Kamis, 13 September 2012

Clipping blog

Clipping blog

The Shame of Soldier Disenfranchisement

Posted: 13 Sep 2012 08:50 AM PDT

This is what voter disenfranchisement looks like:

A 92 percent drop in absentee-ballot requests by military personnel in Virginia is raising concerns that the Pentagon is failing to carry out a federal voting law.

With only 1,746 military voters in Virginia requesting absentee ballots so far this year — out of 126,251 service members in the state —the Military Voter Protection Project says the system has broken down.

And it's not just in the Old Dominion. MVPP Executive Director Eric Eversole reports significant declines in absentee-ballot requests by service members across the nation.

Compiling data from Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, Alaska, Colorado and Nevada, Eversole's organization found that military families have requested 55,510 absentee ballots so far this year. That's a sharp decline from the 166,252 sought in those states in 2008.

Why is this, I wonder? I doubt that soldiers are less enthusiastic about voting, considering how many issues will bear directly on them as members of the greatest fighting force the world has ever known. Our government must get smaller over the next six years. We have no other reasonable option. The next President will help decide whether the cuts that will inevitably come to the defense budget are made with great wisdom and insight or whether they’ll be handed over to a political hack who knows as much about the military as a brain-damaged chimp knows about string theory. What happens during the next Presidential administration is likely to set the composition of our armed forces and the compensation we give our brave warriors during and after their service. It is vital that all our soldiers have as much of a chance to vote as the rest of us do.

Right now, that isn’t the case.

According to the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, all military installations throughout the world, with the exception of those located in warzones, must operate a voter assistance office to provide troops with access to voter registration and absentee ballot materials. While the law said the installation voting assistance offices (IVAOs) would open in 2010, an investigation by the DoD found that only 114 of the 229 IVAOs listed by the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) were operational.

"To assess effectiveness of DoD efforts to establish IVAOs, we attempted to contact 100 percent of the installations identified by the FVAP website," reads the report, which was published in late August. "Results were clear. Our attempts to contact IVAOs failed about 50 percent of the time."

And this from the initial link:

Robert Alt, director of the rule of law program at the conservative Heritage Foundation, calls the situation "a national disgrace."

He pointed to a 2011 study of 24 states alleging that a paltry 4.6 percent of military absentee ballots that were requested and returned were actually counted in 2010.

"The military is one of the most underrepresented groups in the country. It doesn't seem like correcting this problem has been a priority for this administration," Alt said.

Why should it be? The Obama administration has its pet constituencies and, clearly, soldiers are not one of them. He’d much rather use our government’s formidable power to prevent states from securing the rights of legitimate voters.

He is not the ultimate power, though. Congress still has the power to push the Department of Defense to do its job and get ballots to every soldier that wants one, no matter where they serve. Congress can impress on the Department of Justice the importance of our most sacred right — the right to choose our own government representatives — and pull them off the backs of states that have put reasonable voter identification laws into place. Congress can make sure our voting system remains free and fair for everyone, not just the people the administration thinks will give them more power.

Our government must do right by our soldiers. That ought to be a non-negotiable point.

Michelle Malkin’s Passionate Response to White House: These Optics Suck!

Posted: 12 Sep 2012 08:22 PM PDT

In case you missed Michelle Malkin’s appearance on Fox News Channel’s Hannity show tonight, it was the most passionate response I’ve seen yet to the Obama administration’s poor response regarding the attack on the Egyptian consulate and the U.S. Embassy in Libya.

These optics suck, White House! I mean, we have 4 Americans who are dead, who were butchered and slaughtered because this administration did not have the foresight to fortify these embassies on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.

Below is the full interview:

Russian Warships Used In DNC Convention U.S. Military Tribute

Posted: 12 Sep 2012 03:22 PM PDT

Fox News reported early Wednesday that the backdrop Democrats used in their DNC tribute to our United States military last week was filled with Russian, not American, warships.

The event occurred on the final night of last week's convention when retired Adm. John Nathman paid tribute to veterans, in front of a gigantic screen that showed four ships from the Russian Federation Navy.

The mistake was immediately noticed by Navy veteran Rob Barker, a former electronics warfare technician who is no longer in the Navy. “I was kind of in shock,” Barker told the Navy Times.

Having learned to visually identify foreign ships by their radars, Barker recognized the closest ship as the Kara-class cruiser Kerch.

“Vendor error” was blamed on the mistake, while those issuing the apology went on to criticize Mitt Romney for not mentioning our troops in his RNC address.

Whether or not this “mistake” was really a mistake, or done purposefully, it certainly makes one thing abundantly clear: amateurs are running the show.

The Delivery Presents – The New Ownership Society and A Visit from @AHMalcolm

Posted: 12 Sep 2012 01:12 PM PDT

The entire story of the Democratic National Convention was “The Government is your Master”. To be sure, they said it more kindly and in ways that soft-pedaled the obligations and enhanced all the goodies you will get from Big Nanny for a short while, but there it is. That this message is fundamentally un-American should not need to be said, but we live in strange days and so I spent some time in Episode 163 on the subject of just who bosses around whom in our Constitutional Republic.

Andrew Malcolm is one of the most-accomplished and nicest men I’ve ever met. I treasure all the time I spent talking with him and I delight when I can have him on The Delivery. He was live from Charlotte when we spoke, which put him in a very good position to speak about the topic of the first half. Sit back, grab a cold drink, and enjoy the show!

The Delivery - Episode 163
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