Pennsylvania's Voter ID law

What is going on with PAs voter ID law? What is the real purpose of the law? Is voter fraud really a legitimate concern?

Going through the comments on the Inky's website (The Philadelphia Inquirer puts comment sections after most articles, the section after the Letters to the Editor is, in particular, a very popular place for on-line political comments even though all the comments are usually deleted the next day) I saw a somewhat persuasive defense of Pennsylvania's Voter ID law. The commenter, clearly acting in a similar position to the one that your humble writer holds (I act as the Minority Inspector of Elections for my polling place) declared that, as an election official, his job was to ask voters for their name, look up that name in the book printed up by election officials, the would-be voter signed underneath the name and then voted. The commenters complaint was that it was impossible to verify that the person then voting was really and truly the person that he or she claimed to be, especially as the book often used signatures that were entered in a long time ago and, to a non-handwriting expert, it appears as though a different person is signing in.

To this, all I can say is that on my second ship in the Navy, my job as Personnelman was ordinarily to work with enlisted sailors, but one day a Yeoman asked me to take a document up to the ship's Executive Officer (Known as the XO, second in command after the CO, the Captain) have him sign it and then bring the document back to the ship's Admin Office. The XO was clearly having a bad day as he complained that he had to sign off on documents all the time and he simply had to trust the people who were asking him to sign as he couldn't actually go to inspect the machinery he was certifying was in good working order, couldn't question the Petty Officer who was assuring him that she was following protocol and couldn't personally assure himself that the officers who served below him had really run through all of the proper checklists and had really exhausted all avenues before resorting to what they were now asking him to certify was the correct procedure. I stood straight, listened sympathetically, said "Yes, sir," and took the now-signed document back to the Admin Office. Even on a medium-size ship of just 400 sailors, it was often necessary for the people in charge to simply take their people's word for it that they were following the correct procedures and that the weapons or the machinery they were assuring their senior people was in good working order was indeed in good working order.

Are there exceptions? Are there sailors who lie and who say they've inspected something when they actually haven't? Yes, there are a few such isolated, very infrequent cases here and there. Generally, by and large, the system works and American ships make it safely to and from their destinations and they perform their missions correctly all the time. In terms of voter fraud, are there cases of voters pretending to be someone they're not? Yes, but those such cases constitute fewer than 100 for the entire country, for the entire past decade. Voter fraud, someone who pretends to be someone they are not for the purposes of submitting an improper ballot, is a more-or-less nonexistent problem. How do we know this? Well, the G.W. Bush Administration opened up an investigation back in 2002 and concluded after five years that the problem of voter fraud was more-or-less nonexistent. Please keep in mind that during those years, Republicans controlled the Presidency, the House and the Senate, so there was little or no Democratic interference to complain of.

The Montgomery County Community College hosted an information session on the voter ID law on Thursday the 26th of July. The line of questioners went out the door. The piece reporting on that session goes over all of the ID cards currently known to be valid for voting with. The Intelligencer tells of a number of cases where voters were able to obtain valid voter IDs, but as their first case tells it, she had to jump through a number of legal hoops to do so as

Block’s birth certificate and Social Security card bear her maiden name: Joyce Lucille Altman. Her Medicare card identifies her as Joyce Block, her utility bills are in her married name, and her marriage certificate is in Hebrew.

Wow! Who would ever have thought that a single individual would have identifications in so many different formats and using so many different names? Gee, it's almost as though this person were someone who had lived a long life under many different jurisdictions (The cited voter is 89 years old). Also, to believe that asking voters to show IDs will solve the problem of voter fraud is to ignore that, for many decades, young people have been drinking and buying cigarettes using fake IDs.

What could be the reason that Republican governors (No Democratic governors are pressing for voter ID laws) are trying to get voter ID laws into place? As the Senior Washington Correspondent of the Huffington Post puts it,

...there is ample evidence that voter ID laws inhibit voting, particularly among minorities and the poor — two major demographic segments that tend to vote Democratic.

And that’s hardly a coincidence. Consider the recent bragging by the Pennsylvania House Republican leader that his state’s voter ID bill “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

This is not simply another gratuitously partisan act by the GOP. This is an attack on the very notion of democracy.

Voting rights are under attack and the US Attorney General Eric Holder very aptly described voter ID laws as a "poll tax," designed specifically to disenfranchise voters.

The voting blocs that support each candidate have "floors," vote totals of which they're not likely to go below, no matter how bad the Democratic or Republican candidate is. The Republican floor is estimated to be about 45%, meaning the Republican candidate only has to work on winning over 6% of the population in order to win. Or, what the candidate can do is to deny the Democratic side votes that should rightfully be theirs and thereby have to win over fewer undecided voters. All voters should be uncomfortable with this as the very idea of democracy is  at stake. Is the winning candidate going to win because he truly represents the voters or because he's going to carry out dirty tricks?

Batman

Just saw Dark Knight Rises. Cool stuff! I thought of this piece when I watched it. Yeah, Bruce Wayne is definitely more of a feudal lord than a Bain-style capitalist who spends all day watching financial numbers go up and down and jumping in to make quickie deals. Bruce is definitely more of a baron whose estate largely runs itself so that he is largely free to concentrate on other things. 

Is this movie a story of a lone hero who singlehandedly saves everybody? Ehh, not really. As I noted with Thor, whose “posse” consists of the Warriors Three, Thor isn't really a Superman-style lone hero as much as he's the head of a small super-hero team who occasionally has to go running off on his own. Batman definitely has a posse here and clearly has to lean on folks to carry on in his absence when he's taken out of action.

Hypothetically returning fire during the Aurora massacre

I read an interview with Ted Nugent wishing that someone in the theater during the Aurora massacre had a gun so that he or she could have returned fire and saved a lot of lives.  In response to one of Nugents' comments, I thought back to the 1980s when I was researching a paper on Star Wars/SDI/Missile Defense back when President Reagan was focusing on stopping Soviet ICBMs from reaching the US. Some pro-SDI people had opined that the technology needed to make the moon landing a success was similar enough to what would be needed to stop ICBMs that the task would be a pretty simple one. The critics (that I very much agreed with) pointed out that the moon wasn't disguising itself, wasn't taking evasive action and wasn't shooting back. None of those conditions would hold true while trying to stop ICBMs. I thought of that as I read Nugent's statement:

Last week my wife Shemane and I were filming a segment for our Spirit of the Wild show and we were shooting at watermelons surrounded by human silhouette targets just as kind of a competition and from 20 feet and from 20 yards and we were shooting from every imaginable angle, under cover, from sitting, from squatting, from prone position, from behind cover and from in the open, and we never hit an innocent and we never missed the watermelon. And I'm just a guitar player. If a guitar player can neutralize a watermelon from 20 feet -- and this is with live fire, by the way.

To which my reaction was "Okay, you and your wife were in a perfectly safe, leisurely situation, in broad daylight with no distractions, all the time in the world and absolutely no danger. So what does your situation have to do with anything?" Keep in mind that the alleged attacker James Holmes was wearing body armor, came in by surprise and started shooting, the dark theater was immediately filled with screaming people scrambling wildly, trying desperately to get out of the way.

In other words, Nugent's situation of neutralizing watermelons in a leisurely, unhurried manner had absolutely nothing in common with the situation faced by the people in Aurora, Colorado.

And by the way, Nugent tries to present the AR-15 rifle as a mere sporting implement, but as one can see by this picture thread, that particular model of gun was a weapon of war that soldiers used back during the Vietnam War. The AR-15 was not a toy and wasn't merely a hunting rifle.

Sex workers and the police

The TV series "The Client List" just finished up its first season and the relationship between the sex workers, the police and other authorities is not portrayed as a good one. I would note that the series is careful to avoid any strident condemnations and focuses instead on being an entertaining series, with plenty of soap opera-type situations and reasons for the characters to feel pride in themselves and even occasional solidarity with each other. Why are authorities so mistrusted and seen as being on the opposite side from our heroines? Well, it might be because of situations like this one, where condoms are needed for sex workers to be safe from disease and accidental pregnancy, but where police are using the possession of condoms as evidence that the workers are engaged in prostitution.

In an entirely predictable development, the workers are not supplying themselves with condoms, which of course, increases their exposure to risks and makes their work more dangerous. This doesn't just affect sex workers, "transgender women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth" are also people who need condoms and are finding the possession of "too many" condoms to be legally hazardous.

Back during the 1980s, the anti-pornography feminists were actively promoting the censorship of pornography, under the theory that, well, they weren't worried about their own exposure to the stuff, but about your exposure to it.

These self-appointed, righteous moralists are not worried about their own ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality -- they are worried about yours; they aren't worried about their own ability to resist being seized by uncontrollable urges to commit rape and other violence -- they are worried about yours; they are not worried about their own ability to remain decent, law-abiding, ethical human beings who do not wish to hurt or degrade others -- they are worried about yours; in short, they are not worried about their own souls -- they are worried about yours and mine.

Also, a very serious consideration is a purely financial one. The very first people to lose money when pornographic films are banned are the performers in the films. When porn is legal, performers can keep addresses where fans can write to them and where performers can send catalogs of their films back to the fans along with responses to their letters. That's the very first source of income that dries up the minute pornography becomes illegal. Performers then have to deal with the public through agents, who frequently couldn't care less about correspondence to/from fans.

Does it really help the public to legally oppose the sex trade? There's no question that sex workers don't appreciate it as they're usually the ones who end up getting punished in many ways other than just getting arrested. "The Client List" looks into the question of just what sex workers do with all of the money they may make and it's clear that it constitutes a bit of a problem for them to store/invest all that cash without running into many legal and other difficulties.

Update: And yes, the Lifetime channel, which carries "The Client List," also carries the Bristol Palin reality show and no, I don't have the slightest interest in ever seeing that. A young woman whose major claim to fame is that she failed at abstinence-only sex education and then went on to support that very policy. Sorry, but I don't think Ms. Palin has anything to teach anybody.

Bachmann's got nothing

Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) made accusations against both Huma Abedin, the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN). Ellison writes a very civilized letter to her basically saying she's got nothing of any serious substance to back up anything she says. What I found truly shocking was that Frank Gaffney, her main source, has not only been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as “the anti-Muslim movement’s most paranoid propagandist,” but it also turns out that Gaffney has accused "New Jersey Governor Chris Christie of 'treason' for appointing a Muslim judge." Now personally, I'd accuse Governor Christie of many things, but being an overly-tolerant liberal is most certainly not one of them. 
Folks might remember that a woman who was unknown to Bachmann spoke to the Congresswoman at a campaign event and told her that the vaccine against the HPV (human papillomavirus) was dangerous. Bachmann immediately ignored the scientific consensus that the vaccine was entirely safe and badly needed and that she was needlessly fearmongering. Never mind, some anonymous woman with no obvious expertise, but who obviously believed in what she was saying, was more credible to Bachmann than the consensus of actual scientists.
I find it shocking that such a person, with absolutely no idea of what distinguishes a credible source from your run-of-the-mill crank, sits on the House Intelligence Committee.

Update: Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee concedes that Bachmann is making crazy accusations.

Further update:

The Muslim Brotherhood responds to charge that they employ Huma Abedin as an agent:

But in Egypt, the birthplace of the Brotherhood, the organization’s leaders were either perplexed by the accusations or simply hadn’t heard them. Nor had they heard of Huma Abedin.

“The Muslim Brotherhood can’t even penetrate the Egyptian government,” said a Brotherhood leader in Egypt’s Daqheleya province, Ibrahim Ali Iraqi, in response to the accusations his group had infiltrated top US agencies.

Emphasis added. Oh, here's a link by which you can ask that the Intelligence committee drop Rep. Bachmann.

Barbara Stanwyck

Turner Classic Movies is playing four pre-code Barbara Stanwyck movies. I wasn't aware of that until they were halfway through, so I wasn't able to get “Ten Cents a Dance.” I've set my machine to tape “Forbidden,” at least. I was first aware of Stanwyck as the matriarch on “Big Valley” (1965-1969), which also had Lee Majors (“Six Million Dollar Man” 1974-1978) and Linda Evans (“Dynasty” 1981-1989) on it. Upon Stanwyck's passing away in 1990, the Boston Phoenix did a review of her many films and I was like “Wow! She was a pretty accomplished actress!” so I've tried to catch flicks of hers whenever I can. She definitely plays the world-weary bad girls quite well. Picture of Stanwyck.

Update: Just finished watching "Forbidden" and I apologize to the Stanwyck fans out there, she may indeed have played a world-weary bad girl in films like "Lady of Burlesque" and she certainly appeared to adopt that persona in "Ten Cents a Dance," but she played a very different character in "Forbidden." Nope, Stanwyck was just dang good at her craft and was an excellent actress. 

Throwing this out for debate...

Here's a subject for debate. I had an email exchange with someone who had written an editorial for the Inquirer about marriage equality for the LGBT community. He waxed poetical on marriage and our relationships to our ancestors:

Denying children biological ties creates all sorts of identity problems (including sexual identity problems)

…

Marriage also transcends the individual by placing him in a social web that involves responsibilities to parents, grandparents, children, etc. He finds his identity and is linked to generations and even to history.

…

...the overriding concept of marriage is that a man and woman give of themselves (and their particularities), temper their individual wants, in order to become something that is larger than the sum of the two. Marriage is greater than the sum of its parts.

…

For their optimum development and well-being, children do best when they are raised by their married mother and father. Every deviation from that ideal reduces outcomes for children.

So, from the perspective of children, we should make marriage more subserviant [sp] to their needs, not the desires and whims of adults.

Now, a buddy from my letter-writing group Rapid Response pointed out that marriage was not always centred around children, in fact, the post-World War II generation that gave birth to the baby boomers was the first generation in history that had the leisure time, the material goods and the physical safety that permitted them to concentrate so heavily on the psychological needs of their children.

Of course past generations paid attention to their children, Henry VIIII wanted a male heir to take over England after he passed away, but so long as the child was male and physically capable, Henry would have been content. Elizabeth I was a capable heir, but keep in mind that her childhood was a bewildering and chaotic one, with her mother executed when she wasn't yet three years old and a succession of stepmothers following. Of course, as a female, she wasn't expected to take over the kingdom, but everyone knew that, as she was of royal blood, she might very well do so. The idea that marriage in those days was centred around children, even royal children who might one day inherit the kingdom, was clearly not applicable. Were English marriages centred around children during the days of the “dark, satanic mills” or when the “Little Match Girl” perished in the snow? Obviously not.

Now, is it a good thing for children to know their grandparents? Sure, I guess so. I knew my great-grandmother on my father's side. “Great-Grammy” passed away when I was less than five years old. I liked her, but didn't really know her. My paternal grandfather passed away before my birth. Everything I heard about him was good. My paternal grandmother lived until my maturity. On my mother's side, both of my grandparents lived until then. My mother had a twin sister and they had a brother. I never met the brother and everything I heard about him was bad. His ex-wife had booted him out, he came back, his kids got tired of him really quickly and he moved out again. My sisters and I got along fine with the ex-wife and kids.

Did I miss either my paternal grandfather or my uncle on my mother's side? Not really. I certainly don't remember wanting to know more or inquiring about either of them. I certainly never got the impression that any of my uncle's bad traits were destined to be passed on to me. I don't remember feeling better because my grandfather was such a fine fellow. It just never occurred to me to look at myself as the product of my ancestors and their traits.

So here's my question. With people becoming orphans through wars and accidents and poor health, with children getting adopted and in many cases, never being able to get in touch with their birth parent(s), with parents immigrating and leaving grand-parents behind in the “old country,” with mothers having conceived their children via rape and thus not having any reason to ever care who the father was, with mothers being promiscuous and thus not even knowing who the father might be, is knowing one's social context a “nice to have” sort of thing or is it an urgent necessity that a child is lost without?

Dallas

Taped the first show of Dallas and am about 45 minutes through it. It's a perfectly decent show, but now I remember why I didn't follow it in its first iteration. The characters are simply too wealthy. I can't identify. It reminds me of Grey's Anatomy. Again, a perfectly decent show, but a show that had characters just continually having sex all the time. That world has nothing in common with mine.

Missile Defense and NAFTA, Old issues revisited

This has to be the least surprising news I've seen in awhile. Star Wars/ABM/Missile Defense is worthless! Na-a-awwww! Re-e-eally?!?!? Gee, who'd a thunk it? I did a paper on this back in college during the late 1980s, concluding that, yes, "shooting down a bullet with a bullet" can be done, but missile warheads are very small, move very quickly and devices used to detect them are not difficult to fool. Any system for stopping missiles is very easily overwhelmed with lots of real warheads, chaff (clouds of small bits of metal) and decoys. To take just one of the more obvious examples, a multi-stage ballistic missile takes about 30 minutes to get from Russia to the United States. Over 20 of those minutes are spent in space where there's no air friction, where a decoy can be as simple as a balloon coated with metal-based paint. Such a decoy can't be deployed until the real warhead is in space and will quickly burn up on re-entry, but it's pretty much impossible to separate such a decoy from a real warhead when your detection devices are hundreds to thousands of miles away. A single warhead could pop out 20 to 30 decoys, and with small air-sprays, they can all follow different, widely divergent paths. If you want to stop them mid-course, all of the warheads, both the real ones and the fake ones, have to be stopped, or at least a good 80-90% of them. An ABM system will have very little time between the time all the balloons burn away and the warheads impact their targets. A system would have to be extraordinarily fast and capable to deal with the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of remaining warheads. And:

The GMD system, however, is widely considered to be ineffective. Despite the billions of dollars spent, the system has not had a successful intercept test since 2008, with two failures in 2010. A recent report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences found that, “The current GMD system has serious shortcomings, and provides at best a limited, initial defense against a relatively primitive threat.”

In other words, the US spent from the Eisenhower era to the 1972 ABM treaty developing anti-missile defenses, private entrepreneurs continued researching means and methods from 1972, with the government again picking up the tab for research in 1983, whereupon the government has continued to fund research and development ever since. What has the US accomplished in all that time? Doesn't sound like six decades of research has accomplished very much.

What has the impact been on US-Russian relations?

In past years, Russia has opposed the missile shield program. It considers the program to be a serious threat to its national security and disapproves of NATO forces continuing to build military bases in Europe. The US government called Russia’s reaction “unjustified” and defended the program by citing increased threats to Europe from the Caucasus and the Middle East. An important political figure, Alexander Vershbow – NATO’s Deputy Secretary General and former Ambassador to the Russian Federation – stressed at the Moscow Conference that the missile shield program is not meant to be hostile to Russia. He also added the US and NATO respect and take seriously the Russian government’s concerns.

If you have to assure the other party that your weapons system is "not meant to be hostile," your diplomacy has pretty much completely and utterly failed. And sorry, but when the US took Georgia's side against Russia during their 2008 conflict, any thought on Russia's part that the US wasn't hostile was dashed to the ground.

And speaking of old issues, one of the major issues that progressives had with NAFTA and the World Trade Organization back during the Clinton Administration was that the system that they set up was designed to override national sovereignty in favor of corporate interests. Well, a leaked document from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations demonstrates that, yes indeed, the newest "free" trade negotiations are again, designed to do precisely that.

Under the agreement currently being advocated by the Obama administration, American corporations would continue to be subject to domestic laws and regulations on the environment, banking and other issues. But foreign corporations operating within the U.S. would be permitted to appeal key American legal or regulatory rulings to an international tribunal. That international tribunal would be granted the power to overrule American law and impose trade sanctions on the United States for failing to abide by its rulings.

The terms run contrary to campaign promises issued by Obama and the Democratic Party during the 2008 campaign.

So, even though Americans have opposed turning over decisions best made by national governments to a body that will privilege corporations over people and even though President Obama promised that he wouldn't take part in any such thing, we're seeing our government again planning to do precisely that. As the blogger says:

This is really important stuff. We’re talking about restricting access to life-saving drugs, and giving up sovereignty over key domestic laws and regulations to foreign multinationals. That would be true for foreign companies in the US and domestic companies in the eight Pacific nations engaged in the trade pact. This is completely in line with the NAFTA consensus, which also allowed corporations the right to sue nations party to certain trade treaties. Private sector lawyers would be the judges on the international tribunals, with clear conflicts of interest, as they advocate for and serve the clients who would be suing the government in this case.

The march of folly continues and decisions that were awful the first time around are no better years later, but they continue to be pursued.

Update: Leaked documents from the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreements show that the agreements are even worse than we thought. The agreements blatantly and explicitly favor corporations over national governments. BTW, the piece also documents that the US has paid $300 million to settle similar anti-sovereignty claims that arose from NAFTA.

Not so sure about that

An alleged liberal wrote in the New York Times Magazine an update to the decade-old argument that liberals should ignore right-wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh. His logic runs that by paying attention to him, we're giving him the oxygen of publicity and thereby strengthening his public influence. Of course, it might have been an interesting piece (or a true update) had the author acknowledged that the argument was pretty much decided in 2004 when Media Matters was founded, specifically to shine a light on and to thereby combat right-wing misinformation by bringing that misinformation to wider public attention. Is ignoring right-wingers likely to be an effective tactic? Balloon Juice thinks that's a pretty dumb and cowardly idea. Digby points out that liberals started out by ignoring right-wingers and that they grew in power and influence anyway. Media Matters itself notes that:

If liberals are going to pay no attention [to] Fox News, they may as well ignore the entire Republican Party because there's no functional daylight between the two.

And earlier asked how the whole “ignore them” tactic works:

Ask John Kerry how initially ignoring the right-wing media's meticulously planned-out Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign worked for him and Democrats in 2004.  Ask the same question to former ACORN leaders who saw Congress move to defund the group based on the dishonest attacks waged by the right-wing media. Or ask National Public Radio's former CEO, Vivian Schiller, who was forced to resign in the wake of a bogus right-wing smear campaign.  

And sorry, but Almond's whole argument here just strikes me as a fairy dust argument built on wishes and good intentions:

Consider the recent debate over whether employers must cover contraception in their health plans. The underlying question — should American women receive help in protecting themselves from unwanted pregnancies? — is part of a serious and necessary national conversation.

Okay. I agree with that.

Any hope of that conversation happening was dashed the moment Rush Limbaugh began his attacks on Sandra Fluke, the young contraceptive advocate.

Okay, this is an accurate, realistic description. Yes, a serious conversation got turned into a circus. But then Almond's piece goes seriously off the rails with his description of liberal reactions/proposed solution:

The left took enormous pleasure in seeing Limbaugh pilloried. To what end, though? Industry experts noted that his ratings actually went up during the flap. In effect, the firestorm helped Limbaugh do his job, at least in the short term.

See, my problem here is with the whole Hollywood notion of there being no such thing as bad publicity. Of course there is. Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his thirteen-year old cousin was not something that urban audiences were going to ignore, even though it may have made sense where Lewis came from. His musical career never truly recovered from that. Limbaugh didn't just get some more uncritical, admiring viewers. Yes, he sold his trash to more unquestioning people who became fans, but he also attracted a lot of critical attention, people who were disgusted by his statements and who, if Limbaugh were a bug that they stepped on, would quickly scrub him off of the bottoms of their shoes.

[Almond] says Limbaugh’s ratings are up, which seems to be wrong (no link, so I can’t check his numbers), but he also lost advertisers in unprecedented numbers. Backlash from the Heartland Institute’s climate denier billboard campaign featuring Ted Kaczynski crippled the organization. Komen’s attempt to cut funding to Planned Parenthood was a massive failure and has badly tarnished their brand and their donations, probably irreversibly.

There just doesn't appear to be much evidence that backlash doesn't work. It seems to work just fine, even if talkers like Limbaugh get a, perhaps temporary, boost in viewership.

Snow White & The Huntsman

I commented to the person who sold me my snack for the movie that, when I lived in Pensacola, FL, I used to leave my apartment at the time the movie was supposed to begin, drive about three miles, get popcorn and soda, get into a seat and about then, the movie would begin. Tonight, I looked at my cell phone when the previews/coming attractions ended. The announced time for the show to begin was 9:20, it actually started at %$#@^&# 9:40!!! Bleaugh!
Good stuff, though! Snow White (Kristen Stewart) makes for a very convincing princess, both as a cultured and mannerly young woman and as a determined warrior. Stewart reminds me a bit of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. Ford played an ordinary doctor who then performs amazing physical feats, running around for miles and miles. Stewart is like Ford in that her character is in spectacularly good shape for someone who's been sitting around in a dungeon for around ten years. And yeah, Charlize Theron makes for a really, really e-e-evilll villainness.

Catch-22

So I respond to this piece by making an online comment (The Inquirer  doesn't always, but most of the time and in this particular case, deletes all the comments and re-formats their pieces the next day). I over-stated my case, making the claim that there's no documented case of voter fraud (Where an individual pretends to be someone he's not in order to vote illegitimately) ever having occurred. A commenter posted three URLs to stories of documented voter fraud. I replied okay, fine, there are a few isolated cases of voter fraud, but the documented cases of vote suppression, where the government denies voters their Constitutional right to vote vastly, enormously outnumbers cases of voter fraud and included this URL that documented a few of those many, many cases

The commenter replied that Think Progress is a lefty website and therefore a provider of suspect information and then made comments indicating that he read the URL, but clearly didn't follow the link to the story. Then, today, I saw this piece.

So, if Think Progress is a provider of information of suspect quality because it has a clear political viewpoint and therefore, an agenda, but the national media has decided to black out the issue of the Governor of Florida suppressing votes, then we've got a classic Catch-22. We don't learn of vote suppression from the national media because the national media isn't covering it. Why? Because there's no way to make both sides, the Republicans and the Democrats, seem equivalent. The national media simply can't say that the Rs and the Ds are being equally bad. This is very clearly a story of the Republicans being bad, full stop. There's simply no way to take a middle view that blames both sides or that allows the media to take an above-it-all approach. In order to tell the story, they have to place the blame squarely on the Republican Governor of Florida. Think Progress doesn't have a problem doing that, because as we've already established, they're an openly lefty website anyway.

But if regular folks like myself can't use lefty websites to make political arguments, if we can't point out documentation of the problem that websites such as Think Progress have assembled, then how are we supposed to make online political arguments????? I never asked for a list of objective websites I could use because I don't really believe there are any in any event. PolitiFact.com once purported to be an objective, reliable website, but recently disgraced itself by declaring that Democrats made a "pants-on-fire lie" by saying that Republicans had voted to "end Medicare."

At worst, Democrats perhaps overstated their case a bit by saying that altering Medicare beyond recognition (By changing it from a single-payer type program into a voucher program) was the same thing as ending it. So we can toss Politi"Fact" onto the rubbish heap of once-credible sites. So to me, how we determine how credible a story is relies on vastly more than just who produces it. Back in 2002, the George W. Bush Administration declared that President Bill Clinton had permitted Saddam Hussein of Iraq to kick out US weapons inspectors. I had been paying attention at the time and knew that this claim was not true. Fair.org looked at that claim a short time later, showing the stories as they were relayed in December 1998 and the same news organizations reporting in August 2002.

This convinced me quite some time ago that there's simply no such thing as an always-reliable news organization. I stick with the lefty sites myself because I find them to be very highly reliable and willing to follow the facts, even when they make "our side" look bad. I was a History major back in college and in my military work, had to take an objective and cold-bloodedly factual view of what I was reporting on. I learned very early to document what I was saying and to not make statements that I wasn't able to back up with credible evidence. My background gives me a highly reliable BS detector. I can't simply read who produces a story and glance at the title and tell you whether a story is credible or not, I need to read the actual story, as I did in response to a comment here.

As I like to put it "If Sean Hannity of Fox News says the sky is blue, does that mean the sky is actually green or does it mean that even Hannity is right once in a while?"

Update

The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.

Wikiquote

ThinkProgress is exonerated in a piece by FireDogLake.

I should add that the DoJ letter refers to “news reports” that alerted them to the voter purge scheme. Think Progress in particular should be commended for bringing this issue to light. Practically all of the traditional media ignored it; the New York Times, even today, gives it short shrift at the end of a story on the judge’s ruling on voter registration suppression. It took progressive media to raise awareness of this scheme to take away the voting rights of thousands of Floridians, part of a larger war on voting being attempted in Republican legislatures across the country.

The piece is about how the DOJ is finally catching up to the State Government of Florida and is insisting that Florida live up to the Voting Rights Act.

A liberal commentator on CNN

You can tell that I'm conditioned by certain sights and phrases. I looked at a blog post and saw a photo of an attractive woman on CNN who questioned Tony Perkins (The post accurately identified Perkins as the "SPLC-certified hate group leader") and immediately thought "Aw yeesh! How his this woman embarrassed the liberal cause? What wingnut phrases has she adopted wholesale? What right-wing misinformation has she been spreading?"

Why do I suspect CNN of hosting right-wing-favoring stenographers? Because of CNN commenters like Erick Ericson and Dana Loesch. Ericson is a right-wing blogger who also write for the Red State blog and has things like this to say about how the political left views women and blacks:

The Democrats seem to believe that all women believe what they believe and are the same. Instead of unique individuals, they are a stereotyped class of women who care only about birth control, abortion, and government benefits. Stay at home moms who fall outside this view are viewed as second class citizens who really can’t be related to and who cannot relate to women in the workforce. Liberal women who prided themselves on feminist advances into society and think of themselves as unique individuals go on twitter and television and radio to proclaim all women same thinking, same liking, same knowing, and . . . well . . . same.

Like black Republicans such as Condelezza Rice, Michael Steel, and Herman Cain who are ridiculed by the left as oreos, Uncle Toms, or worse, women who think differently are treated as second class citizens, inferior, or somehow “other.”

What a catch CNN! Gee, what a perceptive fellow! You can tell Erickson spends lots of time with lefties because he understands us so well [/snark]! What about CNNs' other right-winger Dana Loesch?

In January 2007, the smear that President Obama attended a "madrassa" as a boy was sparked by a vague Internet report, then spread by Fox News, and finally debunked by CNN -- within the span of a week.

...

Instead of correcting the caller by pointing out that Obama is a Christian and not a Muslim, Loesch said: "Well, yeah, I mean, he did study -- he went to one of the madrassas over in Indonesia for a while. So he knows -- I mean, he -- which is kind of like the equivalent in Islam of a Catholic school in Catholicism. So there's that."

CNN has loyally stood by both commentators and has refused to can either of them, so I was pleasantly surprised to read the FireDogLake post further and saw that, actually, the CNN person Brooke Baldwin, gave our "SPLC-certified hate group leader" Tony Perkins a pretty hard time (The CNN clip is presented here on an Americablog post). Baldwin "asked [Perkins] he would explain to a married gay couple that they should not have the protections of marriage. He did not answer." Perkins said lots of words in response to her question, but they all amounted to him trying to change the subject from the human, emotional question of "How can you say my marriage is not legitimate?" to the more prosaic ones of "public policy" and "research" and how the Obama Administration is taking away the "rights" of homophobes to discriminate against gay people.
So good on CNN for a commentator of theirs to seriously challenge a known homophobe and to defend the perspective of LGBT people who want to be treated as equals under the law.

On noon on June 10th, Philadelphia will commence an LGBT Pride March from 13th & Locust Streets or from 243 S. 13th Street. A statemen trom our local organizer R.W. Dennen:

It's colorful different and exciting as people welcome us with open arms. This will stick with you and never forgotten. This will be sponsored by the Peace Veterans and accompanied by other activists. Since President Obama evolved that gays are equal to other human beings, this will be an important Pride Parade for "Law of the Land" marriage equality and dignity. We must fight this nefarious bigotry and live up to freedom for all.
We implore you to spread the word to your friends. This wll be our fourth year
and we are growing every year.

Besides which, Garden State Equality of New Jersey is holding the 2012 Equality Walk at 4:00pm June 23rd at Erie Park in Montclair NJ. From Philadelphia, that's about a 90-mile or a nearly two-hour drive or you can take the NJ Transit train from the 30th Street Station to New York and then change to the Montclair-Boonton line.

Bush to blame for economy?

On May 20th, the Inky ran a letters column and a commenter asked: “Three and a half years into Obama's presidency and you still continue to blame Bush?” to which I responded:

• Uh, coniljw, Bush oversaw the housing bubble that was noticed by liberal Keynesian economists in 2002 and popped at the end of 2007. Yes, Obama has spent his entire term trying to dig his way out of the mess that Bush created. The downturn of 2007 that continues to this day hasn't been called the “Great Recession” for nothing. Granted, the fact that Republicans have been fighting tooth and nail to keep Americans poor and hungry and unemployed along with Obama's “pivot” from ending the recession to reducing the deficit from early 2010 to mid-2011 are also part of the problem, but yes, Bush is the primary cause of our economic troubles today.

• rich2506

Posted 4:25 PM, 05/20/2012

It was Jimmy Carter that signed the CRA in to law, not Bush. [Community Reinvestment Act – how it allegedly led to the housing bubble]

It was Clinton who gave it teeth - http://clinton6.nara.gov/1993/12/1993-12-08-briefing-by-bentsen-and-rubin.text.html

It was Barack H Obama who sued citibank under the CRA in 1998 to force then to lead money to 'minorities' - Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank

The Bush administration warned about Fannie and Freddie. They got push back from Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and Chris Dodd and the rest of the democrats. You can youtube it

• Philly.Tru

To which I responded:

• All that Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke had to do to pop the housing bubble was to call attention to it. Had they called attention to the fact that housing prices were out of line with rental prices, the free market would have done the rest to deflate the bubble. They failed to do so. Also, prices for commercial construction were consistent with residential housing, it was way overpriced. Bush could very easily have caused the housing bubble to deflate. Was he oblivious or did he deliberately allow it? It's the old question, stupid or evil? Eh, hard to say.

• rich2506

Posted 7:43 PM, 05/20/2012

I don't see such a simplistic solution as being effective. Greenspan tried it in 1996 with stock market and his "irrational exuberance" phrase. In the long run, no one listened but he sure did get the tar beat out himself for saying it.

• Philly.Tru

Posted 8:29 PM, 05/20/2012

Rich, even AFTER the collapse, C. Dodd was STILL pushing for "More Minority Home Ownership". (This was in the spring of '09 he voiced his ongoing support for the policy.)

It was that idealistic push, sell by skin color, not financial ability, that CAUSED the collapse, yet he still was pushing for more of the same.

Ya, same old question... Was Dodd Stupid? or Evil?

Good intentions are fine, but when they cause more harm than good, you would THINK it would be a wake up call to stop, unless you WANTED them to be harmed.

• turkytom

And oh yeah turkeytom, speaking of "idealistic pushes," remember G.W. Bush and the "Ownership Society" where Bush pressed for more homeownership? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNqQx7sjoS8 Ya didn't? Yep, more of that ol' "memory hole" that folks have for inconvenient fact. And Phillytru, if the Federal Reserve Chairman can't speak plainly, why does he exist? What's the point of having a spokesperson who can't speak?

• rich2506

Essentially, my take on the housing bubble is that Bush was “on watch,” i.e., the “guy on the bridge” and in command when the housing bubble occurred. Is it reasonable to look at the immediate past at what one's predecessor might have done? To a point, yes. Right-wing figures have tried to blame President Obama for job losses that occurred during Obama's “first few months, before any of his own policies had time to take effect." Is it reasonable to use the same idea to let Bush off the hook for 9-11? Not really, as military and political policies are easier to change quickly than are economic ones. And one might notice that Media Matters wasn't arguing for nine months, the time Bush had to change the policies that made 9-11 possible, but for just a few months to allow Obama time to put new policies into effect. Yes, it's reasonable to give a president some time to establish new policies, but if Bush had a problem with the CRA, he had more than enouh time to do something about it.

As the housing bubble was noticed in 2002, that gave the Bush Administration five years to notice that there was a problem with housing prices not being consistent with rental prices, that is, that there was a bubble. Bush's Administration then had to the end of 2007 to do something about it. Above, a commenter states the right-wing claim that

The Bush administration warned about Fannie and Freddie. They got push back from Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer and Chris Dodd and the rest of the democrats.

My major problem with this claim of Democratic pushback being a decisive factor is that I just can't reconcile this claim with Bush's fight with Democrats over warrantless surveillance. In early 2008, a year after Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate, Democrats seemed enegized to bring Bush's policies to heel:

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) successfully led an effort to block immunity in December, just before Congress' holiday recess, and the Senate returned to the issue last week, considering dual proposals from the Intelligence and Judiciary committees. Last Thursday, Republicans and a dozen Democrats blocked Judiciary's proposal to update FISA without immunity, but the GOP then refused an agreement that would have required a mere 51-vote majority to pass further amendments.

Were Democratic efforts successful? No, because Bush has the veto pen, a Republican Party that voted in lockstep to support his policies and traitorous Blue Dog Democrats who broke with their party to vote with him. Remember, when the FISA/warrantless surveillance battle occurred, Bush's approval rating was down to 28%, a rating that competed with that of Nixon and Truman at their lowest, but his disapproval rating was 71%, the worst that an American president has ever received. Considering that Bush successfully prevailed anyway on an issue that was important to him, I just can't see how Democratic pushback on the housing issue could possibly have swayed him or the Republican Party.

Also, as I pointed out in my final message, Bush stood behind what he called the “Ownership Society,” where people would own their own homes. From a 2004 White House press release:

Expanding Homeownership. The President believes that homeownership is the cornerstone of America's vibrant communities and benefits individual families by building stability and long-term financial security. In June 2002, President Bush issued America's Homeownership Challenge to the real estate and mortgage finance industries to encourage them to join the effort to close the gap that exists between the homeownership rates of minorities and non-minorities. The President also announced the goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families before the end of the decade. Under his leadership, the overall U.S. homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2004 was at an all time high of 69.2 percent. Minority homeownership set a new record of 51 percent in the second quarter, up 0.2 percentage point from the first quarter and up 2.1 percentage points from a year ago. President Bush's initiative to dismantle the barriers to homeownership includes:

• American Dream Downpayment Initiative, which provides down payment assistance to approximately 40,000 low-income families;
• Affordable Housing. The President has proposed the Single-Family Affordable Housing Tax Credit, which would increase the supply of affordable homes;
• Helping Families Help Themselves. The President has proposed increasing support for the Self-Help Homeownership Opportunities Program; and
• Simplifying Homebuying and Increasing Education. The President and HUD want to empower homebuyers by simplifying the home buying process so consumers can better understand and benefit from cost savings. The President also wants to expand financial education efforts so that families can understand what they need to do to become homeowners.
  

Right-wingers, of course, tend to “disappear” this embarrassing bit of history and try to make it sound as though Democrats were pushing for more homeownership against Republican resistance.

Could Alan Greenspan have worded his “Irrational Exuberance” statement better and more skillfully? There's no question that his statement had an immediate impact. But “in typically enigmatic fashion, Greenspan didn't actually say what most people think he did. His famous utterance was actually part of a question, not a statement of fact or opinion.” So no, I don't believe that Federal Reserve Chairmen are doomed to never state their true opinions, just that they should do so in a carefully-planned manner.

Dark Shadows

Good flick, but I think if I were five years to a decade a few years older (My sister, only four years older, watched it "religiously"), I would have enjoyed it more as I would have been more familiar with the original source material. As it is, I remember watching parts of a few of the shows from the Dark Shadows series, which went from 1966 to 1971. I think at that time, I was more into the Batman and the Star Trek series (Both of which ran from 1966 to 1968).
As a nostalgia remake, the movie reminds me of the Quentin Tarantino trilogy, Planet Terror, Grindhouse and Death Proof. It's a really high-powered, professionally-done remake of stuff I barely remembered or hardly caught the first time around. Of course, in the trilogy, it didn't hurt that Rose McGowan was such a cutie. There's really no one in Dark Shadows, then or now, who's as attractive.

The Avengers

Fun stuff! Really cool to see super-powered beings really pushed to their limits. Yeah, they're super-powered and have amazing abilities, but here you really see them sweat and strain to keep up with the challenges that are being tossed at them. One of the things I recognized from the comics when I watched the first Fantastic Four, the item that just rang absolutely true, was the bickering and arguing. Same is true in The Avengers, they're not all happy, loyal, obedient warriors, they're individuals who let each other know when they disagree, but when the chips are down and their backs are to the wall, they pull together and they all act in concert.

The Hunger Games

Very cool! Our heroine, Katrina Everdeen (Played by Jennifer Lawrence), manages to combine both ninja babe-style fighting competence and solid, down-to-earth humanity and decency. Our dictator looks more and more troubled as the movie progresses because, well, no matter how solid and stable a dictatorship appears to be, the whole carefully-built house of cards can collapse rather quickly. Many of the players who should be brutally and mindlessly playing the roles assigned to them display stubborn flashes of human solidarity, for something better and higher than mere survival-at-any-cost. These flashes are counter to their self-interest of course, which is what's ultimately so inspiring about the film.

Primary season truly begins

With convincing victories in several large states, Mitt Romney is now firmly cemented as the Republican nominee for President (With the sad exception of Newt Gingrich and no one ever expected Ron Paul to win anyway). Romney's speech on victory night was very good in some respects.

Everywhere I go, Americans are tired of being tired, and many of those who are fortunate enough to have a job are working harder for less. For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job … for grandparents who can’t afford the gas to visit their grandchildren … for the mom and dad who never thought they’d be on food stamps … for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month – ...

My question is, of course, how did this sad state of affairs come about? As CEPRs "Scorecard on Development" series shows, these are hardly problems that suddenly began on January 21st, 2009. They are problems that the Republican Party has been actively collaborating in creating for the past 30+ years. Europe has been trying to do things according to Republican blueprints for the past several years and now appears to be undergoing a real change of heart.

The public generally doesn’t know what the technical economic solutions are, and the media keeps telling them, falsely, there are no good alternatives, because the deficit hysterics still control a conversation disconnected from the reality staring them in the face.  But voters now know their elites don’t have a clue and don’t seem to care that the elite solutions fashioned mostly for banks and bond holders are worsening the human suffering without solving any underlying economic problems.

Does the Romney speech contain any ideas for how we solve our economic problems? I certainly didn't hear any new or potentially workable or even interesting ideas and actually, solutions are precisely where Romney's speech really falls short.

Then we get into Romney’s vision….

Romney never makes the turn to how he would achieve this America. Believing in it is apparently enough. The end result isn’t so much a preview of how Romney would govern the country as a game of “I Spy: America the Beautiful” edition.

At least back in 2010, President Obama realized that the solution to an insufficiently stimulated economy was more stimulus and tried to get some through a Congress where the Republican Party could significantly obstruct and delay Democratic programs.

The Democrats have a better way, the Republicans just want more of the same disastrously failed policies that got us into this mess to begin with.

The Rosen-Romney spat and other campaign issues

Mitt Romney awarded his wife Ann the sorta, kinda official-like position of the representative of America's women to the Romney campaign/future administration. Was Ann qualified to hold such a position? According to CNN contributor Hilary Rosen:

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing.

Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we -- why do we worry about their future?

Is the claim that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life" true? Actually, if you want to get all technical about it, yes, that is true. The Federal Government does not classify being a stay-at-home mother and homemaker as "work." Nevertheless, Romney found defenders everywhere who were outraged that her many years of being a mother of five sons and a homemaker were being contemptuously brushed aside. The First Lady promptly tweeted: "Every mother works hard and every woman deserves to be respected."

Of course, nobody has challenged the sentence after that because it's so clearly and obviously true. Romney was a child of wealth and privilege who married into a family of wealth and privilege. Romney has never suffered any kind of economic insecurity and has never had to choose between, say, health insurance and a third meal for the day for her boys. A mother who came to motherhood late in life explains:

But Romney nevertheless had a huge advantage over mothers with less money: She could hire help. She could engage baby sitters, nannies, cooks and housecleaners.

That doesn't mean she didn't find her days filled with managing schedules, overseeing homework, buying new sneakers and, yes, even wiping snotty noses. With five kids, she probably never had enough help around to avoid that duty.

Still, Romney's experience of motherhood is significantly different from that of moms around the country whose family incomes hover at the median of $50,000 a year.

Romney later said:

"Look, I know what it's like to struggle. Maybe I haven't struggled as much financially as some people have, but I can promise you that I've had struggles in my life. And I would love for people to understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling, and that's why we're running."

Which us all very fine and well, but her husband has endorsed the "Path to Prosperity" plan put out by Representative Paul Ryan (R-MI) that would cut deeply and savagely into benefits for those who are less wealthy and privileged that the Romney family is. According to the economist Dean Baker, the Ryan budget plan:

...essentially eliminates [by 2050] all spending on items other than Social Security, health care and defense. By the end of the 10-year budget horizon most of the areas that we think of as the domain of the federal government (e.g. federal highways and airports, federal courts and law enforcement, drug research and safety, the State Department and Justice Department) will be cut by around 50 percent under the Ryan plan.

It's all very fine and well for Ann Romney to "have compassion for people," but how does that "compassion" translate into actual policy proposals? Well...it doesn't.

Bottom line is that Mitt Romney doesn't need to fire his wife as the Romney campaign's liaison to American women, but he needs to find other representatives to tell him what American women are feeling and going through. His wife Ann is a good start, but she knows about the economic struggles of American women essentially second-hand, from people she has spoken with on the campaign trail, blog posts,magazine articles, TV shows and probably books. She can't contribute any wisdom on how non-millionaires are dealing with the economy these days through her own personal experience.


Speaking of the Ryan "Path to Prosperity," Roman Catholic theologians, priests, nuns, social workers and others have condemned the Ryan plan:

If Rep. Ryan thinks a budget that takes food and healthcare away from millions of vulnerable people upholds Catholic values, then he also probably believes Jesus was a Tea Partier who lectured the poor to stop being so lazy and work harder,” said John Gehring, Catholic Outreach Coordinator at Faith in Public Life. “This budget turns centuries of Catholic social teaching on its head. These Catholic leaders and many Catholics in the pews are tired of faith being misused to bless an immoral agenda."

Allegedly, Ryan wants to liberate the poor from dependency on the government, but the 59 Catholics say that his plan is "anathema to the Catholic social tradition."


Also, Obama has decided to put his full weight behind getting the "Buffett Rule" put into legislation. Is there any chance that any such legislation will pass? Nah, but it's a good campaign issue as it reveals a stark difference between the two parties.  Right-wing media sources have decided on some pushback. The Washington Beacon has charged that "[Obama] has yet to propose a comprehensive plan to reform the byzantine tax code," but the Obama Administration has begun work on exactly that. Problem is, tax simplification is a good deal harder and more complex and much less likely to produce new revenues than simply raising taxes would. Every provision in the tax code was put in there by majorities of Congress. Nothing is there that hasn't been considered and argued over and voted on. If a provision is in there, it's there for a defensible and probably a justifiable reason.

As far as other campaign issues go, Mitt Romney has come down firmly on the anti-abortion side of the abortion issue. And no, there's no reason to think that the Republican "War on Women" has been halted or that the two sides are now equal because of the outrage concerning Ann Romney and Hillary Rosen.

George Zimmerman appeared in court and invoked the "Stand Your Ground" law as a justification for killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, that was pressed by ALEC,the American Legislative Exchange Council that writes bills that are later adopted, often wholesale, by right-wing legislatures. The good news is that corporations have been having second thoughts about staying with ALEC and have begun withdrawing their support.

Santorum, anti-porn warrior

Robbery and homicide were at a little over two per 100,000 and around five per 100,000 respectively in the early 1960s. They rose to around nine in the mid-1970s and largely staying between 10 and eight until spiking in the early 1990s, going up to 11 for robbery and almost 10 for murder. Both stats have declined since then to under six. Now, if Rick Santorum were correct and pornography was a cause for rape and sexual assaults, then considering that porn has grown dramatically from its jump from still photos in magazines with the film “Deep Throat” in 1974 and grew rapidly during the late 1980s with first the introduction of the VCR, then even more so with the introduction of the DVD in the mid-1990s and then even more so with online porn in the late 1990s, we should have then seen a pretty steady and by now, a dramatic rise in rape and sexual assaults, right? Well, covering only the years 2000 through 2009, the Department of Justice concluded (Page 2 of the PDF) that rape and sexual assault declined at pretty much the same rate that all other crimes declined during that same period. As pornography became increasingly easy to get and to view privately during this period, I'd say Santorum's thesis, that America is “suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography” is a complete fail.

Update: To gauge how much the adult film industry grew, I looked at adult videos released according to Adult Video News on October 2000 and October 2007. The numbers were 150 and 345 respectively. Since the industry crashed along with everyone else since the end of 2007, it's a pretty good presumption using Santorum's thesis, that the crash would have made some visible difference to the amount of rape and sexual assault. According to Santorum, however, sexual crimes grew since President Obama took office, so again, Santorum achieves a complete fail.