Suppressing votes has a long history in the United States. At the state and national level, suppression has traditionally focused on black voters and in the last 50 years or so, the main culprit has been the Republican Party. At the local level, Democrats have also used a series of arcane rules to disenfranchise black and minority voters who might challenge white hegemony. Our own Commonwealth has been no exception either, according to Keeping the Black Vote Down by Francis Fox Piven.
The devil is in the details. Imagine someone without your social capital trying to register to vote. Imagine someone without this amount of time. This video is on the long side, but I think it gives a good idea of how the actual process disenfranchises voters. Voter ID is not about stopping voter fraud; it’s about stopping voters.
Thanks. It’s more proof that Republicans, when given power, increase bureaucratic headaches and delays for the individual.
Look, since at least the 1960s (when I started paying attention to politics) the GOP has been about:
a) Big business
b) Greed
c) Keeping the down the riff-raff
d) Using the government to attain these ends
When the mainstream Democrats of 1968 belatedly rejected the racism of their members from the deep South, the GOP welcomed those racists with open arms — they fit right in.
The GOP destroys unions. The GOP destroys laws that protect workplace abuses, or refuses to enforce them. The GOP destroys laws that protect consumers, or refuses to enforce them. The GOP destroys laws that protect the environment, or refuses to enforce them. The GOP destroys laws that protect women, or refuses to enforce them. The GOP destroys laws that protect minorities, or refuses to enforce them.
The GOP has, during the Barack Obama presidency, come out of the closet to show America that it cares ONLY about Big Business, greed, and keeping down the “riff-raf” (meaning 95% of Americans). They are the schoolyard bullies who terrorize everybody else. While they have been more blatant, especially in the last few weeks, don’t kid yourselves — this is NOT new behavior.
The GOP is about plain old-fashioned domination. Always has been (at least for fifty years), always will be.
Is why the GOP is so popular: able to command large minorities or even on rare occasions majorities of voters to support their policies, which are essentially designed to benefit a few tens of thousands of people in a nation of over 300 million.
due to a lot of factors, of course. Nationally speaking, I question how popular the Republicans are. Their goals are opposed the the majority of American’s desires.
What has made the GOP a successful party, I think, is the simplicity of the GOP message, encapsulated in a simple narrative that resonates deeply with Americans’ perception of themselves and their country.
Democrats, by contrast, have a more complex message, lack the ability or will to encapsulate it in a simple narrative, and almost always fail at getting it to resonate to its fullest extent. Presdient (not candidate) Obama is a textbook case of failing to resonate with people.
The GOP is so popular today because we have become a society that embraces dogma over reality. Too many of us have lost the ability to analyze or think — so much so that too many of us no longer even recognize that this is a problem. We have become a society where a reliance on peer-reviewed science is, in the eyes of many, a “liberal” trait.
Al Gore laid this out compellingly in The Assault on Reason.
Come on, Tom, you must take a cruise on Gore’s infamously energy sucking boat which is hidden from the public somewhere down south.
Have you read The Assault on Reason? Beyond your knee-jerk, frequently repeated prejudices, do you have any actual criticism of the argument laid out there? Or is this just another case of churlishness masquerading as “balance”?
Edgar, you really ought to try actually reading something before you attack it.
The assault on reason is on full display in congress as we speak. There is nothing remotely rational about those who deny the consequences of default.
I don’t read hypocrites. It’s a prejudice that I gladly adhere to. As for you, KBusch, and your facile “not substantive,” did you ever wonder why your opinions are in the minority most of the time in this great country of ours? We shall see what happens next week in the court of public opinion.
Do come back when you have more to contribute than churlishness.
I often open a second browser window while composing a reply (in this case, to find and review the link to Al Gore’s book).
It appears to me that when I return to the comment, something about exiting and re-entering the page that contains the reply breaks the response mechanism. I hope we can fix this.
In both of my comments, I am quite certain that I clicked the correct “Reply” button. The nesting code is broken.
Can you replicate the error with only one browser window open? And, separately, can you reliably replicate the error with two windows open? This is the first I have heard of this bug, and it woud be helpful to get more details about it so that it can be squashed. Please email us at blue@vps28478.inmotionhosting.com. Thanks!
I believe the single-window case works, at least most of the time, so I’ll try the multiple window case.
I just clicked on the correct “reply” link.
Now, I’ll open another window … done.
Now, I’m back here … I’ll now try submitting the reply.
Of course. *lol*
I hate bugs like this. Oh well, you can delete this exchange if you like.
Perhaps others have had the same problem. The important point is that is appears to be solved, or at least to have gone into remission.
I can see that I’ve started this reply at the proper place, because the comment box is indented (Thank you!).
I notice that when the page reloads, the nesting level is lost and reply reverts to being a new comment. As you can see, this reply now appears at the wrong place (at least, it’s indent is now at the left margin).
It’s easy to replicate: start an indented reply, type some stuff, then hit the browser “reload” button — voila!
Whatever mechanism causes “reload” to break the indentation level may well also play a role in the problem I’ve been seeing. There may be shared code under the covers that is invoked by other events in addition to “reload”.
If nothing else, hitting reload probably should not “adjust” the indent level. 🙂
and as far as I know, you’re the only user experiencing this – the new “reply” feature is working great for me and for everyone else (who isn’t using Internet Explorer). Can you give us some more info on how you view BMG – browser, any special settings you use, etc. – so we can try to track this down? Free free to email me offline if you’d prefer.
I guess Opera is not a supported browser: when I click reply on Opera 11.5 running on Windows 7, I get a blank page. On Chrome it works and I even get a nice animation.