Three Cheers For Dr. Carson! Voter Fraud - Alive and Well!

NO DOUBT YOU HAVE ALREADY HEARD ABOUT DR. CARSON OR SEEN HIS REMARKS ON TV.

HE IS A BLACK PHYSICIAN WHO IS ONE OF THE TOP IN HIS PROFESSION, IS AFFILIATED WITH JOHN'S HOPKINS AND IS THE TYPE OF BLACK AMERICAN THAT SHOULD BE A ROLE MODEL FOR EVERYONE.  

HE SPOKE AT A PRAYER BREAKFAST AND THOUGH HE CLAIMS HIS REMARKS WERE NOT DIRECTED AT OBAMA , IT IS OBVIOUS FROM WATCHING OBAMA THEY GOT UNDER HIS THIN SKIN.

CARSON HAS THE MESSAGE AND DELIVERED IT IN SIMPLE LANGUAGE.  REPUBLICANS LEARN FROM THIS MAN. 

THE MOST WONDERFUL THING ABOUT DR. CARSON IS he is THE ANTITHESIS OF PC'ISM!  (SEE 1 and ia BELOW.)

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So much detestable rhetoric is sheltered by free speech but that is the beauty of freedom. It allows opposites the equal ability to state their case and may the best man win.

The problem with unvarnished freedom is that it works best when the opposites are heard by discerning ears which today is not the case , and perhaps never has been .

Consequently, closed and impenetrable minds are swelling in numbers and free speech, therefore, can be more a threat than an embellishment.  Free speech did not elect Obama. tactics, lies and deceit , in large part, elected Obama. Granted race played a role as well but when Obama campaigned it should have been evident he was not being pressed to explain and define his pronouncements and was able or permitted/assisted  in getting away with murder because he was the 'chosen one.'

Well, we are now paying the price for our intellectual deficits. Obama told the middle class they would be protected,spared the burdens of his policies and now they are being crushed.  He told us we needed to tax the rich and punish them for their success, suggesting their gains were ill gotten.  Well the rich have been punished but the pain and suffering again will largely hit the middle and lower classes.

He sought to radically alter our health care system for the betterment of all.  He succeeded and now even the unions who helped him politically are seeking to avid the pain.

Domestically Obama's policies are more like;ly to restrain growth, suppress employment and restrict energy development.  Meanwhile his espoused intent is to increase those dependent upon government and thus increase the number of voters who will continue to pull the Democrat lever in the mistaken belief entitlements are endless and their position of receiving dole is secure..

Obama told the world America had sinned and we must atone for our behaviour. The world is paying for Obama's naivety and bias towards Muslims. Consequently, radical Islamists are on the ascendancy. No telling where the pain and suffering of Obama's failed foreign policy initiatives will leave the world but casualties mount and the number of dead increases because of Obama's decision to have America  lead from the rear or not at all.

Obama learned well from his radical associations, tutors and protected political ascendancy  how to mesmerize and manipulate public opinion.  His style of divisive leadership will continue because this leopard is incapable of change. 

Dr. Carson understands where we are headed and, to his undying credit, had the guts to tell it like it is with Obama looking on and , no doubt, seething inside!

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Will the IAF take 'President Withdrawal and No Show' off the hook?  (See 2 below.)

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John Fund, our President Day Speaker on Feb 18th, has written about voter fraud and why efforts to eliminate Voter I.D. are dangerous. 

The fight for the ballot box!(See 3 and 3a below.)

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Dick

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1) Ben Carson: US Like Ancient Rome; Obama Not My Targe

World-renown pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson told conservative radio and television host Armstrong Williams on Friday that his attacks on the nation’s ills in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast this week were not directed at President Barack Obama.

In his first interview since upstaging the president at the event on Thursday, Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said his comments were “directed at the situation that is going on in our nation and how we can solve it.”

“It’s not an attack on anybody, but it’s saying there are logical solutions for our problems and there are things that we can all get behind — be we right wing, be we left wing,” Carson said Friday on Williams show “The Right Side.”

“It doesn’t matter, because we need to do the things that will benefit the entire society and get us moving in the right direction. We need to be able to have open discussions.”

Opening his remarks with quotations from the Old Testament books of Proverbs and Second Chronicles, the neurosurgeon blasted the nation’s $16.4 trillion debt, its cumbersome tax system — and its “inefficient” health care system.

President Obama showed no reaction to Carson’s attacks, simply sitting stoically at the dais table. First Lady Michelle Obama also was in attendance.

“Our deficit is a big problem,” said Carson, who last spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1997. “Sixteen-and-a-half trillion dollars. You think that’s not a lot of money? Count one number per second. You know how long it would take to count to 16 trillion? 507,000 years. More than half-a-million years to get there.”

“What about our taxation system?” he continued. “So complex, there is no one who can possibly comply with every jot and tittle of our tax system. If I wanted to get you, I can get you on a tax issue.

‘It doesn’t make any sense. What we need to do is come up with something that’s simple.”

He then discussed the biblical principle of tithing. 

“God has given us a system. He didn’t say, “If you crops fail, don’t give me a tithe.’ He didn’t say, ‘If you get a bumper crop, give me a triple-tithe.’ So, there must be something inherently fair about proportionality.

“You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10, you put in $1,” he said to applause from the audience.

“But some people say, ‘That’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made $10’ — but where does it say that you have the hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot. We don’t need to hurt him.

“It’s that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands,” Carson said. “That money needs to be back here — building our infrastructure and creating jobs. We’re smart enough to figure out how to do that.”

As for health care, he began, “We need to have good health care for everybody, but we have to figure out efficient ways to do it.”

Carson’s solution: “When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account (HSA) to which money can be contributed — pretax — from the time you're born 'til the time you die. 

“When you die, you can pass it on to your family members, so that when you're 85 years old and you’ve got six diseases, you're not trying to spend up everything,” he added. “You're happy to pass it on and there's nobody talking about death panels.”

He added: “For the people who are indigent who don't have any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we already have this huge pot of money. Instead of sending it to some bureaucracy, let's put it in their HSAs. Now, they have some control over their own health care.”

In his interview with Williams on Friday, Carson said likened the United States to the ancient Roman civilization.

“The Roman Empire was very, very much like us,” he told Williams. “They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly.

“When you look at America, it’s not too hard to see great similarities. We’ve spread ourselves all over the place. We have incredible expenses. We don’t adjust — and, consequently, we expand the deficit and the debt and entitlement programs, and not living within our means and not adjusting programs and not adjusting people’s expectations.

“When it comes to wanting things, people don’t really care about the national debt,” Carson said. “They don’t really care about the future; they just care about, ‘Give me my check so I can eat next week.’

“That’s understandable, but we have not created the right kinds of expectations — and we really need to start doing that or we will face a similar fate.”


Who is Dr, Carson

Dr. Benjamin Carson majored in psychology at Yale and graduated from the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He went on to complete both his internship in general surgery and residency in neurological surgery at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In addition, he served as senior registrar in neurosurgery at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Queen Elizabeth II Medical Center in Western Australia.

1a)Ben Carson for President

The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon has two big ideas for America.

Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until "Downton Abbey," make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week.

Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn't look happy. You know something's coming when Dr. Carson says, "It's not my intention to offend anyone. But it's hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere."

Dr. Carson tossed over the PC police years ago. Raised by a single mother in inner-city Detroit, he was as he tells it "a horrible student with a horrible temper." Today he's director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and probably the most renowned specialist in his field.

Late in his talk he dropped two very un-PC ideas. The first is an unusual case for a flat tax: "What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he's given us a system. It's called a tithe.

"We don't necessarily have to do 10% but it's the principle. He didn't say if your crops fail, don't give me any tithe or if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithe. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you've got to get rid of the loopholes. Some people say, 'Well that's not fair because it doesn't hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made 10.' Where does it say you've got to hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot. We don't need to hurt him. It's that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here building our infrastructure and creating jobs."

Not surprisingly, a practicing physician has un-PC thoughts on health care:

"Here's my solution: When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account to which money can be contributed—pretax—from the time you're born 'til the time you die. If you die, you can pass it on to your family members, and there's nobody talking about death panels. We can make contributions for people who are indigent. Instead of sending all this money to some bureaucracy, let's put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care. And very quickly they're gong to learn how to be responsible."

The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon may not be politically correct, but he's closer to correct than we've heard in years.

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2)Israel Air Force now holds key to fate of Damascus, Assad regime

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The Syrian rebels’ hyped up “Great Confrontation” to capture Damascus the capital has ended in a draw with Bashar Assad’s army like all their previous offensives in recent months. They failed to break through to the heart of the capital past the powerful Syrian army’s 4th Division standing in their path under the command of Gen. Maher Assad, the president’s brother. The rebels also lost their position on the Damascus-Aleppo highway. But amid heavy battles with the division's troops, the rebels are still clinging to the southern suburbs of Damascus.

The Syrian capital (1.9 million inhabitants) is therefore the second city after Aleppo (2.3 million) to be divided between the combatants.

Notwithstanding the bitter fighting, the flow of refugees fleeing Syria has slowed down substantially, as many choose life in war zones over the wretched conditions prevailing in Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian refugee camps, where rudimentary essentials such as food, clean water, heating and basic medical services are lacking for the hundreds of thousands of dispossessed Syrians. Adding to these horrors, some Syrian families are said to be selling their daughters for food.

The Syrian outward refugee movement now tends to be internal, people in embattled areas seeking asylum in regions outside the war zones, such as the Druze Mountains southeast of the Golan and Kurdish areas in the north.

Since the Israeli air strike on the Syrian military complex of Jamraya on Jan. 30, Syria’s warring sides have been looking over their shoulders to assess Israel’s moves before embarking on the next stage of their contest because of two considerations:

1.  Military sources report that when the rebels first looked like breaking through to the heart of Damascus in the early part of their offensive – and so forcing Syrian President Bashar Assad to flee the capital – he ordered his army’s 4th Division tanks and short-range surface missiles to be armed with chemical weapons. They were to be used if the city’s defenses were breached. This would have made the battle for Damascus the first Syrian war engagement to deploy chemical weapons in combat.
The only military force close enough to prevent this happening and destroying the forces wielding chemical arms was the Israel Air Force. Its intervention would have been critical in giving the rebels victory.

2.  Ever since the Jamraya episode, Lebanon military sources report Israel Air Force fighters and surveillance planes are conducting over flights almost every day.

According to our military sources, the Israeli aircraft are densely deployed over Syria’s borders with Israel, Jordan and Lebanon, to guard against two eventualities, which the Netanyahu government is bound to preempt:

a)  Information has reached US and Israeli intelligence that Bashar Assad has vowed to his close circle that he will make Israel pay for Jumraya.

b)  Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has directed the Syrian ruler to make every possible effort to transfer to Hizballah in Lebanon the batch of Iran-supplied sophisticated weapons stored in Syria. This directive was handed to Assad by Iran’s National Security Director Saeed Jalilee when they met in Damascus last Sunday, Feb. 3.

All the parties concerned understand that Israel is just as determined to block this transfer as Tehran and Damascus are resolved to get it through.

In view of these challenges and their potential for an armed clash, Israel is keeping an eagle eye on every twist and turn of Assad’s forces in Damascus for any indications of the onset of chemical warfare or traffic on the move toward the Lebanese border with Hizballah’s weapons.

The Syrian ruler for his part is busy hatching schemes for keeping this arms traffic out of the electronic sight of the Israel Air Force, whereas the Syrian rebels are laying plans for provoking a clash between the Syrian army and the Israeli air force to provide them with an opportune moment for bringing their “great confrontation” in Damascus to a successful conclusion. 

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3)The Voter Fraud That ‘Never Happens’ Keeps Coming Back

By John Fund

Critics of voter ID and other laws cracking down on voter fraud claim they’re unnecessary because fraud is nonexistent. For instance, Brennan Center attorneys Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt claimed last year: “A person casting two votes risks jail time and a fine for minimal gain. Proven voter fraud, statistically, happens about as often as death by lightning strike.”

Well, lightning is suddenly all over Cincinnati, Ohio. The Hamilton County Board of Elections is investigating 19 possible cases of alleged voter fraud that occurred when Ohio was a focal point of the 2012 presidential election. A total of 19 voters and nine witnesses are part of the probe.

Democrat Melowese Richardson has been an official poll worker for the last quarter century and registered thousands of people to vote last year. She candidly admitted to Cincinnati’s Channel 9 this week that she voted twice in the last election.

This is how Channel 9′s website summarized the case:

According to county documents, Richardson’s absentee ballot was accepted on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. On Nov. 11, she told an official she also voted at a precinct because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time.
“There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Richardson. . . .
The board’s documents also state that Richardson was allegedly disruptive and hid things from other poll workers on Election Day after another female worker reported she was intimidated by Richardson. . . .
During the investigation it was also discovered that her granddaughter, India Richardson, who was a first time voter in the 2012 election, cast two ballots in November.

Richardson insists she has done nothing wrong and promises to contest the charges: “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States.”

But, of course, as you know there is no voter fraud. Pay no attention to that lightning coming out of

Ohio.

3a)

The Coming Battle Over the Ballot Box

A voting-rights veteran talks about the liberal campaign to expand the electoral rolls—and why Obama is on board.

By JAMES TARANTO

When President Obama declared victory last November, you might have missed the way he spun his voter-turnout triumph into a grievance: "I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time," he said on election night, adding: "By the way, we need to fix that."

He returned to the subject at his inauguration: "Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote." And in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, the president is expected to call on Congress to enact new voting legislation. Several liberal Democrats have already introduced a bill styled the Voter Empowerment Act of 2013.

The effort is a cynical partisan undertaking, according to election lawyer Hans von Spakovsky. In December, some "three dozen of the most powerful liberal advocacy groups, including union organizations," held a strategy session, he says, citing a report from the liberal magazine Mother Jones. They agreed to "oppose all voter integrity efforts, things like voter ID," to push for federal legislation requiring states to permit voter registration on Election Day, and to institute "automatic" voter registration.

"They basically want to use the government to do Democratic voter outreach and voter registration for them," Mr. von Spakovsky says. "They believe that if they can get, for example, everyone registered to vote who is currently getting government benefits like welfare . . . then that will somehow get them more votes at the polls and make it easier to win elections."

The Voter Empowerment Act would also mandate automatic registration of individuals on motor-vehicle, tax and university rolls, many of whom are aliens or have multiple addresses in different states: "You're basically going to be registering lots of people who are ineligible and leading to many duplicate registrations." The groups pushing such efforts—among them the Brennan Center for Justice, the ACLU and the NAACP—include "the same organizations that have been filing lawsuits over the past few years trying to prevent states from verifying the accuracy and eligibility of people on their voter-registration databases," Mr. von Spakovsky says.

All this to solve what he argues is a nonexistent problem. "The number of people who don't vote or don't register because they have some kind of problem with registration is a tiny, tiny percentage. It is so easy these days to register to vote, including the fact that many states now allow online registration, that . . . it is not going to increase turnout."

Which would be just as well if, as Mr. Obama claims, polling places are toocrowded. That problem too, in Mr. von Spakovsky's view, "has been widely exaggerated."

A Pew Center study found that in 2008—when, as Mr. von Spakovsky reminds me, "we had the highest turnout in a presidential election since the 1960s"—the average wait time was 10 to 20 minutes." In 2012, according to an MIT study, Florida had the longest average wait time, 45 minutes. Long waits can be a problem in big cities, but officials "can easily fix that themselves, without any federal help, by reducing the precinct sizes."

Hans Anatol von Spakovsky, born in Alabama in 1959, is a first-generation American. "My father was Russian," he says, and "my mother grew up in Nazi Germany." They met at a camp for displaced persons after World War II. "My childhood was filled with stories from them of what it's like living in a dictatorship, living with the secret police. I very early understood the importance of our democratic process and how important it is to protect our right to vote."

As a young Atlanta lawyer in the late 1980s, he was appointed to the Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections. "That's where the rubber meets the road," he says in his Southern drawl. "That taught me a lot of lessons about how our elections are run and things that we could do to improve their accuracy and integrity."

He tells a story from the field: "The very first thing I ever did was to be a poll watcher in a local election. I walked into a polling place—this was in a housing project in Atlanta—and discovered that the local election officials who were working the desk where people checked in to vote were asking people coming in whether they were a Republican or a Democrat. This was in a general election, where you don't have to answer a question like that. . . . I called it in, I complained about it, and they sent an official down to stop this from happening."

In 2000 he served as a recount observer for the Bush campaign in Florida. He later joined the Justice Department's Civil Rights division as a career lawyer (that is, not a political appointee), where he had "four years of very intense experience" working on the enforcement of voting laws. In January 2006, Mr. Bush gave Mr. von Spakovsky a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission, where he "learned the other side of the coin, which is our campaign finance rules." When Senate Democrats balked at confirming him for a full term, he withdrew his nomination. In 2008 he joined the Heritage Foundation, where he runs the Civil Justice Reform Initiative.

Mr. von Spakovsky is a vigorous critic of Attorney General Eric Holder, whom he accuses of politicizing the Justice Department by enforcing voting laws selectively. The bill of particulars starts with a sensational case: "They threw out and dismissed the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, and that was one of the most obvious cases of intimidation that I have ever seen." On Election Day 2008, two members of the group, wearing paramilitary garb, had stood outside a polling place and shouted racial slurs. One of them was armed with a billy club.

The Justice Department dismissed the case, Mr. von Spakovsky says, "because they did not believe, and did not want, the Voting Rights Act used to protect white voters or to prosecute black defendants. We know that's the case because political appointees within the Justice Department said that in front of witnesses, and those witnesses eventually testified under oath."

Mr. Holder has also "fought every effort to improve the integrity of our election process." The then-chief of the Justice Department's Voting Section, a career lawyer, had "recommended at least eight states be investigated because it looked like they were not properly cleaning up their voter registration rolls by taking off people who had died or moved or otherwise become ineligible. He was told, again by an Obama political appointee, that they had no interest whatsoever in enforcing that law . . . [or] in doing anything that doesn't increase the registration and turnout of minority voters."

In this context, "minority" means "nonwhite," even when whites are a minority. In 2008 voters in Kinston, N.C., a majority-black city of 22,000, approved a ballot measure to establish nonpartisan elections for mayor and City Council. The following year, the Justice Department overrode those citizens by denying the city "preclearance" under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

"Their entire concern in the case was not for the actual racial minority there, which is whites, but for the blacks who were the majority," Mr. von Spakovsky says. The Justice Department "objected, saying that it was discriminatory to do this—even though black voters had voted for it—because black voters wouldn't know who to vote for if party labels weren't next to the names on the ballot." In the face of a court challenge, the department reversed itself and granted preclearance in 2012.

"The left is constantly working on these voting issues," Mr. von Spakovsky says. "They have dozens of organizations, with a lot of money." The goal, he says, is "to change the rules to give them an advantage in elections. The other side of the political aisle just doesn't do that."

The left often accuses the right of seeking to rig voting rules in its favor, often adding the additional poisonous charge of racism. "They keep trying to scare black voters into thinking that these voter ID laws are an attempt to take away the right to vote," Mr. von Spakovsky says. "We know that's not true. The experience of states that have had voter ID laws in place for [several] years, like Georgia and Indiana, shows that it does not suppress the vote of black voters; it doesn't in any way keep them out of the polls."

The liberal website TalkingPointsMemo.com reported that in December Chanelle Hardy of the National Urban League boasted that efforts to institute voter ID had (in the reporter's paraphrase) "flipped a switch with the African-American vote . . . rekindling whatever enthusiasm had waned after 2008's historic Obama win."

Far from being racist, Mr. von Spakovsky argues, "voter ID is just a basic measure to protect the integrity of the voter-registration process. . . . A lot of times, the victims of voter fraud are in fact black voters and people in poor communities. They are the ones who often are taken advantage of, particularly by some Democrats, because they are less likely to complain or find out that their vote has been stolen."

Example: In the 1990s, 11 defendants from 80% black Greene County, Ala., were convicted in a voter-fraud conspiracy whose aim, Mr. von Spakovsky says, was "to prevent reformers from winning elections." The reformers, also black Democrats, were challenging incumbents in primaries. "Those reformers wanted to clean up local government, which was very important to the well-being of African-American residents in this very poor community." The defendants received support from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

On the other hand, Mr. von Spakovsky acknowledges the partisan motives of Republican lawmakers in Virginia and elsewhere who have recently floated proposals to allocate their states' electoral votes by congressional district. That would enable GOP presidential candidates to carry a portion—in some cases a majority—of the state's electoral vote while losing the statewide popular vote.

'I think it's a horrible idea," Mr. von Spakovsky says. "We have enough problems right now with the way congressional districts are gerrymandered. Particularly, we have a real problem with racial gerrymandering in our congressional districts. Well, if state legislatures were suddenly given the opportunity to influence the outcome of a presidential election dependent on how they drew up congressional districts, that would make the kind of gerrymandering we see now look tame in comparison."

Mr. von Spakovsky says it's "disappointing" that voter issues have become a partisan flash point. "It's too bad that some folks try to use this to scare voters and to raise money. It should be a bipartisan effort. The best kind of election is one in which the losing candidate says, 'Well, I lost the election, but it was a fair election.' . . . That's the kind of elections we should be striving for."

President Obama, who has won two such elections himself, could do worse than to take heed.

Mr. Taranto, a member of the Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.

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