The U.S. Department of Justice will block the voter ID provisions of an election law passed in South Carolina earlier this year because the state's own statistics demonstrated that the photo identification requirement would have a much greater impact on non-white residents, DOJ said in a letter to the state on Friday. [...]Because Justice Department lawyers reached the conclusion that South Carolina's voter ID law would have the effect of suppressing minority voter turnout, they found it was unnecessary to examine whether that was the intent of the legislators who voted for the law.
This is huge news for a number of reasons. First, obviously, because of the direct impact in South Carolina. Unless the state files suit or there is other arrangement with the Justice Department, those voter ID requirements are now dead. (And yes, they may file suit. We're talking about a state and a party that is very, very intent on disenfranchising as many voters as possible before the 2012 elections.)
Second, it finally shows a bit of movement on the part of the Justice Department in fighting these ridiculous new laws clearly targeted against poor and minority voters. There are eleven other states that have passed similar voter ID restrictions; we can only hope that this is the first of a series of actions.
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Hey Republicans, here's some of that election fraud you've been looking for.
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Brent Bozell On Fox News: Barack Obama Looks Like A Skinny Ghetto Crackhead
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Rod Parsley: Satan Cooked The Books!
Not only is John Boehner not good at winning, he's not good at losing either.
During his concession speech yesterday, he said a few things which may come back to haunt the Republicans next fall.
You know, sometimes, it's hard to do the right thing. And sometimes it's politically difficult to do the right thing. But, you know, when everybody called for a one year extension of the payroll tax deduction, when everybody wanted a full year of extended unemployment benefits we were here fighting for the right things. May not have been the politically the smartest thing in the world, but let me tell you what. I think our members waged a good fight. [...]
If you can get this fixed, why not uh, why not do the right thing for the American people – even though it's not exactly what we want?
Boehner is obviously implying that the right thing to do would have been a 1-year-extension, and he's right, but here's the thing — the Democrats, including President Obama himself, called for a 1-year-extension as early as September.
The Republicans refused a 1-year-extension unless all sorts of other awful shit was included in the bill, so what the Democrats settled on instead was a compromise brokered by Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell which included a short-term, 2-month-extension.
Fortunately, John Boehner's failure was so complete, so absolute, that no one seems to be taking his victimhood routine seriously.
Oil from an offshore spill has spread roughly 100 nautical miles after a leak occurred while loading a tanker, a Nigerian official said Thursday. Royal Dutch Shell shut down a deep-water oil field off Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta on Tuesday. Peter Idabor, the head of the country's oil spill management agency, said the offshore oil spill is likely the worst in a decade.
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Occupy Albany Ends After Brutal Police Assault
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US Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have failed to qualify for the party's Virginia primary election, local media reported early Saturday.
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Josh Brown: Dear Jamie Dimon
"...it hates people who have been bailed out and don't display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath."
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Global warming hates a white christmas.
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Here is some very weird new holiday ad from loathed Kochgobbler Scott Walker. He is serving at a soup kitchen with his family and, you know, trying to make "getting along" faces at the invisible off-camera poors while his wife plaintively begs Wisconsin to "put our differences aside" and "move forward together" instead of focusing on all this silly old recall business, for peace. We're guessing it's his wife who has to do the talking because of the dripping sarcasm in Walker's voice you normally hear every time he opens his mealy mouth about "struggling" families? READ MORE »
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