Election Commission Quotes

Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.

I commissioned two political experts to advise me about what I could do to oppose the re-election of President Bush.

They worried that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud. And they had good reason to worry. A 2005 bipartisan commission co-chaired by none other than Jimmy Carter found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in American elections. Why should 2020 be any different? They worried that universal mail-in balloting would make ballots harder to track, as some states bombarded addresses with ballots for previous residents who had moved out but hadn’t been struck from the voter rolls. What would happen to all the excess ballots?

Indeed, in 1976, fifteen years after he arrived and was arrested, Charles Sherrod was elected to the Albany city commission.

The actual consumers of knowledge are the children—who can’t pay, can’t vote, can’t sit on the committees. Their parents care for them, but don’t sit in the classes themselves; they can only hold politicians responsible according to surface images of “tough on education.” Politicians are too busy being re-elected to study all the data themselves; they have to rely on surface images of bureaucrats being busy and commissioning studies—it may not work to help any children, but it works to let politicians appear caring. Bureaucrats don’t expect to use textbooks themselves, so they don’t care if the textbooks are hideous to read, so long as the process by which they are purchased looks good on the surface. The textbook publishers have no motive to produce bad textbooks, but they know that the textbook purchasing committee will be comparing textbooks based on how many different subjects they cover, and that the fourth-grade purchasing committee isn’t coordinated with the third-grade purchasing committee, so they cram as many subjects into one textbook as possible. Teachers won’t get through a fourth of the textbook before the end of the year, and then the next year’s teacher will start over. Teachers might complain, but they aren’t the decision-makers, and ultimately, it’s not their future on the line, which puts sharp bounds on how much effort they’ll spend on unpaid altruism . . .

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society. —Majority opinion in Supreme Court case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

In March 1994, Putin attended a European Union event in Hamburg that included a speech by Estonian president Lennart Meri. Estonia, like the two other Baltic republics, was annexed by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, then lost to the Germans, to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. The three Baltic states were the last to be included in the Soviet empire and the first to emerge from it—in no small part because they had a population that still remembered a time before the Soviets. Meri, Estonia’s first democratically elected leader in half a century, had been active in the anti-Soviet liberation movement. Now, speaking in Hamburg, he referred to the Soviet Union as “occupiers.” At this point Putin, who had been sitting in the audience among Russian diplomats, rose and left the room. “It looked very impressive,” recalled a St. Petersburg colleague who would go on to run the Russian federal election commission under President Putin. “The meeting was held in Knights’ Hall, which has ten-meter-tall ceilings and a marble floor, and as he walked, in total silence, each step of his echoed under the ceiling. To top it all off, the huge cast-iron door slammed shut behind him with deafening thunder.

Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system. Unwilling to accept the results of a fair, democratic election, they illegally seized U.S. territory, violently. Together, they formed a new 'Confederacy,' in contravention of the U.S. Constitution. Then West Point graduates like Robert E. Lee resigned their commissions, abrogating an oath sworn to God to defend the United States. During the bloodiest war in American history, Lee and his comrades killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever. And they did it for the worst reason possible; to create a nation dedicated to exploit enslaved men, women, and children, forever.

minimizes the trauma, either by shifting blame for it onto fringe actors of the present (“These acts don’t represent who we are”), relative values of the times (“Everyone back then believed in slavery”), or, worst, back onto the traumatized (“They are responsible for themselves”). There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

In many ways, President Trump followed the electoral authoritarian script during his first year. He made efforts to capture the referees, sideline the key players who might halt him, and tilt the playing field. But the president has talked more than he has acted, and his most notorious threats have not been realized. Troubling antidemocratic initiatives, including packing the FBI with loyalists and blocking the Mueller investigation, were derailed by Republican opposition and his own bumbling. One important initiative, the Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, is just getting off the ground, so its impact is harder to evaluate. Overall, then, President Trump repeatedly scraped up against the guardrails, like a reckless driver, but he did not break through them. Despite clear causes for concern, little actual backsliding occurred in 2017. We did not cross the line into authoritarianism.

America’s last step into the Vietnam quagmire came on November 22, 1963, when Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was no real veteran. During World War II he used his influence as a congressman to become a naval officer, and, despite an utter lack of military training, he arranged a direct commission as a lieutenant commander. Fully aware that “combat” exposure would make him more electable, the ambitious Johnson managed an appointment to an observation team that was traveling to the Pacific. Once there, he was able to get a seat on a B-26 combat mission near New Guinea. The bomber had to turn back due to mechanical problems and briefly came under attack from Japanese fighters. The pilot got the damaged plane safely back to its base and Johnson left the very next day. This nonevent, which LBJ had absolutely no active part of, turned into his war story. The engine had been “knocked out” by enemy fighters, not simply a routine malfunction; he, LBJ, had been part of a “suicide mission,” not just riding along as baggage. The fabrication grew over time, including, according to LBJ, the nickname of “Raider” Johnson given to him by the awestruck 22nd Bomber Group.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Mandal vs Mandir The V.P. Singh government was the biggest casualty of this confrontation. Within the BJP and its mentor, the RSS, the debate on whether or not to oppose V.P. Singh and OBC reservations reached a high pitch. Inder Malhotra | 981 words It was a blunder on V.P. Singh’s part to announce his acceptance of the Mandal Commission’s report recommending 27 per cent reservations in government jobs for what are called Other Backward Classes but are, in fact, specified castes — economically well-off, politically powerful but socially and educationally backward — in such hot haste. He knew that the issue was highly controversial, deeply emotive and potentially explosive, which it proved to be instantly. But his top priority was to outsmart his former deputy and present adversary, Devi Lal. He even annoyed those whose support “from outside” was sustaining him in power. BJP leaders were peeved that they were informed of what was afoot practically at the last minute in a terse telephone call. What annoyed them even more was that the prime minister’s decision would divide Hindu society. The BJP’s ranks demanded that the plug be pulled on V.P. Singh but the top leadership advised restraint, because it was also important to keep the Congress out of power. The party leadership was aware of the electoral clout of the OBCs, who added up to 52 per cent of the population. As for Rajiv Gandhi, he was totally and vehemently opposed to the Mandal Commission and its report. He eloquently condemned V.P. Singh’s decision when it was eventually discussed in Parliament. This can be better understood in the perspective of the Mandal Commission’s history. Having acquired wealth during the Green Revolution and political power through elections, the OBCs realised that they had little share in the country’s administrative apparatus, especially in the higher rungs of the bureaucracy. So they started clamouring for reservations in government jobs. Throughout the Congress rule until 1977, this demand fell on deaf ears. It was the Janata government, headed by Morarji Desai, that appointed the Mandal Commission in 1978. Ironically, by the time the commission submitted its report, the Janata was history and Indira Gandhi was back in power. She quietly consigned the document to the deep freeze. In Rajiv’s time, one of his cabinet ministers, Shiv Shanker, once asked about the Mandal report.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

Indian Express (Indian Express) - Clip This Article at Location 721 | Added on Sunday, 30 November 2014 20:28:42 Fifth column: Hope and audacity Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Tavleen Singh | 807 words At the end of six months of the Modi sarkar are we seeing signs that it is confusing efficiency with reform? I ask the question because so far there is no sign of real reform in any area of governance. And, because some of Narendra Modi’s most ardent supporters are now beginning to get worried. Last week I met a man who dedicated a whole year to helping Modi become Prime Minister and he seemed despondent. When I asked how he thought the government was doing, he said he would answer in the words of the management guru Peter Drucker, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” We can certainly not fault this government on efficiency. Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. The Prime Minister’s Office hums with more noise and activity than we have seen in a decade but, despite this, there are no signs of the policy changes that are vital if we are to see real reform. The Planning Commission has been abolished but there are many, many other leftovers from socialist times that must go. Do we need a Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in an age when the Internet has made propaganda futile? Do we need a meddlesome University Grants Commission? Do we need the government to continue wasting our money on a hopeless airline and badly run hotels? We do not. What we do need is for the government to make policies that will convince investors that India is a safe bet once more. We do not need a new government that simply implements more efficiently bad policies that it inherited from the last government. It was because of those policies that investors fled and the economy stopped growing. Unless this changes through better policies, the jobs that the Prime Minister promises young people at election rallies will not come. So far signals are so mixed that investors continue to shy away. The Finance Minister promises to end tax terrorism but in the next breath orders tax inspectors to go forth in search of black money. Vodafone has been given temporary relief by the courts but the retroactive tax remains valid. And, although we hear that the government has grandiose plans to improve the decrepit transport systems, power stations and ports it inherited, it continues to refuse to pay those who have to build them. The infrastructure industry is owed more than Rs 1.5 lakh continued... crore in government dues and this has crippled major companies. No amount of efficiency in announcing new projects will make a difference unless old dues are cleared. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Does he know that a police check is required even if you just want to get a few pages added to your passport? Does he know how hard it is to do routine things like registering property? Does he know that no amount of efficiency will improve healthcare services that are broken? No amount of efficiency will improve educational services that have long been in terminal decline because of bad policies and interfering officials. At the same time, the licence raj that strangles private investment in schools and colleges remains in place. Modi’s popularity with ordinary people has increased since he became Prime Minister, as we saw from his rallies in Kashmir last week, but it will not la

Their toil had made Jackson’s fortune and raised him to the prominence that won him election as the head of Tennessee’s militia. He now bore a regular army commission and was the US government’s only hope for protecting the Gulf Coast against invasion in the third year of a war that had gone remarkably poorly.56 Jackson told the crowd gathered at

Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) has enjoined the fight against Obamacare. ERLC leader Richard Land says: “…this issue is not about contraceptives. Instead, it is about conscience and religious freedom. And we must not allow this assault on our First Amendment freedoms to stand.”70

who adhere to the teachings of the institution or to be fired if they violate those teachings. The EEOC, however, ruled in favor of Herx in January 2012. The high (clearly) commission found that Herx had her rights violated under Title

The D’Souza case is the one panned by Alan Dershowitz as “selective” and “outrageous.” The piddling sum allegedly involved, $15,000, is well beneath the Justice Department’s norm for criminal enforcement; it falls into the category that is routinely settled with a fine paid to the Federal Election Commission. Certainly it is not in the same stratosphere as the Obama campaign’s own multimillion-dollar campaign finance violations, which are felonies that the same Justice Department opted not to prosecute.

organizations (the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court and the National Election Commission), applies to the public employees of

addition, the Commission conducted the “Manifesto campaign for local election” for civil groups, to support the civil movement to prevent a corrupt person from

of the Code in public organizations. In particular, on the occasion of the 2014 local election, the Commission will actively promote the need of enacting the relative

Since 1974, the Right has begun to insist that free speech is a kind of asset, a form of wealth. For that reason, they say, rich people, institutions, and corporations are entitled to dominate national discourse and drown out anyone who has less money. After the Court’s 2009 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, this has begun to transform American politics, cementing domination of the process by rich individuals and institutions.

The public don’t know the IEC and some ministers don’t even know why we are here either. They say “we have had the election”. It is difficult. ‘You come from a democratic, ordered community. Here, everything is displaced and disordered. Since being here I have done my best to justify the IEC to people. When the chairman of the Indian Electoral Commission was here the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of External Affairs had forgotten the issue, but Karzai cancelled everything to make a meeting. ‘At this time, the IEC has not reached a place where it can conduct an election.

The Anticorruption Commission established by the president is headed by Izzatulla Wasifi, a convicted heroin dealer.

They do not believe the Independent Electoral Commission is truly independent, citing numerous examples of deficiencies: staff bias and incompetence, lack of planning and communication, lack of security for observers and lack of action on alleged electoral breaches, regional staff who show people who to vote for, and washable ink for forefingers so people can vote multiple times.

In the law which Parliament passed establishing the commission, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, it was enough for the applicant to satisfy the main conditions laid down: The act for which amnesty was required should have happened between 1960, the year of the Sharpeville massacre, and 1994, when President Mandela was inaugurated as the first democratically elected South African head of state. The act must have been politically motivated. Perpetrators did not qualify for amnesty if they killed because of personal greed, but they did qualify if they committed the act in response to an order by, or on behalf of, a political organization such as the former apartheid state and its satellite Bantustan homelands, or a recognized liberation movement such as the ANC or PAC. The applicant had to make a full disclosure of all the relevant facts relating to the offense for which amnesty was being sought. The rubric of proportionality had to be observed—that the means were proportional to the objective. If those conditions were met, said the law, then amnesty “shall” be granted. Victims had the right to oppose applications for amnesty by trying to demonstrate that these conditions had not been met, but they had no right of veto over amnesty. Nothing was said in the law about remorse—an omission that upset many of us at first until we realized that the legislature had been a great deal wiser than we had at first thought.

The war with Mexico fiercely divided the American people. While the majority supported the war, a loud minority despised it, and their rancor filled the newspapers and the debates in the houses of Congress. A newly elected congressional representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, declared: ‘The war with Mexico was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the president.’ Lincoln challenged Polk on the issue that American blood had been shed on American soil and implied that the American troops were the aggressors. He charged that Polk desired ‘military glory … that serpent’s eye which charms to destroy … I more than suspect that Polk is deeply conscious of being in the wrong and that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.’ However, like many critics of the war, Lincoln voted for an appropriations bill to support military operations. An Illinois newspaper responded to Lincoln’s fulminations by branding him a ‘second Benedict Arnold,’ and Lincoln was defeated for reelection. Comparing Lincoln to Arnold was perhaps the most vicious charge that could then be made against an American. General Arnold has been a trusted favorite of George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. In August 1780 he had turned traitor and attempted to turn over the American army’s position at West Point to the British in exchange for money and a brigadier’s commission in the British army. His act of treachery was discovered but he was able to escape to safety behind British lines. Henry Clay, a former senator from Kentucky and unsuccessful candidate for president, often called the ‘Great Pacificator’ or the ‘Great Compromiser’ for his efforts to hold the Union together, spoke out forcefully: ‘The Mexican war,’ he said, ‘is one of unnecessary and offensive aggression … Mexico is defending her firesides, her castles, and her altars, not we.’ Representative

In 2013, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violating federal disclosure laws. An FEC audit of the 2008 records of Obama for America found the group failed to disclose millions of dollars in contributions and delayed refunding millions more in excess contributions.8 Excess contributions—sound familiar? But the FEC, you see, is a bipartisan group with an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners. As a consequence of both parties having a say, FEC decisions tend to be more balanced. My case, you may remember, was deliberately not referred to the FEC, as such cases typically are. Rather, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York decided to go ahead and prosecute it. Unlike Obama, I did not benefit from a scheme involving millions of dollars in excess contributions; rather, I paid $20,000 in excess of the campaign finance limit. Yet I ended up in a confinement center, and Obama, for vastly more serious offenses, paid a token fine.

you’re worried about Congress being manipulated by money, the United States House of Representatives started filing their campaign contributions electronically a decade ago, yet the United States Senate refuses to do so. Year after year a bill is proposed, and one way or another it ends up suffocating and dying by the end of the session. This results in a half-million dollar expense to the taxpayer as the Federal Election Commission takes nearly three months to type in, from the various campaigns’ paper reports, every campaign contribution that every Senate campaign receives. And as a result, we cannot see how a member of the United States Senate is being influenced by money until long after the time when the relevance of that information has passed.

Many Americans wonder why Robert Kennedy took no action against Lyndon Johnson if he suspected the vice president’s complicity in the murder of his brother. In fact, we now know that Johnson was concerned that Robert Kennedy would object to his immediate ascendancy to the presidency. The very fact that Johnson would worry about something so constitutionally preordained virtually proved Johnson’s fear that Kennedy would see through his role in the murder. I now believe that Johnson’s call to Robert Kennedy to obtain the wording of the presidential oath was an act of obsequiousness to test Kennedy as well as an opportunity to twist the knife in Johnson’s bitter rival. We now know that the “oath” aboard Air Force One was purely symbolic; the US Constitution elevates the vice president to the presidency automatically upon the death of the president. Johnson’s carefully arranged ceremony in which he insisted that Jackie Kennedy be present was to put his imprimatur and that of the Kennedys, on his presidency. Additionally, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, had recently been blocked from elevation on the federal bench by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This impediment would be removed under President Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy knew his brother was murdered by a domestic conspiracy and, at a minimum, suspected that Lyndon Johnson was complicit. Kennedy would tell his aide Richard Goodwin, “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”86 In essence, Kennedy understood that with both the FBI and the Justice Department under the control of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, there was, indeed, nothing he could do immediately. While numerous biographers describe RFK as being shattered by the murder of his brother, Robert Kennedy was not so bereaved that it prevented him from seeking to maneuver his way onto the 1964 ticket as vice president. Indeed, RFK had Jackie Kennedy call Johnson to lobby for Bobby’s selection. Johnson declined, far too cunning to put Bobby in the exact position that he had maneuvered John Kennedy into three years previous. Robert Kennedy knew that only by becoming president could he avenge his brother’s death. After lukewarm endorsements of the Warren Commission’s conclusions between 1963 and 1968, while campaigning in the California primary, RFK would be asked about his brother’s murder. In the morning, he mumbled half-hearted support for the Warren Commission conclusions but asked the same question that afternoon he would tell a student audience in Northern California that if elected he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder. Kennedy’s highly regarded press secretary Frank Mankiewicz would say he was “shocked” by RFK’s comment because he had never said anything like it publicly before. Mankiewicz and Robert Kennedy aide Adam Walinsky would ultimately conclude that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy, but to my knowledge, neither understood the full involvement of LBJ. Only days after Robert Kennedy said he would release all the records of the Kennedy assassination, the New York Senator would be killed in an assassination eerily similar to his brother’s, in which there are disputes, even today, about the number of shooters and the number of shots. The morning after Robert Kennedy was murdered a distraught Jacqueline Kennedy called close friend New York socialite Carter Burden, and said “They got Bobby, too,” leaving little doubt that she recognized that the same people who killed her husband also killed her brother in law.87

Prosperous non-white nations such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea would be very desirable destinations for Third-World immigrants, and if those countries opened their borders, they would quickly be filled with foreigners. They keep their borders closed because they know they cannot have the same Japan or Taiwan with different people. Israel, likewise, is determined to remain a Jewish state because Israelis know they cannot have the same Israel with different people. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved tough measures to deport illegal immigrants, calling them a “threat to the character of the country.” Linguistically, culturally, and racially, Japan is homogeneous. This means Japanese never even think about a host of problems that torment Americans. Since Japan has only one race, no one worries about racism. There was no civil rights movement, no integration struggle, and no court-ordered busing. There is no bilingual education, and no affirmative action. There is no tyranny of “political correctness,” and no one is clamoring for a “multi-cultural curriculum.” When a company needs to hire someone, it doesn’t give a thought to “ethnic balance;” it just hires the best person. No Japanese are sent to reeducation seminars because of “insensitivity.” Japan has no Civil Rights Commission or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It has no Equal Housing Act or Voting Rights Act. No one worries about drawing up voting districts to make sure minorities are elected. There are no noisy ethnic groups trying to influence foreign policy. Japanese do not know what a “hate crime” would be. And they know that an American-style immigration policy would change everything. They want Japan to remain Japanese. This is a universal view among non-whites. Those countries that send the largest numbers of emigrants to the United States—Mexico, India, China—permit essentially no immigration at all. For them, their nations are exclusive homelands for their own people. Most people refuse to share their homelands. Robert Pape, a leading expert on suicide bombing, explains that its motive is almost always nationalism, not religious fanaticism. Whether in Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Chechnya, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, or Afghanistan, its main objective is to drive out occupying aliens. It is only Western nations—and only within the last few decades—that have ever voluntarily accepted large-scale immigration that could reduce the inhabitants to a racial minority. What the United States and other European-derived nations are doing is without historical precedent.

The 2010 decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Supreme Court essentially approved unbridled corporate campaign spending, represented a milestone in the disempowerment of ordinary Americans.34 The decision allows corporations and unions to exercise “free speech” in supporting candidates and causes in elections to the same degree as individual human beings. Since corporations have many millions of times the resources of the vast majority of individual Americans, the decision has the potential to create a class of super-wealthy political campaigners with a one-dimensional political interest: enhancing their profits.

A land acknowledgement or territorial acknowledgement is a formal statement, often spoken at the beginning of a public event, that it is taking place on land originally inhabited by or belonging to indigenous people. In Canada, land acknowledgements became popular after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which argued that the country's Indian residential school system had amounted to cultural genocide) and the election of liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau that same year.[2] By 2019, they were a regular practice at events including National Hockey League games, ballet performances and parliament meetings. Critics of land acknowledgements have described them as excesses of political correctness or expressed concerns that they amount to empty gestures that avoid actually addressing the issues of indigenous communities. Ensuring the factual accuracy of acknowledgments can be difficult due to problems like conflicting land claims or unrecorded land exchanges between indigenous groups. In the United States, the practice of land acknowledgements has been described as "catching on" as of 2020.

One country, one law; however, the Election Commission's returning officers have own rules, within each constituency since one candidate's nomination has approval in one constituency and other constituencies not, having the same information and documents. In such insight, it seems that the Election Commission fails to create a fair and clean way of decision. As a fact, it will be more questionable if the Armed Forces institutions determine to dig into this subject, for free and fair elections; whereas, it may damage and come to a question the credibility of such established institutions, which will be an awkward position, even a mistake. On such election issues, sober and visionary journalists and writers, express their concerns, executing the suitable ways, for fair and clean election, without distinction. There should be a clause of the present and fresh information, which would cover all things of the nominator, not only the previous one since that penetrates nothing. Nominators should have the second privilege, to clarify its information than direct rejection or unqualified hammer upon it. All the blunders that occurred in these days, show lack of fairness and accuracy, within the rule of justice. The elections require the right procedure; otherwise, cannot qualify, as the standard and fair elections

The Leckwiths were excited about the Beveridge Report, a government paper that had become a bestseller. “Commissioned under a Conservative prime minister and written by a Liberal economist,” said Bernie. “Yet it proposes what the Labour Party has always wanted! You know you’re winning, in politics, when your opponents steal your ideas.” Ethel said: “The idea is that everyone of working age should pay a weekly insurance premium, then get benefits when they are sick, unemployed, retired, or widowed.” “A simple proposal, but it will transform our country,” Bernie said enthusiastically. “Cradle to grave, no one will ever be destitute again.” Daisy said: “Has the government accepted it?” “No,” said Ethel. “Clem Attlee pressed Churchill very hard, but Churchill won’t endorse the report. The Treasury thinks it will cost too much.” Bernie said: “We’ll have to win an election before we can implement it.

As has been the case far too often in the Obama administration, which may go down as the least transparent administration in history, the IRS refused to respond to our FOIA requests. Judicial Watch was forced to sue the IRS in federal court in October 2013, shortly after Lois Lerner had “retired” to avoid the consequences of her actions. Judicial Watch’s efforts through these FOIA requests and subsequent litigation led to the discovery that in addition to targeting conservatives at the IRS, Lois Lerner sent confidential taxpayer information to attorneys at the Federal Election Commission, which enforces federal campaign finance rules, in violation of federal law. Email communications revealed that Lerner, who formerly worked at the Federal Election Commission (FEC), sent extensive materials on conservative organizations—the American Issues Project and Citizens for the Republic—to the FEC, including detailed confidential information, after inquiries from the FEC attorneys. She disclosed this information in spite of Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, which bars the IRS from sending such information to anyone, including other federal agencies. It also turned out that the FEC attorneys were acting without authority to make such an inquiry, because the commissioners who run the agency had never approved an investigation. The emails discovered by Judicial Watch provided a disturbing window into the activities of two out-of-control federal agencies, whose employees, because of their political bias, were trying to target conservative organizations.

The Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000 by ruling that if all the votes were counted in Florida, as that state’s supreme court had ordered, it would “cause irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush].” They were beyond their constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the president over the years. And most important, the Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. But in the fine tradition of John Marshall, today’s Supreme Court wants you to believe that they are the über-overlords of our nation. They can make George W. Bush president, without any appeal. They can make money into speech, they can turn corporations into people, and the rest of us have no say in it. And they’re wrong. It’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what most of our Founders said. Which raises the question: If the Supreme Court can’t decide what is and what isn’t constitutional, then what is its purpose? What’s it really supposed to be doing? The answer to that is laid out in the Constitution in plain black-and-white. It’s the first court where the nation goes for cases involving disputes about treaties, ambassadors, controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, and between our country and foreign states. Read Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution—it’s all there. Not a word in there about “judicial supremacy” or “judicial review”—the supposed powers of the court to strike down (or write) laws by deciding what is and what isn’t constitutional. President Thomas Jefferson was pretty clear about that—as were most of the Founders—and the court didn’t start seriously deciding “constitutionality” until after all of them were dead. But back in the day, here’s what Jefferson had to say: The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves… When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.177 Their elective capacity? That’s a fancy presidential-founder way of saying that the people can toss out on their butts any member of Congress or any president who behaves in a way that’s unconstitutional. The ultimate remedy is with the people—it’s the ballot box. If we don’t like the laws being passed, then we elect new legislators and a new president. It’s pretty simple.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

Around this time, Dave commissioned a poll by Kellyanne Conway testing Mr. Trump in an election for the governor of New York against the incumbent, Andrew Cuomo. Dave, JT, and Jeff traveled to Trump Tower to review the first night’s results with Mr. Trump. Trump suggested that we add this question to the poll: “Would you rather see Donald J. Trump run for governor of New York or president of the United States?

It began two years earlier when Karetnikov seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in broad daylight and dared the West to make him pay. As sanctions were levied against Karetnikov’s associates, the European Commission passed regulation after regulation to prevent South Stream from being built and leaned on the Bulgarian government, where the pipeline would come ashore, to end their involvement. Gazprom executives and Kremlin emissaries began clandestine pilgrimages to Bojan Siderov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, and showered the country with politically strategic investments. Ivanov warily helped the GRU, Russian military intelligence, funnel millions to Ataka, a far-right party opposed to European integration and the exploration of Bulgarian shale gas. After parliamentary elections, Ataka gained enough seats to bolster Siderov’s coalition and pass a bill clearing the way for the pipeline. Everything was in order, and even as of that morning, pipe-laying ships were at work in the Black Sea.

called for the repeal of all campaign-finance laws and the abolition of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It also favored the abolition of all government health-care programs, including Medicaid and Medicare. It attacked Social Security as “virtually bankrupt” and called for its abolition, too. The Libertarians also opposed all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, and called for an end to the prosecution of tax evaders. Their platform called for the abolition too of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, among other government agencies.

When he’d represented Roxbury’s Ward 14 in the statehouse, John Collins had felt powerless to compete with suburban legislators and lobbyists. Boston’s elected officials could not raise taxes or even appoint a new police commissioner without the approval of legislators from neighboring cities and towns, and Boston’s legislators rarely got the better of their suburban counterparts. Boston’s Finance Commission — to take only one example — was funded through city taxes but the governor appointed all of its members.

Figures from the Electoral Commission reveal that the Conservatives spent £2.1 million on Facebook advertising alone during the 2017 election campaign.

2010, when the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, allowing unlimited and untraceable contributions from corporations and other entities to flood US elections.

there were several SQUIREENS, or little squires; a race of men who have succeeded to the BUCKEENS, described by Young and Crumpe. SQUIREENS are persons who, with good long leases, or valuable farms , possess incomes from three to eight hundred a year; who keep a pack of hounds; TAKE OUT a commission of the peace, sometimes before they can spell (as her ladyship said), and almost always before they know anything of law or justice! Busy and loud about small matters; JOBBERS AT ASSIZES , combining with one another, and trying upon every occasion, public or private, to push themselves forward, to the annoyance of their superiors, and the terror of those below them. In the usual course of things, these men are not often to be found in the society of gentry; except , perhaps, among those gentlemen or noblemen who like to see hangers-on at their tables; or who find it for their convenience to have underling magistrates, to protect their favourites , or to propose and CARRY jobs for them on grand juries. At election times, however, these persons rise into sudden importance with all who have views upon the county.

Minor also recalled that once Strider was in the legislature, he was not the same man that the world saw in Sumner during the Till murder trial. Although he is remembered for regularly insulting the black journalists in the hot, crowded courtroom in Sumner, his election to the Senate after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced him to deal with a black constituency that finally had the power of the ballot. Yet Strider would have been happy to rid the Delta of its black citizens. In February 1966, he cosponsored a bill to relocate Mississippi blacks to other states, as a new farm bill was making it harder for laborers to earn a living. A proposed relocation commission would seek federal funds for the removal of those who wanted to go. “If they (Negro farm workers) feel like they are put upon or have to live in tents and opportunities are brighter somewhere else, we’ll be glad to get them there,” said Strider’s cosponsor, Senator Robert Crook of Ruleville.96 Nothing ever came of the proposal, however.

The statute elaborates that such activity involves intentional subterfuge, the commission of crimes at the direction of a foreign-intelligence service, using false identities on behalf of a foreign power, or such heinous activities as sabotage and terrorism.

involving thousands of operatives to reverse the recommendations of the 2005 bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission

Under the Delhi Agreement of 1952, the state was given complete internal autonomy. The Delhi agreement was decided between Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and the Government of India, in the same agreement, Article 370 was brought into existence and it was included in the Indian Constitution. The creator of Marza Muhammad Afzal Begi was under Article 370, the state had its own separate flag, its own court, its own high court, its election commission, etc. But Khawaja Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq, late in 1964, to weaken Article 370 The positions of the Prime Minister and President of the state were changed to the positions of Chief Minister and Governor respectively Central laws were implemented Supreme Court of India and Election Commission of India's jurisdiction was extended up to the limits of Jammu and Kashmir!!!

than one hundred black Louisianans exercising political liberty. The duty of protecting citizens’ equal rights, the Court said, “rests alone with the States.” Such judicial conservatism and embrace of states’ rights doctrine, practiced by the justices, all of whom had been appointed by Republican presidents Lincoln and Grant, left a resounding imprint on what remained of Reconstruction.55 In the disputed election of 1876, Tilden in all likelihood won the popular vote by more than two hundred thousand votes and 3 percent, but did not become president. When election returns poured in, it appeared that Hayes had failed, but the three “unredeemed” Southern states of Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were fiercely and violently contested. With 185 electoral votes needed for victory, without the three disputed states Tilden had 184 and Hayes 166. Both sides claimed they had won and accused their opponents of fraud in the disputed states, although most of the bloodshed and intimidation committed in those states had been against black Republican voters. To resolve this unprecedented situation, Congress established a fifteen-member electoral commission, balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Because Republicans held a majority in the overall Congress, they prevailed 8–7 on repeated attempts to “count” the confused returns. As the midwinter crisis dragged on in Washington, it appeared Hayes would become president. Democrats controlled the House and launched a filibuster to block action on the count.56

The self-denying gentleman, who had imployed his commission of governour so little to the disadvantage of the infant-colony at Connecticut, was himself, ere long, by election made governour of that colony.

In the longer term, business itself will be harmed by shifting from R&D to financial manipulations. In earlier days, that might have been a concern. But managerial ethic has shifted from the time when viability of the firm was a serious concern to today’s focus on gain tomorrow. The long-term prospects for the firm become lesser considerations—or for human society generally. Nothing could reveal this shift with more brilliant clarity than a matter already discussed: the virtually reflexive decisions to race toward destruction, with eyes open, if it yields short-term gain. Right now profits are spectacular and CEO salaries have skyrocketed to the stratosphere, dragging other managerial rewards with them, while for the general population, real wages stagnate, social spending is meager, unions and other interferences with “sound economics” are dismantled. The best of all possible worlds. So why care if my firm will go under after I’ve moved to greener pastures, or for that matter, why care if I leave to my grandchildren a world in which they have some chance for decent survival? Capitalist mentality gone insane. There is, of course, the usual problem. The rascal multitude. They’re not too happy about the undermining of functioning democracy and basic rights. I should add the same is true in Europe. In fact, even more so. The attack on democracy in Europe is even sharper than here. Significant decisions about society and politics are out of the hands of the population. They’re made by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels: the IMF, the Central Bank, the European Commission. All of this, all over the world, is leading to anger, resentment, and bitterness. You see it right now in the Yellow Vest movement in France, but it’s everywhere. In election after election, the centrist parties are collapsing. It’s happening here, too. Parties happen to be keeping their names in our rigid two-party system, but the centrist elements are losing their grip.

In February 1965, Strider won a special election to the state senate, where he represented Grenada, Yalobusha, and Tallahatchie Counties for the next five years. In addition to his role with the Game and Fish Commission, he was a member of the Public Property, Transportation, and Water and Irrigation Committees, and chairman of the Penitentiaries Committee.94

They need the culture war to distract from the war on national security— a war that all Americans are losing, because the government has decided to forfeit its sovereignty. In November 2021, the Federal Election Commission ruled that it would become legal for foreigners to fund US referendum campaigns—subversion that was until recently not only reviled but illegal.20 Another loophole has been created to function as a noose around the neck of American democracy.

Thus, the language of election integrity created an acceptable post–civil rights race-neutral cover to allow the myth of massive, rampant voter fraud to continue to do damage. There was Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was based on his 2016 claims that he would have won the popular vote if three to five million illegal votes had not been cast. That commission collapsed with nothing but blank pages in the section on voter fraud.

The commission also confronted one of the strangest and most nettlesome phrases in COG operations—a seemingly unnecessary aside in the language guiding presidential succession known as the “supplantation clause,” which held that a prior-entitled presidential successor could supplant a lower-level officer who was serving as “acting president.” Harry Truman had felt that “elected” officials should always trump “appointed” officials in presidential succession, and the Presidential Succession Act allowed a newly chosen speaker of the House or Senate president pro tem to take over from a cabinet official who had been serving as “acting president.

Perhaps in that flight of birds . . . the leader was not really a bold spirit trusting to its own initiative and hypnotizing the flock to follow it in its deliberate gyrations. Perhaps the leader was the blindest, the most dependent of the swarm, pecked into taking wing before the others, and then pressed and chased and driven by a thousand hissing cries and fierce glances whipping it on.” —George Santayana, The Last Puritan ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sometime early in 2016 I was at a cocktail party with my editor and publisher Morgan Entrekin who, for his sins, has commissioned every book I’ve published. I

And praise God, William recovered his health again, if not his hair. He began tutoring students in his shop in the evenings to make extra money. His shop soon had the air of a school, with books and maps and charts always lying about. His friend Scott joked that the shop was ‘Carey’s College’. At the Hackleton Meeting House he joined discussions. Once a month now they discussed the churchman’s obligation to evangelize, not just within his parish but to the entire world. Arguments flew back and forth. William found himself drawn more and more to the idea that the ‘Great Commission’ did indeed require churchmen to spread Christ to the entire world. No longer could rigid Calvinism dismiss all efforts at missionary work in other countries as useless because God had already chosen his ‘elect’.

The party contested no elections, offered no candidates, sat on no commissions or official bodies. It simply made noise. Propaganda was its reason for being. And Hitler had become its chief propagandist.

Tume ya uchaguzi ikiidhinisha matokeo halafu watu wakalumbana hayo ni matatizo yenu. Nchi imeshatoa maamuzi yake.

In fact, it had almost reached a solution on two occasions during its long and tragic tenure—first, when the Australian jurist, Sir Owen Dixon headed the five-member UN Commission for India and Pakistan, and second, when the Tashkent Declaration was signed. The first was frustrated by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and the second was set at naught by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, both of whom reached the highest positions in Indian life and politics. Unfortunately, the exit of the BJP government after the 2004 elections proved a major setback in resolving the Kashmir issue. The new United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government did not want any interference in conducting the Indo-Pak dialogue. The Committee almost suspended the excellent, results-focused work it was doing although we kept appealing to the Hurriyat not to backtrack on the agreements achieved.

Rahul Gandhi, the shining star of the Congress party, proposed some ‘game changing ideas.’ He read out a sheet of paper, the sum and substance of which was that this was not the time to talk about the Lokpal, as it was important to address the systemic, structural, sociological and psychological aspects of corruption. The Lokpal, he argued, must be a constitutional body like the Election Commission, implying thereby that the Lokpal Bill should be kept in the cold storage. His proposal required amendment of the Constitution by a two-thirds majority in both Houses which, I am sure he hoped, would take years to muster. There would be no Lokpal till then. In his ‘innocence’ he assumed no one would see through his childish ploy. Interestingly, he had no takers even in his own party and effaced himself from Parliament for some time after! Not surprising, this, as he and his family have most to fear from a strong Lokpal.

The McGovern–Fraser Commission issued a set of recommendations that the two parties adopted before the 1972 election. What emerged was a system of binding presidential primaries. Beginning in 1972, the vast majority of the delegates to both the Democratic and Republican conventions would be elected in state-level primaries and caucuses. Delegates would be preselected by the candidates themselves to ensure their loyalty. This meant that for the first time, the people who chose the parties’ presidential candidates would be neither beholden to party leaders nor free to make backroom deals at the convention; rather, they would faithfully reflect the will of their state’s primary voters. There were differences between the parties, such as the Democrats’ adoption of proportional rules in many states and mechanisms to enhance the representation of women and minorities. But in adopting binding primaries, both parties substantially loosened their leaders’ grip over the candidate selection process—opening it up to voters instead.

Vicente Fox, who succeeded Mr. Zedillo and was president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, institutionalized the policy of ensuring that Mexican-Americans remained Mexican. In 2002, his government established the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior (Institute for Mexicans Abroad) to promote “a more comprehensive approach” to promoting Mexican loyalty. One method was to invite Mexican-American elected officials to Mexico, to deepen their Mexican identity. In October 2003, for example, the Instituto invited 30 American state legislators and mayors for two days in Mexico City, where they met lawmakers, ministry officials, scholars, and advocates for immigrants. The Instituto had plans to bring 400 Mexican-American officials on similar trips every year. The Instituto also sends representatives to the United States. Jacob Prado, counselor for Latino affairs at the Mexican Embassy, explained to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials that it was in “Latino officials like yourselves that thousands of immigrants from Mexico find a political voice.” He went on to explain: “Mexico will be better able to achieve its full potential by calling on all members of the Mexican Nation, including those who live abroad, to contribute with their talents, skills and resources.” American citizens who hold elective office in the United States are still expected to be “members of the Mexican Nation.” One Instituto official is Juan Hernandez. Born in the United States, and therefore a US citizen, Mr. Hernandez was at one time a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, but made no secret of his real loyalties. In 2002 he wrote that he had “been commissioned to bring a strong and clear message from the president to Mexicans abroad: Mexico is one nation of 123 million citizens—100 million who live in Mexico and 23 million who live in the United States.” On ABC’s Nightline on June 7, 2001, he explained, “I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think ‘Mexico first.’ ” Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, who later became national security advisor to Vicente Fox, wrote in the Mexican newspaper El Siglo de Torreon that the Mexican government should work with the “20 million Mexicans” in the United States to advance Mexican “national interests.” Vicente Fox’s interior secretary Santiago Creel once complained, “It’s absurd that (the United States) is spending as much as it’s spending to stop immigration flows that can’t be stopped . . . .” When he took over in 2004 as the man in charge of border relations with the United States, Arturo Gonzalez Cruz explained that his ultimate goal was to see the border disappear entirely. Mr. Fox himself insisted that any measure the United States took to arrest or deport illegal immigrants was a violation of human rights.

Fog in the U.S. Supreme Court, where five judges in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010) sanctified secret bribery as freedom of speech.

During the primaries, conservative website The Washington Free Beacon commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump. The Washington Free Beacon was backed by one of Trump’s wealthy opponents, Paul Singer, a New York hedge fund billionaire and Republican donor. Singer dropped out after Trump became the presumptive nominee. Senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary took over the Trump contract. The new client was the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer working for Hillary’s campaign, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion and received its reports.

The story line was inflamed by the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which lifted restrictions on campaign donations to independent political groups. This opened the gates for unlimited cash to be poured into the third-party groups that Koch became masterful at employing. It appeared that there were no constraints on the political power that billionaires could wield. The Koch brothers were seen as the primary beneficiaries of the new landscape.

The Senate report laid out a basic picture of the money trail: (1) Koch Industries supported the Economic Education Trust; (2) that trust gave cash to Triad; (3) Triad gave the cash to campaign groups like Citizens for Reform, which, in turn, (4) pumped money into elections to defeat Koch Industries’ opponents. (Koch Industries also gave at least $2,000 directly to Triad.) Triad was a new kind of campaign finance machine. It acted as a third party that didn’t directly donate money to politicians. Triad hired consultants who created attack ads for Republicans in tight races. Triad was careful in its language. It never used words like “vote for,” “support,” or “defeat” that might have triggered oversight from campaign regulators like the Federal Election Commission.

Let alone the border states, there was a problem in the capital itself. Many complaints were received after the draft rolls were published on 25 January 1993 in Delhi. The complaints said that the names of foreign nationals were included and genuine Indian citizens were excluded. It was decided by the commission that action would be taken against the Delhi administration for ‘lapses’ in its procedures for including the names of foreign nationals, particularly Bangladeshis, in the revised electoral rolls. The final lists were to be out by 25 March in 13 sectors where a large population of illegal immigrants was supposed to be living. The result was that in the final roll, only 17,000 could be declared as voters from one area where there were 128,000 in the draft rolls. These figures were alarming. The publication of final rolls was held up for some time. In fact, according to police sources, there were possibly around 400,000 illegal immigrants in Delhi at that time. There were speculations in the press suggesting that this was just the tip of the iceberg. It took up to November for elections to be held.