Briefly Noted: October 2012

A New York Times article profiles Texas-based True the Vote, mocking the very idea of voter fraud “because no one can prove it exists.” True the Vote, headed by businesswoman Catherine Englebrecht, is coordinating a nationwide volunteer poll-watching program aimed at preventing voter fraud at the ballot box. Left-wing advocacy groups such as ACORN-affiliated Project Vote and the NAACP Voter Fund say voter fraud is a myth. The same groups have no concern about the incident in Philadelphia in 2008 when members of the New Black Panther Party tried to intimidate voters entering a polling station, yet claim they that asking voters to produce photo identification before voting is somehow racist. Voter fraud is real, according to former Project Vote employee Anita MonCrief. Left-wing groups target minority areas, MonCrief says, and then deflect criticism about the fraud they encourage by telling their critics, “Oh, you’re a racist. You don’t want black people to vote,” said MonCrief, an African-American. “Vote fraud deniers is what I call them.”

Meanwhile, Democratic Party leaders in Maryland forced one of their own candidates for Congress, Wendy Rosen, to step down after they learned she had voted in both Florida and Maryland elections in 2006 and 2008. State Democratic Chairwoman Yvette Lewis wrote the state’s attorney general that Rosen’s actions were “a clear violation of Maryland law,” and added, “there should be zero tolerance for voter fraud of any kind.”

Radical academic and activist Frances Fox Piven wrote an op-ed for Britain’s Guardian, arguing that the floundering Occupy Wall Street movement is far from dead. Piven rationalizes that “major American movement[s]” like Occupy do not “expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance.” She also compares Occupy to the “underground railway” that bravely smuggled slaves out of the old South.

Barrett Brown, a self-described spokesman for the Anonymous computer hacker group, was arrested in Dallas, Texas, for allegedly threatening a federal agent. Wired magazine’s Threat Level blog said Brown “posted a long and rambling YouTube video in which he talks … about retaliating against an FBI Agent named Robert Smith after he learned that his mother might be hit with obstruction-of-justice charges for an incident related to a laptop belonging to Brown that he apparently hid.” Brown boasts that he carried out cyber-attacks against the Church of Scientology, Visa, and MasterCard. Anonymous is allied with the violent Occupy Wall Street movement.

Americans for Prosperity’s Colorado chapter is demanding that Colorado Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia probe Adams State University over its now-abandoned plan to offer course credit to students who volunteer with the Obama campaign. “It strikes me as baffling that an institution of higher ed that is supported by tax dollars would risk doing something that gives the appearance of partisanship,” said AFP spokesman Sean Paige. “They should know better,” he told the Daily Caller news website.

The same Marxist agitators who tried to silence Mitt Romney in the Hawkeye State last year heckled vice president hopeful Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) recently. The agrarian socialists and union goons of the ACORN-like Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) tried to disrupt a Ryan speech at the Iowa State Fair. Iowa CCI activists loudly demanded Ryan halt the “war on the poor” and bragged on their website afterward that they shaved 30 percent off his speaking time. “Ryan spoke for only 12 minutes, well under his allotment of 20.”