouse to register. Before young Rosanell could add her name to the rolls, however, a clerk told her to stand against the wall, look straight ahead, and recite the preamble to the Constitution without missing a word.

When Rosanell did just that, the clerk looked to her mother and said: “She’s a brave little girl.”

Now, Eaton is a plaintiff in a lawsuit, one of two filed this week after Gov. Pat McCrory signed one of the most restrictive voting rights bills in the country. According to the suit, the name on Eaton’s birth certificate doesn’t match the name on her driver’s license or the name on her voter registration card. She will, the lawsuit says, incur substantial time and expense to straighten things out and meet the state’s new requirements.

You see, somewhere along the line, she got married, so the names don’t match up.

Therefore, she must be a voter fraudster. There is no other possible reason.

Anyway, she probably wouldn’t vote for the “right” people, so her rights don’t matter. Q. E. D.

And that is logic in Republican-world.

Read the rest for more Republican logic.

Meanwhile, Sally Kalson points out that this is another case of both sides not (more at the link):

There is no corresponding effort by Democrats to suppress the Republican vote.

Gutting out the vote in North Carolina.

It ain’t pretty.

Well, that worked out pretty much as expected.

After Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) compiled a list of 17 people last month suspected of illegally voting in the November presidential election as non-citizens, an investigation Wednesday easily verified their citizenship and cleared all 17 of wrongdoing, Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett told the Daily Camera.

There’s no there, there.

The state of Florida is poised once again to strike groups who lean Democratic possibly ineligible voters from the rolls.

It worked out so well the last time (emphasis added).

Over time, the state’s initial list of suspected non-U.S. citizens shrank from 182,000 to 2,600 to 198 before election supervisors suspended their searches as the presidential election drew near.

“That was embarrassing,” said elections chief Jerry Holland in Jacksonville’s Duval County. “It has to be a better scrub of names than we had before.”

Election supervisors remain wary of a new removal effort, which the U.S. Supreme Court effectively authorized in June when it struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act.

Jay Bookman reports on Eric Cantor’s claim that the Affordable Care Act will allow the IRS to rifle through your medical records.

It is also a bald-faced, blatant lie, a lie that exposes the moral bankruptcy of the case that Cantor and others are attempting to make. There is no conceivable means under federal law for the IRS to access “the American people’s protected health care information,” and he knows it. His intent is to foster paranoia and distrust in the government, and if he can’t make that argument by telling the truth, he is perfectly willing to make it by telling falsehoods.

The IRS performs two functions in the administration of ObamaCare:

• Use a taxpayer’s income to establish how much subsidy, if any, the taxpayer is entitled to receive to offset the cost of health insurance.
• Collect a $95 tax from those who do not choose to purchase health insurance.That’s it. Period.

Follow the link for details.

Were it not for hate and lies, Republicans would have no platform at all.