Saturday Movie Matinee: Tammany Lives

John Batchelor, Tammany Lives:

SEE ALSO: John Fund NRO: Voter Fraud: We’ve Got Proof It’s Easy 

Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud — or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls. But New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a “John Test” so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures. The Board of Elections, which has a $750 million annual budget and a work force of 350 people, reacted in classic bureaucratic fashion, which prompted one city paper to deride it as “a 21st-century survivor of Boss Tweed–style politics.” The Board approved a resolution referring the DOI’s investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Normally, I wouldn’t think de Blasio would give the BOE the time of day, but New York’s new mayor has long been a close ally of former leaders of ACORN, the now-disgraced “community organizing” group that saw its employees convicted of voter-registration fraud all over the country during and after the 2008 election.

David Freelander, The Daily Beast: ACORN’s Seeds Sprout Up Across the Country:

The left-wing group crushed by the right is gone, but its members never stopped working. After four years of anonymity, the liberal veterans want conservatives to know they’re back.
In 2010, ACORN, the grassroots organizing group, was reeling from a series of scandals, and with most of its funding pulled, shuttered the last of its remaining offices around the country. For conservatives, it was a triumph. The newly ascendant right-wing blogosphere caught ACORN reps on tape giving their low-income clients advice on how to engage in tax evasion, human smuggling, and child prostitution (the tapes, it was revealed later were heavily and selectively edited). What’s more, the right shut down an organization that was responsible for one quarter of all new voter registrations around the country, and had pushed for low-income housing and living-wage jobs over the past four decades. Four years later, it appears as if those shouts of celebration from the likes of Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, and Rush Limbaugh may have been premature. That’s because from Florida to California, dozens of entities have sprung up in the wake of ACORN, many of them with the same leadershipand doing the same work that the group did for 40 years. “These guys created a bunch of organizing Frankensteins around the country,” said Bertha Lewis, who was the ACORN CEO when the organization folded and who now leads The Black Institute, a think tank dedicated to African-American issues. “I had to dismantle ACORN, but nature abhors a vacuum. What were those former ACORN members to do? They were so angry at what they thought was so bogus and unfair that they said we are not going to go away. We have to reorganize.”
oversightandreform: FOX News: Issa on Benghazi:

From An Oversight and Reform Committee hearing 1/15/14: Strengthening Agency Oversight: Empowering the Inspectors General Community: Rep. Jason Chaffetz Questions Inspectors General re: Fast and Furious:

Rep. Jim Jordan questions Inspectors General re: IRS Investigation

Obama Admin Denies Misleading Obamacare Enrollment Claims Despite Criticism – Charles Krauthammer:

The Obamacare Bailout of the Insurance Companies! Dick Morris:

PJ Media’s Trifecta – MTV Sex Ed Shocker:

Jason Brown Free Skate 2014 US Figure Skating Championships:

So incredibly awesome, you’ll cry:

House Republicans Call For Probe Of DOJ’s Sham IRS Scandal Review (Video)

After eight months of a whole lotta nothing happening in the DOJ’s sham IRS investigation, House Republicans wants to see Holder’s investigators investigated.

Fox News reported:

Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Wednesday formally requested that the Justice Department’s inspector general launch his own probe into the department’s review of IRS activities. 

The request marks a serious escalation of their complaints about the department’s conduct and, specifically, a decision to have a President Obama backer lead the investigation.

“The Department has created the appearance that it is not taking seriously its responsibility to conduct a thorough investigation of IRS misconduct,” Issa and Jordan wrote in a letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

***

In their letter, Issa and Jordan cited a litany of concerns, including recent claims from administration officials that criminal charges in the case are unlikely. But they centered on the decision to appoint Barbara Kay Bosserman to lead the FBI probe. Campaign finance records show Bosserman has given more than $6,000 to Obama’s two presidential campaigns.

“Publicly available information suggests that Ms. Bosserman may have a conflict of interest in this matter,” they wrote, also citing a Fox News report that she attended a bill-signing ceremony at the White House in 2009.

Separately, the lawmakers wrote to Labor Secretary Thomas Perez asking him about any possible involvement, given his prior position as Bosserman’s boss in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

Oh – well! If Thomas Perez was involved, we’ll know for sure everything was on the up and up! /sarc

Last night, Sean Hannity talked to two of the IRS’s tea party victims, Becky Gerritson and Catherine Engelbrecht  and Congressman Jim Jordan..

American Center for Law & Justice Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow Appeared on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, yesterday, to discuss the ongoing IRS scandal that the Regime is currently trying to sweep under the rug.

Via Gateway Pundit, Sekulow told Fox host Bill Hemmer that not one of his clients had ever been contacted by the FBI during what he called their “sham” investigation.

“None of our clients were ever interviewed by the FBI. So the reported crime that Eric Holder talked about that may have been committed, the victims of that crime were never interviewed… Some people are asking how the investigation is going. I don’t think it ever got off the ground. It took eight months before we had the first contact by an FBI agent. When we did have the contact they were already closing the file. I think it was a sham from the beginning. Eric Holder is closing a file before talking to a purported crime. I don’t know when that’s ever happened before in our history.

The Council Has Spoken! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results

tribal council 3 (1)

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.

As some of my esteemed Council mates remarked during the voting, this was a tough week to try to choose amongst apile o’ goodies. Hah! says I, because the quality this group pulls off each week is always pretty impressive,but yeah, this week we had a lot of great stuff to choose from. So you know the winners had to have come up with something pretty special,no? Something that really struck a chord?

Right Planet

Leave it to The Right Planet to pull that off, with his heartfelt I’ve Had It With The GOP. Here’s a slice:

For several years now I have watched the GOP move toward the political center—even left of center at times. We have been told this was necessary; otherwise, we would have no chance of winning an election ever again. If this were true, how does one explain the overwhelming landslide victories of Ronald Reagan? Yet the GOP has seemingly learned nothing from the success of Ronald Reagan and his steadfast brand of conservatism.

Lately I have watched GOP stalwarts, like Sen. John McCain, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Jeff Flake, Rep. Peter King, and political operatives like Karl Rove, trash the Tea Party and pummel their conservative and libertarian-leaning GOP colleagues, like Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee, Sen. Rand Paul, Rep. Justin Amash, etc. Yet they withhold their vitriol and indignation for the Democrats and the president, literally treating them with kid gloves.

I have voted Republican all my life. Why? Well, the first election I voted in was for Ronald Reagan. It was a no-brainer for me at the time. I have been a longtime student of military history, particularly the history of the Second World War. I believe in a very strong defense, since it has been proven throughout history that there are many nefarious forces in the world who wish to see the U.S. wiped off the map. If we are not able to project power and defend ourselves, we might as well throw up the white flag and simply submit. This is utterly repugnant and unacceptable to me as an American who values foremost the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But when I voted in my first presidential election, at 18 years of age, I did not have the knowledge that I do now of the philosophy and ideology that drives the Right and the Left. It was simple for me at the time: who supports a strong defense? The answer was obvious to me at the time—Ronald Reagan.

It seems that all I have done for the past six years is study the history and ideology of the political movements within the United States since its founding. As I studied and studied, something became abundantly clear to me: there were profound changes to our form of government that occurred about a 100 years ago, starting with President Woodrow Wilson’s Administration. Of course one can argue it goes back farther than that. But I digress.

It was President Woodrow Wilson who first tried to re-brand the Democratic Party the “Progressive Party.” Some of the most significant and far-reaching changes to our present form of government occurred at this time around 1913 (a very bad year, indeed). These monumental structural changes came in the form of the Federal Reserve Act, the Sixteenth Amendment (progressive, i.e. graduated income tax) and the Seventeenth Amendment (the direct election of senators by popular vote). The Seventeenth Amendment effectively moved us toward direct democracy—something our Founders called “mobocracy,” and expressly warned us to avoid at all costs.

There are other reasons I decided at a young age to join up with the GOP. The Republican Party was originally formed in 1854 as the Abolitionist Party in opposition to the monstrous and evil institution known as slavery. Furthermore, I have identified myself as a Republican because that is the form of government that our Constitution requires in Article 4, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution—meaning: we are to have a “republican form of government.” There is not a single occurrence of the term democracy in our Constitution (check it our for yourself).

Many times I have heard people tell me that the Republican and Democratic parties are really just one and the same. “There is no difference between the parties,” they say. I always bristled a bit at this assessment … until now. I still think we should exercise caution and not throw the baby out with the bath water. But I will return to this later.

I can no longer stand by and be trashed by the very Party that I have so wholeheartedly supported for so many years with my time and money. I can remember times when I defended folks like George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Karl Rove and the like, when they seemed unwilling, or incapable, of defending themselves. But was this by design? By the end of George W. Bush’s second term, the GOP was in a shambles. There’s no denying it, no matter how you try to spin it.

Much more at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Amil Imani with a piece entitled An Open Letter To The God Of Islam  submitted by Joshuapundit.I won’t describe it further except to say that it is a must read if you have any interest in the subject at all.

Here are this week’s full results. Only The Mellow Jihadi was unable to vote this week, but was not subject to the normal  2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day and weigh in…don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that!

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