Justice Department files objection to Texas voter ID law

Lets cut the crap. Like everyone else Hispanics have iphones, laptops, HDTV's, Netflex, but are somehow "paralyzed" when it comes to obtaining a photo ID, something available for free at most DMV's across the country? How is it they don't have the wherewithal to can't get a photo ID... but have no problem getting to the voting booth? 

This is not about what's right and wrong. It's about not hindering Obama voters with such pesky inconsequential details like... is  José here legally?

 (Hmmm...Justice Dept.. guy named Perez.. I'm sure he's looking at it with an unbiased eye.)

The Obama administration has once more gone too far in its "overreach," Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Monday, after the Justice Department objected to the state's new voter photo ID law, saying Texas failed to demonstrate that the law is not discriminatory by design against Hispanic voters.

"Texas has a responsibility to ensure elections are fair, beyond reproach and accurately reflect the will of voters. The DOJ has no valid reason for rejecting this important law, which requires nothing more extensive than the type of photo identification necessary to receive a library card or board an airplane. Their denial is yet another example of the Obama administration's continuing and pervasive federal overreach," Perry said.

On Monday, the Justice Dpartment's head of the civil rights division, Tom Perez, sent a a six-page letter to Texas' director of elections saying that Texas has not "sustained its burden" under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to show that the new law will not have a discriminatory effect on minority voters. About 11 percent of Hispanic voters reportedly lack state-issued identification.

Perez wrote that while the state says the new photo ID requirement is to "ensure electoral integrity and deter ineligible voters from voting" the state "did not include evidence of significant in-person voter impersonation not already addressed by the state's existing laws."

Perez added that the number of people lacking any personal ID or driver's license issued by 

the state ranges from 603,892 to 795,955, but of that span, 29-38 percent of them are Hispanic. 

"According to the state's own data, a Hispanic registered voter is at least 46.5 percent, and potentially 120.0 percent, more likely than a non-Hispanic registered voter to lack this identification," Perez wrote.

"Even using the data most favorable to the state ... that disparity is statistically significant," he said.

But the two data sets, compiled in September 2011 and January 2012 were not an apples-to-apples comparison, said Texas' secretary of state, who noted the department was warned that the two data sets it used to lodge its objection were inconsistent.

"The data they demanded came from matching two separate data sets never designed to be matched, and their agency was warned that matches from these data sets would be misleading," Texas Secretary of State Hope Andrade said in a statement. 

Andrade said that as a result of the objection, which she called "extremely disappointing," existing law will apply in the May 29 primary election.

"My office will continue working with the Texas Attorney General's Office in seeking to implement the will of the citizens of Texas, as enacted by our duly elected representatives in the Texas Legislature," Andrade said.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, said in a separate statement the Texas law was based on an Indiana law upheld by the Supreme Court. He also questioned what the real objection is to requiring photo ID.

"If citizens are required to show ID in order to open a bank account, cash a check, drive a car or board a plane, how much more important is it to show ID in order to exercise one of our most valuable democratic rights?" he asked. "This is an abuse of executive authority and an affront to the citizens of Texas. It's time for the Obama administration to learn not to mess with Texas."

On the other hand, a Democratic state lawmaker told the Houston Chronicle that he was thankful for the decision.

"Throughout the pre-clearance process, Texas consistently failed to produce information showing the law would not have a discriminatory impact on minority voters. The Voting Rights Act exists for this exact purpose: protecting the ability of all Americans to access the ballot box," Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, told the newspaper.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said while Democrats complain that voter fraud is a myth, both the Justice Department and Texas AG's office have prosecuted and won convictions in scores of cases. 

"Those cases include a woman who submitted her dead mother's ballot, a paid operative who cast two elderly voters' ballots after transporting them to the polling place, a city council member who unlawfully registered ineligible foreign nationals to vote in an election that was decided by a 19-vote margin" and several other notable cases, he said. 

Perez noted that the Texas law allowed voters to show military ID, a U.S. citizenship certificate, a U.S. passport or a license to carry a concealed handgun, but the state did not provide any statistics noting how many people lack state ID but have the other allowable forms. 

"Nor has the state provided any data on the demographic makeup of such voters," Perez wrote.

Texas is the second state to have its voter ID law challenged. The Justice Department already blocked a similar law from taking effect in South Carolina -- the first time a voter ID law was rejected by the department in nearly 20 years.

South Carolina sued Holder in response, arguing that enforcement of its new law will not disenfranchise any voters.

As for the Texas law, Perez wrote that while lawmakers offered to make election identification certificates available to protect low-income voters who don't already have any ID, the documents are not free, and it creates the additional burden of traveling to a driver's license office, undergoing an application process that includes fingerprinting and finding supporting documentation to prove one's identity.

Using Census data, the Justice Department argued that the law creates an undue hardship on Hispanic populations that don't have the means to get a vehicle, live extremely far from a driver's license office or can't make it during the offices' limited operating hours.

Upon a federal court order, Texas recently changed its March 1 primary date to May 29 after a months-long fight over redistricting. 

Justice Department files objection to Texas voter ID law

She ain't no Rosa Parks

"Well for one, the 13th amendment to the constitution of the US which abolished slavery - did not abolish slavery for those convicted of  a crime." 
Angela Davis 


Anyone smell a Sharpton?

According to her every  black in jail is a "political prisoner".   She arrived at this conclusion after she was charged with first degree murder and kidnapping, not to mention making the FBI's top Ten Most Wanted List. Now she is idolized... “Black Women Paving the Way to Greatness in Politics.”

First Bradley Manning is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and now Angela Davis is celebrated during Black History Month. Hey...and it's not even April Fools Day yet!




On a tip from Ed Kilbane

Jury isn’t out on Angela Davis

Potential jurors reporting for jury duty in the D.C. Superior Court building have of late been passing a photo exhibit celebrating renowned black women in a series of posters, each featuring portraits of trailblazers exemplifying greatness in their respective fields.

Included among the posters, hung for Black History Month on the walls outside the jurors’ lounge, is one in which the D.C. courts — the federally funded judicial branch of the D.C. government — honor eight “Black Women Paving the Way to Greatness in Politics.”

One might quibble with some of the choices, but most of them are women who indeed deserved to be celebrated. They include: Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman and the first black woman who sought to run for president; Carol Moseley Braun, the first black female U.S. senator; former National Security Council adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the first black female to hold both offices; Patricia Roberts Harris, the first black female Cabinet secretary, U.S. ambassador and law school dean; and our current first lady, Michelle Obama.

One of these personifications of “greatness,” however, comes as a shock, especially in the context of a court of law. It is none other than Angela Davis, a black activist who came to prominence in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A. and the radical black group the Black Panther Party. Ms. Davis was such a high profile communist in the latter days of the Cold War that she was awarded the so-called “Lenin Peace Prize,” given to her in a Moscow ceremony by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev himself.

Of course, Ms. Davis, too, was a trailblazer in her own way.

She was the second black woman to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. She earned that distinction as a fugitive wanted on murder and kidnapping charges stemming from her role in a notorious attack on a courtroom in Marin County in California.

On Aug. 7, 1970, a black 17-year-old named Jonathan Jackson, toting a small arsenal of guns, entered the courtroom of Judge Harold Haley, where convict James McClain was facing murder charges in the death of a prison guard. Brandishing a gun, Jackson halted the proceedings and then armed McClain, after which they together armed two other convicts, who’d been called as witnesses in the case. Jackson and the three freed prisoners then took Judge Haley, the prosecutor and three female jurors hostage, bargaining chips in their effort to force the release from prison of older brother George Jackson, an armed robber who also was under indictment on murder charges in the death of another prison guard.

A career criminal turned Black Panther prison organizer, George Jackson was the author of “Soledad Brother,” a collection of his militant prison letters. The abductors fled with their hostages — Judge Haley now with a sawed-off shotgun taped under his chin, the others bound with piano wire — in a waiting van. They didn’t get far before reaching a police roadblock, where a shootout erupted, leaving Judge Haley, Jonathan Jackson and two other kidnappers dead, the prosecutor paralyzed for life and a juror wounded.

It was quickly established that Angela Davis had purchased at least two of the guns used in the deadly attack, including the shotgun that killed Judge Haley, which she had bought two days earlier and which was then sawed off. California law considered anyone complicit in commission of a crime a principal. As a result, Marin County Superior Judge Peter Smith charged Ms. Davis with “aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder” and issued an arrest warrant for her. Instead of surrendering for trial, Ms. Davis went into hiding. She was captured by the FBI almost three months later at a Howard Johnson motel on 10th Avenue in the heart of New York City.

Ms. Davis claimed that she was innocent, and her case became a cause celebre, as the international communist movement bankrolled her defense and organized a worldwide movement to “Free Angela.” Eventually, she was acquitted in 1972, despite her proven ownership of the murder weapons and a cache of letters she wrote to George Jackson in prison expressing her passionate romantic feelings for him and unambivalent solidarity with his commitment to political violence.

As in the O.J. Simpson trial, however, many remained convinced of the defendant’s guilt despite the jury’s verdict. Ms. Davis was acquitted, wrote author and ex-radical David Horowitz for his Front Page website, “in part because of the difficulty the prosecution had in establishing in court the real connections between Davis and Jackson, and in part because the jury was stacked with political sympathizers like Mary Timothy, an anti-Vietnam [War] activist,” who, according to Mr. Horowitz, would later become the “love interest” of Bettina Aptheker, a prominent Communist Party activist and organizer of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.

There is a further irony in the homage to Ms. Davis‘ “greatness” displayed for jurors in the D.C. Courthouse, the scene of people tried for actual crimes who might go to prison: Ms. Davis is these days a driving force in the prison-abolition movement and founder of a group called Critical Resistance, which is dedicated to smashing what she calls “the prison-industrial complex.”

Ms. Davis holds that any black serving a prison sentence in the United States is in reality a “political prisoner,” whatever offense they may have committed. In her lexicon, those convicted are only victims of “masked racism.” As she wrote in 1998, the poverty in which blacks are “ensconced” causes them to be “grouped together under the category ‘crime’ and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color.” The purpose of prison, in her eyes, is simply to “disappear” people who come from “poor, immigrant and racially marginalized communities.”

Ms. Davis imputes to the American ruling class what she terms “racial assumptions of criminality,” which enable the nation to lock up the innocent under a veneer of legality and “disappear the major social problems of our time.” As she explains, most people “have been tricked into believing in the efficacy of imprisonment,” even though “prisons do not work.” Ms. Davis envisions linking her struggle against this “complex” with other “strands of resistance” to build a new “powerful movement for social transformation.”

In the D.C. Courthouse, as juror selection takes place, lawyers for both sides daily strive to winnow out even subtle biases that could impinge on a jury’s impartial hearing of trial evidence. With her blanket dismissal of evidence as irrelevant in trials of (automatically innocent) minority defendants, Ms. Davis indicts the entire American legal system as a rigged farce.

Did it occur to anyone in the D.C. court system that honoring her for the benefit of its jury pools might send a mixed message?

While Ms. Davis proudly wore the badge of political prisoner, and applies it to any black person who is held in prison, even when she was awaiting trial she steadfastly backed the imprisonment of Soviet political dissidents, whom she called common criminals. When Russian tanks and troops intervened in Czechoslovakia in 1968, she proudly defended the Soviet invasion. Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told the AFL-CIO in 1975 that given her own campaign on behalf of her freedom, it was more than hypocritical for her to oppose an appeal made to her for freedom by Czech dissidents. Ms. Davis has denied the claim.

Is Angela Davis, one must ask the federally funded D.C. Courts, really the kind of person to honor in their halls of justice as an esteemed person of color for jurors in the nation’s capital to emulate and look up to?

She ain't no Rosa Parks

New Medicare Program

On a tip from Keith Grant

You're a sick senior citizen and the government says there is no nursing home available for you.

So what do you do?

Our plan gives anyone 65 years or older a gun and 4 bullets. You are allowed to shoot four Politicians.

Of course, this means you will be sent to prison where you will get three meals a day, a roof over your head, central heating, air conditioning, and all the health care you need!

Need new teeth? No problem. Need glasses? That’s great. Need a new hip, knees, kidney, lungs or heart? They’re all covered. As an added bonus, your kids can come and visit you as often as they do now.

And who will be paying for all of this? It’s the same government that just told you that they cannot afford for you to go into a home.

Plus, and because you are a prisoner, you don't have to pay any income taxes anymore.

Is this a great country or what?

New Medicare Program

Cough Drops-The Mandate (feat. Sandra Fluke)

Cough Drops-The Mandate (feat. Sandra Fluke)

Toto... we're not in Kansas anymore

Mitt finds the Yellow Brick Road in ruins at the hands of the evil King Obama. In November after he defeats him, the ROAD will be restored.

The Road "He" Traveled...

 Technically it's extremely well crafted bearing the same quality of a movie trailer. The underlining  subliminal theme is to blame Bush without mentioning his name. Which boils down to this: 

The 17-minute documentary was directed by Davis Guggenheim and will be released on March 15 at campaign field offices across the nation. It's a testament to Obama's unlimited resources and his close connection with the liberal elite in Hollywood exemplified by Saul Alin...I mean Tom Hanks providing the narrative most likely Pro bono. The trailer comes across in segments becoming a culmination of feigned heart stopping moments mixed with sound bites totally lacking in any real substance. Maybe that's what this trailer is trying to project... since what he has done to fix it, only made it worse.

Are we to believe Obama wrestled with the decision to kill Bin Laden?

BTW--  What if Bin Laden was discovered hiding in some cave in Afghanistan. Do you mean to tell me our military would have to get Obama's permission to kill him. What's he gonna say....no. 

Didn't we already go through this fiasco with Clinton? 

 Naturally all the relevant issues facing this country are going to be overlooked. Bet we won't here anything about the 16 trillion in debt in the full version. This entire trailer is so over the top it's laughable. 

...Is Paved By Liberals

On a tip from Ed Kilbane 

This despicable, vile, bottom feeding little piece of shit not only called her a "cu*t" and a "tw*at" he also taunts her for having a child with Down Syndrome!

Toto... we're not in Kansas anymore