Daily Archives: 31 October 2014

No Voter Fraud?

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From Hans von Spakovsky, of the Heritage Foundation, via The Wall Street Journal, comes this.

In the past few months, a former police chief in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to voter fraud in a town-council election. That fraud had flipped the outcome of a primary election. Former Connecticut legislator Christina Ayala has been indicted on 19 charges of voter fraud, including voting in districts where she didn’t reside. (She hasn’t entered a plea.) A Mississippi grand jury indicted seven individuals for voter fraud in the 2013 Hattiesburg mayoral contest, which featured voting by ineligible felons and impersonation fraud. A woman in Polk County, Tenn., was indicted on a charge of vote-buying—a practice that the local district attorney said had too long “been accepted as part of life” there.

Don’t look for recourse—or even for these cases to survive IMNSHO—from the Barack Obama/Eric Holder Justice Department.

Look to your voting next week. And check your ballots before you push that last CAST or ENTER button.

Should NATO Cooperate with Russia?

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Can it, even? NATO’s new head, Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, thinks so. After all, “Russia [is] NATO’s biggest neighbor and both [are] here to stay.”

Sure. Enemies must cooperate, because they’re both big. Makes sense. Yeah.

“We simply can’t ignore each other. One way or another, we will have a relationship. The question is what kind of relationship,” he said.

NATO continues to aspire to a cooperative relationship with Russia but to get there Russia would need to want it and to take clear steps to make it possible.

Well, he’s half right: we can’t ignore each other. But Russia’s view of “cooperation” has been clear. It invaded and partitioned Georgia, with one effect being the prevention of that nation from joining NATO as it had wanted to do. It invaded and is busily partitioning Ukraine for the explicitly stated purpose of keeping it from aligning with western Europe, much less joining NATO, a move Ukraine had indicated it was interested in exploring. It has threatened Poland with nuclear attack if it accepted basing American missile shield facilities on its soil. It has moved troops close to the Baltic States and pursued cyberwar against them.

Yeah, we need to cooperate with this enemy. Or NATO needs a new politician to head it up who understands the situation.