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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Paradigms and Demographics Evening Edition

For Voter ID Opponents, This Was a Stunning Blow – On Friday, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved the injunction that had been issued against Wisconsin’s voter-ID law by a federal district court in April. The court told Wisconsin that it “may, if it wishes (and if it is appropriate under rules of state law), enforce the photo ID requirement in this November’s elections.” In reaction, Kevin Kennedy, the state’s top election official, said that Wisconsin would take all steps necessary “to fully implement the voter photo ID law for the November general election.” The appeals court issued its one-page opinion within hours of hearing oral arguments in the appeal. As I explained in an NRO article in May, the district court judge, Lynn Adelman, a Clinton appointee and former Democratic state senator, had issued an injunction claiming the Wisconsin ID law violated the Voting Rights Act as well as the Fourteenth Amendment. Adelman made the startling claim in his opinion that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2008 upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law as constitutional was “not binding precedent,” so Adelman could essentially ignore it.  However, that was too much for the Seventh Circuit. It pointed out, in what most lawyers would consider a rebuke, that Adelman had held Wisconsin’s law invalid “even though it is materially identical to Indiana’s photo ID statute, which the Supreme Court held valid in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008).”…...

If Republicans run as Republicans they will win -  If Republicans run as Republicans they will win - Political pollsters have a tough job. They have to create formulas to determine if the person who they are interviewing is likely or unlikely to vote, and it is within this calculation that their reputations are made. Typically, those who are likely to vote in an off-year election are pretty set. They are the people who always vote in elections, and a few others who are motivated by specific issues. In a wave election, the numbers of those motivated by specific issues escalates changing the electoral landscape as the candidates who are beneficiaries of this increased participation sweep to victory. The 2014 election is rapidly looking like something new and different. Democrats are reportedly demoralized by the failed Obama Administration and general fatigue. Republicans, on the other hand, in an orgy of expectation that the primary elections believed the key to taking the Senate was getting the “electable” candidates nominated. And get them nominated they did….[conservatives] want to believe that the Republican Party is still the conservative political party and is not just a different gang of thieves looking to plunder America’s pocket books. If Republicans run as Republicans in the final weeks of this election, they still can turn this into a rout. But then, they might have to govern as conservatives, and perhaps they fear that even more than being backbenchers……

Devolution is needed in America too - The world watched and waited to learn the fate of Scotland following its vote on the referendum for independence. For many other regions within the U.K., including Wales and Northern Ireland; within Europe, including Spain’s Catalonia and Belgium’s Flanders; and states within the U.S., including Vermont, Texas and Alaska; Scotland’s vote energized and inspired separatists’ movements — even though they were disappointed with the outcome.  While Scotland voted “No,” and chose to remain in the United Kingdom, it made enough noise and caused enough concern in London, that, in effect, it won anyway. When the race appeared to be close Westminster panicked — the “parties went into scramble mode.” They vowed “to introduce legislation to grant Scotland’s semiautonomous government more powers [devolution] if voters reject independence.”….. Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Self-Governance, agrees. He told me: “A desire for ‘self-governance’ is hard wired into humans. When asked the question, ‘who should decide the things that affect your life?’ the vast majority of people will answer, ‘me.’ This extends to the idea that local governance is better than edicts from a distant government. People have more power locally. ‘Who decides? I decide.’”…. A report about Scotland, and other separatist movements, in the Business Insider states: “From early on in the campaign they also focused more on making it less about all the things the U.K. is doing wrong and more about how they can do it better.” In the West, we know we “can do it better.” Let your state and federal elected officials know that you support state management of public lands and that you want decisions made at the local level — because we can do it better.....

Liberal Incivility and Gabby Giffords - When a gunman attempted to murder Rep. Gabriel Giffords in January 2011, the country was shocked by what was widely interpreted as an act that symbolized the incivility that had transformed American politics. That assumption, which was primarily aimed at undermining the Tea Party movement that had swept the midterm elections months before in the 2010 midterms, was soon debunked when we learned the shooter was an apolitical madman. But liberals have never ceased yapping about the implications of their opponents’ alleged meanness. Now it turns out the person who is doing the most to give the lie to this assertion is Ms. Giffords….. The kind of gutter politics practiced by Giffords’s advocacy group does nothing to further a productive debate about guns or any other issue. But it does bring to light the hypocrisy of liberals who believe their good intentions or inherent virtue should allow them to defame opponents in a manner they would decry as incitement to violence if it were directed at them.as Giffords has begun to realize that empathy for her situation doesn’t translate into a willingness by the majority of Americans to embrace her positions on gun control, her intervention in political races is now taking on the aspect of a political attack dog rather than that of a sympathetic victim…… But it does bring to light the hypocrisy of liberals who believe their good intentions or inherent virtue should allow them to defame opponents in a manner they would decry as incitement to violence if it were directed at them…… 

Should We Sometimes Ignore Mass Murder but Condemn Lesser Sins? - Oddly, progressives often say “yes” to this question, and have been doing so for almost a century now. At the United Nations, President Obama stated: “In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri—where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.”  Many listeners were jolted by the seeming comparison of a sad but unpremeditated killing in Ferguson with the Russian invasion of Crimea and the ISIS mass murder and beheading of those who disagree with them. According to Victor Davis Hanson, “Here is one of the staple dogmas of the Progressive mind: the sins and crimes of America that require apologies and reparations, even as the millions of dead, tortured, and imprisoned in other nations are shrugged off.”......Josephson published The Robber Barons in 1934....... “Before people pass judgment on Comrade Stalin they ought to come here and see his Works ….Stalin, however, was starving millions of Ukrainians and sending thousands of others to the Gulag in 1934, the year Josephson uttered those words. When Josephson finally left the Soviet Union and returned to America, he lamented, “How can I continue to write books merely for a living, when the form of society in which I live is repugnant?”

My Take – The history of Americans who lauded Stalin included FDR, who also liked Hitler and Mussolini until the war. A number of “progressives “ went to the Soviet Union and came back with glowing reports such as Lincoln Steffens who said, “I’ve seen the future and it works”. And Walter Duranty, working for the New York Times, received a Pulitzer Prize for his articles about the Soviet Union claiming no one was starving to death, in spite of the fact that every reporter there knew otherwise.
 
We see the same lack of proportion and integrity from the media constantly. The media went after the commissioner of the NFL 24/7 because they didn't like the decision he made over a wife beater. I kept asking - what crime did he commit that justified such intense scrutiny? Yet if you were to ask almost anyone about the Pakistani's who sexually molested children for many years in England no one would know what you were talking about - and that's just one small example. Outrage over small things while totally ignoring crimes so huge as to stagger the imagination. The same holds true regarding the environmental movement. The socialist monsters of the 20th century killed over 100 million innocent people, and the environmentalism has probably been responsible for the deaths of that many and more, starting with the ban on DDT. That's a story that isn't being played 24/7! No, instead we hear about a non-crime that doesn't fit the leftist narrative with blithering leftist idiots demanding that Goodell resign. Why?

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