"Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it."

Don't look now, but key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act are about to be struck down by the supremes. This, of course, is not big news to many of you Negroes in America; you are all way too busy having fun to care.

I won't bore you with a bunch of inside baseball and lawyer talk, but the bottom line is this: There is a section of the Voting Rights Act which requires certain states -with a bad history when it comes to treating us black folks as equals- to get a preclearance from the feds before they can do any funny stuff with voting procedures in their states. Now a County in one of those states is suing because they didn't like how Congress renewed key provisions of the law a few years back. That's pretty much it in a nut shell.

"Shelby County’s lawyer Bert Rein argued that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act – which Congress renewed for another 25 years in 2006 – is unconstitutional because the formula used to determine which states are covered is outdated – based on voter turnout and registration data from 1972.

The blatant racial intimidation and discrimination in voting procedures that prevailed in states such as Alabama when the law was written in 1965 and renewed in 1970, 1975, and 1982, no longer exist, the county says."

Riiight.

Not only does it still it exist, it has expanded to other states such as Pistolvania.

Anyway, it's not looking good for Section 5 of the Act, because those conservative judges and their boy Stephen actually seemed to be mocking the very idea of the law. (Well, not Stephen, he never talks, but we all know how he is going to vote.)

One Judge actually called it a "perpetual racial entitlement". Huh?

"It’s an old disease,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said of efforts to thwart minority voting. “It’s gotten a lot better. A lot better. But it’s still there.”

Not only "there"; it's everywhere.

Finally, if this next story doesn't stop you Negroes from sneaking into movies I don't know what will.  You all really need to stop doing what you see white folks do. They can get away with this kind of crap. You Negroes on the other hand, not so much.

"Lendsey and Delilha Harbin ... are facing felony theft charges for allegedly “movie-hopping” last Saturday night at a Portage, Ind., multiplex. The couple is accused of paying to see only one film, then sneaking in to another without paying another admission fee, according to The Smoking Gun.

Reportedly, the hitched pair sprung $6.75 to see the new Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson film, “Snitch,” but when they exited the movie and snuck in to the zombie thriller “Warm Bodies,” they failed to pay.

Two off-duty policemen were moonlighting as security at a nearby IMAX theater and just happened to be standing outside when “Snitch” was letting viewers out. One officer reportedly remembered Lendsey’s bright attire when he first entered theater No. 13, where “Snitch” was playing, and then noticed that the man was nowhere in sight. The second officer thought he had seen the Harbins previously “sneak in to movies without paying.”

The officer reportedly decided to search for the Gary, Ind., duo and found them in another theater waiting for the film “Warm Bodies” to begin. When the law enforcers asked the couple to produce their stubs for the second movie, they could not but admitted to police that they had previously snuck in to movies at the multiplex at least three or four times prior.

When further pressed, they also confessed they had been to a funeral earlier in the day and were not in their right minds.

The Harbins’ excuses apparently fell on deaf ears and they were taken in to custody and placed in a county jail. The pair were later released on their own recognizance." [Source]

Oh lawd! I think I am going to have to stop slipping those munchies into Mrs. Field's handbags. I kid, I kid.

Anyway, at the end of the day, it's the theaters that ought to be charged with a felony for robbing patrons with those outrageous prices for their nasty ass nachos and popcorn.
 

 

Voting Rights from a wingnut's perspective.

I tried to watch the BET Awards tonight, but after seeing T-Pain's dumb ass go on stage with what was literally a "big ass chain" (yes, a big ass chain that said "big ass chain" on it) I just couldn't watch anymore. I decided to come and do some work and blog, instead. I will let you all tell me about it. That is, of course, if you are still watching and didn't decide to turn it off like moi.

Anyway, tonight I want to talk about a fellow member of the Pennsylvania Bar, Christine Flowers, who wrote an article comparing our rights to vote in this country with what has been happening in Iran. She started off alright when she said the following:

'WHERE is my vote?" screamed the protesters in the streets of Tehran. Bloodied opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made their disenfranchisement public and demanded that the world pay attention. And we did, using the magic of the Internet, logging on to Twitter and YouTube, and sharing, in real time, the agony of the Iranian people. We watched, horrified, as one young woman was murdered by government thugs and we witnessed the beatings of countless others.

Votes are precious currency. We pay for democracy with each ballot, each inked finger, each raised hand. The right to self-government isn't free - it's purchased from citizens at a sometimes monumental price. And when those votes are stolen in any way, tyranny takes root. That appears to be what happened in Iran. And it's also what happened in this country at times in our history when huge swaths of our citizens were denied a voice in governance.

It was the days of Jim Crow and gerrymandering, when voting districts in the South were structured so that the black vote was watered down or, in the worst cases, eliminated altogether. A time when men in white sheets did their dirty deeds with ropes and crosses at midnight.

Eventually, we found a way to dismantle the hateful oligarchy of the racists. It was called the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and gave the federal government unprecedented power to oversee local elections to ensure that every citizen of the Deep South, especially those once counted as three-fifths of humanity, could cast their ballots.

It worked. And it deserves to be recognized as one of the pillars of evolving social justice, along with the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act and Brown v. Board of Education. But this doesn't mean that, 40-plus years after the fact, it can't be revisited to see if perhaps some of its provisions are dated and no longer relevant. Of course, don't tell that to the New York Times editorial board, the American Civil Liberties Union and many other groups for whom the mere notion that you could even think of revisiting the VRA is heretical.

And it's exactly why they trembled when the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Section 5 of the act, thinking that the conservative justices would be able to overturn four decades of progress with a stroke of their mean-spirited pens.

Surprise! It didn't happen."

Okay Christine, so it didn't happen, (no thanks to Clarence) but you shouldn't be gloating because the fact that you folks on the right think that Section 5 of the act should even be revisited at this particular time in our history, just goes to show how out of touch you really are.

Anyway, I said Christine's article started off okay, but then it ended like this:

"...Back in 1967, my father spent a summer in Mississippi registering black candidates for office and black citizens for the vote.

He came back with stories of little children using the "n-word" and "Yankee lawyers" dodging spit - and worse. He wrote in his diary that "It made me feel very ill to know that there were people in America who differed very little in my judgment from those who manned Auschwitz in 1944."

And that's why, 40 years ago, that law was a godsend. But as Chief Justice Roberts noted in his majority opinion, today "minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels." He also observed that when Congress renewed the act in 2006, it relied on data more than three decades old. Talk about back to the future.

You'd think we could sensibly judge for ourselves whether in 2009, with a black president sitting in the Oval Office after a serene and glitch-free election - and a black woman being one of the richest and most influential figures in the country - the Voting Rights Act could withstand a sensible critique - especially in utility-district voting in Texas.
YOU'D also think that, given what's happening in Iran, we could look at ourselves honestly and say, our votes, once threatened, are now safe. At the very least, if we want to maintain the fiction that black voters are still denied their full rights at the ballot box, we could also acknowledge that white voters who are intimidated by Black Panther thugs at Philadelphia polling places should get the same federal protection.

But when the Justice Department shelves the prosecution of those thugs, you have your answer. I guess the times are indeed a-changin' - in some unexpectedly interesting ways."

"Our votes...are now safe"? Christine, of course, makes the classic mistake that so many whites make when the view the achievement of black folks as a collective: They cherry pick the few of us who have achieved to extraordinary levels in this country, in spite of racism.

And finally, she ends her article by telling a flat out lie. Those "Black Panther thugs" intimidated no one, and they were at very few polling places on election day in November of 2008 here in Philadelphia.

So what started out as a decent article which seemed like, for once, the issue of race was going to be given fair treatment by a wingnut, pretty much turned out how I suspected it would: Wrong.

I am sorry you didn't surprise me, Christine. But I am sure you are not.

Article here.