Clay Jones for June 25, 2014

Minority outreach Republican style.

Nice satire as usual. Except for your first paragraph which was actually straight and very pertinent to the editorial cartoon itself. The link was cute, especially as it pertained to Algeria and not Mississippi. Indeed if voting is going to have difficulties thrown at it in the form of ID required, then that ID should be paid for by the states or other voting local elections and should be free to the citizens that can legally register to vote. And you can not tell me that the various levels of government can not afford to fund such without a special poll tax. If we are going to have such stringent voting rules, then that is the only fair and reasonable way to have them in a democratic republic such as ours is!!

It costs $17 to get an ID in Mississippi according to the DMV website.

Michael, I live in a relatively small township. The idea that the poll workers could identify me on sight is silly. They do not know me—I have lived here for over 14 years—and I am sure that in a large city that is even more true. I see no problem with having to produce an ID to vote, at least in my state, as anyone receiving state aide—those poor who are most cited as being disadvantaged by a requirement to produce an ID to vote—must have a State ID to utilize and access much of that state aide. Medicaid, SNAP, HWAP, and many other benefits require proof of identification which would seem to indicate that when going to vote this very same ID would be available.

Where does the opposition to producing an ID really come from? I do not understand.

archimedes

“I believe the state should provide free ID’s but that they should also be presented when you vote.”Except IDs can be forged. Just ask an under age teen who smokes and/or drinks.

The usual conservative conspiracy theory in action. There is very little provable fraud. If you investigate all of the instances they often refer to, you will find they are mostly fabrications. The only real reason to push ID so hard is to try to reduce the number of liberal voters who will vote. In a democracy voter suppression should be unacceptable. The right to vote is key to a truly free society. If you don’t believe that, just watch the news coming out of the middle east.

Did anyone see the PBS special on Freedom Summer last night? It was very good. Among other things, it’s a bitter indictment of the Democratic power structure at the time — and of LBJ in particular. It was the left, not the liberals, who were at the heart of the civil rights movement. Liberals came along eventually, but only late and reluctantly.

Gosh, in Ontario it seems to work very smoothly. If you’re on the list of voters, you get a card in the mail. You take that card and one other piece of ID and you vote. I use my Ontario Health Card — everyone has one, so there’s no need to get extra ID. A driver’s license is okay as well. You can’t vote twice, because you won’t get two cards at two different addresses. You have to use ID, but ID that everyone already is sufficient. What’s the problem?

I will try to be concise and give a simple answer to a complex question.+Part One: The left in my day (the 1960s and 1970s) could be roughly divided into the Marxist left and the non-Marxist left. The Marxist left included various kinds of communists and also various kinds of socialists. They thought about economics first, and developed the rest of their policy on the basis of their economic analysis. The non-Marxist left included left anarchists, pacifists, and the religious left, especially religious pacifists. I worked most closely with the religious pacifists. These groups often based their economic policy on their overall political, moral, or religious stands.+Part Two: It’s pretty easy to distinguish liberals from leftists on three questions of policy.+First, liberals (here I’m mostly talking about liberal democrats) disapproved of segregation, but in order to maintain the democratic coalition they were willing to tolerate segregation in the south. Leftists actively organized and demonstrated; mostly leftists did not believe that the established political mechanisms could solve the problem of racism in the US, and so they mostly worked outside of the political parties.+Second, liberals did not fundamentally critique the US imperial system. They wanted a soft empire, but that’s a far as they went. So liberals supported the War in Vietnam, though they were sometimes disturbed by the way it was fought. It took a long time for liberals to come out against the war, and even so they did not generally apply the lessons of the War to develop a critique of the imperial system. Leftists were anti-imperialists as a matter of principle.+Third, liberals by and large support a capitalist market, though they think it should be regulated to avoid major depressions. They are willing to accept a certain level of poverty and alienation as a necessary part of the capitalist market. Leftists have no particular love of the market (though they can recognize its value in certain circumstances). Leftists think that any economic system which accepts poverty and alienation is fundamentally flawed, but different leftist groups have different solutions.+That’s how I saw it, anyway. I’d be interested to hear other accounts, if anyone has a different perspective. I’m being somewhat critical of liberalism, so I’d be interested to read a defense of liberalism on these or other points.

All this hand-wringing about voter ID and voter suppression is trumped by the fact that the majority of registered voters do not bother to vote most of the time.