There are a lot more costs than just the ID fee itself.

You do know that poll taxes were so racist that they amended the constitution to prohibit them, right?

Edit: Extra regulation not enough, now you want a new tax! Regulations and taxes ftw

Driving isn't a constitutionally protected right. Voting is.

The line of argument is invalid anyway. Every other 'thing' that requires ID can have it's own justifications for it that are irrelevant to voting.

Ben,

We work in hot dog analogies now.

bahbah,

I'm a hot dog vendor. I sell hot dogs. I also have an ID, because I use it to buy booze. There's another hot dog vendor on the next block. He's Mormon, so he doesn't drink. He doesn't have an ID. I ask the city council to require IDs in order for people to sell hot dogs. I mean, we have food handler's licenses, but they don't have our pictures on them. How do we know that the name on the license is the person making the hot dogs? We should be sure. Seems pretty reasonable, right? Most people have IDs, anyway. The law passes easily, and my hot dog sales go up 80%.

I can confirm that is an acceptable hotdog analogy. Discussion may continue.

That's like the world record best hot dog analogy

There's a really hilarious bit in the Groundswell article where they try to figure out what other name they could call their racist voter suppression plans because "Voter ID" has acquired a negative connotation.

Like people aren't going to figure it out if their state passes NC-style "election integrity" laws designed to stop young and poor people from voting. Because of the name.

Funny, fair and equal, as if anybody wouldn't instantly connect it to fair and balanced.

I hope nobody points out to them that by calling it "election integrity" they only make it easier to rebut the need for the legislation in the first place. Gonna have a hard time ACORN ACORN ACORNing yourself to a win when you can't actually demonstrate meaningful levels of voter fraud.

The general level of delusion involved in "nobody likes our ideas so we need to lie about them to move them forward" is pretty good evidence of the degree to which the party is being marginalized/barking up all the wrong trees.

The issue is that the Groundswell people, while sort of arguably being part of the right wing braintrust, as also members of the actual base. The mark/grifter dichotomy is being blurred, the dealers are getting high on their own supply of bull****.

That **** makes it seem like the people writing their emails, in private, think voter fraud is real and so getting voter ID will stop all the ACORN stealing elections. If Clarence Thomas' wife and the True the Vote lady aren't in on the scam there, jeez, who is?

This seems to about sum it up, really.

There's probably something to be said for the fact that the demo that makes up Groundswell are a bunch of olds who still get all their information from within the echo chamber and don't actually realize there's an internet where you can learn things and stuff. I would assume that there's a significant information deficit between the two parties at play here. (for an example, see devils, rara).

(and as it relates to election results, the degree to which Obama was able to leverage the internet and Romney wasn't is pretty telling. Cancer of the social media is a bad way to die).

Solid hotdog analogy. Checks out.

2 for 2.

This is the only thing that might really hurt them in the Groundswell fallout, the fact that some of the participants are major people in 501c organizations that aren't supposed to be activists, or w/e. Engelbrecht & True The Vote are really a piece of work, def, and they are closely linked to Breitbart "News", etc. Plus, ofc, their lol targeted-by-IRS crap.

The Mother Jones story is amusing, but not that bad or surprising. It needed a money angle. The recent stories about conservative bloggers being paid by the governments of Malaysia and Ukraine to write favorable articles was more interesting, imo. I'm convinced that that is what their entire business model is based on. Breitbart or whoever being paid by AFP/Heritage/FreedomWorks/various thinktanks etc., to pump a message. You think they care about Google ad revenue? So, I'm waiting for someone to find that one email where it's a direct money trail, like the foreign gov't ones, of some domestic organization straight up saying, "Here's $10,000, Boyle, write us a piece on immigration". I'm sure it's coming. You can easily see when the articles at the Daily Caller, Breitbart, etc. are just paid advertising. Plain as day that they are getting paid. Not even debatable, just no money trail nailed down so far.

In fact, the surprising thing about the Groundswell e-mails is that these clowns actually talk like that irl, or at least in Google groups. "We're under attack" and all that nonsense instead of, "This message is what our sponsors really want to promote."

Also, this Frederick Douglass business is not new. Black conservatives heavily linked to RW blogs like Breitbart have been on that for a while. Here's one version...

http://frederickdouglasssociety.org/

Would seriously pay $50/mo for a DVaut1 blog.

The problem like Fly said is the grifter is falling for his own bs. Gone are the days where Republicans could get work done in Congress while throwing a bone to the crazies by proposing a bill that's destined to fail. Now they propose a bill that's destined to fail and then propose self flagellation as a reaction when they don't get their way.

Take Obamacare, most Republicans didn't want it. Fair enough, so in rational land they would work with Democrats to try and remove what they think are the most onerous parts of the bill. Not anymore. They've proposed shutting down Congress by not funding anything unless it defunds Obamacare. That's almost destined to backfire. The public blamed Republicans for the last debt ceiling shut down and no way they don't blame Republicans for shutting down the government indefinitely because they won't get their way for a bill. That doesn't matter though because they have a rabid and fanatical base that doesn't actually worry about governing and they are actively trying to run out anyone that isn't interested in their impractical utopia.

At this point the only question is whether they reform themselves to relevance or disappear when the inevitable third party springs up. Both are a decade away, so gg American political system until roughly 2022 when the next redistricting takes effect.

This **** is gold, don't get me wrong, but much of his best work is riffing off of us rather than writing OPs.

What is the current thinking on when Ds take back Congress? 2016?

2022 ldo

Conceivable, but they're a significant dog to take congress in 2016. R's still have a lot of regional strength.

I have the attention span of a gnat and I always read his posts carefully. No other poster gets that from me.

So that's the blog. People submit topics, he just gets inspired by here, whatever. I think it would be great.