These days, we see the result of Prop 47 with vastly worsened crime in California. One example is the preventable murder of Santa Maria resident Marilyn Pharis in 2015 by an illegal alien who had been arrested at least six times but was not deported because of the law.
Below, Marilyn Pharis was beaten with a hammer, sexually assaulted and murdered in her home by two men, one a Mexican illegal.
On Monday, Tucker Carlson reviewed the history of the law and its philosophy which he connects to the support of rich liberals who donated big to fund the dangerous proposition because of their feelings of guilt or desire for chaos as appears to be the case with George Soros.
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: In cities across this country, left-wing extremists are becoming, of all things, prosecutors. They’re getting elected on an agenda that favors criminals over decent people and undermines the rule of law.
How is this happening? Is there suddenly a national groundswell of support for crime and lawlessness? No. No, there’s not. Most Americans believe in order; they always have. What’s happening is an end-run around democracy. A small group of left-wing megadonors is drowning local elections with tidal waves of cash. As it turns out, that works, and it’s not very hard to do. We’ve already told you, in some detail, about how Hungarian-born billionaire, George Soros got a pro-crime radical, called Larry Krasner, elected district attorney in Philadelphia. Violence in that city immediately, and predictably, went up.
That’s what happens when you stop enforcing the law: people die. And, in Philadelphia, they have. By any measure, the Larry Krasner experiment has been an ugly disaster and, yet — and this tells you everything about where we are right now — many progressives see Philadelphia and what Krasner has done there as a model for the rest of the country. They’d like to bring it to your town and they’re trying to do that.
Last month, a longtime left-wing activist called Chesa Boudin was elected DA in San Francisco. Boudin ran on the promise to make an already filthy and disorderly city even dirtier and more chaotic. He pledged to effectively legalize prostitution, public urination, and living on the sidewalk. He dismissed the prosecution of criminal gang members as, quote, “explicitly racist,” though he didn’t explain how. He promised to do away with cash bail entirely. Just in case anyone missed the point of all of this, supporters at Boudin’s election party chanted, “F the police.” Even in America’s most flamboyantly liberal city, this was too much for a lot of people. When you tear down the justice system, only the criminals thrive. Everyone knows that. Yet, in the end, Chesa Boudin was elected anyway, if only by a narrow margin.
How’d he do that? Well, with the committed backing of Silicon Valley’s ruling class. Boudin won the support of people like Kaitlyn Krieger. She’s the wife of Instagram’s co-founder. Krieger, who is a living parody of a silly, out-of-touch rich lady, gave Boudin $27,000. Now, it’s hard to imagine Krieger would have done that if there was a possibility she might have to live with the consequences of it. But, of course, there was never any chance of that. Krieger is a billionaire. She can live behind gates protected by her own police force, if she wants, and maybe she does.
The same is true for people like Elizabeth Simons, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire, James Simons. Simons gave Chesa Boudin $25,000. If you sense a trend here, that’s because there is a trend here. Scratch the surface and you’ll find that the destruction of California has been paid for by the very rich, the guilt-wracked heirs of inherited fortunes have guilt-racked heirs of inherited fortunes have long been a major force in left-wing politics, of course. The more they despise themselves, the more left wing they tend to be. What’s new is the burgeoning coastal billionaire class.
Now, people who amass fortunes incrementally over time through hard work and innovation typically have conservative political instincts. But people who’ve made huge piles of quick cash in finance or technology usually do not. People like that understand they’ve hit the lottery. They can’t say that out loud, of course. They have to pretend that they earned it all fair and square, really.
But deep down, they know that’s a crock. They’re winners in an awful scam. They know that and they feel bad about it. So, to salve their consciences, they fund radical causes designed to destroy the very society that made them rich — sending money to Chesa Boudin is the equivalent of paying a secular indulgence. You pay the price in the end.
This is how California got Proposition 47 passed in 2014. Prop 47 downgraded a long list of felonies to misdemeanors, including any theft of under $950. Since it became law, crime has surged in California. On the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, for example, violent crime has more than doubled. Murders, assaults, robberies and rapes have jumped by 115 percent.
The city of San Francisco, meanwhile, now has more property crime than any place its size in this country. Why? Well, because criminals understand the rules. They know they can’t be punished. Authorities in Sacramento say that members of shoplifting rings bring calculators into stores to make sure their thefts come in under $950. The law allows them to steal with impunity.
It’s grotesque, and it’s incredibly destructive. How did it happen? You know the answer. The moneyed left bought the election.
George Soros put in almost $2 million behind Proposition 47.
B. Wayne Hughes Junior, son of a billionaire storage tycoon, gave another $1.2 million. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings chipped in a quarter million, as did venture capitalist Nick Pritzker. Former Facebook president Sean Parker gave $100,000 to the effort. Cari Tuna, wife of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, gave $150,000.
Moskovitz went to Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, a fact that allowed him to become a billionaire while still in his 20s. Moskovitz and his wife are now reportedly worth more than $12 billion. Now, if that sounds like a lot, possibly even an obscene amount for a 35-year-old who’s never really done anything, Moskovitz agrees with you or pretends to agree, anyway.
“Cari and I are stewards of this capital,” he told Business Insider a few years ago. “It’s pooled up right around us now, but it belongs to the world.” Of course, just because all that money belongs to the world doesn’t mean the world gets to decide how it is spent. Dustin and Cari Moskovitz make that call. Like so many in our ruling class, they could care less about what happens to ordinary people in the normal parts of America.
Thanks to the projects they fund, the country’s streets are dirtier and more dangerous. But within the gated tranquility of their world, the Moskovitzes feel like incredibly good people — empathetic, virtuous, enlightened people. And that’s what matters. In fact, it’s all that matters.
But there were other facts being revealed to experienced Washington veterans, and one appeared Thursday on Tucker Carlson [...]]]>
But there were other facts being revealed to experienced Washington veterans, and one appeared Thursday on Tucker Carlson Tonight: former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterterrorism Terry Turchie brought his national security expertise to analyze the proceedings.
One big headline: while the major accusation against Trump for years has been that he colluded with the Russians, Turchie observed, “And if there’s anything that was in the purview of Director Mueller, it was to look at Russian influence in the 2016 elections. And in fact, he didn’t do that.”
Turchie didn’t mention the previous president by name, but noted, “The FBI has been compromised . . . by the Democratic Party.”
It’s discouraging to see America’s premier law enforcement agency so corrupted, but that’s what the Deep State does — bend government institutions to the will of the elites.
Here’s the full interview:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Well, more than 200 times yesterday, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller deflected or declined to answer a direct question while testifying before Congress. Anyone watching at home learned very little about Russia, but it was not a total loss. Viewers learned how to use the word “purview” from the sheer number of times Mueller said a topic wasn’t in his:
MUELLER: It’s outside my purview.
It’s outside my purview.
With regard to Steele, that’s beyond my purview.
As I said before, I will say again, it’s not my purview.
CARLSON: So, Mueller’s testimony in the end was weird, sad and embarrassing. But was it more than that? Could it have been harmful to the national security of this country? Terry Turchie suggests it might have been. Turchie is a former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterterrorism, and he joins us tonight. Terry, thanks a lot for coming on.
TERRY TURCHIE: Thank you, Tucker.
CARLSON: You’re suggesting that this might actually have hurt the country. How?
TURCHIE: Well, absolutely, I think in fact, I’ve talked to a number of former agents today, and yesterday after the hearings, and I think we’re pretty sure and feel pretty confident that we should be saying right now that we’re probably going through one of the most dangerous times in our country’s history, because we feel that what came out of this and what came out of those hearings, definitely confirmed our worst fears from two years ago.
And that is, from all the pieces that came out and all the pieces that we’ve collected, we feel like the Democratic Party is the hostile intelligence service here, if you will, that targeted the President and wants to get him removed from office. And if there’s anything that was in the purview of Director Mueller, it was to look at Russian influence in the 2016 elections. And in fact, he didn’t do that.
I mean, what he did is, he took facts from everywhere and that entire report is trying to pin those facts around the idea that the theory that Donald Trump was in bed with the Russians; that is not the way you do an investigation.
And yesterday when he concluded his testimony said, one of the real bad things here is they’re going to do it again. Well, yes, they are, because he did nothing to stop it. And the FBI did nothing to stop it. And that’s what really makes this different.
The FBI has been compromised and the facts are very clear. We don’t know today if it’s still compromised by the Democratic Party, and too many questions remain unanswered. We don’t have time to go into all of them.
But let me just give you one little piece of something that we look at when we do counterintelligence investigations like this. You always look at and you ask, who initiated the meeting? In any kind of thing — who initiated this meeting? With say the target. And so let’s take Trump Tower. They all are raving about that terrible meeting at Trump Tower.
That meeting was initiated by Natalia Veselnitskaya. She is the one who called Donald Trump, Jr., not the other way around.
CARLSON: That’s correct.
TURCHIE: Before she did that, what did she do? She met with Fusion GPS that Bob Mueller has no idea who they are. I mean, I was crushed when I saw that. What did Glenn Simpson, the President of Fusion GPS, who had he met with before all of this? He’d met with Perkins Coie, the law firm that was representing the DNC and paying for and filtering money to Christopher Steele to write the dossier.
The same law firm, by the way, that would not allow the FBI to get into the DNC network, when we had the e-mails all hacked. This is awful. This is this is very obvious. And I think you’d be hard pressed to find an experienced FBI counterintelligence agent who really knows what they’re talking about.
I worked Russian counterintelligence for 20 years. So did many of the people I talked to. This is not about Donald Trump. This is about the Democratic Party weaponizing Intelligence agencies to convince the nation. They’ve known for decades as to how those people work, and in this instance, turning it against the President to get him removed from office. That’s what the resistance does. We are now going through the revolution that we started in 1960.
CARLSON: Terry Turchie, thank you for that.
The history is complicated. Sessions was the first senator to respond to Trump’s seriousness about immigration enforcement and what that could mean, so [...]]]>
The history is complicated. Sessions was the first senator to respond to Trump’s seriousness about immigration enforcement and what that could mean, so the candidate was grateful for the support. In fact, Sessions helped Trump create his position paper on immigration for the campaign.
Below, in happier times, Senator Sessions joined Donald Trump for a campaign rally in Mobile, Alabama, on August 21, 2015.
Sessions got into trouble when after being appointed AG, he announced he would recuse himself from the Russia investigation facing the Trump administration. Surely Sessions knew that problem was coming, yet didn’t warn Trump that he would remove himself from acting as the AG in anything close to that arena. Why not? Basic honesty would require Sessions to tell his boss how he would respond to the Russia situation.
Ann Coulter had a good idea:
Mr. President! Please move Sessions to Homeland and make Kobach AG. WIN-WIN-WIN! Look at the elections! Country is almost gone.
Or Jeff Sessions might run for his old Senate seat, mentioned as unlikely in the report below, but after he rests up and feels better, the senator life might look appealing once again. And he is very popular in Alabama, where he won his 2014 election running unopposed.
After all, Sessions is only 71, which is a kid in Senate years. Here in California, Senator Dianne Feinstein won re-election on Tuesday at age 85.
Tucker Carlson had some comments about the Sessions situation:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Well there are always aftershocks immediately after campaigns. The first one of the 2018 mid-terms arrived pretty quickly this afternoon. The president fired his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions.
For more than a year, the President has publicly criticized and ridiculed Sessions, so it was not very surprising. Now, the president has assured the ability of replacing Sessions with a new appointment since Republicans held the Senate; clearly, he saw no reason to keep him around.
Now, in theory, going forward, Jeff Sessions could challenge Doug Jones in 2020 to reclaim the Alabama Senate seat that he gave up to serve the president as AG. If he did that, he’d almost certainly win. He’s one of the most popular people in the state.
We asked a source close to Sessions and he said that’s probably not going to happen and Sessions will probably just retire into private life. And if he does that, of course, we will wish him the best. But it will be, and we should say this, a loss for the country.
Donald Trump’s longshot presidential campaign succeeded because he promised what so many voters wanted and, yet, what so few politicians were willing to campaign on because they are cowards.
Among his many promises, the most important was his pledge to reverse decades of deliberate neglect and treat our national borders like they’re real, like our country matters. Nobody understood that message better than Jeff Sessions. He understood it immediately.
He was one of the president’s first and most unwavering supporters, I think the first in the Senate, and it was because of immigration. When the president took office, he gave up an essentially lifetime post representing Alabama to help fulfill Trump’s mission.
Sadly, the country was going another way. Within about five minutes of the 2016 election, Democrats decided their defeat was not about immigration or an abandoned middle class. It was instead, you’ll remember, about Russia and the conspiracy between Vladimir Putin and Trump.
Now, Republicans said they didn’t believe that story. And yet, for some reason, many of them allowed Democrats to reframe the entire political debate in the country and make Russia the single biggest issue in American politics.
But Jeff Sessions did not fall for that. He never let himself get distracted from the mission at hand. While everyone else obsessed over dossiers and FISA warrants, Sessions worried about the mission he was hired to do.
He introduced a zero-tolerance approach to immigration prosecution. He treated illegal entry into the United States as a crime because it is a crime. His DOJ issued new opinions to restrict the exploitation of asylum laws in this country.
He fought to strip federal funding of sanctuary cities. Courts ruled against him but he did everything he could to get those things done. His department accelerated the hiring of immigration judges, didn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s a big deal. More cases can be heard and deportations can take place more quickly.
That’s a service to America and also, by the way, to the people being held. On DACA, Sessions’ refusal to defend that program, which is unconstitutional, really, induced the President to end the program.
Sessions wasn’t just effective at immigration though. He rolled back the Obama Administration’s soft-on-crime policies across the board. He pursued tougher penalties for drug dealers that earned the condemnation not just of liberals but of wealthy libertarians, who decided the war on drugs was a total disaster.
This, at a time, when more people were dying every year of drug ODs than died during all of Vietnam. But the decadent decided, “Oh, it’s immoral to prosecute drug dealing.” OK. The population knew differently because their relatives were dying.
Of course, Sessions also ended the Obama Administration’s harassment of local law enforcement that helped drive a surge in violent crime in major cities. If you live in one, you know what we’re talking about.
Sessions did all of this even as the President who appointed him attacked him in public. Those attacks started more than a year ago after one of the President’s public rebukes. We traveled with Sessions just by chance to El Salvador where he was pushing a fight against MS-13. Sessions made it clear he was in the cabinet to get results and would serve as long as the President would have him.
(Begin El Salvador Clip)
CARLSON: He has said again and again in many different forms throughout this barrage that you should have acted differently, you should have not recused yourself from oversight of the Russia investigation. Do you agree with that?
JEFF SESSIONS: Well, you know, I understand his feelings about it because this has been a big distraction for him. But Tucker, I talked to experts in Department of Justice, people who have trained in that. I’m confident I made the right decision.
CARLSON: You said the criticism was hurtful, and the President has made it really clear that he doesn’t seem to want you to run the Department of Justice. Will you continue to run it?
SESSIONS: Well he can make that clear at any time. I serve at the pleasure of the President.
CARLSON: Yes.
SESSIONS: If he’s — he wants to make a change, he can certainly do so and I would be glad to yield in that circumstance. No doubt about it.
(End video clip)
CARLSON: Sessions wasn’t perfect, obviously. He never seemed like an especially good administrator of a large agency. He sometimes got rolled by his staff. The Russia investigations have shown that FBI and DoJ are deeply politicized. And Sessions never seemed to fully get a handle on the permanent bureaucracy beneath them.
But if you take three steps back, here’s what you see. In an Administration beset with constant leaks and infighting, and people looking out for themselves and only themselves, Sessions was maybe one of the very few people who never forgot why he was there, to make America a better country. We can only hope that his replacement will do the same.
As it happens, the concept is fake —churches cannot set themselves up as mini Mexicos inside the United States, separate from American law. ICE officers could walk in any time [...]]]>
As it happens, the concept is fake —churches cannot set themselves up as mini Mexicos inside the United States, separate from American law. ICE officers could walk in any time and arrest the foreigners, but they don’t do so because they think it would look bad to have a Mexican moocher being dragged out with a priest squawking about the cruelty of la migra.
Many US citizens would cheer to see ICE arrests in the hypocritical churches, which are America-hating pro-Mexican institutions, but we probably won’t ever get to see that welcome sight.
Remember Elvira Arellano? She was the poster Mexican church lurker a decade ago, often holding her anchor-baby kid as a prop, as I imagined at the time to look like a ventriloquist set-up:
Fox News had a chat on the subject on Monday with Pastor Robert Jeffress who assured viewers that ICE could arrest the lawless foreigners at any time:
PASTOR JEFFRESS: I think our viewers are going to be surprised to learn that churches actually have no ability to harbor or offer sanctuary to people breaking the law. Right now, law enforcement officials can go into any church, any mosque, any synagogue and arrest those who are breaking the law, whether it be illegal immigrants, domestic terrorists or tax evaders; the only reason immigration officials aren’t doing that right now is they don’t think the optics wouldn’t look good of doing that, but right now they have the freedom to do that if they want to.
The Washington Times printed an article on Friday that precipitated the discussion:
]]>Illegals finding unlawful sanctuary in America’s churches, Washington Times, November 10, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Church World Services, a nonprofit based in New York that presses for amnesty and opposes much of President Donald Trump’s border crackdowns, knows of dozens of illegals who’ve sought sanctuary within America’s places of worship over the last few years.
Churches, in other words — at least some of them — have become an illegal’s best friend. And it’s hardly biblical; it’s hardly heavenly or humanly lawful.
From The Associated Press: “Amanda Morales sees her children off to school each day from the entrance of a gothic church, but she won’t even venture onto the sidewalk for fear of what may happen if she leaves the building where she has been a virtual prisoner for more than two months. Morales has been living in two small rooms of the Holyrood Episcopal Church at the northern edge of Manhattan since August, shortly after immigration authorities ordered her deported to her homeland of Guatemala.”
She ran to the church for safety; she’s since stayed in the church for protection from deportation. This is not a boo-hoo for Morales moment. This is a sad and outrageous reflection on how politically correct our churches have become.
And churches offering such protections are becoming more and more common in America, particularly as Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency increases its enforcement.
Morales is just one example; her kids are legal, but she’s a fugitive and could be arrested at the drop of a hat. ICE, however, views churches as safe zones — “sensitive locations,” in fact — and won’t enter to arrest and deport.
Should this change?
(Continues)
A distracted student is news?
This is pretty weak gruel, even for Carlos Slim’s Amnesty Gazette.
[...]]]>
Friday’s New York Times front page included a whiner about a college student who claimed she was too busy to obtain proof of citizenship required to vote in Kansas (where sovereignty warrior Kris Kobach [pictured] is Secretary of State).
A distracted student is news?
This is pretty weak gruel, even for Carlos Slim’s Amnesty Gazette.
A 21-year-old because miffed when his visit to the DMV didn’t produce the voting card he expected, so he is part of a lawsuit. The characters presented by the Times seem like slackers at best, and are not very sympathetic. Doesn’t anyone tell the kids these days that becoming an adult requires getting all your official papers?
The Times must think that actually requiring people to prove citizenship to vote is too hard for young and/or diverse people.
However, the public still regards law and sovereignty as valuable: a Rasmussen poll last year found that 78 percent favored proof of citizenship before being allowed to vote. The survey was prompted by a federal judge upholding the right of states to require proof of citizenship in order to register for voting.
]]>Kansas Voter ID Law Sets Off a New Battle Over Registration, New York Times, October 15, 2015
Amelia Flores, a high school senior with plans to become an electrical engineer, eagerly filled out a form to register to vote for the first time at the Kansas State Fair last month. But she left the fair without registering, stymied by a state law championed by Republicans who dominate elected offices in Kansas that requires her to provide proof of citizenship.
“I think it’s ridiculous and restrictive,” said Ms. Flores, who later received a notice in the mail informing her that she must produce a birth certificate or other proof of citizenship to complete the registration. “A lot of people are working multiple jobs, so they don’t have time to get this stuff done. Some of them don’t have access to their birth certificate.”
Ms. Flores, who said she was born in Washington State, unwittingly joined a list of more than 36,000 people in Kansas who have tried to register to vote since the law went into effect in 2013, but then did not complete their registration. This month, under a rule adopted by the Kansas secretary of state’s office, county election officials throughout the state began to cull names from the voters list, removing people who had been on it at least 90 days. Those removed from the list must start the registration process over in order to vote.
The move has touched off a new battle over voter registration, pitting the Republican secretary of state, Kris W. Kobach, an ardent supporter of strict voting rules, against Democrats and advocates of voting rights who say the law was intended to suppress voter turnout. Mr. Kobach was named in a federal lawsuit filed in September by two plaintiffs who had applied to register to vote in Kansas but were added to the roll of incomplete registrants when they did not submit proof of their citizenship.
In an interview, Mr. Kobach said culling the list would help address complaints from county clerks that notifying people of the law’s requirements was costly and often ineffective. He asserted that most of the people on the list had moved since their initial registration or “never had any intention of voting in the first place.” And he defended the law as necessary to prevent voter fraud.
“We now live in a society where there is a record number of noncitizens who live with us,” he said. “This is a common sense way of ensuring that only U.S. citizens are able to vote.”
But advocates of voting rights said the Kansas law, like about a dozen similar voter identification laws passed in Republican-led states since 2011, is intended to depress voter turnout among groups that lean Democratic, including low-income and minority voters.
Douglas Bonney, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said the Kansas requirements might particularly discourage young voters who do not have ready access to the required documents. “It has caused a massive wall for them,” he said.
An analysis by The New York Times of the list of voters showed that more than half of them were under 35, and 20 percent were from 18 to 20 years old. Fifty-seven percent of the people on the list did not declare a party; 23 percent were Democrats; and 18 percent were Republicans. The vast majority — 90 percent — had never voted before.
“This disproportionately hits 18- to 24-year-olds,” said Jamie Shew, a Democrat and the county clerk for Douglas County, Kan. “For a lot of them, they say, ‘I’m not going to worry about it.’ They’re busy and this is just one more thing to do.”
Under the law, which was passed in 2011, registrants must prove citizenship by producing a document from an approved list, which includes birth certificates, passports and naturalization records. They may bring the document to a county clerk’s office or email a photo of it. Under Mr. Kobach’s new rule, if they fail to do so, they would be removed from the voters list after 90 days. Residents can try to register again even after being removed from the list.
The 36,000 people on the list represent about 2 percent of the state’s 1.7 million registered voters. The Wichita Eagle reported in September that more than 16 percent of people who have tried to register to vote since the law went into effect in January 2013 have been placed on the list.
Several people on the list who were contacted by The Times said that they did not remember trying to register to vote and had no idea why their names were on the list. Two people said that they had moved out of state since they began the registration process, so had not bothered to complete it. Several others said they had wanted to vote but felt hamstrung by the requirement to provide proof of citizenship, and eventually gave up.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Cody Keener, 21, said that he tried to register to vote while renewing his driver’s license last year and assumed that his registration was complete. Mr. Keener, a full-time student at Baker University who lives in Lawrence, Kan., said he later received a notice from the Douglas County clerk’s office that he had been marked as “in suspense” because he had not submitted proof of citizenship. Angered by that requirement, he decided to join the suit.
“I walked out of the D.M.V. under the impression that I was registered,” he said. “When I found out later that 36,000 other people were on the list, I thought about how many people would be in my shoes, and how many tens of thousands of people would show up on Election Day thinking they were registered to vote.”
Mr. Shew, the clerk for Douglas County, whose most populous city is Lawrence, which is home to the University of Kansas, said many people had expressed frustration with the law. “The part that’s disheartening to me is, you hear a lot of people on the phone say, ‘This is just too much to deal with, forget about it.’”
Mr. Shew said that before the proof of citizenship requirement, a provision of the law known as the SAFE Act, went into effect in January 2013, registering to vote required no identification.
Kansas is one of four states that require proof of citizenship to register to vote, along with Alabama, Arizona and Georgia. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only Kansas and Arizona are currently enforcing the law. In Georgia, officials said they were still smoothing out legal and technological requirements and did not yet have a timeline for when the law would take effect. In Alabama, the secretary of state’s office said that its proof of citizenship law conflicted with a federal law and could not currently be enforced.
Though advocates of the laws contend that they prevent illegal voting, critics assert that voter fraud is rare. Even Mr. Kobach said in the interview that he knew of fewer than a dozen cases of noncitizens who had successfully voted in Kansas in the last seven years. But last Friday, he moved to prosecute three cases of suspected voter fraud, the first time in Kansas history that a secretary of state had prosecuted a voting crime, his office said.
Michael Smith, an associate professor of political science at Emporia State University in Kansas, said that the list was populated by many young people who were “very skittish, very skeptical” of the voting process and who would be less motivated than others to vote.
“I have no doubt that if this population was fully registered, the turnout rate would be on the low side,” he said. “But we’re still talking about enough voters that they could swing a close election.”
Zachary Lamb, 22, one of the would-be voters on the list, said he remembered trying to register, but disregarded a follow-up notice in the mail reminding him to complete the process.
It directed him to go to a building and bring paperwork, said Mr. Lamb, a football coach and a Republican, but he had never found the time.
But he said he agreed with the law demanding proof of citizenship, a requirement he did not believe was too much to ask.
“Honestly, I think I’ve just been lazy, and I’ve been pretty busy,” he said. “I don’t think it’s too difficult of a process to go through.”
(See my article The Thin Blue Line Is Compromised at the Top about how political the top cop job is.)
]]>SF sheriff seeks to opt out of immigration program, San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2010
San Francisco’s sheriff is seeking to opt out of a federal program that uses the fingerprints of arrestees to check their immigration status.
Sheriff Michael Hennessey sent a letter Tuesday to the California attorney general asking that the state Department of Justice not share the city’s fingerprint data with federal immigration authorities.
San Francisco is scheduled to begin participating in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s so-called Secure Communities program on June 1. Under the program, anyone arrested will have their fingerprints checked against a database used by ICE.
Hennessey says the program conflicts with a San Francisco policy that requires law enforcement to report only those born outside the U.S. who are booked for felonies.