Newsflash:
Inoculating Our Children Against Fear and Hatred "Ewww. Don't do it, Patrick. Don't do it. Dogs pee here." A woman was giving my husband a hard time because our 10-month-old son had dropped his banana on the ground. Patrick picked it up, licked it and was about to hand it back to our boy. Seamus grabbed for it eagerly and scarfed it down. A minute or two later, he was grunting for more. Read the Full Story
Pentagon officials ask Congress to shift $9.6B The Pentagon wants Congress to shift $9.6 billion of this year’s Defense Department budget toward expenses for the Afghanistan war, transportation and other items. Read the Full Story
Syria: the threats, costs, claims and lives What the civil war in Syria has exposed is that the massive political and social transformation, and real regime change under way is led by people themselves. US military involvement serves only to escalate the destruction. Read the Full Story
Pentagon Said to Seek $80 Billion for War Amid Withdrawal The Pentagon will ask Congress to approve about $79.5 billion for combat operations, the least since 2005, as U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan, according to administration officials. Read the Full Story
Jerry Brown: California’s Mystery Man One of California’s great mysteries is the state’s governor, Jerry Brown. In a time when America’s politicians strive to be everywoman and everyman, Brown goes his own way. While a nation frantically chases youth, the 75-year-old governor who glories in his age and experience, is at the top of his game. Read the Full Story
No Koch News: A Movement to Unsubscribe After years of mismanagement, the Tribune Company newspapers -- including the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times -- are up for sale.  And one of the potential buyers? The Koch brothers.  And wow are people outraged! Read the Full Story
Video: Pentagon Accused of 'Rewriting Constitution' to Wage Endless War in Senate Hearing Pentagon officials today claimed President Obama and future presidents have the power to send troops anywhere in the world to fight groups linked to al-Qaeda, based in part on the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Read the Full Story
An urgent message to 200 members of Congress They fanned out across the country from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Chicago, south to Atlanta and Miami, to the towns of Western Massachusetts, in New York City and beyond, and they entered offices on Capitol Hill in a national “Educate Congress” letter-drop campaign. Read the Full Story
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Logo Lowdown from the 2012 elections. Part 1--donors on the record Here's who is buying America's democracy The spark that ignited tea party wrath in 2008 was not such right-wing bugaboos as "Obamacare," the federal deficit, or states' rights, which were added on later by Koch-created front groups. Read the Full Story
Logo Lowdown from the 2012 elections. Part 2--donors OFF the record, or off the radar The money swamp created by Citizens United: Dark Money, corporate shell games, and SuperPAC plutocrats Some of you might remember "CREEP" from 1972's Nixon-McGovern matchup. It could've been an apt code name for Tricky Dick himself, but instead it referred to the "Committee to RE-Elect the President." Read the Full Story
H.R. 1000, the “Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act” Since 2000 more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. have closed and roughly 50,000 industrial jobs have been lost each month.  Now service sector jobs, where the remaining two-thirds of all workers are currently employed, are disappearing.   Read the Full Story
image Inoculating Our Children Against Fear and Hatred
image Pentagon officials ask Congress to shift $9.6B
image Syria: the threats, costs, claims and lives
image Pentagon Said to Seek $80 Billion for War Amid Withdrawal
image Jerry Brown: California’s Mystery Man
image No Koch News: A Movement to Unsubscribe
image Video: Pentagon Accused of 'Rewriting Constitution' to Wage Endless War in Senate Hearing
image An urgent message to 200 members of Congress
image When the IRS targeted liberals
image Logo Lowdown from the 2012 elections. Part 1--donors on the record
image Logo Lowdown from the 2012 elections. Part 2--donors OFF the record, or off the radar
image H.R. 1000, the “Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act”
Tuesday, 23 October 2012 18:57

Conservative Media Ignore GOP Voter Registration Fraud

Written by  Ari Berman | The Nation
Conservative Media Ignore GOP Voter Registration Fraud Beach Peanuts

The RNC-funded Strategic Allied Consulting, run by checkered GOP operative Nathan Sproul, is under criminal investigation in Florida for submitting fraudulent voter registration forms to election officials. (Sproul is still running voter-canvassing operations for conservatives in thirty states.) Sproul’s associate Colin Small, who had worked for Strategic Allied Consulting and as “Grassroots Field Director at the Republican National Committee,” was charged last week with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors for trashing voter registration forms in Virginia.

Republicans claim that the voter registration fraud was committed by a few bad apples and pales in comparison to the fraud committed by ACORN in 2008. But ACORN was never funded by the DNC. And the abuses committed by Sproul and Small were far worse than those attached to ACORN. Unlike Strategic Allied Consulting, ACORN never changed the party affiliations on fraudulent voter registration forms and self-reported suspicious materials to election officials. Nor did ACORN ever destroy valid voter registration forms, as Small is accused of doing. (Not to mention that none of the fictitious characters falsely registered by ACORN workers, like Mickey Mouse, ever voted.)

Despite the right’s preoccupation with voter fraud, Sproul and Small have received scant coverage from conservative media outlets. Fox News, which ran 122 stories on ACORN from 2007–08, mentioned Strategic Allied Consulting only three times since the scandal broke in late September and hasn’t aired a single report on voter registration fraud in Virginia. Nor have National Review or The Weekly Standard, the pre-eminent conservative magazines, run an article about either case.

ACORN was far from perfect, but it did not deserve the witch-hunt treatment it received. In 2009, Peter Dreier of Occidental College and Christopher Martin of Northern Iowa studied the media’s shameful coverage of ACORN during the 2008 election and found:

82.8% of the stories failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare

· 80.3% of the stories failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law

· 85.1% of the stories about ACORN failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems

· 95.8% of the stories failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of “voter fraud” to dampen voting by low‐income and minority Americans, including the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with the politicization of voter-fraud accusations—firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

Republicans, it turns out, have committed the very voter registration fraud they once accused ACORN of perpetrating. Nor did new voting restrictions in states like Florida and Virginia, which could collectively make it harder for 5 million Americans to cast a ballot in 2012, prevent the fraud they were supposedly meant to combat.

For more coverage of voter suppression, check out The Nation’s joint project with Colorlines.com, Voting Rights Watch 2012.

Link to original article from The Nation

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