The other day I heard this song in a cafe and thought “it’s really sad they don’t make music like this any more”. Damn it made me feel old to know I’ve started thinking this way.
What makes you feel old?
Or talk about whatever.
by DougJ| 105 Comments
This post is in: Music, Open Threads
The other day I heard this song in a cafe and thought “it’s really sad they don’t make music like this any more”. Damn it made me feel old to know I’ve started thinking this way.
What makes you feel old?
Or talk about whatever.
by DougJ| 77 Comments
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights
I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.
I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, “I’m different.” If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand.
by Kay| 69 Comments
This post is in: Activist Judges!
Best to be on the side of access to voting
In the debate over the future of the Voting Rights Act , it sometimes becomes apparent that certain members of the Supreme Court are either oblivious to our nation’s recent history or willfully ignore it. Justice Antonin Scalia made this abundantly clear in his comments during the Feb. 27 oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder , statements that he repeated in a speech on April 15.
To Scalia, the Voting Rights Act — especially Section 5, which requires covered states to submit any changes in voting practices to the Justice Department or a Washington court for approval — is a “racial entitlement” and a violation of state sovereignty. In his view, it unfairly and unnecessarily treats seven Southern states, plus Alaska, Arizona and parts of six others, differently from states not covered by the act. This month, according to the Wall Street Journal, he called the act a form of “racial preferment” that affected only African Americans while ignoring the white population.
Such statements indicate that Scalia is woefully ignorant of the legislation’s history. Because of our nation’s painful legacy of racial injustice, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has often been used to safeguard black voters specifically, but its protections extend to all Americans regardless of skin color, as was vividly demonstrated in the period after its passage.Enactment of the Voting Rights Act also led to the abolition of the poll tax. So in May 1966, African Americans were able to vote freely for the first time in an off-year primary election. In Alabama, a Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Richmond Flowers, vigorously campaigned for black votes. The favorite to win in Alabama, however, was Flowers’s opponent, Lurleen Wallace, a stand-in for her husband, George, the gubernatorial incumbent who was ineligible to run because of term limits. A vote for the Wallace ticket would be a vote for segregation; George Wallace had been the scourge of the civil rights movement in Alabama and had actively incited racial hatred to obtain the support of white voters.
On Election Day, the turnout was extraordinary. In Selma, the polls opened at 8 a.m., but black voters started lining up hours before. In Birmingham, a blistering sun caused one older man to faint, but when an ambulance arrived, he refused to go to the hospital until he had cast his ballot. “This is the first time I’m voting,” he said. “It might be my last.”
For African Americans, the outcome was disappointing. Few had doubted that Wallace would win, but the size of her victory was what was truly surprising. And it was due, in part, to the Voting Rights Act.
Analysts later discovered that, while their projections had accounted for the historic enfranchisement of Alabama’s blacks, they had missed an equally important development: the even greater expansion of the white vote. By eliminating the literacy tests and other impediments such as the poll tax, the Voting Rights Act gave many poor whites the opportunity to register and cast ballots. A skillful get-out-the-vote campaign by Wallace’s staff added 110,000 new voters to the white majority, decreasing black influence even as the number of black voters grew. Nor was this phenomenon limited to Alabama. Throughout the South, many of the new registrants were white.
The act protects all voters, especially in the states and districts covered by Section 5, from any obstacles that might be put in their way. That was true in 1966 and remains true today as efforts to suppress the minority vote continue. Scalia needs to do his homework before the court determines the act’s future.
It’s always been a real easy choice to be on the liberal side re: voting. If you want a government that represents the country, you should be working to protect and improve laws and systems that allow and improve access for ALL voters. The other side, Scalia’s side, is really indefensible. That’s why conservatives have to make up elaborate fairy tales about voter impersonation fraud and “racial entitlement.” This voting rights rollback crusade they’re on isn’t about the mechanics of voting or what actually happens in elections in the US. It’s about some larger theoretical point involving validation of their cherished beliefs about “racial entitlement” and how they they have been wronged. It’s a horribly selfish position for a state actor like Scalia to take, and if he succeeds, I hope it comes back and bites his Party in the ass.
by DougJ| 113 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes
GOP daddies:
Republicans want to limit the number of bullets federal agencies can purchase so American gun owners can buy more.
Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe and Rep. Frank Lucas have introduced a bill that would prohibit every government agency — except the military — from buying more ammunition each month, than the monthly average it purchased from 2001 to 2009.
The lawmakers say the Obama administration is buying up exceedingly high levels of ammunition in an attempt to limit the number of bullets the American public have access to on the open marketplace….
Sounds crazy, but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords, you will find that this is something to Republicans’ complaints.
Anyway, both sides do it, remember all the crazy thing anonymous Daily Kos commenters said about Bush?
by DougJ| 120 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I took my car in for an oil change last Thursday before a long weekend trip. I noticed the next day that if I drove for a while, then stopped (say to get gas or lunch) for a short time, it had trouble starting. The key would turn and make a click, and the lights, radio, etc. would go on (so it’s not the battery), but the engine wouldn’t turn. Usually on the second or third try, it would start, but then after a long drive when I stopped for groceries, it took ten tries, then when I got home it wouldn’t start at all.
Then it started fine this morning, I drove it to the shop, and I checked and it would start again, but just barely.
What do you think might be causing this?
by $8 blue check mistermix| 22 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
As we have seen in recent weeks, OSHA’s ability to protect workers has severe limitations due to underfunding. In 1980, OSHA employed 2950 people. In 2006, it employed only 2092 people, despite the near doubling of the size of the workforce. The explosion at the West Fertilizer plant in Texas on April 17 that killed at least 14 people demonstrated the agency’s very real limitations. There are so few OSHA inspectors that it would take 129 years to inspect every workplace in the country at current staffing levels. Punishment for OSHA violations are often weak and employers have minimum fear that of any real punishment.
Between 2001 and 2011, OSHA has issued just four new health and safety standards; during this period, the agency has promulgated regulations at a far slower rate than during any other decade in the agency’s history.
One of the most consistent conservative memes has been that OSHA is a bunch of pointy-headed government bureaucrats who focus on niggling little details. Here’s a newspaper column from 1976, six years after OSHA was created, about President Ford’s 1976 campaign statement that he’d want to throw OSHA “into the ocean”. It’s been a 40 year Republican/corporate effort to keep this part of the beast on life support, and West, Texas is just one of the many success stories that have been left along the way.
This post is in: Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republican Venality, Midnight Confessions
Dave Weigel used this clip recently, in an entirely different context, and inspired in me a fierce bout of the-opposite-of-nostalgia. I was one of those deluded Dukakis voters (I may have been one of the three women in America who though Mike was sexy) who believed America was ready for a grown-up president after eight years of Republican fairytales, juvenile cruelty and senile dementia.
When the reported vote totals started coming in on the tv (no internet for commoners, in those days) I told my politically-minded friends that I suspected Lee Atwater and his fellow ratfckers had somehow gamed just enough electronic voting systems to guarantee themselves the win that all the exit polling was denying. They, of course, rejected my whole premise as bootless conspiracy theorizing — the technology to do so simply didn’t exist, I was told. And besides, this was America, where such a wildeyed scheme of treason would surely be exposed as soon as more than the tiniest cadre of true believers heard about it. Look at Watergate!
We sure have come a long way in these past twenty-five years, haven’t we?