Briefly Noted: November 2014

George Soros’s election-rigging project is back from the dead. The Secretary of State Project (SoSP), a 527 political committee that went dormant two years ago, has been reincarnated as iVote. SoSP helped to elect community organizer Mark Ritchie, the ACORN-loving Minnesota secretary of state who oversaw Al Franken’s controversial victory over Republican Norm Coleman for a U.S. Senate seat in the 2008 election cycle.

In its own words, the Washington, D.C.-based iVote is a “PAC of grassroots activists and veterans of the campaigns of last three Democratic nominees [sic], launched a campaign to ‘flip the script’ from playing defense on voter suppression, to playing offense, not only on voter protection, but also on expansion of voting access.” Like SoSP, iVote is trying to help left-wing candidates, who think voter fraud is a figment of your imagination, become elected as secretaries of state in states across the country, where they can then change election rules to discriminate against Republicans. iVote was founded by Jeremy Bird of 270 Strategies, national field director for the 2012 re-election campaign of President Obama.

At press time, President Obama is seriously considering nominating Thomas Perez, his far-left labor secretary, to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder. Perez would likely be worse than Holder, the scandal-plagued left-wing cabinet member who has taken the Department of Justice (DoJ) to new lows of mediocrity and lawlessness. Perez is also a past president of CASA de Maryland, an advocacy group for illegal aliens funded by George Soros and the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Perez, who previously ran the DoJ’s civil rights branch, “fits all the qualities that Eric Holder had: A lack of ethics, disrespect for the rule of the law, and placing ideology first,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. During his previous stint at DoJ, Perez “was the point man in terms of enforcing law in [a] racially biased manner.”

Politically correct radical left-wingers hate opposition. Taking a page from England’s bloody King Henry VIII, who cracked down on religious dissenters, Houston’s radical mayor Annise Parker is trying to root out opposition by harassing local pastors who opposed Houston’s bizarre “Equal Rights Ordinance.” That city by-law, now the subject of a lawsuit, makes it lawful for men to use women’s bathrooms, showers, and dressing facilities, and vice versa. Attorneys working with the city government issued subpoenas to pastors that demanded, among other things, that the pastors turn over any sermons that criticized the mayor or the ordinance. Houston city attorney Dave Feldman said religious ministers are fair game. “If they choose to do this [i.e., criticize the ordinance] inside the church, choose to do this from the pulpit, then they open the door to the questions being asked,” Feldman said.

Americans have long lamented how little today’s college students know about current affairs, but an experiment carried out by Dan Joseph of CNS News (part of Media Research Center) seems to confirm the worst. Several students at George Mason University have signed a petition Joseph circulated calling upon President Obama to support the hostage-beheading terrorist group ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). The U.S. is conducting airstrikes against ISIS, which is receiving nonstop international media coverage for its horrific brutality. These students “will, one day, go into the world and have real responsibilities … have children … [and] probably vote in presidential elections,” Joseph said.