Re: OT:Thanksgiving



"Robert" <no@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:846sk3lb90lqamjaijfh71c60g9hn214eg@xxxxxxxxxx
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.

:-) I liked that... not seen it before...

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.

Incredible that nation of over 300,000,000 could hang on such a knife
edge...

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

I find this staggering. How can Democracy work when every State is allowed
to interpret who can and cannot vote?

How could anyone interpret this mess?

There should be one clear law for the Union: "Everyone not in jail has the
right to vote."

Anything less creates schisms and classes in the society.

By all means punish felons (you guys seem Hell-bent on doing so... for all
the good it does...), but once someone pays their debt to society, they
shouldn't be marked as a second-class citizen for the rest of their life.

I was watching one of those cop video documentaries on free-to-air TV here
tonight and I thought some of the police treatment was apalling. It was all
from the USA. I realise miscreants are likely to carry guns and police need
protection, but some of what went on was definitely excessive...

As someone who upholds the rule of Law and supports the Police (recognising
that in any society they have a very difficult line to walk) I couldn't
believe watching fugitives being shot for no good reason except that the cop
concerned simply wasn't up to dealing with the situation. "I thought he had
a gun..." Looking at a blurry video from 50 yards away I could see the
person concerned did NOT have a gun, yet an officer sworn to protect and
serve the public and only half that distance away, put three rounds in him.
(The guy survived but got ten years in jail... they obviously didn't knock a
few years off for nearly shooting him to death...)

BTW, this was not an anti-police video. The commentary commended all police
actions and excused the excesses.

A burglar had a police dog set on him. Fair enough. But the handler didn't
call the dog off once the guy had given up. Instead he let the dog seriously
maul the guy, ignored the victim's screams of surrender, then rewarded the
dog with "Good Boy...". I found it sickening and an abuse of power.

I am not a bleeding heart Liberal who would scream "police brutality" if
someone genuinely resisted arrest, but neither do I think that when someone
has surrendered they should be shot or savaged by a dog.

There are calls for the police here to be armed (currently, they are not)
and they are currently trialing tasers, amidst divided public opinion. After
watching this program, I've changed my mind on issuing tasers (I was in
favour, but I realise that if you give someone a toy, they can't wait to use
it...there have already been misuses of pepper spray by police here...)

I guess the bottom line on what I'm saying here is that if you view
criminals as a sub-human, sub-culture, treat them brutally, and remove any
hope of them ever being being able to lead a normal life, you shouldn't be
too surprised at what you get.

If you see them as fellow human beings, citizens of your country, who have
screwed up, accord them the same respect you would any other person, you
might get a different type of criminal. At the very least you could be proud
of your Police Force and your Society.

The only way to lower the crime rate is to change people's minds about
wanting to commit crime, and changing social conditions so that nobody NEEDS
to commit crime to survive. There will always be greed, there will always be
anti-social screw-ups (who were created by the same society they rebel
against), there will always be crimes of passion, and crimes caused by all
the human frailty that flesh is heir to, but we should recognise it for what
it is and seek to repair the damage done. Beating them into submission is
stupid and pointless; creating a criminal under-class simply sets Society up
for a war it can never win.

I hope I never see a war like that here.

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."




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