Voter ID struck down, just not ours

As Pennsylvania stands poised to require identification of voters at polling places to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, the U.S. Department of Justice has struck down a Texas voter I.D. law.
Texas is one of a handful of states whose voting changes require court or Justice Department approval, and the DOJ in this case found the requirement would disproportionately affect Hispanic voters. Pennsylvania is not one of the states subject to this special review, though it strikes me that one could make the same case here about the impact on minority voters that the feds made in Texas.

And we learn from Politico.com that Virginia U.S. Senate candidate George Allen will go after incumbent Tim Kaine with a Super PAC, signalling a spread of the why-even-pretend-there-are-campaign-finance-rules virus from presidential to congressional elections.

It was inevitable, if discouraging. In a piece a few weeks back, I checked with the Federal Election Commission for Super PAC’s registered in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and found only six in our region, and just one that had anything to do with a Congressional or Senate contest.

That was something called Renew Delaware, created by a Colorado-based political consultant to attack Democratic Senator Tom Carper. With a year, we’ll see plenty more of these.

Finally, in case you missed it, Rick Santorum has a catchy campaign song, sung by a couple of home-schooled supporters. You can hear it by playing the video above.