Email-Gate! I worry what will happen. But this whole post explains why Rove's email cover-up was much worse than Hillary's. I think it's 30,000 but when I went to Google the number, what I found were Conservative sites still screaming about Benghazi :/ Great day for news! Next on Voting Rights:
Protest-Leader standing in front of Chase Manhattan Bank a while back.
First though, I want to take time to say, Credit where credit is due:
George Bush was the only Republican of his stature who attended Obama's Selma Speech. Neither John Boehner nor Mitch McConnell even thought of going. I'm not saying I go to everything I should, but Bush stood out as a Republican supporting Black Civil Rights. 2) I like his paintings. I think they they are therapeutic and good for him to get into, 3) I really loved DoNotCall.gov and 4)
There are even a few good things he let pass that Republicans today would oppose.
Debate on Vote-Fraud: Magically Stolen from The Democrats(aided by voter amnesia):
Meanwhile in 2004 there were real attempts to suppress the vote of black minority voters. So much so that the Ohio vote could not be certified. Normally the law says that if one state can't be certified then the whole nation's vote is not certified and(I think) needs to be voted on in the Senate. But that concern was blown away in order to re-elect George Bush. I think you had to be a fan of Presidential Vote Certification on C-SPAN, as I was in 2000 and 2004, even to know about this.
The sinister irony of it was that the administration fired several US District Attorneys for failing to over-prosecute vote-fraud which was neither intentional nor fraudulent(and there were not many more than 100 examples in the whole USA of e.g, someone signing up to vote as Mickey Mouse), and Karl Rove tried to cover all this up by destroying over 5 million emails(to Hillary's recent 30,000 lost)].
Democrats' opposition to these firings backed them into the position of saying that voter fraud does not exist, when only as recently as 2004 Ohio and many other states like AZ and NM used non-transparent Diebold machines and a number of practices relating to those touch-screen voting computers put the thumb on the scale to depress the vote of of poor minorities in the US. For instance, mailing people in Albequerque the wrong polling addresses, so that even though poll workers could redirect them, it still wasted voters' precious time.
Framing
Republicans know how to steal Dems' talking points from previous elections and re-frame debates. Democrats are constantly trying to figure out how they steal the terms of debate and how to win back the framing of it. Joseph Romm has written a helpful book on rhetoric Language intelligence. I kind of admire Karl Rove's knack for this but I admire Joey more because his Climate-Change blog climateprogress.org is grounded in sincerity.
Recent History of Voting Rights Discrimination:
Touch-screen voting was brought through after 2000 with the well-intentioned HAVA Act, to make voting clear and easy: to remedy hanging chads and butterfly ballots, which helped Bush win in FL, and to make voting more accessible to the differently abled. However corporations like Diebold quickly co-opted the new goodwill so as toto remove the transparency with which votes were counted. They pulled the wool over everyone's eyes with the above-mentioned "touch-screen", also known as DRE(Direct Record Entry) machines.
Poll-monitoring and Watching the Vote-Count became a grass-roots movement among lawyers and liberal activists, who did succeed in enabling PBOS(Paper Ballot Optical Scan) in many states by enacting changes to the law. Yay for them! You can always scroll down and check the map, here:
Cruel and Ironic Twist to The 1965 Voting Rights Act:
Recently the Supreme Court turned back the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in a cruel twist where a few Southern states(who claimed they had shown good behavior and no longer needed voting-law restrictions that had been made just for them), took their new-found freedom and reinstated restrictive voting laws, scarcely a day after the Supreme Court granted them freedom to make their own law, thereby proving the very next day that they couldn't handle that freedom. Jim Sensenbrenner(R-WI) is trying to get the voting Rights Act of 1965 back through Congress.
The Law of the Land has now enabled the offending Southern States to reenact their discriminatory voting laws and Obama himself can only complain, as he did in his Selma speech, last Saturday. Racism is enacted into US policy and into Law in this country now!
Even if we have that much longed-for discussion on race, unfair voting Laws for some of the South, persist.
Hillary what? Her email scrape pales in comparison to all this.
How did it happen?
You might ask how this roll-back of Voting Rights could have happened under Obama. Did it even happen? Well, one of his parenthetically stated complaints is that there is a discriminatory thing called gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is when a state's Board Of Elections(BOE) draws the voting districts on a map. Lately it has squished the Democrats.
Conservative state BOE's have drawn rings around poor or black districts, granting them less representation in proportion to the population so that their votes per capita are diminished. They have also made the district re-drawing more frequent. It used to be they re-drew it every 10 years.
Everyone riled up about Benghazi and Email-gate sweeps these seemingly obvious facts under the rug.
Some of our media journalists are young and may not have been concerned with fair voting in 2000 or 2004 but a lot of us are older and should not willfully lie to our children!
More History: Now not only was there intimidation of poor black voters in Ohio and Florida in '04:
Florida is a whole other voting nightmare including ten-page ballots in Fort Lauderdale in 2012. That basically chokes up voting lines.
Just a note to recall that in 2000, FL Secretary of State Katharine Harris over-purged the lists of felons who couldn't vote, thereby disenfranchising many qualified voters.
More Reflections on Fair-Voting
1) Election Day should be a holiday!
2)That college student voting has become more difficult and confusing- even today- is a scandal.
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