Monica Goodling referred to vote caging in her testimony to Congress last month, but no one really paid attention to it. Even Congresswoman Linda Sanchez asked Monica for a definition of the term. The press dug in for the dirt she laid out on Gonzales and McNulty but ignored this nugget. The Bush Administration was up to so many evil (and criminal) deeds that it is hard to keep up with them all.
From Slate Magazine:
Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., asked Goodling to "explain what caging is," clarifying that she was unfamiliar with the term. Goodling fumbled around, muttered something about, "it's a direct-mail term, that people who do direct mail, when, when they separate addresses that may be good versus addresses that may be bad," then made sure to end with, "I don't … I believe that Mr. Griffin doesn't believe that he, that he did anything wrong there and there, there actually is a very good reason for it, for a very good explanation." Which explanation Goodling did not then provide.
(snip)
Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren't living at (because they are, say, at college or at war). The Republican National Committee reportedly stopped the practice following a consent decree in a 1986 case. Google the term and you'll quickly arrive at the Wizard of Oz of caging, Greg Palast, investigative reporter and author of the wickedly funny Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans—Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Palast started reporting allegations of Republican vote caging for the BBC's Newsnight in 2004. He's been almost alone on the story since then. Palast contends, both in Armed Madhouse and widely through the liberal blogosphere, that vote caging, an illegal voter-suppression scheme, happened in Florida in 2004 this way:The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked "Do not forward" to voters' homes. Letters returned ("caged") were used as evidence to block these voters' right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and—you got to love this—American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.
So we knew this was going down during the election but no one in the mainstream really reported on much about it. People like Greg Palast were all over it, but the only people that were paying attention to it were in the activist left.
Now we have a Republican operative who recently left the White House admitting that these crimes took place. Tim Griffin did a lot of work disenfranchising minority voters and was paid royally for it. He was even selected to replace one of the fired U.S. Attorneys. So all of these scandals merge together to create what we know as the corrupt Republican party...in a nutshell.
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