All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

The truth about voter fraud

Politics, , , , , , ,

It’s being actively perpetrated by Republican Party officials, not criminally-minded voters. Of course, this isn’t exactly news. This past June, Mike Turzai, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House, explicitly boasted that voter ID laws in that state would enable Mitt Romney to win the presidential vote there:

“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation — abortion facility regulations — in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done,” he said to applause at a Republican State Committee this weekend, according to PoliticsPa.com.

The comment contradicted the usual Republican line that voter ID laws are for guarding against voter fraud — which is extremely rare if not nonexistent in practice — and not to help elect Republicans.

Pennsylvania passed a new law in March through a GOP-led legislature requiring voters to show a driver’s license or government issued photo ID before voting.

Turzai’s statement was widely condemned by Democrats and activists, who continued to remind the public that voter fraud is extremely, extremely rare and that Republican harping on it was indicative instead of a desire to suppress certain votes — principally those cast by minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.

Well, now we have even more evidence that Republican attempts to eliminate Democratic votes was not restricted to Pennsylvania, nor to one erstwhile and tone-deaf state representative. The Palm Beach Post reports:

A new Florida law that contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters, former GOP officials and current GOP consultants have told The Palm Beach Post.

Republican leaders said in proposing the law that it was meant to save money and fight voter fraud. But a former GOP chairman and former Gov. Charlie Crist, both of whom have been ousted from the party, now say that fraud concerns were advanced only as subterfuge for the law’s main purpose: GOP victory.

Former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer says he attended various meetings, beginning in 2009, at which party staffers and consultants pushed for reductions in early voting days and hours.

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer told The Post. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only. … ‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ ” Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.

“They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue,” Greer said. “It’s all a marketing ploy.”

It must be noted straightaway that both Crist and Greer are hardly disinterested observers. The latter is, in fact, currently under indictment, “accused of stealing $200,000 from the [Republican] party through a phony campaign fundraising operation.” Crist, likewise, is rumored to be switching to the Democratic side of the aisle after already angering conservatives by realigning as an independent in 2010.

Nevertheless, the article’s extensive investigation is well-conducted and deserving of greater attention. Given the Republican Party’s obsession with the voter fraud phantom menace, it’s nice to see journalists actually digging a little deeper by talking to active participants in the discussions, instead of simply inferring Republican leaders’ intentions from badly-justified voter ID laws.

Related articles

Mini-robots playing “Fur Elise?” Yup, this must be 2012

Technology, , , , , , ,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YigAzrFoN3E]

Wired has more:

Here’s how it works: A single “leader” bot knows the score and the positions other robots must be in to play the right notes at the right time. The leader sends this information to the robots closest to it, directing them to the appropriate positions on the virtual keyboard. Those robots, in turn, relay the information to the bots closest to them, mimicking the swarming behavior of insects.

The researchers hope to make the robots as efficient as possible by minimizing the distance traveled by each bot and using the fewest robots possible at any given time. This means the slower the tempo of the song, the fewer robots playing, and vice versa.

Hamas, in its own words

Media, Politics, , , , , , , ,

Surprise, surprise. Turns out that, despite a lot of unsavory rhetoric and actions, Hamas doesn’t sound quite so radical and irrational as it’s made out to be in the Western press. Open Zion snags this quote by Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal:

“I am the leader of Hamas. I tell you and the whole world, we are ready to resort to a peaceful way, without blood and weapons as long as we attain our Palestinian demands: a Palestinian state and the ending of the occupation and the (West Bank separation) wall.”
-Khaled Mashaal says in an interview with CNN – largely ignored by the Israeli media.

The Ynet article includes more from Mashaal:

Hamas Politburo Chief Khaled Mashaal said his Islamist movement Hamas is willing to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967borders or 22% of “historical Palestine.”

According to Mashaal, this has been Hamas’ mission and what it has been fighting for since its inception. In an interview aired this weekend on CNN, Mashaal said: “I accept a Palestinian state according to the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital, with the right to return.”

Mashaal also addressed the issue of recognizing Israel, saying “I want my state. After this state is established, it (can decide) its position toward Israel. Don’t ask me when I’m in prison under Israeli pressure. You cannot ask me, as a victim, what is my stand toward Israel.”

Other encouraging signs exist as well (see first link above), including a Hamas-led investigation of “unlawful executions” of Israeli collaborators. Of course, it seems likely this will be a sham, but the very fact that Hamas feels the need to legitimize itself by carrying out some semblance of the judicial process is more evidence that the broad brush used so frequently to portray the democratically elected organization is inaccurate and out of date. One of the key contradictions of Israel’s position vis à vis Hamas is the fact that it continues to decry the organization as a fanatical terrorist group while simultaneously negotiating truces and ceasefires with it, with an eye towards a potentially more permanent settlement later on. The coexistence of those two actions is logically absurd, yet Israel and its defenders persist in perpetuating it as if it makes even a shred of sense.

(The same can be said, in many respects, in regards to Iran. In that nearly all experts agree that striking Iran’s nuclear facilities would set back progress on the bomb by only a few years at most, what does Israel get out of doing it? Given its inability to stop the technical savvy of Iran, a preemptive Israeli attack only makes sense as a deterrent — a message to Iran that further development is useless because bomb-building facilities will continue being destroyed. But if this type of deterrent measure works, then Israel’s constant depictions of the ayatollah as a fanatical theocrat operating outside the bounds of rationality simply do not add up.)

The New York Times, Israel, and Gaza

Media, Politics, , , , , ,

Robert Wright justifiably takes issue with the Paper of Record’s description of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip:

Sadly typical of the way the MSM covers the issue is a recent New York Times piece about the ceasefire by David Kirkpatrick and Jodi Rudoren (both of whom have done excellent work on other issues in the region). The piece described the blockade as “Israel’s tight restrictions on the border crossings into Gaza under a seven-year-old embargo imposed to thwart Hamas from arming itself.”

Putting it this way is a real time saver, not just because it fits into a single short sentence, but because, if you’re too busy to actually write that sentence, the Israeli government’s press office would be happy to do it for you. But this description of the blockade raises a question:

If the essential purpose of the blockade were indeed to “thwart Hamas from arming itself,” wouldn’t restrictions on imports into Gaza suffice? (And even then the import restrictions wouldn’t have to be as draconian as they were when imposed, or even as tight as they are now, after some loosening.) What I’d like to see an enterprising MSM reporter ask is: How do Israel’s severe restrictions on Gazan exports keep arms from getting to Hamas?

The Nation‘s Greg Mitchell is on the same page regarding the newspaper’s photo captioning.

The peace process industrial complex

Media, Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

Stephen Walt thinks the media relies too heavily on stale sources with nothing new to add on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as exemplified by this New York Times piece):

Case in point: Helene Cooper and Mark Landler’s New York Times article from a few days ago.  The title of the piece was “Obama, Showing Support for Israel, Gains New Leverage Over Netanyahu,” and the article suggested that the combination of Obama’s reelection, Netanyahu’s support for Romney during the campaign, the Gaza fighting, and the upcoming Israeli election would suddenly give Obama a lot of new-found influence over the Israeli leader.

There were two fundamental problems with this piece.  The first is that it is almost certainly wrong.  Netanyahu is going to get re-elected anyway, so he hardly needs to curry favor with Obama.   In fact, quarreling with Obama has increased Netanyahu’s popularity in the past, so where’s the alleged leverage going to come from?  Over the past four years, Obama has backed Israel over the Goldstone Report, the attack on the Gaza relief vessel Mavi Marmara, and the Palestinian statehood resolution at the UN.  He’s also stopped trying to get Israel to halt settlement building.   Obama was already re-elected when the latest round of fighting broke out, yet the administration reflexively defended Israel’s right to pummel Gaza as much as it wanted.  If you’re looking for signs of new-found leverage, in short, they’re mighty hard to detect.

Do Cooper and Landler think Netanyahu will be so grateful for all this support that he’ll suddenly abandon his life-long dream of Greater Israel?  Or do they think Obama will be so empowered by re-election that he’ll put the rest of his agenda on the back-burner and devote months or years of effort to the elusive grail of Israeli-Palestinian peace?  After pandering to the Israel lobby throughout the 2012 election, does Obama now think it is irrelevant to his political calculations?  Hardly.  We might see another half-hearted effort at pointless peace processing (akin to the Bush administration’s token gesture at Annapolis), but who really believes Obama will be able to get Netanyahu to make the concessions necessary to achieve a genuine two-state solution, especially given all the other obstacles to progress that now exist?

The second problem with the article were the sources on which Cooper and Landler relied.   The article quotes four people: Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, and Robert Malley.  All four are former U.S. officials with long experience working on U.S. Middle East policy, and mainstream reporters like Cooper and Landler consult them all the time.   There are some differences among the four, but all share a powerful attachment to Israel and both Ross and Indyk have worked for key organizations in the Israel lobby.   All four men have been closely connected to the post-Oslo “peace process,” which is another way of saying that they have a lengthy track record of failure.   I know Washington is a pretty incestuous hothouse, but are these really the only names that Cooper and Landler have in their smart phones?

Texas caterwaulin’

Politics,

It should surprise no one that some Texas residents are making secession noises:

Sales of bumper stickers reading “Secede” — one for $2, or three for $5 — have increased at TexasSecede.com. In East Texas, a Republican official sent out an e-mail newsletter saying it was time for Texas and Vermont to each “go her own way in peace” and sign a free-trade agreement among the states.

A petition calling for secession that was filed by a Texas man on a White House Web site has received tens of thousands of signatures, and the Obama administration must now issue a response. And Larry Scott Kilgore, a perennial Republican candidate from Arlington, a Dallas suburb, announced that he was running for governor in 2014 and would legally change his name to Larry Secede Kilgore, with Secede in capital letters. As his Web page, secedekilgore.com, puts it: “Secession! All other issues can be dealt with later.”

In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on a variety of issues, including health care and environmental regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat.

Is there really that little to do in Texas?