Tag: Voting Rights

The American Taliban

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

HBO’s series The Newsroom debuted ten weeks ago. Written by Alan Sorkin it is a fictional behind the scenes look at a cable news network, Atlantis Cable News (ACN), its star, Will McAvoy, the Republican anchor for its premier news program, News Night and his staff. Each episode has focused around a major event in the recent past, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the killing of Osama Bin Laden. In the last episode of the season, the News Room took on the issue of voter ID laws and the non-issue of voter fraud.

Sometimes it takes a fictional character to poke the hive.

The American Taliban cannot survive if Dorothy Cooper is allowed to vote

Ouch

Are You Too Dumb To Vote?

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks some people are too dumb to vote:

   Personally, I think the voting age should be much higher, not lower.  I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18, to be brutally honest.

   (…)

   It is a simple fact of science, that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth.

In some cases he may be right except that he wouldn’t agree. 46% of Americans believe the creationist view of human existence:

The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God’s guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.

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Click On image to enlarge

Hmmm, why would that be? Could it be a failure of our schools? Scarecrow at FDL says:

assume these numbers reflect the effects of private religious schooling and the growing trend of devising various schemes to use public dollars to subsidize private/religious schools, as reported in the New York Times.

Every time I hear Arne Duncan go on about NCLB or his Race to the Top and how we ought to be promoting clever ways to give parents more choices outside the public school system in how they teach their children, so as to improve their children’s math and engineering scores, I have to wonder why he just doesn’t make moving the numbers on this chart in a more enlightened direction as a measure of what “success means.” That chart shouts “failure” when I look at.

Or could it be more that our country’s “youths”, as Chris Mooney points out in his new book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Realityyou’re too misinformed to vote if you get your news from Fox News:

In June of last year, Jon Stewart went on air with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the channel’s misinforming of its viewers. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

Stewart’s statement was factually accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site PolitiFact [weighed in http://www.politifact.com/trut… and rated it “false.” In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?

There probably is a small group of media consumers out there somewhere in the world who are more misinformed, overall, than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on all the available evidence-especially in areas of political controversy. This will come as little surprise to liberals, perhaps, but the evidence for it-evidence in Stewart’s favor-is pretty overwhelming.

I am fairly certain Jonah wasn’t pointing his pudgy conservative finger at the religious right or Fox News but if the shoe fits

GOP War On Voting

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Back in August, columnist Ari Berman wrote an article in Rolling Stone about the GOP war minorities, elderly, students and  the poor who traditionally vote Democratic, by passing state laws that make it increasing difficult, not just register to vote but to actually suppress voting:

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

On Sunday the Brennan Center for Justice released it’s study that these new laws will disenfranchise at least 5 million votes in 2012.

These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election. Based on the Brennan Center’s analysis of the 19 laws and two executive actions that passed in 14 states, it is clear that:

   These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.

   The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.

   Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.

States have changed their laws so rapidly that no single analysis has assessed the overall impact of such moves. Although it is too early to quantify how the changes will impact voter turnout, they will be a hindrance to many voters at a time when the United States continues to turn out less than two thirds of its eligible citizens in presidential elections and less than half in midterm elections.

This study is the first comprehensive roundup of all state legislative action thus far in 2011 on voting rights, focusing on new laws as well as state legislation that has not yet passed or that failed. This snapshot may soon be incomplete: the second halves of some state legislative sessions have begun.

So far, 34 states have passed such laws.

Mr. Berman sat down for a discussion on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and ProPublica reporter Lois Beckett who co-wrote, “The Hidden Hands in Redistricting: Corporations and Other Powerful Interests,” about how money is helping re-shape Congressional districts along partisan lines, a practice known as gerrymandering.:

Question: Where is the Obama Justice Department that should be challenging these laws as they relate to the 14th Amendment and the voting rights act?

The Week in Editorial Cartoons, Part II – Climate Change Obstructionism

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette

Nick Anderson

Nick Anderson, Comics.com, see reader comments in the Houston Chronicle

Help Stop Voter Harassment, Early Voting and on Nov 4th at the Polls

On my trip over to ePluribus Media this morning I found this open thread Help Make Sure Every Voter’s Story Gets Told in 2008, not long but with very useful information that was gathered from two other sources from yesterday, one found here at daily kos about incidents at early voting polls here in North Carolina and also sourced at Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic

Regardless of your political alignment, nobody — from any party, special interest or group, has the right to interfere with your right to vote for the candidate of your choice.

Scottish Americans Unite!! Craig Ferguson’s brilliant rant

From CBS: On the Sept. 10th edition of The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson, a new American citizen preparing to vote in his first US election asks, “Are we so lost we have to be sold our own democratic right!?”

*/:-D

My Arch-Enemy (Rep. Steve King) Strikes Again

(I apologize in advance for writing about a different King on the anniversary of Dr. King’s death)

Everyone should have an arch-enemy, right?  Someone who is the very antithesis of everything you stand for and believe in?  I’ve been looking for just the right candidate in an arch-enemy and a clear frontrunner has emerged:  Rep. Steve King of Iowa’s 5th congressional district.

King, a Republican (duh!), was recently in the news for his remarks about Barack Obama.  He said if Obama was elected president that al-Qaida “would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror.”  King also said of terrorists’ reaction to a potential Obama victory that “he will certainly be viewed as a savior for them.”  A savior for terrorists, Congressman?  Remarks like this are, sadly, just another day at the office for King.

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