GAO: Voter ID laws suppress voting, not fraud

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A hundred years without any noticeable betterment for blacks? What about the end of the convict lease program and the end of school segregation to name a few things I can think of off hand (that last one, by the way, was enforced by a Republican).
And I said that the kind of changes LBJ was championing would have been better and more effective if taken in smaller bites. From a democratic standpoint, how can the clumsy actions of LBJ, that drove the south republican, be considered a victory?


Racially motivated ?voter suppression? again
Yes, most blacks vote democrat. College students and Hispanics are more of a mixed bag, trust me. I?m really not seeing anyone being suppressed.


That?s hysteria right there.
Like I said before, if things were as bad as you make them out to me there would be an armed revolt and it would be justified.


Of course it exists and it will always exist but nothing near the overblown levels you suggest.

Evidence, or I make this real nasty real quick.

Change in increments is bulls h*t, even if there had been a little change for the good in the past. Again, blacks had been waiting more than long enough, and change in increments wasn't going to do it. Immediate action was all that could answer the problem. Do you seriously think white southerners could change without being immediately shaken up?
As for suppressing the African American and college vote - one traditionally black school found that the polls were relocated to an almost inaccessible place recently. It's obvious what the intent of that was. How was that in any way defensible? And that's hardly the only example. The whole fight against voter fraud was directed at low income and minority communities, with bill boards warning against the punishment for voter fraud appearing in black neighborhoods. Why weren't any of these in white neighborhoods? Possibly because whites weren't being targeted?

I think you know these vile racists look to political parties to the right; they certainly aren't looking to the Democrats since the Democrats purged that element in the civil rights era. That's not to say that all conservatives and libertarians are racist, but racists certainly will gravitate toward parties dedicated to cutting the social safety net which they stereotype as being abused by minorities. What parties do you seriously think racists gravitate to?

Which spawned Nixon's "southern strategy" or whatever. Had a more subtle yet sustainably steady method of persuasion been used, the same end result would have been achieved without driving the entire south to the GOP where most of it remains to this day.
Nice going, democrats.


Yeah, right; and this "voter suppression" has been so effective that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both got two terms.

The white southern backlash - by your own admission - was short lived, as most white southerners learned to reject the bigotry of their fathers. Had civil rights been done incrementally, white southerners would have had time to circumvent civil rights, but not so with a civil rights blitzkrieg. And the southern whites were only Democrats because the Republicans had been the party that had destroyed the Confederacy, but most southern Democrats were actually cultural conservatives. They rejected the Democratic party simply because that party was becoming a liberal beacon, and so flocked to the Republicans because they held more in common with white southerners. And that, by the way, is how Nixon's southern strategy is still being felt today.
And as for Obama and Clinton being elected and reelected - even if red state conservatives failed to stop that, it hardly meant they didn't try. Plenty of minority voters had been disenfranchised in the election between Bush and Gore due to Republican shenanigans in Florida.

See, that's a much more nuanced statement than what you said before, which if you'd said in the first place, I wouldn't have objected to. In fact, I've said similar things in the past, that small government ideologies are going to attract more than their share of oddballs because of the central tenet of non-interference, which unfortunately is going to include outspoken racists and such, but that doesn't make the ideology itself racist, any more than Hitler being a vegetarian makes vegetarianism a Nazi thing. However, I would argue that flamboyant, compound living Neo-Nazi type racists are really not the problem these days, the real problem is institutional racism in government, especially law enforcement, and other forms of 'soft' racism, and that form of racism is very well represented in the Democratic party. Bill Clinton executed a mentally ill man and slashed welfare to show how tough he was, Obama has accelerated the drug war and deported immigrant workers at a record clip; who were they appealing to by doing those things?

Isn't being correct enough?

Really though, you've been arguing with me for 5 years and you still say things like this? Did you forget again that I actually voted for Obama in '08? That I support gay rights, non-intervention, ending the drug war, reforming the justice system, ending cronyism, free speech, reproductive rights, and a whole other slew of social justice issues? That I'm to your left on virtually everything but guns and economics?

When you say things like that, I can't tell if you just don't pay attention, don't care enough to get things right, if you're deliberately misrepresenting me out of malice or spite, or if you've got problems beyond autism that effect your memory or cognition, and it puts me in the awkward position of constantly assessing and deciding whether to be patient or give you both barrels, which is frustrating. You say it's hard to agree with someone who disagrees with you often, how do you think I feel when you regularly conflate me with racists and bigots?

Also, you've got more to lose here, the Democrats would have a virtual lock on the country if they dropped gun control from their platform, gun owners outnumber anti-gunners by a sizable amount, and the Democrats lose far more voters than they pick up because of that position. Anti-gunners are kind of like the religious right to the Republicans in that they wouldn't have anywhere else to go if the party changed positions, and unlike the religious right, there aren't that many of them, so really it would be win/win as a political move, but they won't do it because of, how shall I put this, class issues. A guy named Dan Baum, a real Democrat's Democrat who also loves guns, wrote a book called Gun Guys, where he traveled around the country talking to gun owners, and he found huge numbers of people who would vote Democrat except for the gun issue (it certainly factors into my voting habits), and laments the political cost to the party of maintaining this foolish position. You should check it out, or even just some of the reviews on Amazon, which I linked for you, they're illuminating.

Of course I know you voted for Obama, and that you hardly qualify as a racist or homophobe. I actually wasn't talking about you when I said gun rightsers could try courting liberal causes for once in order to get more Democratic support; rather, I was talking about the NRA and GOA leadership and most politically active members.
As for gun owners having nowhere else to go save the Republican party - you yourself had mentioned Dan Baum, a "Democrat's Democrat," and I know that he's not the only pro-gun rights Democrat. Maybe it's just a case of the gun rights movement having nowhere else to go but the GOP is a self fulfilling prophecy.
As for soft racism of the war on drugs and the actions of law enforcement being perhaps the most detrimental to minorities - that is in large part true. But the fact is, the right is just as supportive of such such methods, if not even more so than liberals.
Regarding that "mentally ill man" Clinton had executed - he actually had been rendered brain damage during a prison fight after his conviction and sentencing.
As for me being spiteful and malicious toward you - no, I'm actually not, though I concede I sometimes let my temper get the best of me, and so sometimes I am not as clear as I would like to be in my responses, especially if I am interested in making a particular point. So no, I don't think I have any sort of cognitive disability, I just write posts without thinking when I see red.

I sort of agree with you on that, I support the NRA to an extent because they're effective, but I hate the way they come off in public, it's an embarrassment, and I think it damages the cause. You'll find that's not an uncommon view in the gun community, albeit one often only expressed in private. The NRA in particular is too old, too white, and too stodgy, I cringe whenever Wayne Lapierre tries to blame video games or mental illness or culture for some shooting or another, I mean I know why they have the siege mentality there, I just think it's bad PR. They actually do endorse Democrats, Harry Reid has been A rated for years and gotten their support, but they do need to separate themselves from the GOP, as they're less effective when they're seen as a partisan organization.

I do feel the need to point out that most people don't really understand how the NRA works, as they don't get their power from money, but from their membership and their collective political clout, which includes millions of people who are not actually members but use the organization as a gun rights cheat sheet. It's not like a PAC running adds to convince anyone of anything, the NRA doesn't actually spend that much money or do much campaigning, all the NRA has to do is grade the politicians and aggregate their views on guns in one place, and gun owners use that information to make their decisions; the way I put it is the 100 million gun owners in this country are the wind, and the NRA is the weather-vane telling people which direction it's blowing.



Well, we won't know unless one party or the other changes their position, and I don't see that happening anytime soon. It's a winning issue for the GOP, and it's too culturally ingrained for the Democrats to abandon, they've spent too long demonizing us and smearing us as uneducated rednecks who'll make the streets run red with blood shooting it out over parking spaces and the last case of Miller Lite.



"The Right" is much more than the GOP, you know. You know where you won't find any support for heavy handed law enforcement? Libertarians. We're the hipsters of hating the police, we've been doing it since way before it was cool.



Doesn't really matter, all I was doing was showing that there clearly is an element within the Democratic base that finds executions, welfare cuts, deportations, and the drug war appealing, and that Democratic politicians pander to them, showing that your house perhaps isn't as clean as you'd like to think.



I can understand that, quite a bit of what I write in the box never actually makes it into my posts, usually something along the line of 'go f*ck yourself you ignorant piece of s**t', but I massage that into more palatable form, usually. What kills me with you is that I often feel like you're responding to things I didn't actually write, this misreading I keep pointing out, and when it keeps happening it makes the discussion feel pointless, as it doesn't matter how well I write or how meticulously I source my claims if you just ignore them and argue against a GOP strawman that you know full well that I'm not, while throwing out all sorts of claims that you can't or won't back up. Basically, you're forcing me to argue by discrediting you personally, and that's going to be a nastier argument than sticking to the facts by it's very nature, as my target has shifted from 'prove this claim wrong' to 'prove that the person making this claim is not qualified to do so'.

Did you actually read what I wrote?
Whatever......


It's evidence that "voter suppression" if it exists is ineffective. As I've said before, voter fraud probably isn't enough of an issue at this time to warrant extra voter authentication steps but as long as we have leftist sponsored gun owner suppression then lets spread the civil rights suppression around evenly and give the left a taste of its own medicine. Is that a counter-productive (or asshole-ish, trollish, vindictive) way of looking at it? Yes, but I'm that kinda guy.

You wrote about a backlash to LBJ's civil rights legislation, so I just expanded on my response to make a point.
I'm delighted to see you concede that voter fraud is bullsh*t, but answering anti-gun sentiment with anti-civil rights legislation - - really?

I think we are both on our way to patching any bad feelings between us.

Which was opposite of what I actually said but oh well, I'm not going to keep going in circles with you to no avail.


I didn't concede diddly. What I said a few "voter suppression" threads ago and earlier in this thread was that voter fraud while real probably isn't enough to get up on a soapbox over. I don't remember the exact words and I'm not going to go find it for you but they were to that effect.

From earlier in this thread:



You have your civil rights and I have mine. That seems to be your attitude, sans the admission that gun rights are actually a part of civil rights.

Of course, there is no way to get all potentially lethal items out of the hands of everyone. The difference is that with guns we are talking about items whose only real purpose is to kill. Yes, you can use a gun to hunt (which is killing, though not killing humans), and you can use a gun for target practice (which is practicing killing) and that's really it. If someone doesn't possess a gun, it does not impact their day-to-day life - they do not need a gun to perform common tasks. On the other hand, if someone suddenly decides they want to kill, there are few ways to accomplish it as easily or on as large a scale as can be achieved with a gun.

Almost anything else that we legally allow people to possess not only has one or more legitimate uses that don't involve killing, but has a primary use that doesn't involve killing.

And some more GOP voter shenanigans (Georgia this time):

http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2014/10/14/georgia-voter-registrationsgotocourt.html