The Real Reason Romney Won't Release His Tax Returns?

You have to love those Dixiecrats err Republicans who are trying to suppress the Democratic vote in order to win the election for Romney. Mike Turzai the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House, of course, recently admitted that this is exactly what voter ID laws are meant to do in his state. "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania", Turzai said at the recent Pennsylvania Republican State Committee meeting, "done". The applause for Turzai's statement by the Republican audience at the conference shows so well how the party of free soil and free labour, the party that sent in the military to ensure that blacks could vote in the South during Reconstruction, has become a party of voter suppression a la the Dixiecrats during the Jim Crow era from 1877 to the second Reconstruction all in the name of winning elections. And such cynicism and hunger for power should be frightening to anyone who believes that voting is a right to all Americans legally able to vote.

It is not only Turzai's statement which makes it clear to anyone with an empirical rather than ideological mind that voter suppression is what Republican ID voter fraud laws are really about. Republicans have offered little in the way of evidence to support the need for the voter ID laws they have passed and want to pass all across the United States. Some in fact become mute when asked to offer evidence of voter fraud and of individuals masquerading as someone else when they go to their voting places to vote.

Speaking of evidence, evidence, if very, very limited and sketchy evidence, came to light last year in an article in Forbes magazine, hardly a paragon of liberalism, that suggests that at least one person may have violated the voting laws though not in masquerade as someone else, Mitt Romney. Romney may have voted in Massachusetts in 2010 while living in his mansion, the same mansion that he wants to put a 3600 square foot basement in presumably good Mormon fashion, to prepare for the coming apocalypse and second coming of Jesus, in the very upscale La Jolla, California when he claimed to be living in the basement (what is it with Romney and basements?) of his son's house in Belmont, Massachusetts. Apparently Romney is not only one of the one percent, he is also one of the 0.7% of voters who engage in voter fraud. And it is for this reason that Romney, some in the media speculate, refuses to release his tax returns.

Perhaps then Republicans are on the wrong track. Perhaps instead of passing laws to restrict the ability of America's minorities and elderly to vote they should be passing laws restricting the ability of Rich Republicans to vote in Massachusetts while living in California. Needless to say, I don't expect reality to impact the position of right wing wingnut dittoheads on this issue. For most humans it is ideology rather than reality that creates reality. And that is why humans, particularly in modern societies in the West, often ignore the realities right in front of their eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and hands.

And now for something somewhat different. Why can't the United States do something like Denmark where voters are placed on a national register (for voting, national health, official residence) and create an electronic voting system that links voters to their birth records, social security numbers, and residence and once they are in the national voting system they can't ever be purged from it? Are we simply too incompetent to create such a system or is there no political will for such an obvious common sense voting system.

And now for something somewhat completely different different. Affluent La Jolla had a covenant which prohibited Jews from living in that seaside city until the 1960s. Apparently, the lure of a University of California campus, today's University of California San Diego, however, proved more alluring even then anti-Semitism in the 1960s, so La Jolla's prohibition against Jews living amongst America's "best" went the way of the dinosaurs and the city got UCSD as a replacement gift in its stead. Aw, isn't that sweet?

Sources
MS Bellows, "Mitt Romney's Tax Returns: The 'Voter Fraud' Theory'", 17 August 2012, the Guardian
Fred Karger, "Did Mitt Romney Live In His Son's Unfinished Basement Last Year?",15 June 2011, Forbes
Sue Garson, "The End of the Covenant", 2003, San Diego Jewish Journal