Keeping Alabama from going back to the days of taxation without representation

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a brief to defend the Voting Rights Act against a constitutional challenge filed in Shelby (related to Dick?) County, Alabama.

LDF’s brief asks the District Court for the District of Columbia to deny Alabama’s motion for summary judgment –which seeks to have the Section 5 preclearance provision declared unconstitutional based on recycled arguments that have been rejected previously. Instead, LDF asks the court to grant its motion for summary judgment on the grounds that a detailed Congressional record demonstrates that ongoing discrimination remains pervasive in those states and jurisdictions around the country where Section 5 applies.

Yep, emboldened by their bloodbath,the red republicans from the reddest state in the union(aka the cradle of the Confederacy), are trying to get rid of them there gerrymandered districts even though ongoing discrimination remains pervasive in The Heart of Dixie. It's even more ironic this issue comes to the forefront at the same time jury selection begins in the Jimmy Lee Jackson murder trial, 45 years after the fact.

Jackson’s death on Feb. 26, 1965, became the catalyst a few days later for the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a major turning point in the civil rights movement and an event that helped bring about passage of one of the most important pieces of legislation in the nation’s history, the Voting Rights Act.
Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was black, is now a martyr of the movement. Highways in the Black Belt are named for him. He figures in history books on the era.

This is what happens when republicans win elections... one of the first things they do is try to go back to the states right to discriminate against minorities.

“Shelby County, Alabama is the latest challenge brought by opponents who seek to have a core provision of the Voting Rights Act declared unconstitutional based on arguments that have been soundly rejected. But, the facts speak for themselves. There is a long, detailed and thoroughly examined record that shows widespread and ongoing discrimination in many parts of the country,” said John Payton, LDF President and Director-Counsel.

In 2006, the City of Calera, which lies within Shelby County, enacted a discriminatory redistricting plan and failed to seek federal review of the plan as it is required to do under Section 5, leading to the loss of the city’s sole African-American councilman, Ernest Montgomery, who was the preferred candidate of African American voters. Eventually, through enforcement of Section 5, Calera was required to draw a nondiscriminatory redistricting plan and conduct another election in which Mr. Montgomery, one of the clients represented by LDF in this case, regained his seat. This result allowed Black voters to assert their preference at the ballot box.

The African American vote is a powerful voting block. Both parties realize they can't win elections without the African American vote, so is their plan to neutralize it's block voting strength?. The Voting Rights Act plays a central role in redistricting.

Redistricting will determine political representation for the decade to come, with political lines redrawn so that each district is roughly equal in population size based on the most recent census data. The maps that are produced must also comply with the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

“The Voting Rights Act plays a central role during the redistricting process. Therefore, it is important that historically under-represented communities be educated about the process to ensure that they do not have their voting strength diluted,” Clarke explained. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits minority vote dilution, providing that a voting practice is unlawful if it has a discriminatory effect. Section 2 also prohibits the enactment of redistricting plans (and other voting practices) that was adopted with a discriminatory purpose.

NAACP State President Earl Vaughn tried to tell y'all,

It’s been crazy,” said Vaughn, a Dothan resident and president of the Alabama chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I’m getting beat up pretty bad out there and I didn’t say what they said I said.”

Vaughn said national media reports indicating he wants Alabama’s Azalea Trail Maids kept from marching in the Inaugural Parade next week in Washington are inaccurate.

Vaughn said he believes some publications took a portion of a comment he made last week to the Montgomery Advertiser that changed the meaning of his statement.

In the Thursday, Jan. 8, edition of the Advertiser, Vaughn said he is disappointed no part of the African-American community, such as the marching bands from historically black schools Tuskegee or Alabama State, where chosen to represent Alabama along with the Trail Maids.

So did AL State Senator Hank Sanders
"Well, there's a certain mean spiritness that's out there, not only in Alabama but it's in America. And that makes this election extremely important."

Redeye tiptoeing away from the computer whistling Dixie...

Redeye's Tuesday Must Reads

There are two sides to every story and we finally get to hear Keith Olbermans side, not from MSM but via buzzflash.com

You should also know that I did not attempt to keep any of these political contributions secret; I knew they would be known to you and the rest of the public. I did not make them through a relative, friend, corporation, PAC, or any other intermediary, and I did not blame them on some kind of convenient 'mistake' by their recipients.

The South Shall Rise Again!

As the Democrats get clobbered time and again, I note how these successes remind me of he the Southern Strategy used to gain control of the Congress before the Civil War and how again they used it to almost win the Civil War.

Yep. Alabama's' own Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions fired the first shot when he made sure the Azalea Trail Maids were Alabama's only representative in the inaugural parade of the first African American President of the United States of America. When Alabama State NAACP VP Edward Vaughn, myself and others tried to sound the alarm, we were called racist and accused of attacking the "girls" and told to STFD and STFU.

Get over it. This is such a non-issue. No one see these girls as a representation of racism except those who get bent out of shape over trivial little matters.
Complete nonissue. It is pretty funny to see how much time and attention you have put into this.

Note, some of these same people complain media attention given to AL State Senator Hank Sanders' mad as hell robo call to DEMOCRATIC voters cost Lt. Governor Jim Folsom the election, and portrayed Alabama in a negative light. There is more than a whiff of hypocrisy.

CNN reaches a lot of people, even in Alabama. Folsom only lost to Kay Ivey by about 45,000 votes. There's no way to know how many people came out to vote for Folsom because they got the call vs. how many were motivated to vote against him because they heard about it, but I'd love to see what kind of movement Folsom and/or Ivey's internal polls showed between October 15th, when the calls hit Alabama answering machines, and Election Day.

The fix is in.

Hmmmm, sooooooo we just experienced a wave election fueled by anger in the electorate over the lack of jobs and feelings about the economy. YET it is now reported that the economy was showing these really positive signs of improvement for the last couple months - BUT news outlets like MSNBC sat on the numbers and only released them AFTER the elections, along with a glowing commentary encouraging people to be optimistic.
Don't sleep... The Hustler's are coming home to roost.

It’s funny but having the first black President has been a dual edged sword. On the one hand we have been given the boost to our pride of finally achieving the highest office in the land and that black folks have all the skills necessary to overcome centuries of racism and on the other hand we have a President who can barely use the word black in public for fear of agitating the racist who will be agitated no matter what he says.

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
--Thomas Jefferson

Peace be with you.

Say, have you seen my Democracy?

"Well, there's a certain mean spiritness that's out there, not only in Alabama but it's in America. And that makes this election extremely important." ~Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders (D)

While the righty's focused on Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders "racially charged language" in his mad as hell robo call to Alabama DEMOCRATIC voters, I can't get the above quote out of my mind.

This is what Sanders is talking about (emphasis mine):

Anderson Cooper didn't talk about it because he said hell. All the Alabama media didn't talk about it because he said hell. They talked about it because of the cotton fields / Jim Crow language. Are you really suggesting that the reporter omitted Folsom's denouncing of that racially charged language? Really?

Folsom didn't denounce it because he wanted to maximize black turn out. Explicitly disagreeing with Sanders would have hurt that goal. He was a coward for not saying the right thing (as was Sparks). I know lots of reporters are marginally aware of issues, but this one is pretty easy. State Senator says voting for certain people will cause blacks to go back to the cotton fields. He also said "hell." Hmmm.... I wonder which is more newsworthy!

Can't have them there black voters turning out, no sirree. They might want some equal rights or something. They might want equal access to quality public schools. They might get jobs they aren't qualified for because of the color of their skin. They might want to live in south Huntsville. They might become the President of the United States of America. They might want to play football at Alabama or Auburn. Oh wait, that's OK.

Here is another example of the mean spiritness and toxic discourse that has permeated modern political discourse;

with this post you have once again confirmed my thought that you are a raving lunatic and the only reason i come back to read your tinfoil hat claptrap is it's a wonderful barometer on the thought processes of the media matters left.

When did it become acceptable for civilized people to resort to name calling, personal attacks and insults when the substance of their arguments fail?

When did it become acceptable to attack the messenger and not the message?

When Adult Bullying become acceptable and, when did complaining about injustice become whining?

When did it become acceptable to ban/prosecute your fellow Americans from forums/blogs because they didn't agree with your political philosophy/candidate?

In Sweet Home Alabama the new republican majority said their first order of business will be to clean up Montgomery. What the hell does that mean? Never mind. We know.

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
--Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions Makes Alabama Proud

Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions makes Alabama proud! Not. Is anyone surprised Alabama Senator Sessions is leading the charge of the gop brigade attacking the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall?

It was Marshall who, with Howard Law School Dean Charles Hamilton Houston, his mentor, conceived and then painstakingly effectuated the jurisprudence that led to the striking down of the odious "separate but equal" doctrine that threatened to destroy this country. While many decry "activist judges" (by which they seem to mean judges who uphold civil rights for minorities and women), those judges who undermine civil rights often demonstrate the most extreme forms of activism. Judges such as those who declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was constitutionally sound turned the Constitution on its head and made a mockery of equal protection. Those activist judges subjected an entire segment of Americans to more than half a century of state-imposed degradation, subjugation and humiliation.

I'm not surprised, after all Beauregard threw the first salvo when he made sure The Azalea Trail Maids were the ONLY official representative from Alabama the Beautiful in the Inaugural parade of the first African American President. State NAACP President Eddie Vaughn tried to tell y'all....

MOBILE -- Katie Henson hopes when she and the other 49 Azalea Trail Maids stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue in their hoop dresses and matching bonnets that the nation sees them as they see themselves -- the embodiment of Southern hospitality.

For the president of the NAACP's Alabama chapter, though, 50 young women -- 39 of them white -- wearing costumes reminiscent of the time when slavery existed doesn't conjure up an image he thinks is fitting for the swearing-in of the nation's first black president, Barack Obama.

Some thought Mr. Vaughn and I were making a big deal out of nothing and accused of "attacking the young women" and told to SFTU because it was a "diverse group".

With all of the problems and challenges facing this country and President Obama, fifty Alabama women (including some African-American ones) marching in a parade wearing strange outfits and freezing their tusses off, is not high on my "to worry about" list.

Kathy said it best;

Mr. Vaughn has an undeniable point. When you see a single young woman, let alone fifty, as a neon-colored caricature of Miss Scarlett at the Barbecue, it calls to mind, well, Miss Scarlett at the Barbecue. I’m sure girls north of the Mason-Dixon line wore hoop skirts too—we’ve all seen Little Women—but the silhouette of the big ruffledy Barbie-cake skirt and parasol is forever linked in the American mind with the antebellum South. And not just any aspect of the South, but the sprawling, colonnaded white plantation house, where in the evening by the moonlight you can hear those darkies singing. And when we choose to present that as the single representative image for our state, it looks like we’re yearning to hear ‘em singing again. It just does, y’all.

Let's rewind to the Sonya Sotomayer confirmation hearing when Senator Sessions slammed her for not voting like other Puerto Ricans

This morning, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) castigated Sotomayor for not ruling with her fellow Puerto Rican colleague, conservative Judge José A. Cabranes, when she decided to deny an en banc appeal in Ricci v. DeStefano, a process in which all judges of a court hear a case (as opposed to a three-judge panel of them). Sessions seemed to indicate that people of the same ancestry should vote the same way:

Thought for the day;

I would pay good money to hear Sonia Sotomayor say, “Senator Sessions, I think it’s ironic to be facing these questions from a man whose judicial nomination was rejected by this very committee on the grounds that he’s a huge racist.”

Update Seriously, though, when the Republican Senate Conference was meeting, did nobody say "if we're going to oppose the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, maybe we shouldn't have a giant racist leading the charge?" This seems like a situation in which Mel Martinez might have been able to offer a useful perspective. Or they could have called up JC Watts out of retirement. What were they thinking?

Can you say circular firing squad?

But back to 1986. During the debate over his nomination, committee Democrats questioned Sessions' prosecutorial discretion, focusing in particular on a case he pursued against three Marion, AL civil rights workers--Albert Turner, Turner's wife Evelyn, and Spencer Hogue, Jr.--whom he accused of voter fraud. Sessions was unconcerned with claims of fraud outside the so-called Black Belt, but he alleged that the trio had falsified absentee ballots in Perry County during the 1984 election. After conducting an exhaustive investigation, though, he was able to account for only a small handful of questionable examples, and even those he couldn't pin on his defendants, who were acquitted after only a few hours' deliberation.

Of course none of this is mentioned in the MSM or by the Talking TeeVee Pundit Heads.
Senator Sessions was right (pun intended) on the money to question Elana Kagens qualifications, but he is dead wrong to use the confirmation hearings to call her a liar and to lead an attack on Thurgood Marshall.

Sessions is engaging in what the Supreme Court engages in, interpretation of the law based on an interpretation of the Constitution. He says it in a very self-assured way, in a way that says "I know I'm right" but that doesn't change the fact that the 2nd amendment is just as unclear as the 8th.

In Sessions' world it's only activism if he disagrees with it. I'm not a big Kagan fan, but the GOP is off the fucking rails.

What nelliah said;

This racist won't care what he says no matter how bigoted. His constituency will still elect him. That is the reason for this appointment. He will enable the other Republicans on the committee and Senate keep their hands clean. Sessions will do all the name calling innuendoing and bring up nothing but bullshit to muddy the debate. It will be easy for the Republicans to scream about what Sessions says even if is is unadulterated crap. They will have every argument they have used in the past; communist, pro-gay, pro-abortion pro-taxes, anti-religion. And many more wedge issues they are fixated on. Pitiful. Especially with the mild mannered wimps the Democrats have leading this Senate. If they once took the gloves off and said this is how it is going to be and used the reconciliation ploy as the Republicans did and only needed 51 votes I would croak! Especially for SCOTUS justice nominees.

Look away. Look away.