The critical race for Ohio’s next Secretary of State

Remember the progressive Secretary of State project?

The Secretary of State Project originated due to the culmination of frustration, anger, bitterness and overall resentment Democrats felt towards Republicans in the wake of President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004. Still plagued with memories of Katherine Harris and Florida from the 2000 presidential contest, Democrats placed the blame for Senator John Kerry’s loss squarely on the head of former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who ruled that provisional ballots in the state would not be counted if they were submitted in the wrong precinct, a decision upheld by the United States Court of Appeals. Bush’s victory in the state – a relatively slim 118,000+ votes – gave him the necessary electoral votes (twenty) to cross the victory threshold of two hundred and seventy.

Democratic founders of the SoS Project saw conspiracy in Blackwell's decision, insisting that those individuals who were elected on the principle of upholding and enforcing election laws were, in fact, political operatives. But rather then push for reform so that the offices of the Secretaries of State reflected a level of neutrality, perhaps making it so holders of those positions were elected on a nonpartisan basis, they instead sought to implement an aggressive agenda exactly the same in nearly every respect that they had just accused Republicans of performing.

Through the strategic process of placing specific candidates, ones that met a certain liberal or progressive criteria set down by the organization, in positions of power that oversaw and administered state elections, the Democratic Party would be "better positioned than in the previous elections to advance traditional Democratic interests," particularly when it came to the administration of election laws.

. . .

The SoS Project has not been active since 2010. It spent just over $50,000 in 2012 and its website was taken down.

The SoS Project may be gone technically, but it seems to be operating under different auspices. Paula Bolyard’s report at PJ Media shows that Ohio voters may yet be vulnerable to progressive, uh, cheating:

Ohio SoS Candidate Who Moved to Keep Trump Off 2020 Ballot

 Vows to 'Impact' Election if She Wins

Ohio has long been known as a battleground state because it often plays a pivotal role in deciding presidential elections. Although the state has a mere 18 electoral votes, Ohio is often a barometer of the nation's political mood. A down-ticket race that hasn't garnered much national attention — but should — is the contest to be Ohio's next secretary of state. Two state lawmakers, Republican Frank LaRose and Democrat Kathleen Clyde, are vying for the position that the Democratic candidate has said could impact the 2020 presidential election.

Kathleen Clyde, who, as a member of the Ohio House introduced the TRUMP Act last year to try and force President Trump to release his tax returns, has vowed to play a role in the 2020 presidential election should she win next Tuesday. Clyde, who did not return PJM's request for a comment, said in February, “It is a very powerful and important position, impacting the presidential election because of our importance as a battleground state and the redistricting process” [emphasis added]. She explained, “It matters who runs the elections in this critical state.”

LaRose, 39, is a combat veteran and U.S. Army Special Forces Green Beret, who earned a Bronze Star for his service in Iraq. The father of three has served in the Ohio Senate since 2011. Clyde, also 39, has served in the Ohio House since 2011. A lawyer by trade, Clyde, according to her website, is a "dedicated defender of voters and voting rights" who "wants to take her life’s work to the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office to secure and modernize Ohio elections so every Ohioan’s vote counts."

 A Baldwin-Wallace University poll earlier this month showed the race in a dead heat, with LaRose and Clyde deadlocked at 32.6 percent. A Libertarian candidate, Dustin Hanna, had 7.2 percent, while nearly a third of voters were undecided, likely owing to the fact that neither candidate had statewide name recognition going into the contest.

The fact that impacting the election is on Clyde's mind "should give every Ohioan great cause for concern," LaRose told PJM. "Let me be clear. The secretary of state does not get to impact Ohio's election, the voters do." LaRose added that if he's elected to be Ohio's next chief elections officer, he "will run fair elections, assuring that the voices of Ohioans are heard."

But Democrats clearly have a different idea. That's why Democrats far and wide — from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren to Eric Holder to Tom Steyer — are focusing their attention on the race and pouring pallets full of cash into it.

Grant Schaffer, LaRose's campaign manager, told PJM, "We're facing an unprecedented wave of out-of-state spending in the secretary of state's race.

National figures like George Soros, Donald Sussman, Eric Holder, Tom Steyer and his wife, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, and Hilary Clinton have all made large personal investments in the race." All, he said, "have publicly stated interests in defeating Trump or want to run for president themselves." He said outside groups like OMG-WTF and iVote are targeting the race.

If the money is pouring in from out-of-state to promote Clyde’s campaign for SoS, that’s bad news for Ohio. And the Libertarian candidate usually splits the conservative vote. 

# # #

Eric Holder named to lead effort to destroy GOP

art credit: OtterLimits

If this doesn’t scare you, nothing will. It's not a headline from The Onion, either. From Thomas Lifson at AmericanThinker:

Eric Holder named to lead effort to destroy GOP

after Hillary wins the presidency

This election is for keeps: plans are being implemented, with President Obama already signed on, staff hired, and money being raised.  Perhaps lulled into complacency by the MSM polls, the Democrats have already constructed and staffed their strategy to permanently disable the Republican Party.  Eric Holder is the perfect henchman, a man above nothing in his quest for political dominance, unbound by old-fashioned concepts of justice.

The GOP will remain in existence as the token opposition, useful for legitimizing the actual one-party regime, the essential element of the election rituals reminding us of the Republic we once enjoyed.

Edward Isaac-Dovere of Politico has the scoop:

As Democrats aim to capitalize on this year’s Republican turmoil and start building back their own decimated bench, former Attorney General Eric Holder will chair a new umbrella group focused on redistricting reform—with the aim of taking on the gerrymandering that’s left the party behind in statehouses and made winning a House majority far more difficult.

The new group, called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, was developed in close consultation with the White House. President Barack Obama himself has now identified the group—which will coordinate campaign strategy, direct fundraising, organize ballot initiatives and put together legal challenges to state redistricting maps—as the main focus of his political activity once he leaves office.

The group is moving forward in a systematic way, assembling talent and money:

Though initial plans to be active in this year’s elections fell short, the group has been incorporated as a 527, with Democratic Governors Association executive director Elizabeth Pearson as its president and House Majority PAC executive director Ali Lapp as its vice president. They’ve been pitching donors and aiming to put together its first phase action plan for December, moving first in the Virginia and New Jersey state elections next year and with an eye toward coordination across gubernatorial, state legislative and House races going into the 2018 midterms.

Redistricting, aka Gerrymandering (depending on the eye of the beholder), is now a science, thanks to the data-mining capabilities of all the Silicon Valley Big Money corporatist allies of the Democrats.  Assembling masses of data from Google, Facebook, and others, they can put together districts micro-targeted with just enough Democrats to win and shove the GOP voters into 90% majority districts, shut out forever from control of state legislatures and the House of Representatives.

As Richard Baehr emailed me, "so long as there is an opposition, it must be destroyed."

It will be, if these well designed, politically connected, well financed efforts are implemented under a President Rodham.  

Combined with a Supreme Court committed to the living Constitution fantasy, the Uniparty will rule us all any way it desires.

The continuing avalanche of Wikileaks confirms just how corrupt the entire political and governmental structures are. Sharyl Attkisson (who quit her CBS job a couple of years ago amid concerns of media bias) has a long column focusing on the corrupt corporate media scandal she is calling “Newsgate.” It looks like it's merely the tip of the iceberg. 

# # #

Eric Holder: buh-bye

Tea Party Patriots’Jenny Beth Martin offered these comments on the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder:

He will go down in history as the nation’s most corrupt attorney general. Americans must never forget that the blood of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is on his hands. Eric Holder’s illegal scheme to put guns in the hands of the Mexican cartels led to that brave patriot’s death. He became the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, which is fitting, given his utter and open contempt for the American people and the Constitution.

He began his tenure by dismissing the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, and he slithers out of office having played defense for Lois Lerner by his refusal to appoint a special prosecutor. He is a disgrace to that honorable office.

As one chapter ends in the Obama Administration’s war on the Constitution, Americans must remain engaged and vigilant. There’s no doubt the President will try to ram through a lame-duck Senate another partisan hack for Attorney General. We cannot allow that to happen.

Over at PJ Media,Roger L. Simon had this to say:

he was a political bagman, a low rent consigliere whose  unquestioning obedience to power was evidently appreciated by Barack Obama and rewarded with the full position of attorney general. Obama knew what he was getting for our number one law enforcement official.  With that background, no wonder Holder investigates nothing, leaving “Fast & Furious,” the IRS, Benghazi, all the scandals, untouched, stonewalled or deliberately obfuscated.  He was chosen to be a “Good German” and he was one.  He spent most of his time inveighing against what he perceived to be racial injustice.

Now I have a theory about the etiology of Holder’s fixation on race. When you know deep down you’re a dishonest person, when you have had to eat the bitter pill of your own corruption who knows how many times (even Clinton finally admitted that he had gone too far pardoning Rich and damaged his own reputation), you have to invent a narrative for yourself to justify your activities.  So over may years Holder developed what I have called elsewhere a “nostalgia for racism.”  No matter that racism was diminishing in our culture, he had to keep racism alive, believe it was alive.  If racism were going away, he would no longer have a raison d’être, an excuse for his biased behavior, an excuse, as it turned out, to go beyond the law, act unilaterally and punish political enemies.

Toward this end, in a sense, Holder encouraged racism, as did Obama.  They are both slightly more polished versions of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Like Jackson and Sharpton, they act as if they care about the black man or woman in the street, but in actuality they just care about themselves.  The racial posturing is a form of moral narcissism that works to preserve racism, not to defeat it.

It’s not by accident black America is suffering under Obama/Holder.  At least subconsciously, it’s by design. . . .

 

Who will be the next AG? The WaPo reports that

Possible contenders include U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr.; former White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler; Tony West, the former associate attorney general who just stepped down; Loretta E. Lynch, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York; Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York; and Jenny Durkan, who is about to step down as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington state.

Perhaps I am not paying close enough attention, but I never heard of any of them. I doubt that the Obama administration would consider, oh, Kris Kobach.  

# # #

HOLD HOLDER in Contempt for Fast and Furious

Fast and Furious:

Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force

HOLD HOLDER in Contempt!

Last week (June 20, 2012), Fox News reported that

President Obama has granted an 11th-hour request by Attorney General Eric Holder to exert executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents, a last-minute maneuver that appears unlikely to head off a contempt vote against Holder by Republicans in the House.

Over the weekend, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy (who wrote the book on the jihad organization led by the “Blind Sheik” in the first WTC bombing) published an analysis of Fast and Furious that is devastating to the administration assertions of Executive Privilege, and to the continued stonewalling by Holder himself. Essentially, McCarthy sets forth the internal organizational structures in the DOJ and how cases are categorized and funded; he makes the case that Fast and Furious was categorized as an OCDETF, that is Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. OCDETF cases are, by definition, under the direct authority of “Main Justice,” the AG’s DC department. Extracts from this Must Read [my emphases]:

ATF and the U.S. attorney had to apply to Main Justice for OCDETF status. A case gets approval for funding — which can run well into the millions of dollars — only if senior Justice Department officials, after studying the formally submitted proposal, determine that the investigation has great promise.

The Obama Justice Department made exactly that determination. And this was no rubber stamp — it never is, given the number of agencies across the country competing over the OCDETF pot of gold. Chairman Issa’s most recent memo (dated May 3, 2012) explains that, to win its OCDETF designation, Fast and Furious was “reorganized as a Strike Force including agents from ATF, FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component of the Department of Homeland Security.” Because of the investigation’s importance, a senior ATF agent (who later became a whistleblower) was transferred to Phoenix to help oversee the case.

…the defining features of OCDETF are investigative coordination under the Justice Department’s leadership and the liberal sharing of information across the department’s array of agencies. No OCDETF case is an outlier.

. . . in January 2010. It was then that the case became an OCDETF investigation. . . . It is a deliberate process. ATF and the U.S. attorney had to apply to Main Justice for OCDETF status. A case gets approval for funding — which can run well into the millions of dollars — only if senior Justice Department officials, after studying the formally submitted proposal, determine that the investigation has great promise.

The Obama Justice Department made exactly that determination. And this was no rubber stamp — it never is,

. . .

OCDETF cases get the attention of the Justice Department’s top hierarchy. What gets that level of attention gets the attorney general’s attention.

McCarthy cites chapter and verse, including memoranda that Darrell Issa has already received, not from Eric “Stonewall” Holder, but from whistle-blowers, that put the AG at the center of this deadly scandal.

Alert for this week: Call Rep. John Boehner to make sure he knows WE know about the OCDETF status of Fast and Furious. One American border patrol agent is dead, one ICE agent is dead, and hundreds of Mexican citizens are dead. And the House should vote to hold Eric Holder in contempt. For starters.

Rep. John Boehner:

• Phone (202) 225-6205
• Fax (202) 225-0704
• Or go here for Twitter, Facebook and other social media links to his office