JailBreak

If you talk to a liberal about voter fraud no doubt they’ll say it doesn’t exist. Show them a list of occurrences of voter fraud, like the one here, they’ll respond that ‘well…conservatives seek to suppress voting, and while an occasional illegal vote or two may happen, it’s a trivial problem and has never affected the outcome of an election.’ Wrong again. See the examples listed below.

Probables
There are at least four famous cases of voter fraud leading to invalid elections. It just so happens that each case features a Democrat as the offender, but I’m sure that’s just random <g>. I call these cases ‘probables’ because they’re unproven in any court of law.

• LBJ Lyndon Johnson’s fraudulent win in the 1948 Senate race is thoroughly documented in Robert Caro’s biography, and earned LBJ the nickname ‘Landslide Lyndon’. Wikipedia summarizes it thus: ‘Robert Caro argued in his 1989 book that Johnson had … stolen the election in Jim Wells County, and that 10,000 ballots were also rigged in Bexar County alone.’
• JFK Remember all those dead people voting in Illinois? As Slate magazine remembers it: ‘ “You gotta swallow this one,” says a Republican hack in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, referring to the 1960 election, in which John F. Kennedy prevailed. “They stole it fair and square.” ’
• Bob Dornan Loretta Sanchez beat the incumbent Bob Dornan (R-CA) in a 1996 contest widely regarded as fraudulent. As summarized in Wikipedia:
  

  A task force found 748 votes that had been cast illegally—624 from non-citizens in addition to 124 that had already been thrown out by California officials. This was not enough to overturn Sanchez’ margin of victory and she was allowed to keep her seat. However, in consultation with the INS, the House committee identified as many as 4,700 questionable registration affidavits. The probe was dropped before these affidavits could be investigated.

• Al Franken Franken’s 2008 US Senate election in Minnesota is also widely regarded as fraudulent. He won by 312 votes in a recount. A Wall Street Journal editorial says:
  

  at least 341 convicted felons voted in Minneapolis’s Hennepin County, the state’s largest, and another 52 voted illegally in St. Paul’s Ramsey County, the state’s second largest. … The number of felons voting in those two counties alone exceeds Mr. Franken’s victory margin.

Definites
Following are all cases of elections actually overturned due to voter fraud. Because they’re all judgments reached in a court of law I call them ‘definites’.

2005 Memphis TN State Senate 29th district
2012 Vernon CA city council
2013 Weslaco TX city commission
2013 Hidalgo, TX school board
2014 Havre MT Chippewa Cree tribal business committee
2015 Lorain OH city council
2015 Hazelhurst GA mayor
2015 Perth Amboy NJ city council

The Bottom Line
Don’t believe it when you hear that vote fraud doesn’t happen, or that it’s just trivial and there’s no impact. Remember “landslide Lyndon”, dead people voting in Illinois, and the examples listed above of voter fraud leading to invalidated elections.

Several years ago I was out for dinner with my wife and found that the correct tip had invisibly and suddenly become fifteen per cent. Forever, it was ten per cent. Now, suddenly it wasn’t. My reaction was “wait…when did this happen?” and then “who decided this?”

Things change. What was OK yesterday is suddenly no longer OK, and vice versa. Some of us may not be tuned in, and we wonder where the changes come from.

My example of the increase in the tip is trivial, but it started me thinking about the issue: who decides? Following are two examples that are more meaningful.

First – Bowe Bergdahl, the US deserter from 2009, rescued in a prisoner exchange. The US offered up five Taliban prisoners, they released our deserter. Not only that, but our anti-war President honored the deserter’s parents with a Rose Garden ceremony. Of course in fairness I should say ‘accused’ deserter.

The contrast in this example is with the Roman view of prisoners. Not even deserters, but troops captured in battle against the Carthaginians in 215 BC. Hannibal sent a delegation of paroled prisoners to Rome with a ransom offer. The Roman Senate debated the offer in the presence of the prisoner representatives. The historian Livy quoted one Senator asking the representatives “Do you think to buy yourselves back to the place you lost by cowardice and crime?” The Senate declined the ransom offer. No counter-offer, no bargaining, just “no”.

Slavery is my second example. Until 150 years ago, slavery was a fixture of western civilization. Slavery was common in classical Greece and Rome. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slave owners. Today, practically everyone in the western world agrees that slavery is morally wrong.

Standards change. Morals are set and transmitted by moral authorities, and these authorities change along with the standards. In early Christendom there was one moral authority: God, whose words were recorded in the Bible and interpreted for us by the Pope and the King, God’s representatives on earth. For a long time no questions were taken, and discussion occurred only at the margins, for example in defining heresy. Then figures like Henry VIII and Martin Luther appeared, the Protestant Reformation occurred and we were all able to read the Bible for ourselves in the vernacular and begin to make our own judgments about morality. This is a simplification, but the trajectory should be clear. Moral authorities were one, today they are many.

Parallel changes occurred with governance and political authority. Crudely put, we’ve gone from Caesar Augustus to Huey Long. I’m left with questions.

1. Who decides right and wrong today? Who or what can speak on any moral issue and exert a compelling influence? Some will tell you it’s Kim Kardashian and her cohorts:

Where once people would head for Church of a Sunday for a bit of spiritual direction from the preacher, himself drilled by his rigid code, now we get it from the Kardashians, Kanye West, the former Bruce Jenner, Donald Trump etc.

Moral authority today is as thoroughly democratic as our political system. Morality is now determined by mass opinion. Mass opinion takes us invisibly (to me) from ten per cent tips to twenty per cent tips.

2. What about the rest of the world? My discussion applies only to the western world: western Europe plus the ‘settler societies’ (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Parts of the Islamic world are an exception – people who reject western liberalism and center their beliefs on an unchanging source: the Koran. What about Buddhists and Hindus – to what extent do these cultures experience moral drift?

3. Has evolution made our emotions different over time, accounting for moral change? If true, does this mean that Islamic fundamentalists are evolutionary throw backs?

4. Does this process imply anything for constitutional government in the US? How do we reconcile an 18th century document with 21st century impulses?

On one side are supporters of ‘the living constitution’ defined by Bing as this: “the Constitution has a dynamic meaning or that it has the properties of an animate being in the sense that it changes”. On the other side are originalists who argue “since the original designers of the Constitution provided for the process of changing it, they never intended for their original words to change meaning”.

The bottom line
In the western world, morality and the sources of moral authority changed over time. What was moral in the past is not moral today, and the reverse. Moral standards today are set in a process of mass discussion and deliberation that seems unconscious and invisible. Moral authority today comes from the masses.

In my memory it’s always conservatives that were considered narrow-minded: forever resistant to logical argument and humane sentiment on topics from voter rights to the minimum wage. But today I see that now it’s liberals actively quashing dissenting voices — trying over and over to erase any evidence of different opinions.

The Bing search engine’s definition of liberalism is this: “one of the basic tenets of liberalism is tolerance”. However, liberals today often seem unwilling to tolerate any expression of views they don’t agree with. The Pew Research Center published poll results in 2014 showing that liberals are more likely to block political views which which they disagree:

More than four-in-ten consistent liberals who use Facebook (44%) say they have blocked someone on a social networking site because of a political post. Consistent conservatives are less likely to have done this (31%), as are those with more mixed ideological views (about two-in-ten).

This graphic is copied from the article:

Specific examples follow…

Elizabeth Warren and the Brookings Institution
In July, 2015 an economist associated with the Brookings Institution testified before a Congressional panel. Brookings is a left-of-center think tank. The economist, Robert Litan, had impeccable credentials and was associated with Brookings for 40 years. The testimony was critical of regulations favored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

Sen. Warren then had Litan fired, arguing that his testimony was paid for by the financial industry. Warren’s action drew a lot of comment, including a letter to the Washington Post from five Democrat economists protesting Warren’s act:

he has been completely transparent about the support for, and conduct of, the study in question, as both Brookings and Senator Warren were well aware from the day he first testified before the Congress on the matter…To attack him as being ‘bought,’ or to sever ties with him over an incidental bureaucratic issue, is below the standards that support free and open policy debate

Tenured Professor Fired for Blogging
John McAdams is a Harvard PhD and tenured professor at Marquette University. In November, 2014 he posted a blog post describing an argument between a TA and student in a class at Marquette titled ‘Theory of Ethics’. The argument was recorded, including this statement by the TA:

You can have whatever opinions you want but I can tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments, and sexist comments will not be tolerated. If you don’t like that you are more than free to drop this class.

Prof. McAdams’ blog post got lots of attention as documenting an example of intellectual intolerance and browbeating. The following month he was suspended from teaching, and banned from the campus. In January, he was notified that the university was ‘commencing the process to revoke your tenure and to dismiss you from the faculty’. The notification from the university accused the professor of choosing to ‘shame and intimidate with an Internet story that was incompetent, inaccurate, and lacking in integrity, respect for other’s opinions, and appropriate restraint.’

However, according to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Marquette’s faculty handbook forbids dismissal for ‘academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action.’ The Journal’s editorial began with this trenchant comment: ‘Blogging can be dangerous to your livelihood – or at least it can at Marquette University, where a professor may lose his job for expressing the wrong political views.’

RICO for Expressing the Wrong Opinions on Global Warming
Sen Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) suggested in a May 29, 2015 editorial in the Washington Post, that Federal prosecutors should use RICO laws to prosecute global warming skeptics.

The Senator’s proposed prosecutions would target, according to a supporting paper: ‘a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts’. Which one of the listed activities is remotely improper? Apparently they’re improper only if you’re arguing the other side.

Of course, global warming non-skeptics get lots of support via taxpayer money. The Senator’s suggestion is that if opponents join the debate using private cash, then prosecute them. As an October 9, 2015 editorial on this issue in the Wall Street Journal (appropriately titled “Shut Up—Or We’ll Shut You Down”) said: ‘The strategy of the progressive left is no longer to win public debates, but to forcibly silence their opponents’.

A Retired General is Forced Out at Northwestern
Lt Gen Karl Eikenberry, USA, Ret., and former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, is surely a great source of knowledge and wisdom on international politics. That’s probably what Stanford University had in mind when they hired him as a lecturer and faculty member in 2011. In November, 2015 Northwestern University announced Eikenberry’s appointment as executive director of the Buffett Institute. As Northwestern said in the announcement: ‘He has played a highly visible role on the world stage with his frank and insightful ideas about some of the most critical issues of our day and will play a central role in taking the scope and impact of our global programs to an entirely new level’.

However, Northwestern faculty objected to the hiring. A February 9, 2016 letter signed by 46 faculty said ‘we believe that it would be irresponsible to remain silent while the University’s core mission of independent research and teaching becomes identified with U.S. military and foreign policy.’ In other words, US military experience is a dis-qualifier.

The Faculty Senate voted to support the hire, but the controversy continued and Eikenberry withdrew from the position in April.

The Bottom Line
When liberals speak out in support of diversity they apparently don’t include diversity of thought and opinion. Diversity of race, color, and creed is good. Different opinions are not tolerated.