My appearance on Fox News Channel's "Hannity"

I made "Hannity" the TV show -- at least in the form of video footage.

This video shows a clip from Thanksgiving (Nov. 22, 2012) that contains one of my segments from the documentary "District of Corruption." In it I'm talking about ACORN and Saul Alinsky.



(hat tip: Big Government)

The Rice Diversion

This is my article from today's Front Page Magazine:

The Rice Diversion

By Matthew Vadum

After U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice lied her way through a tense meeting with Republican lawmakers yesterday about her role in the Benghazi scandal, the mainstream media escalated its attacks on those Republicans who continue daring to question the official account of that bloody day in September.

A short time after meeting with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Rice released a statement indicating that she had incorrectly described the attack at the U.S. consulate in Libya when she appeared on five Sunday TV talk shows days after. At the height of the election season in mid-September she peddled the Obama administration’s fairy tale in which a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Islam video somehow led to the killing of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Rice said her comments were based on intelligence available at the time. “Neither I nor anyone else in the administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in the process,” said Rice, who attended the meeting with acting CIA director Michael J. Morell.

Rice contradicted the testimony of former CIA Director David Petraeus who told lawmakers Nov. 16 he never believed the Obama administration’s claim that the attack was a mob action prompted by a video. Petraeus said that he believed all along that Islamic terrorists attacked the diplomatic mission on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.

The senators were not moved by Rice.

“It is clear that the information that she gave the American people was incorrect when she said that it was a spontaneous demonstration triggered by a hateful video,” said McCain. Echoed Graham, “Bottom line: I’m more disturbed now than I was before.”

Graham and Ayotte indicated they plan to block Rice’s nomination as secretary of state if President Obama names her to replace Hillary Clinton.

But because the senators won’t cave in to pressure, media figures are smearing them at every opportunity.

McCain, Graham, and Ayotte are engaged in a “Benghazi witch hunt,” according to Martin Bashir, one of MSNBC’s most ardent Obama worshipers.

A LIST OF ACORN's "OLD" GROUPS

A LIST OF ACORN's "OLD" GROUPS 
(updated November 25, 2012)

This list is a work in progress. It is compiled and regularly updated by Matthew Vadum at matthewvadum.com. Some of the below information was included in Vadum's book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

These groups already existed before ACORN filed for bankruptcy in New York on Election Day 2010:

ACORN Housing Corp. changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc. (website) EIN: 72-1048321; pension plan info.; Tax returns: 2010 Form 990 2009 Form 990 2008 Form 990 2007 Form 990 2006 Form 990 2005 Form 990 2004 Form 990 2003 Form 990 2002 Form 990 2001 Form 990 2001 Form 990 2000 Form 990 2000 Form 990 1999 Form 990 1998 Form 990 (Note added June 23, 2012: This entity is no longer in business. The Louisiana secretary of state website lists it as "Not in Good Standing.") AHCOA has/had various subsidiaries.

Executives (according to Dun's Market Identifiers, May 17, 2012)
Alton Bennett, President
Guillermo Loaiza, Secretary-Treasurer
Dorothy Amadi, Vice President
Mike Shea, Executive Director
Bruce Dorpalen, Loan Coun Director
Sean Flynn, Comptroller
Martin Shalloo, Dir of Ops
Ecima L Trujillo, Natl Field Director
Bruce Dorpalen, Loan Coun Director


Project Vote (website) continues to operate but did not change its name. Tax returns: 2010 Form 990 2009 Form 990 2008 Form 990 2008 Form 990 2007 Form 990 2006 Form 990 2006 Form 990 2005 Form 990 2005 Form 990 2004 Form 990 2003 Form 990 2002 Form 990 2001 Form 990 2001 Form 990 2000 Form 990 1999 Form 990 1998 Form 990 1997 Form 990

Petraeus Recants Obama’s Benghazi Fiction

My article from the Nov. 19, 2012 issue of Front Page Magazine:

Petraeus Recants Obama’s Benghazi Fiction 

By Matthew Vadum

Former CIA Director David Petraeus told Congress he never believed the Obama administration’s claim that the attack on a U.S. mission in Libya was a spontaneous mob action prompted by a crude anti-Islam video.

In closed-door testimony Friday, Petraeus said that he believed all along that Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. In so doing, Petraeus recanted his previous account two months ago of that terrible day that left four Americans dead in which he promoted the Obama administration’s official storyline.

“General Petraeus’ testimony today was that from the start he told us that this was a terrorist attack, that terrorists were involved from the start,” King said after the House Intelligence Committee sitting. “I told him in my question I had a very different recollection of that.”

“The clear impression we were given was that the overwhelming amount of evidence was that it arose out of a spontaneous demonstration and it was not a terrorist attack … he has, I think, a different impression of the impressions he left on Sept. 14.”

A CIA analyst also testified that the intelligence agency’s talking points for the White House immediately drafted after the attack specifically stated that al-Qaeda played a role in the attack that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Somehow the passage about al-Qaeda disappeared from documents. “After it went through the process … that was taken out,” King said.

The Fiscal Cliff Draws Near

My article from today's Front Page Magazine:

The Fiscal Cliff Draws Near

By Matthew Vadum

Emboldened by his class warfare-fueled reelection victory, President Obama is demanding $1.6 trillion in tax hikes as congressional leaders scramble to prevent the country from falling over the so-called fiscal cliff.

In this high-stakes game of poker, Obama is holding fast to his original budget blueprint, which includes $1.6 trillion in new revenue generated by raising taxes on households earning more than $250,000. Obama’s progressive preening comes as the outgoing 112th Congress meets in a lame duck session to deal with unfinished business. At the top of the list are whether the Bush-era taxes rates should be extended and if the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts approved by the congressional “super committee” on fiscal affairs will be avoided. If current tax rates are not extended, the already fragile economy will almost certainly nosedive.

Together the tax rate expirations and the spending cuts constitute the fiscal cliff, a term coined by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, whose protracted cheap money policy has contributed to the nation’s economic doldrums. Unless Washington comes up with a solution, taxes will skyrocket on New Year’s Day and the planned spending cuts will take effect.

Although the stock market has been rising since Obama took office, buoyed artificially by the Federal Reserve’s protracted easy money policies, market participants have been signaling that the growing national debt is a huge problem. It now stands at $16.2 trillion and climbing, upon from $10.6 trillion on Inauguration Day 2009.

The U.S. dollar is slowly collapsing, eroding Americans’ purchasing power, and the price of gold, historically a barometer of economic anxiety, has doubled since Obama took office, rising from $853.25 an ounce to $1,710.00 as of yesterday.

But President Obama remains as determined as ever to raise taxes. During a Wednesday press conference, Obama said he will not “extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent that we can’t afford, and according to economists, will have the least positive impact on our economy.”

In a scene perhaps anticipated by the 1979 book, Drunk Before Noon: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Washington Press Corps, Obama called on one of the many friendly reporters in the White House audience, CNN reporter Jessica Yellin.

She threw this class-warfare softball at the president: “Mr. President, on the fiscal cliff, two years ago, sir, you said that you wouldn’t extend the Bush-era tax cuts, but at the end of the day, you did. So, respectfully, sir, why should the American people and the Republicans believe that you won’t cave again this time?”

Voter Fraud Redefined

Here's my November 8, 2012 column from American Thinker:

Voter Fraud Redefined

By Matthew Vadum

Voter fraud ain’t what it used to be.

Left-wingers have been deliberately dumbing down the definition for years.

In all my years as a journalist covering American politics, I have understood that voter fraud, a phrase coined by lawyers, was a blanket term that refers to a host of election-related offenses.  Lawyers frequently make up terms for specialty areas — for example, elder law, environmental law, probate law, and wrongful dismissal law.

Voter fraud, also known as vote fraud, election fraud, and electoral fraud, refers to the specific offenses of fraudulent voting, impersonation, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, bribery, destroying already cast ballots, and a multitude of crimes related to the electoral process.

A quick internet search reveals a comparable definition.  One online reference site counsels:

Electoral fraud is illegal interference with the process of an election. Acts of fraud affect vote counts to bring about an election result, whether by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate, depressing the vote share of the rival candidates or both. Also called voter fraud, the mechanisms involved include illegal voter registration, intimidation at polls and improper vote counting.

Lawyers say that fraud is the most difficult crime to prove because showing that the act complained of actually happened is not enough.  It must be proven that the perpetrator had intent to defraud.  

Like any fraud, voter fraud is by its nature generally very difficult to detect and prosecute.Voter fraud in the form of actual fraudulent balloting is especially hard to demonstrate in court.  A prosecutor must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person voted without having the right to vote, used fraud (deception) in the process, and intended to defraud the victim (in this case, the public).  These facts can be hard to establish after the voter leaves the polling place.

For years now the left has been trying to muddy the waters by applying a far stricter definition of voter fraud, moving the semantic goalposts in order to define the problem out of existence.  Fraudulent registrations, of course, open the door to fraudulent voting, something the left vehemently denies.  

They deny it because the left depends on voter fraud in order to get left-wing candidates elected.  This helps to explain why they bent over backwards in recent years to defend ACORN, the voter fraud empire that filed for bankruptcy on Election Day 2010. 

Left-wing activists and think-tanks constantly churn out studies and reports financed by George Soros, purporting to prove that voter fraud is as unreal as Cookie Monster.  They claim that those on the right want to crack down on voter fraud solely as a means of preventing the poor and minorities from voting.

“Nobody claimed that voter fraud was a myth until the last couple of years,” my work colleague at Capital Research Center, Dr. Steven J. Allen, J.D., Ph.D., told me.

As Allen, who grew up amidst Alabama’s dubious politics many decades ago, observes: 

Everyone in politics openly discussed voter fraud for hundreds of years of American history. Politicians, political reporters, and everyone involved in politics openly discussed how widespread voter fraud was. Only when Republicans took over legislatures in states that had long been ruled by Democrats and where fraud was prevalent and began to do something about this problem did this myth emerge that voter fraud was nonexistent. Remember that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed specifically to prevent voter fraud which was endemic back then.

As election law expert and New York Times bestselling author J. Christian Adams has explained, “[l]iberal foundations, public interest law firms and advocacy groups have created a permanent network of experts and organizations devoted to an arcane but critical task: monopolizing the narrative on election laws and procedures. Cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of civil rights and the right to vote, they seek to affect the outcome of the election. They challenge any effort to protect the integrity of the ballot box by denying the possibility of vote fraud and crying ‘Jim Crow.’”

Let’s look at some of the more prominent voter fraud deniers on the left.

Ari Berman of the Nation describes “election fraud” as an “extremely rare occurrence” and argues that only illegal voting constitutes voter fraud.  When South Bend, Indiana prosecutors charged local Democratic officials with faking 22 petitions to get President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards on the 2008 Indiana ballot, Berman dismissed the incident as insignificant.  “[T]here’s no evidence that the alleged forgeries played a decisive role in getting the Democratic candidates on the Indiana ballot in 2008 or determining the outcome of the primary or general election,” Berman wrote.

This is the same line of reasoning adopted by Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) after the names of several Dallas Cowboys showed up on voter rolls in Nevada in 2008.  “Obviously it’s not right for a fake ‘Tony Romo’ to be registered in Las Vegas … but remember the basic point[:] it’s not voter fraud unless someone shows up at the voting booth on Election Day and tries to pass himself off as ‘Tony Romo.’”  How reassuring.

Adam Serwer of Mother Jones, writing in the Washington Post, agrees with Berman that “[v]oter fraud is a virtually nonexistent problem” and blames conservatives for “blurring the distinction between voter registration fraud — which is as easy as filling out a registration form incorrectly — and the actual act of casting a fraudulent ballot.”  Oh, the irony.

Brentin Mock of Colorlines goes farther, denying the very existence of the problem.  “Voter fraud as a thing has been exposed by civil rights watchdogs and a wide range of journalists as pure conspiracy theory,” Mock writes.

Of course, all of this leftist rhetoric is pure sophistry.  Even if a person “only” commits voter registration fraud, that is a necessary step along the way to fraudulent voting, and it should be prosecuted in order to protect the integrity of the electoral system.  Registration fraud is a gateway to fraudulent balloting, and it must be prosecuted.  Police don’t let a bank robber go free because he forgot to load his gun.

No single group in American history ever outdid ACORN in terms of voter registration fraud.  At least 52 individuals who worked for ACORN or its affiliates, or who were connected to ACORN, have been convicted of voter registration fraud.  ACORN itself was convicted in Nevada last year of the crime of “compensation.”  Under the leadership of ACORN official Amy Adele Busefink, who was also convicted of the same crime, ACORN paid voter registration canvassers cash bonuses for exceeding their quotas.  This is illegal because it gives people an incentive to commit fraud by adding Mickey Mouse and Mary Poppins to the voter rolls.

Under Busefink’s leadership, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote generated an impressive 1.1 million voter registration packages across America in 2008.  The problem was that election officials invalidated 400,000 — that’s 36 percent — of the registrations filed.  It is highly unlikely that typographic and other innocent errors alone generated so much bogus paperwork.  And this is only one activist group’s fraudulent activities in one election.

It is irresponsible for law enforcement officials to view those 400,000 registrations as mere mistakes.  All 400,000 bogus registrations should be presumed to constitute individual attempts at fraudulent voting that got caught early.  The hundreds of thousands of incidents of voter fraud that occur during every national election should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Left-wingers and Democrats are more likely than conservatives and Republicans to commit voter fraud.  Sometimes they justify the behavior on so-called social justice grounds.

Republican voters tend to be middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud, while “the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic,” according to Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson.  “Some liberal activists that Sabato and Simpson interviewed even partly justified fraudulent electoral behavior on the grounds that because the poor and dispossessed have so little political clout, ‘extraordinary measures [for example, stretching the absentee ballot or registration rules] are required to compensate’” (Who’s Counting, by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, pp. 8-9).

Should we not punish bad behavior just because it is more likely to be done by someone who is poor?  The left seems to suggest precisely that.

Was Petraeus Sacrificed for Obama?

My article today from Front Page Magazine:

Was Petraeus Sacrificed for Obama?

By Matthew Vadum

As the scandal regarding the Obama administration’s deadly bungling in Benghazi, Libya, begins to heat up, suddenly CIA director David Petraeus is out, felled by his own sex scandal.

Complicating matters further, Ronald Kessler reports at Newsmax that “Senior FBI officials suppressed disclosure of the highly sensitive case, apparently to avoid embarrassment to Obama during his re-election campaign.”

Congressman Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the details of the Petraeus situation that have been reported by the media so far don’t make sense. “It seems this [investigation] has been going on for several months, and yet now it appears that they’re saying the FBI did not realize until Election Day that Gen. Petraeus was involved. It just doesn’t add up,” said King.

According to the administration, the Petraeus resignation makes the ex-CIA chief unavailable to testify in Congress this week about what the administration knew and when it knew it. Acting CIA director Michael Morrell is now expected to testify Thursday before the House and Senate intelligence committees behind closed doors.

Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee’s panel on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, said Petraeus’s resignation ultimately won’t prevent Congress from compelling his testimony.
“The fact that he’s resigned and had an affair has nothing to do with whether he will be subpoenaed to Congress. I hope we don’t have to subpoena a four star general and a former CIA director. I would hope he would come voluntarily but if he won’t he will be subpoenaed … But there is no way we can get to the bottom of Benghazi without David Petraeus.”

The knives have apparently been out for Petraeus for a while. In a story that may have been planted by the Obama White House, Fox News reported earlier this month that the CIA did almost nothing while the consulate was in flames. Anonymous officials also told the Wall Street Journal that the CIA failed to provide adequate security at the mission. The CIA replied that its personnel were involved in repelling the attack.

Boehner Mocks Tea Party Caucus

My piece on Big Government today:

Boehner Mocks Tea Party Caucus

By Matthew Vadum

House Speaker John Boehner dismissed the Tea Party as irrelevant in an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer yesterday, while at the same time sending out contradictory messages on taxes.

Two days after the presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were defeated in the election, Boehner stated incorrectly that there is no “Tea Party caucus to speak of in the House.” He then appeared to say Republicans now take the movement for granted, adding, “all of us who were elected in 2010 were supported by the Tea Party.”

Although the official Tea Party Caucus hasn’t been as active as other officially recognized congressional caucuses such as the Democratic-dominated Congressional Progressive Caucus, it has nonetheless existed since 2010.

The Tea Party Caucus was founded by Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), an outspoken conservative who narrowly won reelection Tuesday in a hotly contested race. The caucus website lists 60 House lawmakers, all Republicans, as members. Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are also members of the caucus.

Boehner's comments are surprising because after initial grumblings about the former Massachusetts governor’s commitment to conservative principles, Tea Party supporters and disgruntled conservative Republicans overwhelmingly united behind Mitt Romney during the past election cycle.

Right now Boehner, Senate leaders, and the newly victorious President Obama are engaged in a high-stakes game of poker over the so-called fiscal cliff.

Current tax rates, enacted during President George W. Bush’s first term, will jump on Dec. 31 if they are not extended, possibly sending the already fragile economy into a tailspin. Hefty defense and domestic spending cuts will also take effect at the end of the year unless Congress and President Obama can agree to a legislative fix. Boehner also wants to establish some kind of framework for moving forward with serious tax and entitlement reform talks in the new year.

There is also the prickly issue of the national debt ceiling. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Wednesday that if the current $16.394 trillion legal limit on federal borrowing needs to be raised in coming months by another $2.4 trillion, “We’ll raise it,” according to CNSNews.com.

Simmering below the surface is the fact that constitutionalists and limited-government backers in the House Republican conference are also upset that after Mitt Romney lost his race for the presidency Tuesday, Boehner almost immediately began waving the white flag in their view in front of the newly re-energized Democrats.

Boehner told Sawyer that he won’t fight Obamacare. Asked by Sawyer if he intended to pursue full repeal of the unpopular health care law, Boehner said, “the election changes that,” and that “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

Boehner has been less that clear about whether he is open to raising tax rates.
On Wednesday the Speaker said House Republicans were willing to consider “some additional revenues via tax reform.” The successful tax reform compromise of 1986 that President Ronald Reagan reached with a divided Congress could be a model for any tax deal that might be reached, he said. “We’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions.”

“The president has called for a balanced approach to the deficit with a combination of spending cuts and increased revenues, but a balanced approach isn’t balanced if it means higher taxes on small businesses that are the key to getting our economy moving again and keeping it moving,” Boehner said.

“A balanced approach isn’t balanced if it means that we increase the amount of money coming into the coffers of government but we don’t cut spending and address entitlements at the same time. A balanced approach isn’t balanced if it’s done in the old Washington way of raising taxes now and ultimately failing to cut spending in the future. A balanced approach isn’t balanced if it means slashing national defense instead of making the common sense spending cuts that are truly needed.”

But Thursday he told Sawyer that “raising tax rates is unacceptable.”

“Frankly, it couldn’t even pass the House,” Boehner said. “I’m not sure it could pass the Senate.”

Since Election Day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has come out more definitively against tax increases than Boehner has.

Discussions of an impending Republican “civil war” are everywhere in the legacy media as GOP lawmakers, their donors, and grassroots members come to grips with President Obama’s unexpected re-election victory.

Members of the majority party in the House for the incoming Congress typically meet in the weeks following Election Day to unofficially elect the Speaker of the next Congress. House members then ratify that decision when they formally elect a new Speaker at the opening of the new Congress in early January.

What to Expect in the Next Four Years

My article from today's Front Page Magazine:

What to Expect in the Next Four Years

By Matthew Vadum

Americans have narrowly voted to reelect a president who will continue policies that will — not may — eventually lead to the downfall of the American republic.

The Tuesday election was a crushing defeat for the Tea Party-energized conservative movement but as a wise person once said, all defeats in politics are temporary. It is unfathomable to many Americans that a man they see as a wrongheaded, arrogant, corrupt Chief Executive could be reelected in a harsh economic climate, but as we saw with Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 win during the Great Depression, it can happen.

For the time being I’ll leave it to others to hold forth on how best to take on the still-expanding Leviathan that President Obama is piloting but now that some of the initial pain and shock from Tuesday evening is beginning to wear off, let’s take a look at the grim future America faces if it fails to correct its course.

The economy is a shambles and thanks to the news-suppressing Obama-worshipping media, a huge chunk of the populace seems unaware of just how rotten things are. A quick recap: More than 23 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up seeking work. The workforce participation rate is the lowest in 30 years. Annual household income is down $4,000. A record 47 million people are on food stamps. The national debt is now an astonishing $16.4 trillion and it’s probably going to shoot up even more.

This is just a smattering of the deeply depressing economic statistics that define the age of Obama.

In light of the election results, House Speaker John Boehner has demonstrated that he may be flexible on what has been the GOP’s signature issue: tax cuts. However, his public pronouncements on tax cuts since the election haven’t exactly been easy to interpret. During a Wednesday press event, he said he may be amenable to raising government revenues then during an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer the next day he said he didn’t want to raise taxes.

It is far from clear if such increases would prevent the day of fiscal reckoning. More likely tax hikes would simply delay it a bit by propping up America’s unsustainable welfare state, a redistributionist infrastructure that President Obama and Democrats are determined to further expand.

Boehner also struck the colors on the issue of Obamacare repeal. He told Diane Sawyer that he has no plans to fight President Obama’s unpopular health care legislation further. Asked if he intended to pursue a complete repeal of the law, Boehner said, “the election changes that,” and “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

Although these matters are worth worrying about, they are short-term concerns. Many Americans viewed this past election as America’s last, best chance to at least try to right the ship of state.

What may happen to the country over the long-term is terrifying.

‘Disenfranchisement Hysteria’ Is Rampant, Says Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler

My PJ Tatler blog post from November 6, 2012:

‘Disenfranchisement Hysteria’ Is Rampant,
Says Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler

By Matthew Vadum

The Left’s obsession with voter ID laws amounts to “disenfranchisement hysteria,” according to Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R).

Photo ID requirements for voting, whether instituted in America or anywhere in the world, are “correlated with increased voter turnout, substantial increased voter turnout, and a whole lot of good things and I think that shows that some of this disenfranchisement hysteria is, frankly, frankly silly,” Gessler said during a  panel discussion on electoral integrity at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on July 26 of this year.

Voter ID advocates like the good-government group True the Vote have long maintained that asking voters to prove they are citizens is essential to combat voter fraud. Left-wingers, on the other hand, say such requirements are unfair to people who are too lazy to obtain acceptable forms of government-issued identification.

Gessler praised True the Vote, a good-government group that is on the front lines of the battle for clean, honest elections. True the Vote is one of those groups that liberals hate and that voter-fraud deniers like left-wing journalist Brentin Mock routinely smear. Without any credible evidence whatsoever, Mock has accused True the Vote, which merely watches polling places to keep officials honest, of trying “to strip voters of election rights.”

Gessler seems justified worrying about fraud at the voting booth. On this Election Day there is news of widespread voter fraud, malfunctioning voting machines, and military uniform-wearing New Black Panther Party members reemerging at Philadelphia polling places. Last year, Gessler released a study showing that nearly 5,000 illegal aliens voted in the U.S. Senate election in Colorado two years ago.

“We’ve got bloated and inaccurate voter rolls. We have a very loose honor system when it comes to voting in this country, both in the registration and voting as well; often times, for example, no forms of ID, or no photo ID required,” he said. “Over time we’ve seen the increased use of mail ballots which, while it has many good points, also increases a very common avenue for voter fraud.”

Those who oppose voter ID laws embrace “a culture of see no evil, hear no evil,” and their “argument is ironically propagated by some of the same people who see massive corruption when it comes to a campaign finance system.”

Such people, Gessler said, “see massive corruption in the ballot initiative process, but when it comes to voting in the polling booth, our hearts become pure, without malice,” according to voter ID opponents.

“I think we all want to believe that everyone is of good faith and willing to do the right thing, but I think Americans intuitively understand that in any human endeavor, and elections are hard, complicated human endeavors, in any human endeavor, there is a small proportion of people who will when tempted do the wrong thing, who when tempted, will break the law. And political power, as gained through elections, is a temptation and that tempts people to do bad things.”

Matthew Vadum is an award-winning investigative reporter and the author of "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers" (WND Books, 2011) and "Government Unions: How They Rob the Taxpayer, Terrorize Workers, and Threaten our Democracy" (David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2012). His next major work will have a shorter title.

Voter Fraud in Nevada

My American Thinker blog post from November 6, 2012:

Voter Fraud in Nevada

By Matthew Vadum

Remember this classic line from Michael Corleone in The Godfather?

"Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract."

This is essentially what labor unions are doing in Nevada to help re-elect President Obama.

Culinary Workers Union Local 226 appears to be committing voter registration fraud by hoodwinking noncitizen immigrants into registering to vote and then threatening them if they fail to cast their ill-gotten ballots illegally. People who have been lawfully admitted to permanent residence in the United States, that is, permanent residents or green card holders, do not have the right to vote in elections.

Glenn Cook of the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that union members who barely speak English were made to sign voter registration forms without understanding what they were signing.

Union goons then visited those members to press them to vote. When they failed to vote, union officials kept visiting and ramping up the pressure.

"One of the immigrants was visited at home by a Culinary representative and said the operative made threats of deportation if no ballot was cast," according to Cook.

Cook writes that the immigrants, who refused to be identified in print, said they're afraid of losing their jobs and being prosecuted for signing a government document that says at the bottom, "I swear or affirm I am a U.S. citizen. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct."

Of course all of this had to be happening in Nevada, a heavily-unionized state plagued by voter fraud.

It was in Nevada that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was convicted last year in a massive voter registration fraud conspiracy.

Former senior ACORN executive Amy Adele Busefink was also convicted alongside ACORN. She appealed her conviction on constitutional grounds and was rebuffed last month by the Nevada Supreme Court.

While under indictment in Nevada, Busefink ran ACORN and Project Vote's disastrous 2008 national voter drive. In that drive election officials invalidated 400,000 of the 1.1 million voter registration packages submitted.

Busefink now works for Project Vote, the ACORN affiliate that employed President Obama in 1992.

In fact, Busefink is running the left-wing group's national 2012 voter drive.

Matthew Vadum is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. His book on ACORN and President Obama, Subversion Inc., was published last year. 

What a Romney Presidency Would Look Like

My pre-election musings on what a Romney presidency might look like are quite useless now but maybe they're worth a chuckle or two. Laughs help to ease the pain a little.

Along the same lines, somebody grabbed screen shots of the provisional Romney transition website that was set up before it disappeared into the ether.

Anyway, here is my November 6, 2012, article from Front Page Magazine:

What a Romney Presidency Would Look Like

By Matthew Vadum

If Mitt Romney is elected 45th president, he will be spending a lot of time cleaning up the mess that President Obama leaves behind.

If Wednesday morning, or next week, or next month, or whenever the election is resolved, America wakes up to President-elect Romney, the soon-to-be Chief Executive will start plotting the course of his fledgling administration.

The most important thing Romney can do from the moment his election is (hypothetically) declared is to project confidence and show America and the rest of the world that the country is back from the abyss after four bleak years of autocratic rule by a corrupt Marxist caudillo the likes of which the U.S. had never before seen.

Romney needs to act quickly to assure nervous markets that he is going to reverse Obama’s reckless spending policies, balance the federal budget, strengthen the greenback, and bolster America’s shrinking military might. He needs to let the nation’s Islamofascist enemies know he means business.

Unlike Obama, Romney likes Israel and wants it to survive and thrive.

A President Romney would act quickly to chuck the wreckage of Obama’s foreign policy overboard. Romney will not be afraid to project American power overseas and he certainly will not bow to foreign leaders, a disgraceful Obama habit. Romney will make it clear that he truly believes in American exceptionalism, unlike his predecessor — whose childhood mentor was a Communist Party USA operative.

Obama's Army of Illegal Election Workers

From today's issue of Front Page Magazine:

Obama's Army of Illegal Election Workers

By Matthew Vadum

Democrats have enlisted thousands of young illegal immigrants to drag their supporters to the polls on Election Day tomorrow.

These get-out-the-vote workers may or may not be breaking the law by helping with voter mobilization. Because the workers are already unlawfully present in the United States, presumably all employment they engage in –including electioneering— already violates laws against unauthorized employment.

It’s not like their patron, President Obama, would do anything about it anyway. This past summer Obama swept aside federal law in order to pander to this growing constituency. In a move more imperial than presidential, Obama bypassed Congress and partially implemented the so-called proposed DREAM Act which would have offered a path to U.S. citizenship for youthful illegals who served in the armed forces or attended college. Up to 1.4 million illegal aliens could benefit from the move.

Using undocumented aliens as election workers is a new low for the activist Left.

“For people who aren’t supposed to be in the country in the first place to be deployed for partisan advantage is the last straw,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that favors limits on immigration levels.

“‘The strategic deployment’ of illegal immigrants who benefit from the Obama administration program is a ‘corruption of the political process,’” he said.

And there can be little doubt that some of the Obama supporters these election workers cajole into voting booths will themselves be illegal immigrants ineligible to vote in the national election. Lax, and in some cases non-existent ID requirements, at the state level will allow people to vote who have no legal right to vote.

In the battleground state of Nevada, Culinary Workers Union Local 226 is strong-arming union members who are bona fide U.S. permanent residents into unlawfully casting ballots. (Permanent residents, or green card holders, are allowed to reside and work in the U.S. permanently but are not allowed to vote unless they become naturalized as U.S. citizens.) The union is affiliated with the UNITE HERE labor federation.

NAACP Takes Over Houston Polling Place

My post from the American Thinker blog today:

NAACP Takes Over Houston Polling Place

By Matthew Vadum

There are credible reports that NAACP activists took over a Houston, Texas, polling station, urged voters to vote for the Obama-Biden presidential ticket, and also gave them rewards to do so.

Poll watcher Eve Rockford said members of the left-wing so-called civil rights group appeared at the early polling place wearing NAACP-labeled clothing and 50 cases of bottled water.  The activists handed out the water bottles to individuals standing in line waiting to vote.  They were also “stirring the crowd” and “talking to voters about flying to Ohio to promote President Barack Obama,” said Rockford, who was trained in poll-watching by True the Vote, a prominent electoral integrity organization.

Rockford said, “The NAACP began hand picking people out of the lines and began moving these people to the front of the line.  The people were getting mad and asking why were these people being moved to the front of the line.”

Rockford said she complained about these irregularities and election officials at the site did nothing.

While no group has been able to match the impressive voter fraud body count generated by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) over the years, the NAACP has been nipping at ACORN’s heels.  The Houston action is just the NAACP’s most recent adventure in the world of election fraud.

Last year a Tunica, Mississippi jury sent Mississippi NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers to prison for five years.  She was convicted of voting 10 times using the names of other people, some of whom were dead. At sentencing, Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster said, “This crime cuts against the fabric of our free society,” according to the Tunica Times.

The NAACP Voter Fund registered a dead man to vote in Lake County, Ohio, in 2004. (Plain Dealer, Sept. 23, 2004)  The same year, out of 325 voter registration cards filed by the NAACP in Cleveland, 48 were ruled to be fraudulent.  (Akron Beacon Journal, Sept. 29, 2004)

In 2005 in Defiance County, Ohio, Chad Staton pleaded guilty to 10 counts of falsifying voter registration forms.  A grand jury indictment stated the man had filed forms in the names of Jeffrey Dahmer, Brett Favre, George Foreman, Maria Lopez, and George Lopez, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Michael Jordan, Mary Poppins, and Dick Tracy.  Staton had been hired by Georgianne Pitts, who worked for the NAACP Voter Fund.

Despite such reports, the NAACP and its allies in the media remain stuck in voter fraud denial mode.

Earlier this year NAACP official Jotaka Eaddy said voter fraud was overblown as an issue.  Anti-voter fraud laws are “created really to drive fear,” said Eaddy, who is special assistant to NAACP President Ben Jealous and senior director of the NAACP’s voting rights project.

“When we look at the tactics that are being used to put forth these laws it’s to shrink the electorate.  Mass confusion of voters.  Just chaos, create chaos,” Eaddy said at the left-wing Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C., on June 19.

Eaddy is just one member of an army of well-funded voter fraud-deniers.  These left-wingers, who often work for nonprofits funded by George Soros, typically claim that voter fraud is a figment of conservatives’ imagination and that anyone who wishes to combat it is guilty of voter suppression.

Touré, a co-host of MSNBC show “The Cycle,” said earlier this year on his show that “voter fraud is a red herring … it does not exist.”

After Ari Berman of the Nation and Adam Serwer of Mother Jones, probably the worst vote-fraud denier in the world of journalism is Brentin Mock, who relentlessly attacks electoral integrity advocates as code word-using racists.  To Mock, poll-watching aimed at catching and deterring fraud is racist vigilantism, little different from the lynchings of the Jim Crow era.  Mock describes voter fraud as a “myth,” and refers to the respected Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky and political columnist John Fund as “anti-voting rights activists and voter fraud hucksters.”

He describes True the Vote as one of hundreds of Tea Party groups across the nation that has “plugged itself into an existing infrastructure of influential far-right organizations hellbent on criminalizing abortion, banishing gun control, repealing the Affordable Care Act — and now, on intimidating would-be voters.”

That’s what it’s come to in the age of Obama.  Volunteer your time to promote good government and get smeared as a racist.

Matthew Vadum is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C.  His book on ACORN and President Obama, Subversion Inc., was published last year.

The Socialist Democrats: An Election Primer

My article from the October 30, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

The Socialist Democrats: An Election Primer

By Matthew Vadum

The socialist wing of the national Democratic Party is larger and probably more powerful than it has ever been.

But its numbers depend on how you define the term socialist and how you measure influence.

Labels can be misleading. Since the 1960s and the ascent of the so-called George McGovern/Jimmy Carter/Walter Mondale wing of the Democratic Party, being a socialist, or fairly close to a socialist, has become the norm in the party. The days in which a Democratic elected official could be slightly left-wing (i.e. favoring a mixed economy that was more capitalist than socialist) and at the same time pro-defense, as in the case of President Harry S. Truman and Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, are long gone.

Nowadays it is generally safe to presume that a Democratic lawmaker is a socialist unless evidence suggests otherwise.

But the word socialist still carries with it a certain stigma in U.S. culture, even in the age of Barack Hussein Obama, easily the most radical president the United States has ever seen.

Even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) resists calling herself a socialist even though she clearly supports that ideology’s planks. And even though Pelosi is not a member of the CPC, like its members she occupies a parallel universe in which the United States is evil, racist, imperialistic, and all the other unpleasant adjectives that Marxists apply to this country.

Only the bolder members of Congress, often those in safe Democratic districts, tend to openly associate themselves with socialism.

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are undoubtedly socialists, though most shy away from the label. The CPC has long had ties to the far-left Institute for Policy Studies, Democratic Socialists of America (the largest Marxist group in the country), and the Communist Party USA.

The CPC, which is co-chaired by Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raul M. Grijalva (D-AZ), has 75 members in the U.S. House of Representatives, including two nonvoting delegates, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), and Donna Christian-Christensen (D-VI). This means that of the 190 Democratic House members with voting privileges, 73, or nearly two-fifths of all House Democrats, are members of the radical caucus.

Even though Democrats no longer control the House, because CPC members comprise a large percentage of the Democratic conference, the socialists within that conference have greater sway over what direction the Democratic leadership takes in Congress. Radical Democrats have fewer moderate Democrats, such as members of the increasingly endangered Blue Dog Caucus, to struggle against in policy fights.

Matthew Vadum's work is cited in 49 books (so far)

I've been keeping a running tab of the books that reference my work and/or quote me.

Authors on the right, such as John Fund, Phyllis Schafly, Michael Reagan, David Horowitz, and Michelle Malkin rely on my research and commentary.

Authors on the left, such as Arianna Huffington, Thomas Frank, and Center for American Progress visiting fellow Shirley Sagawa, have also given my work a vote of confidence by relying on it.

Here is the list as of November 4, 2012:

* asterisk indicates New York Times bestseller

In reverse chronological order (sorted by year):

49) The Maclean's Book of Lists, Rogers Publishing, 2012, page citation unknown.

48) Judge Me By The People Who Surround Me: The Obama Challenge, by Barbara Bluefield, Outskirts Press, 2012, page citations unknown 

47) Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, by Thomas Frank, Macmillan, 2012, page citations unknown 

46) Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk, by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, Encounter Books, 2012, page citations unknown

*45) Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind, by Mallory Factor and Elizabeth Factor, Center Street, 2012, page citations unknown

44) No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom, by Phyllis Schafly and George Neumayr, Regnery Publishing, 2012, page citations unknown

43) The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, by Richard L. Hasen, Yale University Press, forthcoming: expected publication summer 2012, page citations unknown

*42) Cowards: What Politicians, Radicals, and the Media Refuse to Say, by Glenn Beck, Threshold Editions/Mercury Radio Arts, 2012, at least 3 citations

41) The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money-Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future, by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, Crown Forum, 2012, 278n4

Benghazi Investigator Slams America and ‘Islamophobes’

My article from the November 2, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

Benghazi Investigator Slams America and ‘Islamophobes’

By Matthew Vadum

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities.

So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling the epithet “Islamophobe” the same way American leftists use the word “racist” to shut down debate.

Pickering’s pontifications came two and a half weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named him to head a State Department “Accountability Review Board” tasked with examining the circumstances surrounding the deaths on Sept. 11, 2012, the 11^th anniversary of 9/11, of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, information management officer Sean Smith, and security personnel Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

At last week’s panel discussion, Pickering piously but incorrectly invoked the Holocaust to argue that American Muslims were somehow in danger.

Andrew Breitbart and the Shirley Sherrod Video

I've been having a back and forth on Twitter with Jason Alexander (the actor from "Seinfeld" -- yes, I'm a big fan of him and the show) about the late Andrew Breitbart.

I often get into it and can get a bit hard-edged with people on Twitter but we managed to keep things civil. For me, I suppose, this is progress.

It's late and I'm tired so I'm going to now paste here what I was going to put up on Twitter.

It appears below as it would have had I put it on Twitter (because, again, I'm tired and need to go to bed soon):

Alrighty. It's confusing and has a lot of moving parts but it boils down to this:
Sherrod’s in a video speaking of her past racist acts. 1/
 She admits she treated a poor white aid applicant differently. NAACP audience cheers this racist behavior. 2/
 Sherrod doesn’t clarify anything at this point and seems to go along with audience. 3/
 Andrew says on "Hannity" (http://video.foxnews.com/v/4288023/) that he publicized the
Sherrod speech 4/
 to get at NAACP, not Sherrod. The fact that NAACP people cheered Sherrod's racist acts 5/
 was far worse than anything alleged against the supposedly racist Tea Party, Andrew Breitbart says. 6/
 AB says he wasn't out to get Sherrod. In fact he says he doesn’t care about Sherrod and that 7/
 he never called for Sherrod to be fired. He was trying to defend the Tea Party which he
said 8/
 has been falsely maligned for alleged racism. But when the story broke, Agr Secy Tom Vilsack 9/
 freaked out and summarily fired Sherrod. My guess is Vilsack was wrong to do so. Andrew 10/
 can't be blamed for Obama admin's hypersensitivity. Incredibly, the NAACP threw Sherrod 11/
 under the bus immediately, not grasping the moral of the story, i.e. that NAACPers are the problem, 12/
 not Sherrod per se. Lost in all this is the fact that when Andrew introduced the world to the 13/
 Sherrod video he placed a lengthy commentary alongside it that the MSM ignored. 14/
 Breitbart’s commentary is at http://web.archive.org/web/20101007143545/http://biggovernment.com/abreitbart/2010/07/19/video-proof-the-naacp-awards-racism2010/#more-145962 15/
 AB acknowledges at the time the short version of the video came out that in the full speech 16/
 Sherrod gave she backs away from her racist pose somewhat. Andrew writes, 17/
 "Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help."
18/
 But Sherrod decides it would be best for the man to get help from “one of his own kind.”
19/
 She sends him to a white lawyer for help. That's it in a nutshell, Mr. Alexander. 20/
 Sherrod became collateral damage as the MSM, NAACP, and Obama admin scrambled for cover. 21/
 Andrew's mistake, I suppose, was in not explaining things as clearly as he could have. 22/
 Perhaps he should have put the exculpatory info about Sherrod in 40-point type at the top of  22/
 his commentary but somehow I suspect the MSM still would have pilloried him. 23/23

All of this is explained far better in "Hating Breitbart," the documentary film about Andrew Breitbart that came out recently but unfortunately there is no transcript online at the moment that I can reference.