When it comes to the “voter fraud” cases that Karl Rove and the Bush White House care about, practically all of them are trumped up nonsense — little more than veiled attempts to disenfranchise suspected Democrats.

This is not to say that voter fraud doesn’t occur; it’s just not the kind of crime that Rove is looking for.

The CBS News Investigative Unit has learned a man who was a field coordinator in Congressman Patrick McHenry’s (R-NC) 2004 campaign has been indicted for voter fraud in North Carolina.

The indictment charges that Michael Aaron Lay, 26, illegally cast his ballot in two 2004 Congressional primary run-offs in which McHenry was a candidate. The charges indicate that Lay voted in a district where it was not legal for him to vote.

At the time Lay was listed as a resident in a home owned by 32-year-old McHenry but campaign records indicate Lay’s paychecks were sent to an address in Tennessee. McHenry won the primary by only 86 votes. According to Gaston County, North Carolina District Attorney Locke Bell, Lay was indicted on Monday, May 7 by a local grand jury.

CBS News has learned that these charges were first investigated by the North Carolina State Board of Elections up to two years ago. The results were forwarded to the previous Gaston County District Attorney Mike Lands. In January, Bell was elected the new district attorney for the county and pursued the indictment.

Of course, this isn’t the kind of case that would be of interest to the Justice Department. McHenry is a loyal Bushie.

The obvious comparison to Rudy Giuliani’s speech at Houston Baptist College is JFK’s 1960 speech to Greater Houston Ministerial Association, at which the then-senator articulated his support for the separation of church and state. There is, however, a key difference.

Rudolph W. Giuliani directly challenged Republican orthodoxy on Friday, asserting that his support for abortion rights, gun control and gay rights should not disqualify him from winning the party’s presidential nomination.

He said that Republicans needed to be tolerant of dissenting views on those issues if they wanted to retain the White House.

In a forceful summation of the substantive and political case for his candidacy, delivered to a conservative audience at Houston Baptist College, Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, acknowledged that his views on social issues were out of line with those of many Republican primary voters. But he argued that there were even greater matters at stake in the election, starting with which party would better protect the nation from terrorism.

The comparison to the JFK speech is intentional and has been picked up by the media. But the connection doesn’t hold up — JFK effectively told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, “We’re together on the issues, but you need to get over my Catholicism.” Giuliani effectively told the Houston Baptist College, “We’re not together on the issues, but I’m strong on national security. 9/11, 9/11, 9/11.”

To be sure, admitting that he’s a full-blown, regular ol’ pro-choice Republican is definitely the right call for Giuliani. After donating repeatedly to Planned Parenthood, opposing the GOP’s proposed ban on so-called “partial-birth” abortions, backing public funding of abortions, and accepting an award from NARAL, Giuliani’s drive to “moderate” his position was transparently ridiculous. He could have followed Romney and gone for the wholesale flip-flop, but Giuliani knew no one would buy it. He’s left with only one option — grudgingly admitting reality, which he did yesterday.

But Giuliani’s argument quickly falls apart anyway — not just because the GOP base isn’t willing to back a pro-choice candidate, but also because Giuliani doesn’t actually know anything about national security and foreign policy.

Just in the past few weeks, Giuliani has shown that he doesn’t know the difference between Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programs, and has no idea whether Iran and al Qaeda are Sunni or Shia. Asked recently for his thoughts on the efficacy of the president’s escalation strategy in Iraq, Giuliani said, “I don’t know the answer to that.”

As National Review’s Rich Lowry recently noted, when Giuliani responds to voters’ questions, “his answers on foreign policy and military affairs aren’t deeply informed.”

So Giuliani is left with an awkward pitch: vote for the guy who disagrees with the party’s base on all the key issues and overlook the fact that he doesn’t know much of anything about his signature issue.

How he plans to pull this off, I have no idea. By comparison, JFK had it easy.

I have another take on Rudy’s speech taking on the ‘orthodoxies’ of the Republican party.

In our society, at least in most of it, the word ‘orthodoxy’ comes with at least a loose negative connotation. We’re open-minded, tolerant people. So to call one of a political party’s bedrock issues an ‘orthodoxy‘, as the Times does here, is at least to slightly prejudice the question.

As Steve notes, Giuliani’s choice of Houston is meant to echo John Kennedy’s speech addressing the issue of his Catholicism to southern Baptists.

But why do Republicans need to give up these ‘orthodoxies’? By and large I agree with Rudy on abortion, gay rights and gun control. But a lot of people get into politics precisely to take the opposing positions. Why shouldn’t they organize their voting around these issues that mean so much to them?

It reminds me of the predictable as the seasons articles you’ll read every few years in the Post and other papers asking whether Democrats are going to give up their hidebound orthodoxies of supporting Social Security or the progressive income tax or civil rights. For many of us those are precisely the reasons we’re involved in politics, so why should we give them up because some frivolous oped writer who doesn’t know the first thing about public policy thinks it’s the hip new thing to do?

How many Democrats would support a flat-tax, pro-privatization, anti-gay rights candidate for president? And why should they? Washington’s beautiful people, the froth at the top of the politico-cultural mug, look down on everybody, right and left, who’s really committed politically. It’s a mild embarrassment, like loud clothes or poor table manners.

The new frontrunner for “worst idea in modern journalism” has to go to James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the two-year-old site pasadenanow.com, who recently ran this job posting: “We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA.”

Yes, we’ve apparently entered the era of outsourcing local journalism.

[Macpherson] acknowledged it sounds strange to have journalists in India cover news in this wealthy city just outside Los Angeles.

But he said it can be done from afar now that weekly Pasadena City Council meetings can be watched over the Internet. And he said the idea makes business sense because of India’s lower labor costs.

“I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem for local publications,” said the 51-year-old Pasadena native.

Got that? It’s not just a way to save money; outsourcing news coverage can make journalism better.

Please. Someone can watch a city council meeting anywhere, and dutifully act as a stenographer, but it’s a stretch to call it journalism.

The big news orgs begin to pick up the story of the Iowa farmer family snubbed by the Rudy campaign. More to come?

Frank Rich seems to believe corruption has ruined the Republican brand.

By my rough, conservative calculation — feel free to add — there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously — an all-time record.

Wrongdoing of this magnitude does not happen by accident, but it is not necessarily instigated by a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy. When corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing philosophy. That’s the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it.

That might be a while.

It was a credibility-killing moment for John McCain. Last month, the senator insisted that there are parts of Baghdad safe for Americans to go for a stroll and that General Petraeus travels around the city “almost every day in a non-armed Humvee.” Obviously, that was wrong. McCain took this to the next step, of course, when he went to a Baghdad market, surrounded himself with 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships, and then told reporters that he was able to walk freely in Iraq’s capital.

Tim Russert asked him about this on Meet the Press this morning. McCain responded:

“I’ll be glad to go back to that market — with or without military protection and Humvees, etc.”

It’s hard to believe anyone will be impressed by this misplaced bravado, but it’s worth remembering that the day after McCain took his heavily-protected stroll, 21 Shia market were ambushed, bound, and shot from the same market.

Nevertheless, McCain thinks he can go for an unescorted walk in Baghdad? It’s as if he’s given up on being taken seriously altogether.

When a once-proud man becomes a joke, it’s a sad thing to watch.

Josh noted the other day that the Fort Dix Six may not quite rise to the level of the take-down of the “Seeds of David” goofballs in Miami last year, “but it may not be far off the mark either.”

With this in mind, CJR’s Paul McLeary explained the other day that foiled terrorist plots are obviously very serious, but too often, these threats have turned out to be less than they appear. (via Daily Kos)

It’s hard for the press not to run with stories of possible domestic terrorism, and for good reason — it’s serious and scary business. That said, not all plots are created equal, and lumping them all together into one grab bag of thwarted domestic terrorism cases is something reporters should avoid, especially given some of the absurd plots that have been uncovered over the last couple years. This is not to say that all leads shouldn’t be investigated — they should — or that anyone discovered in any stage of planning an attack shouldn’t be scooped up — they should– but we’ve seen a couple of cases in the last few years be blown way out of proportion, and that makes us wonder what the Fort Dix story will become.

The New York Times this morning offers a good example of this grab-bag coverage when it says that the Fort Dix case is “the latest in a series of plots, targeting sites in the United States, that authorities said they have foiled. These included one last June in which seven arrests were made in Miami after the authorities described suspects talking about blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the F.B.I.’s Miami headquarters.

Except, as we later found out, the cult in Miami — billed by Dick Cheney as being “a very real threat” — turned out to be more farce than force. McLeary also noted that the “Lackawanna Six” were “hardly the criminal masterminds that they were initially made out to be.”

A few other examples come to mind. The plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t quite what it was made out to be. Jose Padilla was not actually prepared to detonate a dirty bomb in DC. The facts of the British hijacking plot didn’t stand up well to scrutiny, and the plot to attack Los Angeles’ Library Tower turned out to be far less serious than we’d been led to believe.

Has the administration ever heard of the boy who cried wolf?

After a midterm campaign cycle in which the GOP’s “culture of corruption” played a major role, lobbying reform was slated to be a key legislative issue in the 110th Congress.

Interest in changing the way the system operates, however, appears to be waning.

House Democrats are suddenly balking at the tough lobbying reforms they touted to voters last fall as a reason for putting them in charge of Congress.

Now that they are running things, many Democrats want to keep the big campaign donations and lavish parties that lobbyists put together for them. They’re also having second thoughts about having to wait an extra year before they can become high-paid lobbyists themselves should they retire or be defeated at the polls.

The growing resistance to several proposed reforms now threatens passage of a bill that once seemed on track to fulfill Democrats’ campaign promise of cleaner fundraising and lobbying practices.

Kevin Drum offers congressional Democrats some good advice: “Come on, folks: show some spine. If Democrats want people to believe that there’s really a difference between the two parties, then show them there’s a difference.”

Eleven House Republicans met with Bush and his senior aides in the White House on Tuesday for an “unvarnished” conversation about Iraq. If the leaks from the meeting are accurate, the GOP lawmakers warned the president that his war policy is putting the future of the Republican Party at risk.

Of course, 11 possible GOP defectors aren’t enough to scare the Bush gang. Even if this delegation bucked the party and started voting with the Dems — which, we should remember, they haven’t — that’s not enough to change the policy. The House will still need a two-thirds majority to override a veto, as will the Senate. When 60 Republicans from the House and 15 from the Senate show up on Bush’s doorstep, then the White House will start taking them seriously.

Depending on the source, larger numbers may very well be on the way.

Last week, a group of 11 congressional Republicans met with President Bush to express their frustration with the state of the Iraq war, pleading with Bush to change his unpopular Iraq policy.

Today, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said, “The 11 House Republicans who went to see him speak for more than just 11 House Republicans. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.” Hagel said that president “may find himself standing alone sometime this fall,” noting that several conservatives are beginning to back “trap doors and exit signs” to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

I’d add that Michael Abramowitz reported today that a conservative House Republican with close ties to the leaders said the concerns voiced by the 11 have become common throughout the caucus. “That wasn’t the Tuesday Group speaking,” he said, referring to an organization of moderate GOP legislators. “No, that’s the Republican sentiment.”

Maybe. For all the Republican hand wringing, a grand total of four GOP lawmakers — two in the House (Gilchrest, W. Jones), two in the Senate (Hagel, Smith) — have been willing to put their votes where their mouths are. When the number reaches, say, double digits, it’ll be far more impressive.