Vote fraud and vote suppression have been around as long as elections. They are only rarely decisive in elections — usually just some of the very close ones. But we are headed for some very close elections again Tuesday. Ballotpedia has a new feature covering Dead People Voting, as well as extensive coverage of other news about vote fraud and voter suppression.

So said George Will in a speech to the Ronald Reagan dinner at the Defending the American Dream Summit hosted by Americans for Prosperity.

Will delivered a profound assessment of the current political and financial plight of America. He identified the core problem as cultural — an entitlement mentality that has spread throughout the land, where “the benefits of consumption have been separated from the pain of saving.” He cited the U.S. savings rate, which averaged ten percent in the 1980’s, five percent in the 1990’s, and went negative in 2005. This shift from saving toward borrowing took household debt from 50 percent of GDP in 1980 to 100 percent of GDP last year.

Where did so many Americans get the idea they could borrow their way to prosperity? Will says they learned it from the federal government. When you can’t afford what you want with today’s earnings, just borrow and buy.

Will closed on an optimistic note, because he said there remains a fundamentally conservative core among the American people; it will be tapped to recover from the current crisis.

Written by James Creelman of the New York World in October, 1896 as he covered the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Quoted by Richard Jensen in The Winning of the Midwest.

Jensen wrote that “Bryan transcended the role of evangelist for financial unorthodoxy; he led a mass movement for America’s redemption. The silverites felt they only needed to win the presidency to achieve their utopia. one man with the people’s mandate could sign free silver into law, appoint new judges, defy Wall Street and London, and signal a revolutionary shift in national values. Bryan understood the crusaders’ need for a messiah, and he played the role perfectly.”

(p. 273)

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged swift action on a Treasury Department plan to buy illiquid mortgage-linked securities and avoid severe spillover effects on the economy.

“Action by the Congress is urgently required to stabilize the situation and avert what otherwise could be very serious consequences for our financial markets and for our economy,” Mr. Bernanke said in his prepared remarks.

Isn’t that why they backed bailout number one, for Bear Stearns; number two, for Fannie and Freddie; and number three, for AIG?

Congress needs to consider the serious consequences of approving yet another bailout by these two bureaucrats with our checkbook. They listen too closely to those who created the crisis in the first place.

Lenders apparently made a couple of trillion dollars of bad loans. There is no way to avoid some pain as those mistakes are discovered and accounted for. The markets would implement a fast, harsh solution which would remove capital from the control of the people who squandered so much wealth. Yes, that would be painful for many, especially those who made the bad investments.

But the bailouts shift the losses from those who deserve them to all taxpayers; they therefore reward the profligate and punish the responsible. They also signal to Wall Street that the best way they can apply their talents in the coming months is by finding which bad loans they can dump on the taxpayers; they will not be focused on getting capital to where the market needs it.

The economic consequences of this bailout will be to cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars; to redirect Wall Street from profit-seeking to rent-seeking; and to prolong the developing recession indefinitely.

Congress should not fight for little amendments, it should just say “No More Bailouts.”

These organizations were classic rent-seeking companies; Fannie has a large headquarters on Wisconsin Ave. in Washington, D.C., because the source of their power and profits was Congress, not customers. They hired people for their political pull, not their financial acumen. And what we got was government-style extravagance, self-dealing, and ultimately a doubling of the publicly held debt of the United States.

This is a stunning financial development, and it should become a stunning political development. Of course Fannie paid the politically powerful from both parties, but they put their biggest dollars and biggest hires on the side of the biggest spenders.

Here is how much some of the winners profited from this scandalous operation, according to an insightful Wall Street Journal editorial:

Franklin Raines, CEO: $90,128,761 (1998-2003)

Jamie Gorelick, vice-chair: $26,466,834 (1998-2003)

Jim Johnson, CEO: $21,000,000 (1998 alone)

Who are these people? Let’s ask wikipedia:

Franklin Delano Raines (born January 14, 1949 in Seattle, Washington) is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae who served as White House budget director under President Bill Clinton.

Jamie S. Gorelick (born May 6, 1950) is an American attorney and judicial officer who was Deputy Attorney General of the United States during the Clinton administration. She was appointed by former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle to serve as a commissioner on the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which sought to investigate the circumstances leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

James A. Johnson is a United States Democratic Party political figure. He was the campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s failed 1984 presidential bid and chaired the vice presidential selection process for the presidential campaign of John Kerry. In the 2008 election, he is a member of the vice-presidential selection process for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama.

And Raines was a donor to Obama’s 2006 Senate campaign.

Notice a pattern?

Here is the best of the story from the London Times:

Wikipedia has become another important internet tool in presenting politicians to voters. Few would be surprised if a campaign worker had been given the task of putting positive spin on Mrs Palin’s entry in preparation for last week’s announcement. A tracking site estimated that the page was viewed more than 2 million times on Friday.

Since the announcement the Sarah Palin page has been edited many hundreds of times more and Wikipedia has now put in place a partial block so that only established editors can change the entry. Some of Young Trigg’s entries have been amended or toned down.

The New York Times reports on the wiki wars:

The daily page view totals for even well-known candidates are striking. For example, according to a site that tracks the traffic to Wikipedia, the John McCain article had 645,000 page views in June. That month, Barack Obama had 1.35 million page views. Henrik Abelsson, who tracks the traffic, said that on Friday there were 2.4 million page views for Gov. Palin’s Wikipedia article.

Last year, a graduate student, Virgil Griffith, created a clever Web site, Wiki- Scanner, that made it easy to detect where anonymous editors of Wikipedia were accessing the site. In the process, companies, government agencies and, yes, politicians were caught in the act of spiffing up their Wikipedia entries, even as many assumed that anonymity would make them safe. (Wikipedia, incredibly and mercilessly, keeps a record of every change made to every article.)

The editorial denounces a federal court decision upholding the First Amendment rights of petitioners. The Free Press agrees with the court “that circulating recall petitions constitutes core political speech.”

But it calls on the state to appeal the decision, and calls for constitutional reform to restrict the recall process “that is already too easy.”

Let’s see — there has not been a recall vote on a Michigan legislator since 1983, the last time the legislature passed a tax hike, according o a comprehensive survey in Ballotpedia.

So what is the panic about? Could it be that the Free Press fears a voter revolt over the massive tax hikes Speaker Dillon and Governor Granholm pushed through, which triggered this recall?

The Free Press performance throughout the recall campaign has been disgraceful. Dillon and local political boss Miles Handy — who was defeated for re-election earlier this month — used paid street blockers to harass petitioners; the local police participated in the harassment; the Dillon agents made slanderous attacks on taxpayers and hired lawyers to make spurious arguments in court. The Free Press did nothing to come to the defense of citizens being abused by powerful government officials and their hired agents.

And now they panic because federal judge Robert Holmes Bell has ruled that the First Amendment applies to more than just the hired hands at the Free Press. It also applies to citizens who question the actions of politicians.

The Free Press is good at covering the Tigers and Red Wings. It should stick to covering sports, the weather, and the continuing decline of Michigan’s over-taxed economy.

This will likely lead to a recall vote on Dillon on the November 4 general election ballot.

The decision is based on the “’strong’ liklihood” that restrictions on petition circulators “violate Plaintiff’s First Amendment rights…”

More from the preliminary injunction:

“…Defendant Terri Lynn Land, as Michigan’s Secretary of State, SHALL re-examine the petitions filed seeking a recall election against Representative Dillon of Michigan’s 17th House District WITHOUT consideration of M.C.L. 168.957 requirements that (1) recall petition circulators be registered to vote, and that (2) recall petition circulators be residents of the legislative district of the official to be recalled. If upon such re-examination Defendant determines that the required 8,724 valid signatures were gathered, then Defendant SHALL place the recall against Representative Dillon on the November 4, 2008 general election ballot.”
(emphasis in original.)

He talks to Jon Caldera of the Independence Institute about their strategy.  And he cites the Sam Adams Alliance in describing the capacities the Left has created — and that we need to create to counter their power grab.  The success is one reason the Democrats rewarded Denver with the national convention.  And the strategy is being extended to other states.  The prospects are ominous in this election year.

But the long-term implications are not so bad.  It is ironic that the Left is ahead of us in privatizing the functions of political parties.  But they carry the huge burden of promoting policies that are disastrous for all but the rulers.

That post links to a Michael Malone opinion column from the Wall Street Journal titled The Next American Frontier.

Malone casts a vision of a glowing future of increasing freedom and independence because of the amazing ways Americans are applying the new technologies to restructure work and lives. He even sounds an optimistic tone about the implications for government. While he may underestimate the ability of government to suppress the benefits of liberty (see World History), here I want to take issue with his claim that “New political parties” will be part of the flourishing innovation of coming decades. Any new parties will not flourish.

Today’s dominant political parties are part of the government. They are entrenched in federal and state law in hundreds of ways; and they have no ability to deny their nominations to anyone. So they are both part of government, and by law must allow their label to be used by anyone with enough votes in a primary. They are both entrenched and without the power to exclude. So they can be treated as part of the background noise.

This was not always so - in the 19th century, political parties were private organizations which selected candidates and held them accountable to the party platforms. The parties were controlled by informed citizens. And they worked — they kept the government burden at close to 5% of the economy for an entire century, which was the greatest feat of constraining government known to man.

How can we recover the vigorous citizen control of politicians exercised by our ancestors?

We need a new way to describe our problem.

Our most leveraged political idea is not an issue or policy position, but a superior paradigm of the reality of contemporary American politics.

The biggest mistake of conservatives during the last half century has been to view Republican party organizations and candidates as the main defenders of liberty. This is an understandable error, as it worked for both parties in the 19th century. But the direct primary gutted party power below the presidential level, while decades of growing state and federal regulations have frozen the major parties in place.

What can we do to regain the discipline, the control exercised by responsible citizens over both political parties and politicians in the 19th century?

Privatize.

All of the essential functions of the parties must be privatized in a variety of independent organizations owned and controlled by patriotic citizens.

These three arenas of action need to be developed, linked, and coordinated to drive policy change: Issues, campaigns, and infrastructure. Our greatest weakness is infrastructure – the capacity to train future candidates; to run creative litigation; to investigate and expose corruption; to publicize and defend ideas and people; and to develop the specific policies needed today to solve problems and win votes while increasing freedom.

The policies pushed by campaigns should not come from consultants who get them by reading polls. They should be developed by our best thinkers working in coordination with independent groups that are politically savvy, tested in the polling and political arena, and then fed in marketable ways to our campaign operations.

What we have had is a failure of leadership, a failure to replace a crippling 19th century paradigm with one that accepts modern reality. The political parties are now part of the government. They are not suitable vehicles for protecting us from government.

This paradigm both explains conservative failures during the past generation, and lights the way out of the wilderness.