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Michael Bay: Hollywood’s Conservative Hero?

by Will7881iwjsf Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Director Michael Bay is one of the most successful—if critically detested—filmmakers of the past 30 years. He is worth $400 million. He lives the life of a consummate playboy. His explosion-heavy action films (The Rock, Armageddon, the Bad Boys movies, the Transformers flicks, etc.) have grossed over $4.5 billion worldwide. His new movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction (released on Friday), is also expected to make all the money.

But what about his politics?

When I talked to the 49-year-old director last year, he demurred on the question of whether he leans right or left: “Yes, I am a political person, and I have my views about America,” Bay told me. “I’m very proud of my country; obviously it’s going through a lot of turmoil, and we have a very ineffectual government… It doesn’t matter at all whether I’m liberal or conservative—it’s not a part of what I do. I don’t feel the need to go out and tell people what to believe politically.”

Bay is obviously more private about his politics than, say, mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who worked with Bay on some of his biggest hits and is one of liberal Hollywood’s top conservatives. You won’t find much at all about Bay’s politics online or in his past statements, and a search of a public campaign finance records database turned up nothing.

However, Bay did tell me that, though he doesn’t receive a writing credit, he works closely with his screenwriters and will tweak the scripts as he sees fit. And there just so happen to be many hints of political conservatism in his movies. Out of the 11 movies Bay has directed, the one truly left-wing outlier is The Rock (1996), starring Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. The action film depicts the blowback from illegal American covert operations overseas, and is critical of gun-toting “patriotism”; it was also co-written by West Wing creator (and diehard liberal) Aaron Sorkin, so there’s that.

But much of Bay’s filmography is loaded with political content and attitudes that your average (stereotypical?) American conservative can totally get behind. In Armageddon (1998), a NASA-recruited team of blue-collar oil-drillers agree to embark on a dangerous mission to blow up an asteroid and save mankind—on the condition that they never have to pay taxes again.

In Bad Boys II (2003), the film’s rowdy-cop heroes illegally invade (and destroy large chunks of) communist Cuba, in the name of fighting the international drug war. The subsequent car chase concludes in front of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where a conveniently placed mine tears apart the body of the psychotic Cuban drug lord:

And Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, easily doubles as a critique of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Seriously. In this fictional Transformers universe, Barack Obama is identified as the president of the United States. (George W. Bush appears briefly in the first Transformers, where he orders some Ding Dongs on Air Force One.) President Obama orders the American armed forces to try to engage in diplomacy with the Decepticons (the bad-guy alien robots) and to suspend cooperation with the Autobots (the good-guy alien robots). The Obama administration also agrees to hand Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf) over to the Decepticons—the kind of act of shameful appeasement that the president’s real-life conservative critics so often accuse him of perpetrating.

Fortunately, brave members of the US military disobey these orders (a mutiny, essentially), and the day is saved! (Bay loves the US military, and also patriotism, very much so.)

“Optimus Prime truly cares about the future of the human race, unlike the Obama administration, which Bay represents as so prissy and antiwar it just wants the alien robots off the planet,” Mary Pols wrote for Time in 2009. “Bay’s Obama would probably drive his Prius over Optimus if he had the chance.” According to Bay, the reason Obama is in the film is because he once bumped into him—back when he was 2008 presidential candidate Obama—in a Las Vegas airport. Upon meeting, Bay said a couple of nice things to the future president, and Obama in turn complimented Bay by calling him a “big-ass director.”

This exchange was apparently enough to make the director want to turn the Democratic politician into a movie character. Here’s video of Bay recalling their encounter:

And in the new Transformers installment, Mark Wahlberg‘s tough-talking character, whose family property is cluttered with bold American flags, warns despotic, anti-Autobot government agents about “messing with people from Texas.” To be fair, the film can also be interpreted as a shallow pro-immigration-reform robot movie.

Regardless of how Michael Bay views Obama, or Bush, or the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, or the tea party, his patriotic views may have been best captured in a line delivered by Wahlberg in Bay’s 2013 crime film Pain & Gain: “When it started, America was just a handful of scrawny colonies. Now, it’s the most buff, pumped-up country on the planet. That’s pretty rad.”

As for making public political statements, again, don’t hold your breath. If Bay is going to make a stand, he is way more likely to do so out of his love for animals than any political conviction. In late 2010, Bay offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of a woman who threw puppies into a river. Bay is a dog lover who lives with two gigantic English mastiffs named Grace (after actress Liv Tyler’s Armageddon character) and Bonecrusher (after a Decepticon).

Looking out for puppies. That enjoys bipartisan support, right?

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Michael Bay: Hollywood’s Conservative Hero?

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Immigration Reform: It’s Finally Officially Dead

by hujnyaz Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve had a friendly argument with Greg Sargent for some months about whether immigration reform was dead, or was merely on life support and still stood a chance of resuscitation. But in a way, it may turn out we disagreed a little less than we thought. He points me today to this Politico story:

Last summer, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) privately told the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference that if reformers won the August recess, then Republicans would move a bill in the fall. But the Syria crisis, the government shutdown and the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov consumed attention through the end of 2013.

….As recently as this month, however, there was more movement in the House than previously known….But then Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) lost his Republican primary election. And young children from Central America crossed illegally over the southwestern border in record numbers. Those two unforeseen events killed any remaining chance for action this year.

….For their part, reformers underestimated how impervious most House Republicans would be to persuasion from evangelicals, law enforcement and big business, and how the GOP’s animus toward Obama over health care and executive actions would bleed into immigration reform.

Before last summer I didn’t think immigration reform was irretrievably dead. I thought it was damn close, but it wasn’t until fall that I was pretty sure it was, indeed, completely dead. And that’s pretty much my read of what Politico says. (Though, as it happens, I wouldn’t actually put much stock in John Boehner’s promise to the NHCLC, since it sounds mostly like something he said merely to avoid gratuitously pissing off a constituency, even though he knew perfectly well the reformers weren’t going to win the August recess.)

I’d say the last paragraph of the excerpt is key. The reformers may have kept up their hopes, but for some reason they simply didn’t understand just how hellbent the tea partiers were against any kind of serious immigration reform. I, on the other hand, being a cynical liberal, understood this perfectly. They were never going to bend—not no how, not no way—and Boehner was never going to move a bill without them.

The canary in the coal mine was always Marco Rubio. He genuinely wanted reform; he genuinely worked hard to persuade his fellow conservatives; and he genuinely had credibility with the tea party wing of the GOP. But by the end of summer, he understood the truth: it wasn’t gonna happen. At that point, he backed away from his own bill, and that was the death knell. No base, no bill. And by the end of summer, it was finally and definitively clear that the base just wasn’t persuadable.

In any case, Republicans have now abandoned even the pretense of working on immigration reform, and Sargent says they’ll come to regret this:

The current crisis is actually an argument for comprehensive immigration reform. But Rep. Bob Goodlatte — who once cried about the breakup of families — is now reduced to arguing that the crisis is the fault of Obama’s failure to enforce the law. Goodlatte’s demand (which is being echoed by other, dumber Republicans) that Obama stop de-prioritizing the deportation of the DREAMers really means: Deport more children. When journalist Jorge Ramos confronted Goodlatte directly on whether this is really what he wants, the Republican refused to answer directly.

….This is the course Republicans have chosen — they’ve opted to be the party of maximum deportations. Now Democrats and advocates will increase the pressure on Obama to do something ambitious to ease deportations in any way he can. Whatever he does end up doing will almost certainly fall well short of what they want. But determining the true limits on what can be done to mitigate this crisis is now on him.

I don’t know what Obama is going to do. For years, he followed a strategy of beefing up enforcement in hopes of gaining goodwill among conservatives. In the end, all that accomplished was to anger his own Hispanic supporters without producing anything of substance. At this point, there’s no downside to taking maximal executive action, so he might very well do that. But will he do it before or after the midterms? Or just give up and move on to other things? Hard to say.

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Immigration Reform: It’s Finally Officially Dead

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Jon Stewart Explains How to Make GOP Senators Care About Climate

by Katherined5a Posted on June 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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There’s no better evidence of how much the Republican Party has changed on the environment than this: The fact that Environmental Protection Agency administrators who served under Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all think global warming is real and we should do something about it.

On Wednesday, this quartet—William Ruckelshaus, who served under both Nixon and Reagan; Lee Thomas, who served under Reagan; William Reilly, who served under George Bush Sr., and Christine Todd Whitman, who served under George W. Bush—testified before a US Senate subcommittee. But as the Huffington Post’s Kate Sheppard reports, the Republican senators present “mostly ignored” their testimony.

The whole spectacle was enough to inspire a Jon Stewart rant, one that is truly priceless. Watch:

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Jon Stewart Explains How to Make GOP Senators Care About Climate

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Turns out there are a few Republicans who want to do something about climate change

by MaeGlydewweqqeq Posted on June 19, 2014

Turns out there are a few Republicans who want to do something about climate change

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Here’s a helpful reminder that not all Republicans oppose climate action. Former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush I and II spoke out on Wednesday in support of federal efforts to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants. They appeared at a Senate hearing organized by Democrats to discuss EPA’s recently proposed power-plant rules. From USA Today:

“We have a scientific consensus around this issue. We also need a political consensus,” said Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey Governor and first EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, who resigned her post after disagreeing with the White House’s direction on pollution rules.

Whitman was joined by William Ruckelshaus, the nation’s first EPA administrator under President Richard Nixon, William Reilly, who led the EPA under President George H.W. Bush, and Lee Thomas, who was administrator under Reagan. …

[T]he four EPA administrators … said the Obama administration had worked hard to make the proposal flexible and workable, using authority provided by Congress.

It’s About Time for Obama’s First Visit to American Indian Land

by WendyHaddad Posted on June 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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This Friday, President Obama will step on American Indian land for his first time as president. He’ll be visiting the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which straddles one million acres of the Dakota plains, to meet with leaders and discuss issues facing American Indians. The last sitting president to visit reservation land was Bill Clinton in 1999, so this week’s visit is a big deal.

In a June 5 op-ed in Indian Country Today, the president promised to do more for American Indians. But he also argued that his administration has already delivered great progress. Is that the case?

When Obama visits Standing Rock, he will find a community where 86 percent of residents are unemployed. That’s only the sixth–worst unemployment rate among Indian reservations: the worst is 93 percent, at the Sokaogo Chippewa Community in Wisconsin.

On top of unemployment, the American Indian community faces a number of other challenges: sky-high rates of adolescent suicide, rape, obesity, alcoholism, drug use, physical abuse and even post–traumatic stress disorder.

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It’s About Time for Obama’s First Visit to American Indian Land

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Issa’s New Scandal: An Obama Plot Against Gun Dealers

by q1jurse Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Having been booted off the Benghazi beat, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is firing up conservatives about yet another Obama scandal: a supposed White House plot to put gun dealers and other lawful merchants out of business by denying them banking services. Issa, who chairs the House oversight and government reform committee, alleges that Operation Choke Point, a Justice Department program that cracks down on fraud by scrutinizing banks and payment processors, is being used by the Obama administration to target gun sellers and other businesses the administration doesn’t fancy. “Operation Choke Point is the Justice Department’s newest abuse of power,” Issa said, in a report released May 29.

Issa wants the program dismantled, and he is deploying some of the same tactics he’s used to slam the administration on Benghazi and the so-called IRS scandal—dumping documents, whipping the conservative media into a frenzy, and accusing the administration of overstepping the law—to get his way. The same day Issa’s report came out, the House approved an amendment to the annual Justice Department spending bill that strips the program’s funding.

Meanwhile, some Democrats are mystified that conservatives are up in arms about an anti-fraud program, and the Justice Department is emphasizing this effort has nothing to do with limiting gun-selling.

Operation Choke Point compels banks to take greater steps to prevent fraud and not engage in financial transactions with companies they suspect might be breaking the law. Under Choke Point, the Justice Department has opened civil or criminal investigations into at least 15 banks and payment processors—which serve as the middleman between banks and businesses in credit card transactions—to determine if these firms have enabled fraud.

The Justice Department is working with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on the initiative. The controversy began in part because the FDIC in 2011—years before Operation Choke Point launched—issued a list of businesses associated with high-risk activity that financial institutions should watch out for. These include enterprises peddling firearms, pornography, drug paraphernalia, and racist materials. The FDIC noted that financial institutions that “properly manage these relationships and risks are neither prohibited nor discouraged from providing payment processing services to customers operating in compliance with applicable law.” In other words, there was no reason for a bank not to handle payments for these businesses just because of the goods they sell.

Nonetheless, Issa’s report alleges that the Justice Department is using the FDIC guidance as a hit list. “The FDIC’s policy statements on firearm and ammunition sales carry additional weight in light of FDIC’s active involvement in Operation Choke Point,” the report reads. But a Justice Department official tells Mother Jones that this conclusion is incorrect. “We’re not using the FDIC’s list at all,” the official says. “There’s been a lot of misunderstanding, there’s been accusations were going after gun owners…None of our cases involve gun merchants or porn.”

The Justice Department insists it’s committed to ensuring its anti-fraud campaign doesn’t inhibit lawful merchants. Issa, though, claims that Attorney General Eric Holder knew that banks would drop clients deemed “high risk” by the government, such as gun-sellers, as a result of Operation Choke Point. His report cites a recent Washington Times article reporting that a number of firearms merchants had their bank accounts shut down, supposedly because of the Obama administration. “The experience of firearms and ammunitions merchants…calls into question the sincerity of the Department’s statements,” the report states. Fox News promoted this charge, declaring, “The Obama administration, after failing to get gun control passed on Capitol Hill, has resorted to using its executive power to try to put some in the firearms industry out of business, House Republican investigators say.”

The Justice Department maintains there’s no reason banks should feel threatened by the government for doing business with certain industries, including gun-dealers. The Justice Department official notes that when the department subpoenas banks, it’s looking for payment processors that might be engaging in fraud. “We’re not saying give us all the docs you have on risky businesses,” the official says.

What about the gun-sellers who say their bank accounts were shut down? One of the gun-merchants who was cited in the Washington Times, and who says he’s a victim of Operation Choke Point, first complained publicly about his dispute with Bank of America long before the initiative was launched. The other banks in the story wouldn’t say why they closed the accounts. The Justice Department official says the agency isn’t sure why the gun merchants’ accounts were allegedly shut down, because the information its investigations have obtained does not include any links to gun dealers. “Banks are making their own assessments, that’s not something we can control,” the official says. (Last month, when several news outlets reported that JPMorgan Chase & Co shut down the accounts of people in the porn industry because of Operation Choke Point, a Chase official told Mother Jones that the government program had nothing to do with the bank’s action.)

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and a number of other Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), support Operation Choke Point. “It is a mystery to me why Chairman Issa is attacking the Department of Justice for cracking down on fraud against American consumers,” Cummings tells Mother Jones. “Contrary to the chairman’s accusations, documents produced to the committee show that the Department is using lawful investigative techniques to reduce consumer fraud.” In over 850 pages of internal Justice Department documents that Issa released, there isn’t a single mention of firearms dealers.

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Issa’s New Scandal: An Obama Plot Against Gun Dealers

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When Will Fury Start to Grow Over Growing Fury?

by Retha46Huqhh Posted on June 6, 2014

Mother Jones

The White House, says the LA Times for the third straight day, is facing “growing fury” over L’Affaire Bergdahl. How many times have I read a headline like this over the past few years. Dozens? Hundreds?

Hard to say. But it sure seems to be the defining quality of American politics these days. We just bounce from one outrage to the next, mostly ginned up by the right, but sometimes by the left too. It’s a wonder that America hasn’t dropped dead of a collective heart attack yet.

Has it always been this way? Maybe. It’s not as if we lacked for partisan outrages in the 50s and 60s. But I’d sure like to hear from folks who have a good memory for those years. Was the procession of outrages really as nonstop as it is today? Did we at least take a break between outrages back then? Or has nothing changed except our exposure to this stuff thanks to Twitter and 24-hour cable news?

In any case, I think this is the fundamental reason that I continue to sympathize so much with President Obama, regardless of whether he’s pursuing policies I happen to like. I exchanged some emails with a friend about Obama’s seemingly tone deaf handling of the Bergdahl case, and one of the things he said is this: “My read is he is getting bored and detached after being so boxed in and hammered. He sounds like he is starting to check out. I think the staff is getting demoralized and are just not caring too much since they know it’s going to get hit one way or the other.”

Obama has always had a certain amount of contempt for the modern media and its endless Politico-style pursuit of shiny objects designed to “win the morning.” Ditto for the parochial nature of congressional politics and the insane tea-party style of no-compromise governing adopted by the modern Republican Party. Because of that, he’s often a lousy politician. He’s not willing to pander to the requirements of fake, outrage-of-the-day PR, nor does he even really want to engage in the normal sort of horse-trading that’s always been a part of politics. Aside from pure personal preference, I suppose his excuse on the latter is that there’s no point: Republicans are no longer willing to horse-trade, so why bother playing the game?

Instead, he wants to take the long view and ignore all the childish nonsense. Logic tells me that’s probably dumb, but in my heart I find it almost impossible to blame him. I keep thinking that if someone acts like an adult—or at least a little more like an adult—maybe eventually the media and the public will get a little chagrined and start ignoring the shiny objects. I know it’s not going to happen, but I still can’t bring myself to rebuke Obama for holding out hope. I think that’s why I often cut him so much slack.

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When Will Fury Start to Grow Over Growing Fury?

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains How Republicans Blew It on Climate Change

by JulissaStubbs Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you care about the place of science in our culture, then this has to be the best news in a very long time. Last Sunday night, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey—which airs on Fox and then the next day on the National Geographic Channel—actually tied ABC’s “The Bachelorette” for the top ratings among young adult viewers, the “key demographic” coveted by advertisers. And it did so by—that’s right—airing an episode about the reality of climate change.

Tuesday evening, I had the privilege of sitting down with the show’s host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, to discuss this milestone, and how he feels generally as the 13-part series comes to a close. (The final episode, entitled “Unafraid of the Dark,” airs this Sunday night.) “The ratings are exceeding our expectations,” said Tyson, fresh off the climate episode triumph. But Tyson emphasized that to him, that’s not the most important fact: Rather, it’s that a science show aired at all in primetime on Sunday night.

“You had entertainment writers putting The Walking Dead in the same sentence as Cosmos,” said Tyson. “Game of Thrones in the same sentence of Cosmos. ‘How’s Cosmos doing against Game of Thrones?’ That is an extraordinary fact, no matter what ratings it earned.”

I spoke with Tyson in the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Hall in DC, below a painting of the society’s founders signing its charter in 1888. Tyson, wearing a glittering space-themed tie, sipped white wine before moving upstairs to a reception where he was destined for an hour of handshakes and selfies. Later that evening—after a special advance airing of the final episode of Cosmos—he would electrify a packed room by explaining to a young girl how solar flares work, a display that involved him sprawling across the stage (and his fellow panelists) as he contorted his body to mimic the dynamics of the sun’s plasma. The show concluded with Tyson explaining how “plasma pies” (as he dubbed them), ejected towards us by our star, ultimately become the aurora borealis and the aurora australis.

There were other Cosmos luminaries on the stage—including executive producers Brannon Braga and Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow—but Tyson won the room that night. Easily.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, surveying some of the universe’s awesomeness in Cosmos. Fox/National Geographic

Overall, Tyson notes, Cosmos premiered not only on Fox but on National Geographic Channel and, globally, in 181 countries and 46 languages. “It tells you that science is trending in our culture,” Tyson averred to me. “And if science is trending, that can only be good for the health, the wealth, and the security of our species, of our civilization.”

And yet, many members of our species still deny that the globe is warming thanks to human activities—a point that Cosmos has not only made a centerpiece but that, the program has frankly argued, threatens civilization as we know it. Tyson is know for being fairly non-confrontational; for not wanting to directly argue with or debate those who deny science in various areas. He prefers to just tell it like it is, to educate. But when we talked he was, perhaps, a little more blunt than usual.

“At some point, I don’t know how much energy they have to keep fighting it,” he said of those who don’t accept the science of climate change. “It’s an emergent scientific truth.” Tyson added that in the political sphere, denying the science is just a bad strategy. “The Republican Party, so many of its members are resistant to embracing the facts of climate change that the legislation that they should be eager to influence, they’re left outside the door,” said Tyson. “Because they think the debate is whether or not it’s happening, rather than what policy and legislation can serve their interests going forward.”

You can argue, in fact, that that is exactly what happened this week. One day after Cosmos’ highly rated climate episode aired, the EPA announced its new regulations for power plant carbon dioxide emissions. The whole reason that the Obama administration went this route—regulating carbon via the Clean Air Act—was that climate legislation (the first option, and the more desirable option) was impossible. The legislative math didn’t work. It would never pass.

Now, Republicans are extraordinarily upset by the EPA’s rules, as the agency moves in to fill a legislative vacuum. But thanks to their denial, they may well have lost their chance to find a more ideologically desirable solution, like a carbon tax. (In fairness, some coal state Democrats were also responsible for the failure of cap-and-trade legislation in Congress. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin famously shot the bill with a rifle in an ad for his 2010 Senate campaign.)

That’s bad for our politics, just as climate change is bad for our civilization—but it is surely some small saving grace to at least learn, thanks to Tyson and Cosmos, that science is not bad for the television business. The success of Cosmos, Tyson thinks, changes what can be on TV; how future network programmers will think, in the future, about what constitutes desirable content.

“It will open up their definition of what can be in primetime television,” he said.

On our most popular episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Neil Tyson explained why he doesn’t debate science deniers, and much more. You can listen here (interview starts around minute 13):

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains How Republicans Blew It on Climate Change

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“All of the Above” Is a Perfectly Fine Republican Midterm Strategy

by AprilSouza Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Just a quick note to my fellow liberals. I occasionally see a bit of crowing over the fact that Republicans can’t agree on a coherent midterm story. Is it going to be Benghazi? The economy? Obamacare? Bowe Bergdahl? The EPA? Vladimir Putin? Or what? Republicans are in disarray!

I wouldn’t count on that. Not all of these things will have the legs to carry them all the way to November, but that doesn’t matter. They all reflect badly on Obama, and as this stuff piles up, low-information centrists and leaners all start to think that there must really be something wrong with Obama and his fellow Democrats, even if they don’t quite know what. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right?

An “all of the above” strategy will probably work just fine for Republicans. I doubt that the outrage over Bowe Bergdahl will last long, for example, but the weak White House response to it just adds to the perception that Obama is a weak manager and maybe Republicans are right about him. In November, even if nobody remembers Bergdahl, plenty of people will retain a vague memory that something wasn’t quite right about that whole Afghanistan thing. And because of that, they’ll pull the lever for their local Republican.

“All of the Above” Is a Perfectly Fine Republican Midterm Strategy

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Alabama GOP Is Offering $1,000 for Voter Fraud Tips at Polling Places Today

by Lionel4334 Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today, more than 700,000 Alabamans are headed to the polls for the state’s Democratic and Republican primaries. It’s the first election since Alabama passed its tough new voter ID law, but the Alabama Republican Party apparently doesn’t think the bill goes far enough. According to the state GOP newsletter, the party is sending trained volunteers to patrol polling places—and offering $1,000 rewards for tips that lead to felony voter fraud convictions. Below is a snippet from the missive, which went out Monday:

Any suspicion of fraud or witnessing the willful non-enforcement of the Alabama’s voter laws needs to be reported….”Reward Stop Voter Fraud” signs with our hotline number will be placed at random polling locations tomorrow and at all polling locations in November. Poll watchers trained by ALGOP staff will also be watching to ensure that Alabama’s election laws—including the new photo voter ID law—are not being violated. Our signs and poll watchers will send a clear message to those wishing to commit voter fraud. Anyone attempting to tamper with the election process will be caught and will be prosecuted.

The campaign could add to the confusion surrounding the new law’s requirements. And the underlying tactics are reminiscent of the controversial “ballot integrity” initiatives that cropped up in the 1960s, following the passage of two landmark bills: the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which banned discriminatory voting practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Under a program called Operation Eagle Eye, the Republican National Committee recruited tens of thousands to volunteers to patrol polling places in heavily Democratic neighborhoods. The ostensible goal was to deter voter fraud, but some of their techniques seemed designed to intimidate voters. Poll watchers were encouraged carry walkie talkies, snap photos of citizens casting ballots, and enlist Republican-friendly sheriffs to help block voters whom the party had deemed ineligible. In Alabama, the GOP also offered rewards for tips leading to arrest and convictions for breaking certain election laws.

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Alabama GOP Is Offering $1,000 for Voter Fraud Tips at Polling Places Today

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Tag Archives: republican

Michael Bay: Hollywood’s Conservative Hero?

Immigration Reform: It’s Finally Officially Dead

Jon Stewart Explains How to Make GOP Senators Care About Climate

Turns out there are a few Republicans who want to do something about climate change

Turns out there are a few Republicans who want to do something about climate change

It’s About Time for Obama’s First Visit to American Indian Land

Issa’s New Scandal: An Obama Plot Against Gun Dealers

When Will Fury Start to Grow Over Growing Fury?

Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains How Republicans Blew It on Climate Change

“All of the Above” Is a Perfectly Fine Republican Midterm Strategy

Alabama GOP Is Offering $1,000 for Voter Fraud Tips at Polling Places Today

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Tag Archives: republican

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Turns out there are a few Republicans who want to do something about climate change

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Hosting

For the best website hosting with full support DreamHost is the best. They even have dedicated hosting for wordpress, DreamPress!

Ohm

Eden

ITUNES TV AND MOVIES

FTC Disclaimer

Sustainable Luxury

Clean Water

Spring is for Gardening

Green Power

Green Energy

Aero Garden

Natural Pest Control

FTC Disclosure

Greenreflection on Twitter

Start Plants from Seed!

Heirloom Tomatoes