Re: OT:Thanksgiving

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:26:19 -0600, "HeyBub" <heybub@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Howard Brazee wrote:
On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:49:03 -0600, "tlmfru" <lacey@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Without looking at the site, I presume it refers to the "Roe vs.
Wade" decision on abortion; and that as Democrat women (so it's
assumed) will have more abortions than Republican women therefore
the number of Democrats will slowly decline.

But that really doesn't work when you check the demographics. But
there are people who have strong enough convictions about abortion
that their political preferences move towards the party that gives the
most lip service to their side of this issue.

Well, yes it does fit the demographics.

Abortion should be generally available:
Conservative Repub - 17%
Liberal Dem - 60%
http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=150

It was estimated that there were 75,000 abortions in Florida in 1982 (45,000
by liberal dems and 12750 by conservative repubs, if the above percentages
apply - a difference of 32,250).

There are three kinds of people in the world:

1. Those who can do arithmetic.
2. Those who can't.

Now had those 75,000 gone to term, they would have been eligible to vote in
2000. Of the calculated liberal plurality of 32,000, some would have died,
some moved away, some incarcerated, and so on. But some would have voted.

If the "some" that voted exceeded 600, Al Gore would have been president.

Most likely, half of the 75,000 would have become Republicans and half, Democrats. The
outcome would have been the same. But if say 1,000 more had become Democrats (because they
were black and hispanic), Jeb Bush would have simply disenfranchised 101,000 instead of
100,000.

--- quotation ---

Over the past two years, with Republicans in charge of both the governorship and the
secretary of state's office, now under Harris, the felon purge has accelerated. In May
2000, using a list provided by DBT, Harris's office ordered counties to purge 8,000
Florida voters who had committed felonies in Texas. In fact, none of the group were
charged with anything more than misdemeanors, a mistake caught but never fully reversed.
ChoicePoint DBT and Harris then sent out "corrected" lists, including the names of 437
voters who indeed had committed felonies in Texas. But this list too was in error, since a
Texas law enacted in 1997 permits felons to vote after doing their time. In this case
there was no attempt at all to correct the error.

The wrongful purge of the Texas convicts was no one-of-a-kind mishap. The secretary of
state's office acknowledges that it also ordered the removal of 714 names of Illinois
felons and 990 from Ohio--states that permit the vote even to those on probation or
parole. According to Florida's own laws, not a single person arriving in the state from
Ohio or Illinois should have been removed. Altogether DBT tagged for the scrub nearly
3,000 felons who came from at least eight states that automatically restore voting rights
and who therefore arrived in Florida with full citizenship.

A ChoicePoint DBT spokesman said, and the Florida Department of Elections confirms, that
Harris's office approved the selection of states from which to obtain records for the
felon scrub. As to why the department included states that restore voting rights, Janet
Modrow, Florida's liaison to ChoicePoint DBT, bounced the question to Harris's legal
staff. That office has not returned repeated calls.
......
Beverly Hill, the elections supervisor of Alachua County, where Johnson attempted to
register, said that she used to allow ex-felons like Johnson to vote. Under Governor Bush,
that changed. "Recently, the [Governor's Office of Executive] Clemency people told us
something different," she said. "They told us that they essentially can't vote."

Both Alachua's refusal to allow Johnson to vote and the governor's directive underlying
that refusal are notable for their timing--coming after two court rulings that ordered the
secretary of state and governor to recognize the civil rights of felons arriving from
other states. In the first of these decisions, Schlenther v. Florida Department of State,
issued in June 1998, Florida's Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that Florida could not
require a man convicted in Connecticut twenty-five years earlier "to ask [Florida] to
restore his civil rights. They were never lost here." Connecticut, like most states,
automatically restores felons' civil rights at the end of their sentences, and therefore
"he arrived as any other citizen, with full rights of citizenship."

The Schlenther decision was much the talk at a summer 1998 meeting of county elections
officials in Orlando. So it was all the more surprising to Chuck Smith, systems
administrator with Hillsborough County, that Harris's elections division chiefs exhorted
local officials at the Orlando meeting to purge all out-of-state felons identified by DBT.
Hillsborough was so concerned about this order, which appeared to fly in the face of the
court edict, that the county's elections office demanded that the state put that position
in writing--a request duly granted.

The Nation has obtained the text of the response to Hillsborough. The letter, from the
Governor's Office of Executive Clemency, dated September 18, 2000, arrived only seven
weeks before the presidential election. It orders the county to tell ex-felons trying to
register that even if they entered Florida with civil rights restored by another state's
law, they will still be "required to make application for restoration of civil rights in
the state of Florida," that is, ask Governor Bush for clemency--exactly the requirement
banned by the courts. The state's directive was all the more surprising in light of a
second ruling, issued in December 1999 by another Florida court, in which a Florida
district court judge expressed his ill-disguised exasperation with the governor's
administration for ignoring the prior edict in Schlenther.

Voting rights attorneys who reviewed the cases for The Nation explained that the courts
relied on both Florida statute and the "full faith and credit" clause of the US
Constitution, which requires every state to accept the legal rulings of other states. "The
court has been pretty clear on what the governor can't do," says Bruce Gear, assistant
general counsel for the NAACP. And what Governor Bush can't do is demand that a citizen
arriving in Florida ask him for clemency to restore a right to vote that the citizen
already has.

Strangely enough, the governor's office does not disagree. While Harris, Bush and a
half-dozen of their political appointees have not returned our calls, Tawanna Hayes, who
processes the requests for clemency in the governor's office, states unequivocally that
"we do not have the right to suspend or restore rights where those rights have been
restored in another state." Hayes even keeps a copy of the two court decisions near her
desk and quotes from them at length. Then why have the governor and secretary of state
ordered these people purged from the rolls or barred from registering? Hayes directed us
to Greg Munson, Governor Bush's assistant general counsel and clemency aide. Munson has
not responded to our detailed request for an explanation.

A letter dated August 10, 2000, from Harris's office to Bush's office, obtained under
Florida's freedom-of-information act, indicates that the chief of the Florida State
Association of Supervisors of Elections also questioned Harris's office about the purge of
ex-cons whose rights had been restored automatically by other states. The supervisors'
group received the same response as Hillsborough: Strike them from the voter rolls, and if
they complain, make them ask Bush for clemency.

While almost all county supervisors buckled, Carol Griffen did not. Griffen, Washington
County's elections chief, concluded that running legal voters through Jeb Bush's clemency
maze would violate a 1993 federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, which was
designed to remove impediments to the exercise of civil rights. The law, known as "Motor
Voter," is credited with helping register 7 million new voters. Griffen quotes from the
Florida section of the new, NVRA-certified registration form, which says, "I affirm I am
not a convicted felon, or if I am, my rights relating to voting have been restored."
"That's the law," says the adamant Griffen, "and I have no right stopping anyone
registering who truthfully signs that statement. Once you check that box there's no
discussion." Griffen's county refused to implement the scrub, and the state appears
reluctant to challenge its action.

But when Pastor Johnson attempted to register in Alachua County, clerks refused and
instead handed him a fifteen-page clemency request form. The outraged minister found the
offer a demeaning Catch-22. "How can I ask the governor for a right I already have?" he
says, echoing, albeit unknowingly, the words of the Florida courts.

Had Johnson relented and chosen to seek clemency, he would have faced a procedure that is,
admits the clemency office's Hayes, "sometimes worse than breaking a leg." For New Yorkers
like Johnson, she says, "I'm telling you it's a bear." She says officials in New York,
which restores civil rights automatically, are perplexed by requests from Florida for
nonexistent papers declaring the individual's rights restored. Without the phantom
clemency orders, the applicant must hunt up old court records and begin a complex process
lasting from four months to two years, sometimes involving quasi-judicial hearings, the
outcome of which depends on Jeb Bush's disposition.

Little wonder that out of tens of thousands of out-of-state felons, only a hardy couple of
hundred attempted to run this bureaucratic obstacle course before the election. (Bush can
be compassionate: He granted clemency to Charles Colson for his crimes as a Watergate
conspirator, giving Florida resident Colson the right to vote in the presidential
election.)

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010205/palast
.

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