Bad history.

I saw Selma recently with wifey from the comfort of our home. My wife is younger and from the South so she loves to watch historical movies like this that deal with the civil rights struggle. She says that they make her angry (this one was no exception), but she admits that it's a necessary evil in learning to better understand the history of her country. 

Anyway, if you know the history of voting rights in the South you will understand what the movie Selma was all about. Now, sadly, history is repeating itself in the "Land Of Dixie".

"Although the 2016 presidential election is still more than a year away, Americans are already inundated with campaign promises and a flurry of candidates. But Alabama residents have more to worry about than simply picking a party.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency announced this week that it is closing 31 satellite DMV offices owing to budget cuts. That will leave 28 counties in the state without a place for residents to get the government-issued photo IDs they need to vote. Although it’s a statewide cut, the effects of the shutdown will be felt disproportionately.

“Depending on which counties you count as being in Alabama’s Black Belt, either 12 or 15 Black Belt counties soon won’t have a place to get a driver’s license,” wrote Alabama columnist Kyle Whitmore. “Counties where some of the state’s poorest live. Counties that are majority African American.”

In 2014, Alabama became one of 17 states that require a government-issued photo ID—driver’s license being the most common—in order to cast a ballot. When the measure was under consideration back in 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union lobbied against it, concerned that requiring photo IDs would disenfranchise black voters. Proponents of the measure said strict ID laws would prevent voter fraud. The ACLU argued that as more black residents took public transportation than white residents (62 percent versus 34 percent), black residents were less likely to already have the driver’s license they would need to vote.

Now, there will be fewer places to obtain the IDs needed to participate in the country’s democracy. The newly shuttered offices accounted for 5 percent of the state’s driver’s license transactions, according to the ALEA. Authorities also proposed sending out mobile I.D. vans and crews to affected counties. But rights activists argue that the vans are poorly publicized, and that any sort of restriction is problematic." [Source]

I suspect that there will be more of these types of cuts to come in states with strict voter ID laws that happen to have a large black population. We could see this okey -doke coming from a mile away: Pass stricter laws requiring voter identification, and close the very places that make these cards available to the public.   

Alabama joins states like Texas that are making it hard for people of color because of either racism, politics, or both. I personally suspect the latter.

"Two years ago, Alabama would have needed federal approval to make such a change. A 2013 Supreme Court decision invalidated sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states well known for discrimination, including Alabama, be overseen by the federal government to implement any laws that could impact voting. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority decision that “our country has changed,”'

I bet people like John Roberts said the same thing right after Selma.

*Pic from www. aclu.org

"Dems, It's Time to Dump Dixie" and let Republicans have "Free-Market Jesus Paradise".

I just read a terrific article about the political shift taking place in the South, and why the people in the majority population from those states support one  political party over another.




The South, in case you all didn't notice, is now the domain of the republican party. (At least when it comes to state wide elections)We can thank gerrymandering and inherent racial bias for this interesting political development.




As a result of this shift, the author of the article had some interesting advice for the democratic party.


"Dems, It’s Time to Dump Dixie

With Mary Landrieu’s ignominious exit, the Democrats will have lost their last senator in the Deep South. And that’s a good thing. They should write it off—because they don’t need it.

I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.

And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They need Florida, arguably, at least in Electoral College terms. Although they don’t even really quite need it—what happened in 2012 was representative: Barack Obama didn’t need Florida, but its 29 electoral votes provided a nice layer of icing on the cake, bumping him up to a gaudy 332 EVs, and besides, it’s nice to be able to say you won such a big state. But Florida is kind of an outlier, because culturally, only the northern half of Florida is Dixie. Ditto Virginia, but in reverse; culturally, northern Virginia is Yankee land (but with gun shops).

So Democrats still need to care about those two states, at least in presidential terms. And maybe you can throw in North Carolina under the right circumstances. And at some point in the near future, you’ll be able to talk about Georgia as a state a Democrat can capture. And eventually, Texas, too.

But that’s presidential politics. At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place. They should make no effort, except under extraordinary circumstances, to field competitive candidates. The national committees shouldn’t spend a red cent down there. This means every Senate seat will be Republican, and 80 percent of the House seats will be, too. The Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and they’ll occasionally be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns. But they’re not going win Southern seats (I include here with some sadness my native West Virginia, which was not a Southern state when I was growing up but culturally is one now). And they shouldn’t try.

My friend the political scientist Tom Schaller said all this back in 2008, in his book Whistling Past Dixie. I didn’t want to agree with Schaller then, but now I throw in the towel. He was a man ahead of his time. Look west, Schaller advised the Democrats."  [Source] 

You could argue, of course, that this is all about the democrats choosing to support the black guy to become president. But I saw this trend long before Barack Obama came on the scene.


Nope, this is about white Southerners choosing sides. A form of political segregation if you will. If those Niggers are voting for the liberal democratic guy it can't be good for me.

The article continues:

"But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”

Cohen thinks maybe some economic populism could work, and that could be true in limited circumstances. But I think even that is out the window now."

It's all out "the window now". Maybe the author is on to something. Secession could be next.

I wonder what they will call their new country. I bet they won't give me a passport.

Sadly, I will need one. My in- laws live in Louisiana for crying out loud.  

*Pic from theatlantic.com