Posts Tagged ‘voting fraud’

Texas 2017 Special Session Begins

Wednesday, July 19th, 2017

The Texas Special Session opened Tuesday, ushering in a 30 day flurry of legislative activity. Naturally the media is focusing on the bathroom bill, because liberals are incensed that an unpopular culture war victory imposed by Obama fiat could possibly be overturned. But a lot of other important items are on the agenda, most of which liberals will hate just as much.

The uncontroversial portion of the session is sailing right through:

Waiving rules and blocking Democrats, Republicans in the Texas Senate opened the special legislative session Tuesday by taking rapid action on two key bills, potentially allowing Gov. Greg Abbott to open the overtime session to a longer list of conservative priorities as early as Wednesday afternoon.

Abbott said he will expand the special session’s agenda after the Senate approves two “sunset” bills allowing five state agencies, including the Texas Medical Board, to continue operating.

To hasten action on the bills, Republicans voted along party lines to waive a rule requiring 24-hour notice of meetings so the Business and Commerce Committee could consider the sunset measures while the Senate was in a late-morning recess.

For the first time in more than 30 years, senators also voted — again along party lines — to suspend a rule allowing one senator to “tag” legislation, requiring a 48-hour wait before a bill can be heard in committee.

Here again are the 19 items after the must-pass Sunset legislation that Gov. Abbot has put on the agenda:

  • Teacher pay increase of $1,000
  • Administrative flexibility in teacher hiring and retention practices
  • School finance reform commission
  • School choice for special needs students
  • Property tax reform
  • Caps on state and local spending
  • Preventing cities from regulating what property owners do with trees on private land
  • Preventing local governments from changing rules midway through construction projects
  • Speeding up local government permitting process
  • Municipal annexation reform
  • Texting while driving preemption
  • Bathroom bill
  • Prohibition of taxpayer dollars to collect union dues
  • Prohibition of taxpayer funding for abortion providers
  • Pro-life insurance reform
  • Strengthening abortion reporting requirements when health complications arise
  • Strengthening patient protections relating to do-not-resuscitate orders
  • Cracking down on mail-in ballot fraud
  • Extending maternal mortality task force
  • Here is the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s issue guide for the special session.

    Gov. Abbott Calls Special Session

    Wednesday, June 7th, 2017

    On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called a special session of the Texas Legislature starting July 18:

    Abbott gave legislators an ambitious 19-item agenda to work on — including a so-called “bathroom bill” — after they approve must-pass legislation that they failed to advance during the regular session. An overtime round, Abbott said, was “entirely avoidable.”

    “Because of their inability or refusal to pass a simple law that would prevent the medical profession from shutting down, I’m announcing a special session to complete that unfinished business,” Abbott told reporters. “But if I’m going to ask taxpayers to foot the bill for a special session, I intend to make it count.”

    (Ignore the usual Texas Tribune hand-wringing about the “controversial” nature of the bathroom law; it’s just a restoration of the status quo, reversing what the Obama Administration imposed on the nation via executive fiat.)

    Here are Governor Abbott’s 19 items:

  • Teacher pay increase of $1,000
  • Administrative flexibility in teacher hiring and retention practices
  • School finance reform commission
  • School choice for special needs students
  • Property tax reform
  • Caps on state and local spending
  • Preventing cities from regulating what property owners do with trees on private land
  • Preventing local governments from changing rules midway through construction projects
  • Speeding up local government permitting process
  • Municipal annexation reform
  • Texting while driving preemption
  • Privacy
  • Prohibition of taxpayer dollars to collect union dues
  • Prohibition of taxpayer funding for abortion providers
  • Pro-life insurance reform
  • Strengthening abortion reporting requirements when health complications arise
  • Strengthening patient protections relating to do-not-resuscitate orders
  • Cracking down on mail-in ballot fraud
  • Extending maternal mortality task force
  • That’s an ambitious agenda…if Texas Speaker Joe Straus, who did so much to thwart so many of those items, let’s any of them pass.

    In an effort to force the special session, [Lieutenant Governor] Patrick had held hostage legislation, known as a “sunset bill,” that would keep some state agencies from closing. That “will be the only legislation on the special session [agenda] until they pass out of the Senate in full,” Abbott said.

    That’s quite defensible from a governance perspective, but it is going to eliminate Lt. Gov. Patrick’s biggest piece of leverage against Straus.

    With fewer items on the agenda, maybe House Republicans will have a chance to concentrate and actually act like Republicans rather than let Straus’ liberal coalition run roughshod over them.

    LinkSwarm for October 7, 2016

    Friday, October 7th, 2016

    It’s been one of those weeks. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • This just in: The eight years of the Obama Administration have been a miserable failure.
  • Some ObamaCare patients are losing their plans, others are facing huge rate hikes. In Tennessee, they’re getting both. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt.)
  • More on the same theme:

    ObamaCare’s unraveling shows the danger of a one-size-fits-all federal program. What’s happening in Tennessee is only a nationwide harbinger. Every single neighboring state will have less competition on its ObamaCare exchanges next year. The entire state of Alabama will have only one insurer. Almost all are facing double-digit premium increases: in Mississippi a weighted average of 16%; in Kentucky 25%; in Georgia 33%.

    These problems aren’t confined to the Southeast. ObamaCare exchange buyers will have only one option in nearly a third of American counties, according to an August report from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s a 300% increase in single-option counties from last year. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have approved rates leading to average premium increases next year of over 26%.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Indiana police raid offices in nine county voting fraud case. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • And speaking of voting fraud, the 86 non-citizens registered to vote in Philadelphia are just the tip of the iceberg. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • There’s even a huge voting fraud investigation going on in Tarrant County, with “a vote harvesting scheme involving as many as 20,000 ballots.”
  • Michael Moore: “I don’t think people do trust the Democrats.”
  • Even MSNBC panelists nail the media for obvious left-wing bias.
  • Race relations have gotten worse under Obama. That’s what happens when you have George Soros spending millions to poison race relations, and let Social Justice Warriors go rampaging through your institutions…
  • Both Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte and Donald Trump are gaining in New Hampshire. Remember that until very recently New Hampshire was considered a solidly Republican state.
  • Mayor de Blasio is thin-skinned and unable to handle even the slightest criticism.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • NFL ratings are down across the, and one-third of people surveyed says its because of the Black Lives Matter pandering. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt.)
  • Followup: Dawanna Dukes seeks a plea deal. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • So even Canada has giant brawls in its McDonalds? Bonus: Baby raccoon.
  • Peak Florida? (Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
  • LinkSwarm for July 24, 2015

    Friday, July 24th, 2015

    Today will be full of Stuff. And Things. So enjoy a LinkSwarm!

  • Barack Obama, the MegaBanker’s friend. “Three top Democrats are accusing the Department of Housing and Urban Development of quietly removing a key clause in its requirements for taxpayer-guaranteed mortgage insurance in order to spare two banks recently convicted of federal crimes from being frozen out of the lucrative market.”
  • Companies that continue to fund Planned Parenthood. I believe the American Cancer Society should come in for a particularly hard time for sponsoring an event called “The Race For Life”…
  • And those same companies are scurrying for cover now that the lights have been flipped on.
  • On the New York Times running interference for Planned Parenthood. Which should surprise no one. Of course one branch of the Democratic Party will always defend another.
  • Five examples of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist from 2015.
  • 93% unionized A&P supermarket chain files for bankruptcy. Again. Gee, what could be the cause?
  • Republicans chastise their extremists, Democrats pander to them.
  • Salman Rushdie says the world learned the wrong lesson from his fatwa. Namely to cower down in the face of jihad and really lick boot… (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • Not just Israel: Border walls are going up all across the Middle East to help keep out jihadists. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • How Uber is taking on Bull De Blasio. Man, Democrats hate it when you threaten the profits of their favored entrenched monopolies.
  • Return to the joyous heydays of lesbian feminists collective. “Sitting in endless meetings, unable to reach agreements, and taking days to produce one leaflet because someone objected to the word seminal.” Can’t imagine why they didn’t take the world by storm…
  • All the people who should sue Gawker. It’s a lengthy list. Plus this: “Gawker is the kind of place where they hold up pictures of Sabrina Erdely and say: ‘Now this is how you do it!”
  • Guns don’t kill people, Austin policemen bumping off their 7-month pregnant girlfriends kill people. Allegedly.
  • Sorry Instapundit, but I read this piece and I instantly think Grizzly Man 2.
  • Connecticut Democrat Indicted on Nineteen Counts of That Voting Fraud That Doesn’t Exist

    Monday, September 29th, 2014

    Yet another Democratic office-holder has been indicted on nineteen counts of voting fraud. You know, the voting fraud Democrats keep existing doesn’t exist:

    HARTFORD >> State Rep. Christina “Tita” Ayala, D-Bridgeport, was arrested Friday on 19 voting fraud charges.

    Ayala, 31, is accused of voting in local and state elections in districts she did not live, the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office said in a press release.

    Liberals keep insisting that we don’t need voter ID laws, and that Republicans are just trying to suppress minority votes. And Democrats keep insisting on getting their hand caught in the cookie jar committing voter fraud.

    (Hat tip: Weasel Zippers via Instapundit.)

    When Democrats Say There’s No Voter Fraud, They’re Lying

    Thursday, April 10th, 2014

    There’s an risible liberal talking point that continues to rear its ugly head regarding ACORN and the Democratic Party’s demonstrated record of voting fraud:

    “That’s not voting fraud, that’s voter registration fraud.”

    Before we address the talking point proper (which seems to have originated at the liberally biased “fact checking” site FactChek.org), let us note that:

    1. Voter registration is merely a specific type of voter fraud, not something entirely different.
    2. Both kinds are deeply destructive of the “one man, one vote” principles of representative democracy.
    3. The FBI places both registration and at-the-polls fraud in the same category of fraud.

    So in summary, there is no legal distinction between “voting fraud” and “voter registration fraud.”

    However, even when making that dubious distinction, there have been numerous, documented instances of Democrats and ACORN staffers (but I repeat myself) committing in-person voting fraud:

  • Take, for example, this case in Troy, New York:

    Four Democratic officials and political operatives have pleaded guilty to voter fraud-related felony charges in an alleged scheme to steal an election in Troy, N.Y., FoxNews.com reports.

    The group forged signatures on applications for absentee ballots and on the ballots themselves in a 2009 primary of the Working Families Party, which was affiliated with now-defunct community group ACORN.

  • Or how about Massachussets Democrat State Rep. Stephen Smith (a member of the Joint Committee on Election Laws” who plead guilty to voter fraud and resigned after casting fraudulent absentee ballots “in multiple elections.”
  • Three Arkansas Democrats and a police officer pleaded guilty to…bribing voters for their absentee ballots for a local election in 2011.”
  • In Indiana, a “former state representative and longtime Jennings County Democratic Party worker received an 18-month sentence Wednesday for three felony convictions of voter fraud” for registering and voting the ballots of other people.
  • “A Milwaukee man pleaded guilty Monday to illegally voting five times last year in West Milwaukee, when in fact he did not have residency there.”
  • Here’s a Brownsville woman voting multiple times in the Democratic primary.
  • Here’s a Maryland woman who plead guilty to trying to cast the vote of her recently deceased mother.
  • So even by the standards of facetious distinctions between “voting fraud” and “voter registration fraud,” Democrats and ACORN have committed plenty of both.

    No wonder they oppose Voter ID…

    And Then There Was One

    Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

    The race between Democratic incumbent Timothy Bishop and Republican challenger Randy Altschuler for New York’s 1st first congressional district is the last undecided House race of 2010.

    Bishop is ahead by some 200-odd votes, but Altschuler has been gaining due to absentee and military ballots (despite New York sending troops ballots later than required by law). There are also appears to have been some voting fraud in the race.

    I expect this race to see quite a few court days before all is said and done…

    LinkSwarm for Thursday, November 11, 2010

    Thursday, November 11th, 2010

    Another LinkSwarm of sundry sundries: