Utah Judge who disliked hunters defeated in election

Recently I had a couple of links to a Utah state judge who disliked hunters. Well, it turns out that Judge Lewis was defeated in her retention election (see also here). Apparently Judge Lewis is also facing other problems. She is apparently defeated in her retention election "under investigation for allegedly having reduced the sentence of a convicted child molester by 10 years."

Thanks to N.W. Clayton for sending me these links.

John Fund claims that there was probably significant vote fraud in Montana and possibly Virginia

John Fund was on Dennis Prager's radio show and has a discussion that Conrad Burns and George Allen's losses probably lost their elections because of voter fraud. In the Montana case, he really focuses on the same day registration problem.

More on ACORN and Vote Fraud

I have been making multiple posts on ACORN and the fraudulent voter registrations that it has been turning in. Well, here is something that John Fund had in the WSJ on this group:

The Democratic oak has grown, in part, from Acorn, a feisty, union-backed activist group. The organization says on its Web site that it "registered over 540,000 low-income and minority voters" and deployed over 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers for yesterday's elections. But after years of scandal involving its election efforts and misuse of government grants, Acorn is finally coming under scrutiny, with four of its Kansas City, Mo., workers under indictment for submitting false voter registrations. (As of this writing, all are at large.) Other states--including Pennsylvania and Maryland--are also conducting probes. Notes the U.S. attorney's office in Kansas City: "This national investigation is very much ongoing." . . .

Acorn boasts an annual budget of some $40 million . . .

St. Louis election officials were so inundated with bogus Acorn-generated voter registrants that they mailed a letter to 5,000 registrants, requesting the recipients to contact them. Fewer than 40 responded. Mr. Rathke attacked the officials as "slop buckets" and claimed they had "broken the law in trying to discourage new voters illegally."

City officials scoff at that. They say it's up to Acorn to explain why over 1,000 addresses listed on its registrations don't exist. "We met twice with Acorn before their drive, but our requests completely fell by the wayside," says Democrat Matt Potter, the city's deputy elections director. His election clerks were already putting in 13-hour work days and "dumping this on them isn't fair." In the past, several Democrats, including Mayor Francis Slay, have complained about bloated voter rolls leading to stolen votes. . . .

Phyllis Schlafly on what judges are deciding for everyone these days

What are judges deciding for everyone these days:
* Battleground in Lower Federal Courts
* Should Courts Manage School Sports?
* Judicial Supremacists Strike Again
* Wisdom from Judge Robert Bork
* Counterattack for Private Property

Thanks to Kae for sending this to me.

So what happened to the "Voting Machince Fraud"?

So how come the electronic voting machines are not an issue now? What happened to all the claims of them being used to steal elections? Weren't Democrats such as Pelosi raising concerns about these machines? Of course, her concern was that she would infer vote theft if her side did not take control of congress.

ACORN caught again putting in more false voter registration forms

How many elections have these guys affected? If they are not intent on fraud why do they spend so much time and effort putting in so many fraudulent forms?? There were a number of very close races in Delaware County.

Question: If your last name were Abortion would you name any of your children Alternative? Probably not! So a more pertinent question is this: If you saw the name Alternative Abortion on a voter registration form, complete with an address and a social security number, you’d be suspicious, right?

You’d think somebody was playing a tasteless joke. Or maybe even committing a crime, because that’s what fraudulently filling out a voter registration form is, a crime.

This one is currently under investigation by Delaware County District Attorney’s office, along with hundreds of other suspicious voter registration forms turned into the county voter registration commission.

Not dozens. Not scores. But hundreds!

"If not thousands," says county Solicitor John McBlain.

So far, the county has found more than 100 people who have told investigators and/or signed affidavits claiming someone wrongly tried to register to vote in their name. Another 542 registration forms were identified as having phony addresses and some 1,200 to 1,300 more also appear to be fraudulent.

What’s most interesting about this is that one organization submitted every single one of the near 2,000 registrations that are suspected or proven frauds.

That group is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, otherwise known as ACORN. . . . .

Bummer: higher taxes, a worse situtation in Iraq

Well, the Republicans took it on the chin, losing both the Congress and probably the Senate. My predictions were pretty bad. The Senate judicial confirmations are going to be going nowhere. The last two years of a President's eight years are pretty tough anyway, but with control switching to the Dems, Bush will get nothing. I can only imagine what the Supreme Court confirmation battles are going to be like if Stevens retires as is rumored.

The one thing that I want to see tomorrow is what will happen when the stock market opens. It should be a real test of policies. Does the market think that Republican policies have been good overall? Not so good on regulations, but presumably much better than the Dems on taxes and still probably much better than the Dems on regulations. I am assuming that the market did not expect the Dems to take the Senate. If that is correct, tomorrow should see a real change in values.

UPDATE: The market starts down about 45 points. Undoubtedly part of any discomfort that the market has with these results were already anticipated for the House. New information will change this, but the best guess of the impact of the elections is the initial reaction.

UPDATE 2: With Rumsfield resigning, I looked at the market again, and the DOW took a drop of slightly over 20 points from where it was then at.

Debate French Socialist Style

The debate followed the same non-confrontational format as the previous two meetings, which were criticised because all the questions were submitted in advance and there were no spontaneous exchanges. . . . .

This seems more of a beauty show and ability to memorize answers than a debate.

Who are well known people making political donations to?

Greta Van Susteren (Fox), Ben Bradlee (Washington Post), Arnold Palmer, Vince McMahon, Bill Murray (Actor), Faith Hill (Singer), Will Ferrell (Actor), Jerry Seinfeld (comedian, actor), Robert DeNiro (actor), Tom Cruise (actor), Tom Selleck (actor), Tom Clancy (author), Bobby Knight (basketball coach), Henry Winkler (actor, director, producer), Charlton Heston (actor), and Bart Starr (Football).

New op-ed on Voter Fraud Claims

Brad Smith and I have a new op-ed up at National Review Online:

We have seen this before. In the 2004 elections, Democrats screamed that electronic voting machines in Ohio had been used to steal the election from Kerry. This weekend Nancy Pelosi claimed that Democrats will take control of the House as long as there is "an honest [vote] count."

Never mind that Democrats were almost uniformly in favor of forcing state and federal governments to spend billions of dollars replacing punch-card machines with touch-screen electronic voting machines after the 2000 election. Never mind that claims of a stolen election in 2004 were based on exit polls that even the presiding pollsters acknowledged were fatally flawed. Pelosi has now warned that if Democrats lose this vote, it will be because electronic voting machines were used to steal the election.

Election fraud is an important issue. But instead of improving the election process, Democrats’ regular claims of fraud may actually poison the political debate for years to come. A recent AP poll found that only 30 percent of blacks and 45 percent of Democrats claim that they are confident that their votes will be counted. For all voters, the number is only 60 percent. . . . .

Going out on a limb: Predicting Tuesday's results

Here are my election predictions. The Republicans are going to keep the House and the Senate. My guess is that the Republicans will lose 12 seats in the House and no more than 1 in the Senate. I would not be surprised that Republicans break even or even pick up one seat in the Senate. I think that Republicans will lose Ohio, but could pick up Michigan and even more likely Maryland. A Steele in Maryland win will make the evening a great one all by itself.

UPDATE: Well, I was wrong. It isn't much solace that there were a lot of very close races (e.g., the Senate races in Montana, Missouri, and Virginia). Just a switch of a few tenths of a percentage point in those three races would have meant a Republican loss of three seats. According to Sean Hannity, eighteen of the House seats were decided by less than 5,000 votes. Four or five were decided by less than a thousand votes. Well, in any case, I was wrong.

New Yorkers Respond to Mayor Bloomberg's Cutting Back on Concealed Handgun Permits

Here are some letters to the editor in the New York Post:

Any bad guy in this city can get a handgun for a few hundred dollars. So why is Bloomberg trying to stop the city's honest and hardworking citizens from protecting themselves and their families from those bad guys? . . . .

[Bloomberg] says no one needs a gun in the city, but then he goes around with five heavily armed NYPD officers. . . . .

Putting restrictions on law-abiding citizens who endure a thorough process in order to own a firearm will not put a dent in the crime statistics. . . .

Rumors about Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' health

Who knows if this is even remotely true, though Sean Rushton has always struck me as a reasonably careful guy. If this is true and Bush does get to nominate a replacement, you haven't seen a confirmation battle as what you would see at that time:

For the past several weeks, there has been a rumor circulating among high-level officials in Washington, D.C., that a member of the U.S. Supreme Court has received grave medical news and will announce his or her retirement by year’s end. While such rumors are not unusual in the nation’s capital, this one comes from credible sources. Additionally, a less credible but still noteworthy post last week at the liberal Democratic Underground blog says, “Send your good vibes to Justice Stevens. I just got off the phone with a friend of his family and right now he is very ill and at 86 years old that is not good.” . . . .

Apparently these rumors have been floating around Washington for a little while now. If Chafee wins in Rhode Island, Republicans would probably need 52 votes to get someone through. That probably means that Republicans can't lose more than three seats tomorrow.

Pelosi claims that the only reason that Democrats might not win election is because of fraud in counting the votes

"That is the only variable in this," Pelosi said. "Will we have an honest count?'' . . . .

Election getting very close

A nationwide Pew Research Center survey finds voting intentions shifting in the direction of Republican congressional candidates in the final days of the 2006 midterm campaign. The new survey finds a growing percentage of likely voters saying they will vote for GOP candidates. However, the Democrats still hold a 48% to 40% lead among registered voters, and a modest lead of 47%-43% among likely voters.

The narrowing of the Democratic lead raises questions about whether the party will win a large enough share of the popular vote to recapture control of the House of Representatives. The relationship between a party's share of the popular vote and the number of seats it wins is less certain than it once was, in large part because of the increasing prevalence of safe seat redistricting. As a result, forecasting seat gains from national surveys has become more difficult.

I don't think that this election would be that close if more people saw this movie about what is at stake: Obsession: The Threat of Radical Islam.

Excellent Program on Fox News right now: Obsession

At 10 PM EST Fox News has on a program entitled: Obsession: The Threat of Radical Islam. A preview can be found here.
This is really an excellent show.

Talk at the University of Miami Economics Department on November 10th

This coming Friday I will be giving a talk at the University of Miami Economics Department on my research on Abortion and Crime with John Whitley. I usually wouldn't be giving a talk on a paper that is already accepted, but they were very interested in the topic.