"Obama Stands Up"

Booman Tribune:

I want to like Barack Obama. I want something to make me enthusiastic about voting for him. Yet, he hasn't been showing me much.

Today, he stepped up and did something to make me believe in him. He placed a hold on the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to a permanent position on the Federal Election Commission. He was recess appointed by Bush on January 4, 2006. In other words, Bush couldn't secure the Senate's approval of this guy when Bill Frist was running the joint. Why?

You can read Jeffrey Toobin's 2004 New Yorker article, or you can check out the epluribusmedia profile. Spakovsky has been the point man on voter suppression in the Justice Department. In fact, he was the point man in Florida 2000, masterminding the voter purge.

"In 1997, von Spakovsky wrote an article for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group, that called for an aggressive campaign to 'purge' the election rolls of felons. Within months of that article’s publication, the V.I.P. helped put von Spakovsky’s idea into action. Phillips met with the company that designed the process for the removal of alleged felons from the voting rolls in Florida, a process that led, notoriously, to the mistaken disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, most of them Democratic, before the 2000 election," Toobin wrote. "During the thirty-six-day recount in Florida, von Spakovsky worked there as a volunteer for the Bush campaign.

Then they put him in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, where he pushed 'voter fraud' cases that are non-existent, approved the purging of Native American voters in Minnesota, disenfranchised blacks in Georgia with the photo ID requirement, and signed off on Tom DeLay's illegal redistricting plan. Harry Reid worked out some kind of deal where Spakovsky could be confirmed in a package deal. I guess he got Bush to sign off on the Democrats in the package. Who knows what Reid got out of the deal and who cares?

Here's Obama's statement. He just went up in my estimation.