Would a dead person be allowed to vote? Not only is the answer yes, but then when the hidden camera operators offered to actually show ID, it was refused.

Now, if you’re of the mindset that this sort of thing doesn’t happen a lot, I’d probably be willing to concede the point because we don’t know either way. That being said, since we know it was this easy to do, and since one illegal or illegitimate vote cancels out (e.g.: disenfranchises) one legitimate vote, shouldn’t we be working extra hard to make sure the integrity of our elections is beyond reproach?

And the argument that it “doesn’t happen often” is irrelevant in this case, really, because we have proof that if the nice folks from Project Veritas had bad intentions, this could have easily turned into a case of voter fraud.

But it isn’t just New Hampshire that needs help, either. Check out what’s going on in Wisconsin, the state currently running an effort to recall its governor…

In the City of Milwaukee, Dist 1, a voter used only a magazine subscription invoice as proof of residence, then vouched for someone else’s residency.

1,021 Election Day Registration forms in City of Milwaukee had the proof of residency left blank.

In Greenfield, a voter used their Ohio driver’s license and a passport as proof that they lived in Wisconsin. That same person then corroborated for someone else with the same last name and at the same address, who also only a had passport.

A voter used a Traffic Citation from the State of Illinois to prove Wisconsin Residency.

Several citizens moved to Milwaukee County and registered to vote using out of state drivers licenses for proof of residency. There is nothing on the registration form to indicate the Poll Worker saw anything else to substantiate the residency requirements.

Three individuals used hotel receipts to substantiate their proof of residency. Two also provided out of state drivers licenses and a third person used their military identification card to register and vote.

A citizen registered once using their WI Drivers License then returned to the polling location some time later and registered a second time using a utility bill. In both cases, this person voted. It was not caught by the municipality during their review of forms to update the state Voter Registration System. However, we turned this information over to the Milwaukee County District Attorney office.

Numerous citizens completed their voter registration forms and there was no indication that the Poll Worker verified the eligibility or identity of the person registering to vote.

Numerous corroborators failed to list their address on the registration form as required.

All of that for same day registrations, 33% or more of which were invalid. Now here’s another astonishing factoid:

“We were told this is the first time anyone has done this kind of post-election analysis in the County,” Gamble told MacIver News. “it just floored me to discover they don’t conduct routine quality control checks like this after the election.”

It’s one thing to not do a check during the election, but to not check afterward either? In this country, you have to show a driver’s license to do pretty much anything, and yet we won’t even check the rolls to see who voted afterward?

Whether or not we have a huge widespread problem is open for debate, again, because we don’t have statistics on crime, but when 33% of same day voting registrants in one city (in this case Milwaukee) can register without meeting the standards required, are we really doing our process the best service possible by not making it more stringent and ensuring that it’s held to the highest standards for integrity?

My answer is no, and we need to shape up. It shouldn’t have to come to an election being lost due to voter fraud for us to realize that we have a problem that needs to be fixed.

You know what I love about this rant? It really demonstrates the idiocy of the person making it as well as the clear and concise class warfare contained therein.

She talks about what businesses get “for free” like roads and police and fire, as if they don’t pay taxes. She talks about the publicly educated children as if the businesses don’t pay taxes. She talks about deliveries coming over roads that not only the company pays taxes for, but the companies operating the trucks pay taxes and registration fees for.

The problem with people like Elizabeth Warren is they think that if you have you clearly stole it from someone who doesn’t. If you’re a business, you provide nothing of value. Your products mean nothing. People wanting them and buy it aren’t an honest business relationship.

There’s so much red meat in that idiotic statement that really does sum up what the modern left thinks and believes.

It’s astonishing to me.

Navigation-and-emergency-services company OnStar is notifying its six million account holders that it will keep a complete accounting of the speed and location of OnStar-equipped vehicles, even for drivers who discontinue monthly service.

OnStar began e-mailing customers Monday about its update to the privacy policy, which grants OnStar the right to sell that GPS-derived data in an anonymized format.

Adam Denison, a spokesman for the General Motors subsidiary, said OnStar does not currently sell customer data, but it reserves that right. He said both the new and old privacy policies allow OnStar to chronicle a vehicle’s every movement and its speed, though it’s not clear where that’s stated in the old policy.

“What’s changed [is that if] you want to cancel your OnStar service, we are going to maintain a two-way connection to your vehicle unless the customer says otherwise,” Denison said in a telephone interview.

The connection will continue, he said, to make it “easier to re-enroll” in the program, which charges plans from $19 to $29 monthly for help with navigation and emergencies. Canceling customers must opt out of the continued surveillance monitoring program, according to the privacy policy.

Well, at least it’s a private company and not the government, right?

Oh…

Right…

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The interesting part of this whole thing is that while the guy shooting is talking about the techniques of these creepy bastards, this guy has a phone to his ear and never once says anything, meaning that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Creepy creepy creepy creepy creepy.

More of him documenting the park here.

Lovely.

NYC Hurricane Evacuation Map

Yeah, I wouldn’t exactly call that hot either, so it was with great surprise that I came across pictures of her with the skankiness knocked off her…

Yep. Hot.

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New York, never at a loss for self-congratulatory words, regards itself as the most tolerant of cities, a place where one may express any thought freely. It is true. In New York, one may articulate any idea whatsoever — as long as that idea parallels popular opinion.

Stray too far from generally accepted wisdom, though, and you are asking for trouble.

The latest to discover this reality is a Texas group called Life Always, which bought billboard space in SoHo to deliver an anti-abortion message rooted in recent statistics from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. They showed that in 2009, 41 percent of all pregnancies here ended in abortion. The abortion rate for black women was even higher, almost 60 percent.

Up went the billboard on a building at the corner of Avenue of the Americas and Watts Street. It showed a black girl with these words above her head: “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.”

Was this anti-abortion statement subtle? Hardly. Accurate? Depends on your politics. Offensive? For some people, yes. Out of step with mainstream thought in New York? For sure. And so, a few days ago in this most tolerant of cities, a raft of elected officials wasted no time calling for the billboard’s removal.

Lickety-split, the sign came down.

Great article on the hypocrisy that is the city of New York with regards to freedom of speech.

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Now what if that exploitation was being carried out by a noted black man?

Welcome to Rushcard.

How this card is even legal is beyond me. It’s a prepaid Visa card, not a secured card. That means what you put in is what you can take out. Essentially you draw out of the card to pay for your purchases, and then you can top it off electronically or with a direct deposit from your employer.

If you choose a monthly plan, you’re going to pay $9.95 per month plus a $1 per transaction if you use the card as debit instead of credit. Plus, there are hefty ATM fees and other charges.

If you instead choose the “pay as you go” plan, you avoid the monthly fee and instead pay $1 every time you swipe your card — up to $10 per month. If you don’t use your card for 90 consecutive days, you get hit with $1.95 fee. And the ATM fees are even worse.

“This is what I call the “plastic tax” because you’re so desperate to use plastic you’ll accept almost any terms,” said John Ulzheimer, personal finance expert at SmartCredit.com.

And you’re paying to use your very own money. Unlike a credit card, where a bank extends you credit, prepaid debit cards only allow you to spend what you’ve already deposited on the card.

Plus, even the worst credit cards report to the credit bureaus, so you can use them to build your credit. But prepaid cards don’t even do that.

“If you’re using this card because you’re in a pinch credit-wise, this isn’t going to help you re-enter the world of good credit,” said Ulzheimer.

The sad part is that Rushcard doesn’t get you the credit upgrade you could probably use if you’re considering one of these cards, but they imply that it could. Check this out from the Rushcard website:

Your Prepaid Visa® RushCard can help you build a positive credit file. When you enroll in our FREE RushPath to Credit and make recurring deposits and payments using your RushCard, your transaction information will be reported to participating consumer credit reporting agencies.

How it works
RushPath to Credit is an optional service. When you register online for a FREE account, click RushPath to Credit and select “Enroll.”*

Use your Prepaid Visa RushCard when paying your utility, cable, telephone or any other recurring bills every month.

RushCard automatically reports your payment history to LexisNexis® and PRBC®, a national credit reporting agency.

The credit reporting agencies we report to use your transaction history to create a positive credit file for you. When you apply for credit, lenders may use your positive credit file to qualify you and offer you lower interest rates.

Hmmm… Kinda sounds like it’ll increase your creditworthiness, doesn’t it? Well yeah, except for the part where they warn you that it may not…

RushPath to Credit will not help your current credit rating, record, or history with credit agencies that currently do not accept RushCard transaction history as part of their credit rating system.

Ahhhhh, ok. So in other words, they’ll just claim to help you out. It’s like saying “We offer national exposure for your blog” and when you click the fine print it says “National exposure means someone reading your blog and reposting it on CNN. No guarantee this will happen.”

But if you really want to see just how exploitative these cards are, check out the schedule of fees. Fifty cents just to check my balance at an ATM? A $2.00 fee for enrollment in bill pay? $1.99 to change your account type from monthly to pay as you go?

This should terrify and outrage people, and yet here it is without anyone really caring because Russell Simmons is behind it. I can’t even imagine the outrage of “the community” was being taken advantage of someone who wasn’t a black mogul. Simmons talks a big game about financial empowerment, but it’s pretty obvious whose financial empowerment he’s most worried about.

To be clear, I couldn’t possibly care less what people do with their own money. If you want to get robbed by a guy who does it with a schedule of fees rather than a gun, that’s your business, but let’s be honest here; this card is a disgrace and Simmons should be ashamed of himself for touting how good it is for poor people in urban areas. This card is clearly not designed to help anyone but Simmons himself, and if I had a hall of shame on this site, he and his piece of crap card would be the first inductee.

Egypt…

Yemen…

Jordan…

Now Bahrain…

Protesters in the key Gulf state of Bahrain threatened on Tuesday night to keep up a permanent Egypt-style demonstration in the capital until demands for the government to be sacked were met.

As calls for democracy continued to spill across the Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt, the King of Bahrain was forced to make a rare implicit apology for the behaviour of his security forces.

Two young protesters have been killed by police in the past two days – the second on Tuesday outside the hospital where 10,000 people gathered as the body of the first was being taken away for his funeral.

“We extend our condolences to the parents of the dear sons who died yesterday and today,” King Hamad said in a broadcast address. He promised an investigation headed by the deputy prime minister and said democratic reforms would continue.

His words failed to assuage the protesters, who gathered on Pearl Square, a vast traffic concourse in the capital, Manama, renaming it “Bahrain’s Tahrir Square” after the epicentre of protests in Egypt.

So another US ally and dictatorial autocrat is about to fall, and predictably right-wingers are apoplectic framing it as a religious uprising and even claiming Iran is behind it because, like Iraq, the Sunni majority has kept their thumb on the Shia minority. Diplomats familiar with the situation call the bunk, but that won’t stop rightwingers from making this out to be an Al Qaeda uprising.

At some point we’ll have to come to terms with a simple fact: our policy of turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in these countries in exchange for the repression of people we don’t like and a promise not to go terrorist simply isn’t working.

How many more times does this have to fail for us to wake up?

Mayor Bloomberg spent yesterday getting finger-wagged by angry taxpayers over the snow removal failure, and he let everyone know just how lousy he’s feeling about it on his radio show this morning. “This year is not ending the way I would have preferred, but it’s still been a good year. Nobody has a career that goes straight up,” he glumly pronounced. He also added that the city’s failure to plow the streets days after the blizzard was “character building.”

Yeah. It’s been a real journey in personal growth. Unless, of course, you died, in which case your voyage of self-exploration is over…

A 3-month-old Queens boy was left brain dead last night after snow-clogged routes prevented medics from reaching him quickly — and unplowed streets later forced the EMS workers to ditch their ambulance and sprint with the ailing baby to the hospital.

As little Addison Reynoso hovered at death’s door, a priest performed last rites, and his family considered pulling him off life support.

The baby’s heartbroken father fumed at the city’s lax clean-up response to last weekend’s monster blizzard.

“Clean the streets,” Luis Reynoso said, “because that’s why the ambulance came too late.”

I’m sure Mr. Reynoso is comforted by your character-building experience, Mr. Mayor.

We should all be happy that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is dead. It shows our country has evolved and we’re willing to let able-bodied people serve their country. We should celebrate this new legislation and hang our heads in shame that it took 17 years to fix a terribly dumb law to begin with.

But did we really fix anything? Amidst the cork-popping and cheering, I would argue that we’ve actually made the situation worse. Don’t believe me?

United States Code, Title 10, Subtitle A, Part II, Chapter 37, Subsection 654 is known as the Policy Concerning Homosexuality in the Armed Forces. This is the law commonly referred to as “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” and today, this is what was repealed. Essentially it set forth policy regarding how to handle homosexuals in the military, what could and couldn’t be asked, etc. It also, however, rolled any prior laws regarding homosexuality in the military into one new big law, invalidating all prior laws. This is where the problem lies.

In the version of the bill that passed the Senate today, the one that will land on President Obama’s desk to be signed into law, there is repeal language.

(f) Treatment of 1993 Policy-
(1) TITLE 10- Upon the effective date established by subsection (b), chapter 37 of title 10, United States Code, is amended–

(A) by striking section 654; and

(B) in the table of sections at the beginning of such chapter, by striking the item relating to section 654.

That’s the part everyone is cheering about. Here’s the problem, though.

The item being repealed amounts to the sum of the rules regarding homosexuals in the military. There is no longer an official policy. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is repealed, but 654 isn’t just DADT, it’s the entirety of the military’s “gay policy” if you will. We may have repealed 654, but we’ve now opened the door for a rogue General to decide that he doesn’t want gays in his unit and we now have no way to stop him because the new law contains no language that says it’s okay for gays to serve in the military. In other words, instead of a “it’s okay to be gay” policy, we now have no gay policy.

Now the one thing I did notice is that the new law does require a 60 day review before any repeal of 654 would officially take place. My guess is they’ll patch that little omission at that time, but if they don’t, you can bet your sweet bippy (as my late grandmother used to say) that someone will do something allowing them to take action and challenge this new law.

Maybe it’s time we start writing our legislators and asking them what the deal is?

Once you’ve made a promise to U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, it’s a bad idea to break it. Because if you do, he’ll call you on it, and then he’ll broadcast your perfidy incessantly, with every megaphone he can get his hands on, to anyone who will listen. Just ask President Barack Obama, who failed to keep his word on tackling immigration reform in his first year in office. Though the two Chicago Democrats were once close, Gutierrez has spent much of the past two years badgering the president on the issue. “He was clear in his commitment to me,” says Gutierrez. And yet “everything has been enforcement, enforcement, enforcement”—more deportations of undocumented immigrants, more troops |on the border. “How,” asks Gutierrez, “is this different from what George W. Bush did?”

Gutierrez, 56, is the most passionate, tireless, and nettlesome voice in Congress on immigration matters. He’s a constant presence at rallies and on TV, defending the undocumented and railing against xenophobia. It’s no surprise that a recent Pew Hispanic Center survey ranked him the second-most-important Latino leader in the country, after Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “He’s as close as the Latino community has to a Martin Luther King figure,” says Frank Sharry, founder of the pro-immigrant group America’s Voice. Yet Gutierrez’s tactics are controversial. While many admire his tenacity and credit him with keeping immigration reform alive, others, including members of the Obama administration, believe his confrontational style can be counterproductive. He sees things more simply. “I have only one loyalty,” he says, “and that’s to the immigrant community.”

At least he admits he has no loyalty to the constitution to which he swore an oath, the flag he pledges allegiance to, the voters who got him elected, or the country which he allegedly serves.

I guess we should applaud him for his honesty.

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As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials—working with BP—who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

Last week, a CBS TV crew was threatened with arrest when attempting to film an oil-covered beach. On Monday, Mother Jones published this firsthand account of one reporter’s repeated attempts to gain access to clean-up operations on oil-soaked beaches, and the telling response of local law enforcement. The latest instance of denied press access comes from Belle Chasse, La.-based Southern Seaplane Inc., which was scheduled to take a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer for a flyover on Tuesday afternoon, and says it was denied permission once BP officials learned that a member of the press would be on board.

“We are not at liberty to fly media, journalists, photographers, or scientists,” the company said in a letter it sent on Tuesday to Sen. David Vitter (R-La.). “We strongly feel that the reason for this massive [temporary flight restriction] is that BP wants to control their exposure to the press.”

What is there to hide from? It seems that the government and BP are coordinating on a conscious effort to minimize the reportage of the damage, minimize the perception of the extent of the damage, and minimize the amount of actual data coming out of the disaster.

But hey, President Obama spent 3 whole hours there yesterday so we can just assume all is okay.

This thing stinks. It’s being mishandled badly, and the problem is not being solved. Now we’re keeping the eyes of the people, in this case the press, from seeing everything. What’s even funnier is that after this, you can bet BP will be investigated eight ways ’til Sunday while the inept EPA and other governmental agencies will be let completely off the hook.

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Well, I guess now we know there are people on both sides of the aisle that don’t know crap about the politicians they “support.”

Just for reference, here’s the flip side of the same dumb-ass coin…

A JFK shuttle train that had just undergone preventive maintenance lost two doors just before picking up its first passengers yesterday, sources said.

As the AirTrain pulled into the Lefferts Boulevard stop at 3:30 a.m., the two doors swung off their hinges. One careened onto the tracks and the other jammed into the platform.

“This is very troubling,” said an airport source. “[Had] it happened when the train was crowded, people would have fallen out — and they’d now be dead.”

No one was aboard the computerized two-car shuttle — which carries no conductor or motorman.

One of the broken doors, affixed to the outside of the cars, became “embedded into the concrete platform like a knife into a birthday cake,” said a source.

An alarm sounded, but the train — minus the two doors — barreled on to the Howard Beach station, sources said.

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Fears that al-Qaeda is planning an attack on the nuclear industry in Europe were renewed yesterday after French secret agents arrested a physicist working at an atomic research centre.

The 32-year-old man, who was detained with his brother, 25, is suspected of providing a list of terrorist targets to North African Islamic radicals. He worked for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, according to French police sources.

Agents were said to have intercepted messages in which the physicist, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, had suggested targets in France.

He is believed to have been in contact with members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an Algerian-based terror organisation that joined Osama bin Laden’s network in 2007.

I for one blame Bush. Had he not stirred up Al Qaeda with his cowboy diplomacy in 2001, none of this would be happening right now.

(That’s sarcasm for you guys that are too stupid to see it).

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Reminded me of Nightmare on Elm Street 4…

A little to uncanny for my tastes…