Taking away Civil Rights?

[khirkhib]

I'm with Badnarik on this one.  Bush has taken civil right away from everyone.  Jeb has taken civil rights away from Blacks in florida.

[khirkhib]

I borrowed this from kid oakland at the DailyKos.  I think it fairly explains my view on the matter.

Sun Oct 24th, 2004 at 16:21:23 GMT

The GOP has a problem.
While they can keep their ads, their stump speeches, and their campaign rhetoric just "this side" of the dividing line between what is acceptable and what isn't in our public discourse. While they always seem to have that one "face of color" at their rallies, on their website and in their ads. While George Bush professes to be a tolerant man, and he may be...

their henchman and goons at the local level don't really "get this"....the Karen Hughes memo about "hiding the hate" behind a wall of lies and code words is lost on them.  In a word, not only do local GOP spokespeople sometimes let slip a little racism the GOP rather they wouldn't, some of them are just a bit dense to boot....

Diaries :: kid oakland's diary ::

If you think that's harsh take this single quote from yesterday's NYT article on voter intimidation efforts in Ohio:


"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters - I call them ringers - have created these problems," said James P. Trakas, a Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County.
Here's what I take from this:


Trakas is talking about challenging Black voters under the guise of attacking "the organized left."  This is an old segregationist trick.


Trakas is saying that these voters have been "quote unquote" registered.   He wants to conjure visions of corruption, of illegitimacy, illegality, of dirty tricks.  What that does it make it easier for his supporters and the public to countenance what the GOP is really doing...interfering with the civil rights of Black voters in precincts across Ohio.


Now, Mr. Trakas calls these voters "ringers."  Ringers.  Why would he choose that term?  Why would he proudly say, as if he and his buddies had an in-joke, "I call them ringers."  Think about it.  Listen to it again...say it to yourself....ringers.

So, just to sum this up, according to Rep. James Trakas, GOP co-Chairman of Cuyahoga County:


There are some 'ringers' who are 'quote / unquote' voters, 'causing some problems' in Cleveland.
clear enough yet?

They can't hide the hate It seeps out of every pore.  I call it racism.  Pure, simple, old school.  It's not even really hidden once you listen for it, and if you pair it with what they intend to do, it's crystal clear.  And, if  you doubt this, trust me, everyone Mr. Trakas wanted to get that message in Cleveland...white and Black...got that message. 

James Trakas is just Bull Connor with a GOP membership card.

i. new eyes

I did a some GOTV yesterday.  In downtown Oakland.  We had run out of Nevada scripts at the office, so I called my hometown voters and encouraged them to early vote for our Congresswoman Barbara Lee.  I sat in a room with about ten folding tables that looked like any other Democratic office around the country...Halloween candy in a plastic pumpkin, giant dry erase posters on the wall, bad flourescent lighting...the works.  The only thing different from doing calling like I've been doing in Berkeley lately...was that many of my compatriots were African American women...the woman supervising me was an African American woman....the voters I was calling were predominantly Black.  It's Oakland. It's like that.

Of course, three miles away at Berkeley GOTV....it's been pretty much a 'white affair' and that includes yours truly....and, for whatever reasons, it's like that in Berkeley too.  And it's been that way.  What am I trying to say with this? That's racism too.  And it hurts us.  And I feel that it hurts our cause.  And I think in order to combat the hate I'm trying to talk about, we need to be honest and straight up with ourselves. White Democrats need to see voter intimidation through new eyes, and "we" won't do that sitting around with a bunch of other white folks.  When I reread that piece from the New York Times last night after doing GOTV, I read that line with new eyes.....it just hit me harder...both the words and what the GOP is trying to do.

You see, we all know that "Jim Crow" Trakas is not going to do sh**t to stop people who look like me from voting.  We all know that "Jim Crow" Trakas wouldn't hesitate to be nice to me if I walked up to him dressed in a business suit.  We all know that "Jim Crow" Trakas wasn't trying to intimidate me when he ran his mouth about "quote unquote" voters....about....ringers causing trouble....because, you see, I happen to look almost exactly like Jim Crow Trakas, and because of that, he'd never call me a ringer or try to stop me from voting, hell, he'd probably buy me a beer if we were rooting for the same football team.

Not so for my brothers and sisters at Oakland GOTV.  Not so for millions of Black Americans who deal with this sh**t on a daily basis.  Code words.  Slights.  Hostility.  Failed promotions.  Glass ceilings.  Glares.  Attitude.  Prejudice.  Racism.  And this year: an organized Republican campaign to systematically challenge their right to vote at the polling places in their neighborhoods.

Through intimidation.  Through delays.  Through 'name calling'.  Through code speak.  Through the implication that a Black voter is just a "quote unquote" kind of voter...a ringer.

And this has been going on forever.  The only thing new is that after Florida 2000 a few more people started paying attention.  After Gore lost because of this kind of sh**t, a few more people are looking at these kind of tactics with new eyes.

ii. what to do

So, now, the hard part.  What to do about it?  I think alot of things.


we need to call racism for what it is

we Democrats need to come together more and break down some of the barriers we keep between us

our leadership, this year, needs to address the voter suppression explicitly as a "civil rights" issue.

we in the blogosphere need to be clear and call "racism" on this sh**t.   Rep. James Trakas is just one of many: let's hold feet to the fire.
But, to be frank, these are proposals that we can only start to work on, there's not alot of time before this election.  Is there anything more concrete that we or the campaign could do?  I think so.

#1: Bill Clinton:   I'd like to hear former President Bill Clinton address this issue on Monday.  In his own words, in his own way....I really feel a need to hear Bill Clinton talk very specifically to these attempts to suppress and intimidate the Black vote. 

#2: John Edwards:  I think John Edwards needs to take up this issue big time.  Right now.  He needs to break out of stump mode and talk about this head on...really be a point person.

And he needs to speak to two constituencies:


Black voters who need to know that this Democratic ticket will not let them down and will fight for every voter this election and forward.

white voters, especially moderate and independent voters who are sick of the "code" word racism that divides our nation and, frankly, embarassed to be associated with folks like James Trakas.

#3:  us   On our part,  I think we need to call out James Trakas.  We need to call him out for what he is.  Bull Connor for 2004.
I think we need do some research, talk to folks in Cleveland...and find out the skinny.  We need to make him and the GOP pay a political price for allowing hatred and racism to be used in our politics this way.   We need to tell the country that for all this  talk of law and order.....what James Trakas and the GOP really want to do is to suppress the Black vote. 

We need to make James Trakas the poster boy for everything that is wrong about how the GOP is intimidating voters this year.  In a word, we need to raise hell.

iii. justice versus hate

I have written before that all things are political.  I think we have to play it that way, carefully...looking to both the core ideal of justice and our immediate electoral goals...and very forcefully and strategically fighting for both.  But this issue is personal for me.  I grew up in a white family on a block with mostly Black families in the 1970's.  The neighbor who gave me popsicles in the summer when I was a child was someone who not many years earlier couldn't vote in her home state.  The parents of my friends and playmates grew up under segregation and Jim Crow.  I'm 35 years old.

It may not occur to many white folks, but it is not lost at all in the Black community, that many of the "grandmothers" and "uncles" and "aunts" who are having their vote "questioned" in Ohio this year, grew up under Jim Crow in the South. And the grandchildren: the young man who signed up at the shopping mall, the young woman who registered ouside her school....did anyone think in 1964 that the grandchildren would still be facing this sh**t? That America would still not quite stand up for the principle of "one person, one vote" if that person happened to be Black?

What the Republicans are trying to do in Ohio, what they did in Florida isn't new....it's the same old, same old....and not so long ago it was the law of the land in the South, and de facto, elsewhere.  The right to vote is not just a poll number...it's not just another election year cause....it's a moral yardstick that we are measured on.

Once upon a time, civil rights and justice were  beacons that illuminated our nation and brought Black and white together.  Maybe it's time for that beacon to shine.  Maybe it's time for Democrats to open our eyes...and stand side by side again.

In 2004, it's not too late to say....never again.

One person, one vote. Fight the hate.

[khirkhib]

The Dixiecrats.  The part of the party that the Democrats seperated from.  The dixiecrat tradition is alive and well in the Republican party.

[khirkhib]

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1366

This is most easily seen through the career of Strom Thurmond
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Yes I do and I believe hisotry agrees with me.
The Dixiecrats were members of the States' Rights Democratic Party, which splintered from the Democratic Party in 1948. 

The faction consisted of malcontented southern delegates to the Democratic Party who protested the insertion of a civil rights plank in the party platform and U.S. president Harry S. Truman's advocacy of that plank. Before the convention southern delegates were dismayed by Truman's 1948 executive order to desegregate the armed forces. With that backdrop many southern delegates were already concerned as they headed to the 1948 Democratic convention.

When the Democratic national convention convened in July 1948, some Alabama and Mississippi delegates were prepared to walk out of the convention if the civil rights platform passed. When it did, all of the Mississippi delegates and half of the Alabama delegates stormed out of the convention. On July 17, 1948, the Alabama and Mississippi delegations, and a few individual delegates from other southern states, met in Birmingham, Alabama, to select a presidential ticket to oppose the Democrats. The Dixiecrats chose South Carolina's governor, Strom Thurmond, for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president.

The goal of the Dixiecrats was twofold. First, the splinter party hoped to deny both the Democrats and Republicans a majority in the electoral college, forcing the election into the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Second, Dixiecrat leaders maneuvered to have the Thurmond-Wright ticket declared the "official" Democratic Party ticket on the ballots of all southern states. In the end this ploy succeeded only in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, all Deep South states. Georgia was the lone Deep South state to remain loyal to the national Democratic Party; the Dixiecrat ticket appeared on Georgia ballots as a third party.

On election day 1948, the Dixiecrats won Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina but failed to win any state in which Thurmond appeared as a third-party candidate. In Georgia, Thurmond came in a distant second to Truman. A closer analysis of the Dixiecrat phenomenon revealed an interesting pattern: the Dixiecrats were most successful in the states and counties where black citizens were the most numerous. The Deep South states boasted the largest black populations, and white voters in those states were the most determined to preserve racial segregation and black disfranchisement, and thus were more likely to vote for the Dixiecrat ticket. A similar trend is evident in county-level election returns, in which Thurmond was more likely to win counties where black populations were large and white voters feared racial change. In the border South, where blacks were less abundant and white voters were less preoccupied with segregation, support for the Dixiecrat candidates was negligible.

Although the Dixiecrats immediately dissolved after the 1948 election, their impact lasted much longer. Many white voters who initially cast Dixiecrat ballots gravitated back toward the Democratic Party only grudgingly, and they remained nominal Democrats at best. Ultimately, the Dixiecrat movement paved the way for the rise of the modern Republican Party in the South. Many former Dixiecrat supporters eventually became Republicans, as was highlighted by Strom Thurmond's conversion in the 1960s.

[khirkhib]

George Wallace.  He was a democrat at that time in the hateful segrigationist spirit of the Democrats of the south.  The whole reason why their was the split from the dixiecrats.  I don't need to appologize for every Democrat that did something wrong.  I don't hold you responsible for the actions of David Duke. 

Look the Democratic party has plenty of skeletons in its closet.  I'm a Roman Catholic and my church has done horrible things but that does not negate what it is trying to do now or the spirit that tries to move the church.  You have to accept the good with the bad and do what you can to make the world a better place.

On the issue of Bush I was more specifcally speaking about the 1000s of African Americans that Jeb Bush unjustly purged from the eligible voter list and tried to keep secret even when he knew there were flaws in the list.  Sure the Patriot Act is important but I also feel that it does have flaws specifically on spying on law abiding citizens.  I don't know much about the Patriot Act though.  A libertarian on this site may be betterarmed to tell you about it.

And I check the DailyKos shankbear, And I read the drudge report and I Look for information all over the internet.  That is what it is here for.  I generally reference things to the source but in this case I thought the letter expressed some good points on voter supression.  I'm sorry if I offended your delicate sensibilities but I would appreciate it if you did not call me crazy.  I try to be respectful and put good arguements together on this site.  Too often they are ignored or I'm belittled because of them but if you don't want to hear opinions from the other side of the arguement and if you don't want to engage in civil political discourse than you should problem use a differenet board.