money, money, money

Well you have just described how easily you got around the roadblocks to voting, and you had no problem so you don’t so why anybody else should. Of course the big difference is that you are not poor. What is a nominal fee for you could easily be a day’s worth of food for a poor person. They move a lot, their lives are messy, they probably don’t have the wherewithal to keep track of a birth certificate.

Once again everything is harder for a poor person, they probably don’t have a car, maybe not a phone, if they are several states from their birthplace a trip back home is going to be a difficult trek. I don’t know where these state ID places are, but I expect they are not too conveniently located, let’s go to the google. OK I googled around for five minutes and could not find a list of SOS offices.

By the way while I was at the google I came across this document http://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Applying_for_lic_or_ID_SOS_428_222146_7.pdf?20140312074053 which reveals that it takes more than a birth certificate to get a state ID. It takes at least five different kinds of documents.

I think I’ve made my case that these voter ID laws make it much harder for the poor to vote than anybody else, and since I’ve twice stated that no threat of voter fraud by individual people exists, and you’ve accepted this without rebuttal both times, that you agree with this, so that leaves the only reason for all this voter ID crapola is to keep poor people from pulling that dem lever.

Of course if it turned out that poor people tended to vote republican it would be the dems that were pushing the voter ID option. And if they did they would be in the wrong. As it is it’s the reps pushing that option, and they are wrong, well if you believe in the constitution they are.

Money, money, money. Obama outmoneyed McCain in 2008, and I’m pretty sure he outmoneyed Romney in 2012, if not it was pretty close. Not all rich white people are republicans. If you took a stroll among the lakefront liberals you would find fancy ass house after fancy ass house and all of them with big fat Obama signs stuck in their front lawns. And I know you don’t watch Fox because otherwise you would be whining about George Soros a really rich dem backer who the Foxies see as the antichrist. While rich people are generally republicans there are rich democrats too.

Right now we are having a republican primary for governor in Illinois. There are four candidates, three with minor credentials, they have held office before, or they ran for one, they all have minor name recognition. Then there is this other guy, Rauner, who nobody has ever heard of before. He is a multibillionaire, and has poured his dough into his campaign, he skips a lot of the debates, does not give any interviews, just buys these ads that run relentlessly on tv. And he is outpolling the other three combined.

In a fascinating Illinois twist he is one of those Springfield money men. You know when they are sloshing the money bucket around, he always got his share, he palled around with guys who are in jail now. Of course he never mentions this and since he doesn’t give interviews and skips most of the debates he doesn’t have to answer any for any of it. Since this is a republican primary he naturally is running as sort of a vague tea partier (see, here in Illinois even our tea partiers are faking it). The only issue that he seems to emphasize is being anti union.

Well, you may say, that is an issue alright, there are plenty of anti union people around these days, a political campaign is an airing of ideas, aren’t all these commercials with him parading around in his Carhart coat just another form of that free speech which so many Americans have fought and died for?

Of course I have different ideas of the meaning of free speech, but say it was. But then it seems like a person would wonder well how anti union is he? What has he done in the past that shows his anti union credentials (he has made big bucks off of union pensions)? Isn’t this something I would want to know? Well tough shit Jack, he isn’t giving any interviews, he is skipping debates, he doesn’t need to do any of those things because he is spending money.

What if when we ran an election everybody was limited to a certain amount of spending? If you wanted to get your message out, you would have to go to the debates, you would have to give interviews. You would have to sit down and answer questions from time to time. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?

Big money doesn’t mean that much in big elections, but in smaller elections it screams, and I would think you would have a sneaking suspicion that these unelected guys who are putting out the big bucks are going to want something for it, and that seems like a bad idea to me.