Rhetorical. Digital. Political.

 Unbelievable:

“Make a list… Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done.”
— Mike Huckabee, quoted by the Cincinnati Enquirer, urging supporters of a law limiting collective bargaining for public employees to stop opponents from voting.

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/10/15/quote_of_the_day.html

Well, I guess it isn’t that unbelievable:

Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and “like handing out burglary tools to criminals.”

“It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote,” Vadum, the author of a book published by World Net Daily that attacks the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, writes in a column for the American Thinker.

“Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor,” Vadum writes. “It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money. It’s about raw so-called social justice. It’s about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.”

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/columnist_registering_poor_to_vote_like_handing_out_burglary_tools_to_criminals.php

And this

Sometimes the partisan motivation is so clear that if Stephen Colbert reported on what’s transpiring, his audience would assume he was making it up. In Texas, for example, the law allows concealed handgun licenses to work as identification, but not student IDs. And guess what? Nationwide exit polls show that John McCain carried households in which someone owned a gun by 25 percentage points but lost voters in households without a gun by 32 points.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/06/20/rigging_the_2012_election_110261.html

Finally, this:

AFLURRY OF activity in state legislatures across the country is threatening to make it more difficult for people to vote. These Republican-sponsored measures move the nation in the wrong direction.

The bills generally take two forms: stringent new requirements for the kind of IDs voters must show and restrictions on early voting. Both would suppress turnout in a nation that already fails to turn out a majority of its eligible voting population.

…

According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, the accumulated rate of voter fraud in the few states with documented cases is tiny — amounting to overall rates of 0.0003 percent in Missouri, 0.0002 percent in New Jersey and 0.000009 percent in New York. That could hardly be defined as pervasive illegal activity among voters. In a recent interview, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) failed to cite one conviction resulting from some 221 allegations of fraud statewide.

Compare the minuscule incidence of alleged voter misconduct to the estimated 11 percent of citizens who report not having an ID, many of whom are seniors or low-income earners. Even when there is no fee to acquire a voter ID, the documents required to to get that card, such as passports, may entail some cost and may be harder to come by for many elderly and economically disadvantaged voters.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-vote-against-voting/2011/06/20/AG9es1eH_story.html

“Some of this country’s bravest and best work for the government. Yet in the GOP debate at the Reagan Library, Perry simultaneously praised the Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden and claimed government doesn’t create jobs. Precisely whom does he think those SEALs work for? Enron?”

“If Perry hates government that much, maybe the next time his state’s on fire he can call a CEO.”

Paul Begala