Cleaned-up rolls: only half the solution

The Friday Letter / No. 530 / March 3, 2023

Updated at 10:30 p.m. ET Thursday with additional reporting that the Georgia Senate has rejected Buckhead secession. The original post was released early, on Thursday evening, in error.

Just before the 2020 election, the Public Interest Legal Foundation reported on the state of voter registration rolls. It identified 349,773 deceased registrants nationally, 37,889 duplicate registrations, and 34,000 voters registering non-residential addresses.

Last week the PILF published an interactive voter roll error database. Holding the mouse over a state on the map opens that state's report. The data are old, some going back to 2016, and so they don't reflect election law changes – some of them more symbolic than meaningful – enacted since the fraudulent 2020 presidential election.

They do provide some insight into a broken system that threatens our free elections, not much improved in the last two state legislative sessions. Some, such as Indiana, hide their registration information from the general public, revealing it only to political parties and candidates.

And Georgia, despite its fraud-denying governor touting the state's tightened rules, still allows unattended drop boxes and liberal absentee voting, two of the prime sources of voter fraud.

That is the problem with reports that only show incorrect registrations. Helpful as they are, they don't reflect the ability of criminals in Democrat-controlled counties such as Maricopa in Arizona, Fulton in Georgia, and Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania to commit outright ballot voter fraud. Continued fraud in those areas has not and likely will not be eliminated in time for the 2024 election, if ever.

Man of the people?

Pontificating on constitutional matters is fun for a non-lawyer who isn't inconvenienced by having to cite actual rulings in arguing his position. I am not a lawyer, but neither is Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia.

Mr. Kemp is putting the kibosh on the residents of Buckhead, a prosperous northside Atlanta community whose citizens want to secede and create their own city because they are tired of being 1) mugged, 2) carjacked, 3) robbed, 4) raped, and 5) murdered.

This could be a 4^th Amendment issue: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

Notice the 4^th doesn't say the people have the right to be secure, only to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. Because the legal profession is charged with making simple things hopelessly complicated and beyond the ability of normal people to understand, let this untrained mind explain: It seems to me that when somebody takes your car by force or breaks into your home to steal, that might be called an unreasonable seizure.

Buckhead formed an organization and filed for divorce from Atlanta, a corrupt, crime-ridden city long run by – spoiler alert – Democrats. Buckheaders just want to be left alone to live in peace. Gov. Kemp doesn't like this idea and hopes to quash it, offering the excuse that secession is unconstitutional.

(Fortune magazine isn't too keen either, sniffing that Buckhead is “the wealthiest and whitest” area of Atlanta. Fortune forgot to mention that residents of this wealthiest and whitest area of Atlanta contribute much more than their share to Atlanta's tax base and get little in return beyond sneers and neglect.)

Last year Kemp's lieutenant governor, fellow anti-Trump election fraud denier Geoff Duncan, killed secession in the Senate. Duncan, a registered Republican who campaigned against both Trump and Republican U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker, put his finger to the wind and wisely decided not to seek a second term. The state's new lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, supports the Buckhead movement.

Late Thursday, the Georgia Senate voted 23-33 against allowing Buckhead to secede. Atlanta’s Democrat mayor was jubilant.

'What Goes Around Comes Around' Part 1

File this one under Story of the Year Nominations. A state lawmaker wants to extinguish the Florida Democrat Party.

“For years now, leftists activists have been trying to cancel people and companies for things they have said or done in the past,” Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, Republican of Spring Hill, said in filing SB 1248, the Ultimate Cancel Act. “This includes the removal of statues and memorials and the renaming of buildings. Using this standard, it would be hypocritical not to cancel the Democrat Party itself for the same reason.”

The Democrat Party supported slavery before the Civil War, spawned the Ku Klux Klan, and opposed civil rights legislation for the next century. Democrats adopted pro-slavery platforms at their national conventions in 1840, 1844, 1856, 1860, and 1864.

Bowing to intense pressure from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU, and other leftwing busybodies, the Florida Legislature and many municipalities have removed dozens of Confederate statues in the last several years. Ingoglia says what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

In recent years some Democrat organizations have quietly changed the name of their big annual fundraisers called Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners. Both presidents owned slaves, and Jackson was a sometimes slave trader known to have inflicted excruciating physical pain on runaways.

As reported at NBC News, the bill

would require Florida officials to notify all registered voters who belong to any canceled parties that their parties no longer exist. It would also change their voter registrations to “no party affiliation” and “provide procedures” for those voters to update their affiliations to “an active political party.”

State-friendly journalists came close to breakdown. Even as it reported at least one error of fact – that Democrats supported civil rights legislation after the Civil War when in fact Senate Democrats tried to block every civil rights bill of the 19^th and 20^th centuries – Forbes magazine said Sen. Ingoglia's bill comes at a time when “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Republican lawmakers in the state push controversial right-wing policies ahead of the state’s legislative session.”

To the leftist media, any thought that does not follow – dot-for-dot, word-for-word – the state narrative is right wing.

It's the little things that make this job so much fun, George Burns' character said in Oh God, You Devil! when he caused a waiter's pants to drop while serving drinks at an outdoor party. Three cheers for Sen. Ingoglia.

Coming around, going around, part 2

Angela Davis is a communist who escaped punishment for accessory to first degree murder in 1970.

Though she left the Communist Party USA in 1991 as the East German and Russian utopias collapsed to become a mainstream Democrat, she has hardly mellowed, as David Keene reports at The Washington Times. She has long supported reparations for black people and promotes critical race theory and its bible, the totally discredited 1619 Project written by New York Times propagandist and fake professor Nikole Hannah-Jones. Angela also wants to empty out the prisons – ours, not those in communist countries.

Since her escape from justice 53 years ago, Angela has made a handsome living writing and spewing hatred at colleges and other leftwing arenas.

This week Angela learned that she's the descendant of slave owners – people who helped establish the country she so fervently hates. Whoops! As the left beats the drums for redistributing the people's wealth in the form of reparations, we can't wait to see how much she volunteers to pony up.

Short takes on the news

Fox News
Taking a stand for character. The girls basketball team at a Vermont Christian school forfeited a playoff game rather than play a team with a male on the squad who was also allowed to use the girls' locker room with his girl teammates. Vermont law prevents discrimination against male athletes who say they are female. Last year, a Vermont middle school fired its girls soccer coach because he called a boy suffering from sexual dysphoria a boy, and his high school daughter was suspended for defending her father.

New York Post
If any resident of Western Oregon needs help in understanding why 11 counties in Eastern Oregon want to secede and join Idaho, look no further. A bill introduced in the Oregon Senate, SB 603, would pay homeless people $1,000 a month through a new People’s Housing Assistance Fund Demonstration Program. Funds would be available to anyone “suffering homelessness” or on the brink thereof. It does not say whether the program would apply to homeless people who elect to be homeless and therefore not suffering from it. The funds are unrestricted. Payments “may be used for rent, emergency expenses, food, child care or other goods or services of the participant’s choosing,” including, we presume, alcohol, cigarettes, crack, and fentanyl.

The Blaze
Your green tax dollars at work. The Postal Service will buy 66,000 electric delivery vehicles from Ford after the automaker forged a multi-billion dollar partnership with a Chinese battery maker. The $9.6 billion purchase will come from the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act, which passed without a single Republican vote in either house of Congress.

New York Post
How they voted: Democrats Manchin of West Virginia and Tester of Montana voted with all Republicans to overturn a Labor Department rule that allows retirement fund managers to base investment decisions on leftist political ideology rather than fiduciary responsibility. The resolution previously passed the House and faces a certain Biden veto.

Breitbart
Why cash matters. Bowing to Democrat pressure, Discover Card joins VISA, MasterCard, and Amex in tracking gun and ammunition purchases, beginning in April.

Quotes for today

“This time, I’m not. I was – I did a whole video – I mean – you know, the – what the hell – on. . . .” — Joe Biden, attempting to answer a reporter's question on why he won't visit East Palestine, Ohio

“Participating in a gun buy-back program because you think criminals have too many guns is like having yourself castrated because you think your neighbors have too many kids” — Attributed to Clint Eastwood

Headline of the week

The Babylon Bee
“Thanks to Inflation, More American Families Surviving Solely on Costco Samples”

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