Up here in Seattle we have both... and come tomorrow I don't think it will be the football fans who will be engaging in their annual riot.

Except that every study seems to show that actual voter fraud is minimal

I always hear that claim made, yet every so called 'study' I examine has gaping holes in it's methods as more often then not there is simply not enough data to make an accurate measure as to what level of fraud exists because of the lack of ID requirements.

If I show up to your polling place and claim to be a recently deceased person, someone I know to be on vacation, or not likely to vote... unless the election worker actually knows the person I am pretending to be... I'm almost certainly going to be able to cast a vote illegally and the chances of being caught are slim, ditto for me ever showing up on the radar of someone investigating fraud.

Let me fix that for you:

Voter ID laws are (taken at face value) an attempt to reduce a unknown number of people from voting illegitimately while keeping a larger number of people from voting legitimately.

Somehow one needs a photo ID to fly on a plane, buy a six-pack of beer or open a bank account in most places... but only with regards to voting is it suddenly a horrible thing, even when free IDs are usually available.

To go back to my earlier example, a person doing so would only be casting a single extra vote which on it's own isn't much, however it's not too hard to imagine an individual or group being a little more dedicated and spending the morning of election day doing this over and over again.

How many fraudulent votes would they need? Lets look at some recent close races which come to mind:

in Florida in 2000 George Bush beat Al Gore with a margin of 537 votes out of 5,962,657 cast (0.00901%).
In South Dakota in 2002 Tim Johnson beat John Thune by a margin of 524 votes out of 33,4438 cast (.001567%).
In Washington in 2004 Christine Gregoire beat Dino Rossi by a margin of 133 votes out of 2,810,058 cast (0.00473%).
In Minnesota in 2008 Al Franken beat Norm Colman by a margin of 312 votes out of 2,887,646 cast (0.0108%).

We are talking margins not only within the range of error (accidental over votes, identifying marks, etc), but very possibly within the margin of fraud, something the current system makes very difficult to detect.

Most of us don't wait to put locks on or home doors until after we are burgled, we do so because we recognize a potential threat and prefer to take some actions to reduce the risk, why not here as well?

but you can't argue that voter-ID laws don't skew elections away from Democrats and toward Republicans

That tends to be what happens when you make it harder to commit voter fraud.

Christians ran the colonies from roughly the 1550s when the Spanish colonized Mexico and the Southwest to about 1785 on the East Coast when the Constitution, guaranteeing that the government could not endorse religion (e.g., "Congress shall make no law regarding an endorsement of religion") to bit less than a hundred years later when the Spanish/Russian governance of the west coast ended.

Partially true, the first amendment and it's prohibition at the time only applied to the federal government, state religions went on for a good bit longer, the last one ending in 1833 if I am not mistaken: https://digital.library.txstat...

Really? So the mentality of the left and radical Islam is no different then as well I guess... as from the left I hear that Climate Change is true, unquestionable and those who disagree must be hounded out of public life or forced to comply with certain beliefs... and from the radical Muslims we hear that if you do not subscribe to their particular interpretation you should be stoned, beheaded or set fire to.

As you said "There is a difference in the end result, but the mindset is the same"

Actually our constitution was written to give both the people and state governments a say in how the national government was running things (making bribery a lot harder)... alas the 17th amendment threw much of that out the window, largely removing the need for a Senate.

More so the framers were also quite clear as to the importance of rotation in & out of office, the idea of a career politician was apocryphal to them, so much so that they didn't end up writing term limits (of any kind) in as they thought that elected officials would continue to have virtue.

They created a grand government which has lasted quite longer than they probably expected, was able to end slavery thanks to a few poison pills, but alas virtue is a rare thing in DC today.

And advocating for such a thing should be taken lightly by the left as in my experience it is those on the right who tend to be a bit more armed.

The president doesn't have the power to repeal laws, only congress.

Legally you are correct, but that doesn't stop the current one from effectively doing so via 'executive actions'.

Correct, the more time you spend with a given character/group the more opportunities you have to show them in a more favorable/humanizing light with examination of their motivations & history without explicitly trying to keep them looking evil & unbeatable the whole time.

"ZOMG the Dominion is going to conquer us! Wait... it's founders faced discrimination because of their form and decided to bring order to their part of the galaxy... maybe they aren't so bad?"

"Species 8472 is the greatest threat we've ever faced, how can we stop them? They are only fighting back against the Borg who struck first? Ok, I guess I can understand their anger"

Pick a race on Star Trek which has had more than a few episodes of backstory/examination and you see the same pattern.

It's because while we have a long history of using the death penalty, just enough are squeamish about it that there are efforts to take it out of the public conscious & try to maintain an almost medical like image.

While there are countries today where you can attend a execution in a public square, in the US we have long relegated them to happen at midnight behind tall walls and in a confined room with a limited number of witnesses... including a alcohol swab on the condemns arm to prevent infection just in case they get a last minute reprieve from the needle to be put into their arm.

You're stating it wrong. When someone is dead you can say what you want about them.

No, you are over simplifying it.

The actionability of the utterance usually depends on when it was said... and as the Jesse Ventura vs Chris Kyle case so recently demonstrated, a dead man's estate can still be on the hook for damages. Had Ventura died first the case still could have proceeded provided the claim was made prior to death (and likely the suit as well).

Defamation aside, without a conviction or lengthy civil suit, the rights of the estate to the properties of the deceased/accused/etc does not end as it would with a conviction which goes to the heart of what I said above.

It is pretty clear what happens to the assets of criminals, especially with regard to crimes against humanity and especially when those assets have value derived from the commitment of those crimes.

Sorta... if you go on a killing spree, are convicted then try to sell your story you are going to have some legal problems & prohibitions.

If however while waiting for arrest/trial end up dead (either at the hands of the police or your own), anyone calling you a 'murder' would be at risk of suit a defamation suit from your estate as you were not actually convicted of that crime.

Perverse perhaps, but it follows from the whole concept of innocent until proven guilty. And while it is commonly accepted that Hitler, Goebbels and OJ Simpsons did some rather horrific things... I'm unaware of any criminal case where the Joseph Goebbels estate would have been denied the normal protections afforded to an unconvinced individual.

I'm not defending the practice, I'm just stating what is.

Your time would be better spent pushing for the repeal of the 17th amendment and ending direct election of senators.

And the damage caused by landing on water with parachutes has got to be less than the explosions from the landings on the barges.

Probably not when they figure out how to land on the barge without exploding... at that point the damage from hitting the water and amount of cleaning & service required to be read for launch will be much more.

I hate to break it to you... but we aren't a democracy, we are a republic.

Lets say we changed that ratio a bit... maybe 1 rep per 50k citizens... that would perhaps bump the number of reps to 4,350... do you think that would be any more workable?