Colin Powell Slams North Carolina Voting Law

Retired General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell like myself once considered himself to be a Republican.  But, like me, most of my extended family members and many others, Powell is repulsed by the agenda of today's Republican Party.   Especially its agenda of disenfranchising minority voters, particularly blacks.  One would think that the GOP has merged with the KKK.  A piece at Talking Points Memo looks at Colin Powell's slamming of North Carlina white supremacist favored voter ID law in the presence ot North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory who signed the vile legislation into law.  Here are highlights:

Colin Powell spoke out forcefully Thursday against a sweeping new voting law in North Carolina, arguing that Republicans should be courting minority voters rather than driving them away from the polls.

"I want to see policies that encourage every American to vote, not make it more difficult to vote," the former secretary of state said in a speech at Raleigh, N.C., according to The News & Observer. 
Powell added, "It immediately turns off a voting bloc the Republican Party needs. These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away."

Powell's remarks were even more notable given North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory's (R) presence at the CEO Forum in Raleigh.

McCrory (R) signed the voting bill — passed by the GOP-controlled legislature — with little fanfare earlier this month. The law, slated to take effect in 2016, will require government-issued photo IDs at the polls while shortening the early voting period in the state. Democrats and groups such as the NAACP and the ACLU have criticized the law for its punitive effects on minority and young voters.
Powell, who endorsed President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, has addressed his party's problems with minorities before. In January, he said that he still considers himself a Republican but acknowledged the presence of "a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party."

He revisited that theme in a big way on Thursday, arguing that measures like North Carolina's voting law punish minority voters.

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Pro-Gay States Luring Discriminated Couples to Relocate

Numerous posts on this blog have tracked research that underscores that a thriving gay community is one of the hallmarks of cities and localities that attract the so-called creative class.  Similar research has led to the formulation of a "gay index" which shows that a large population of gays correlates with high tech businesses.  States like Virginia and North Carolina go out of their way to make life intolerable for gays and have written anti-gay discrimination into their laws.  Now, as Bloomberg reports, gay friendly states are seeking to lure gays to relocate from their hostile home states and to bring their talents and assets to those gay friendly states.  Here are articles from Bloomberg:

Hans Bernhard and Mitch Null say they may leave North Carolina -- taking their daughter, their jobs as a veterinarian and an information technology business operations manager at Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) and the tax revenue from their properties.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act, the couple is considering moving to Maryland, where they could have a recognized marriage and guaranteed access to the related federal benefits. Bernhard could also become a lawful father to the couple’s 1-year-old daughter, Eva, since North Carolina law prevents residents from adopting a child if they aren’t married to the legal parent.

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia, making up 34 percent of gross domestic product, have legalized same-sex marriage, including Minnesota and Rhode Island, where laws took effect Aug. 1.

Bernhard and Null’s dilemma illustrates the economic benefits and consequences of a state’s same-sex marriage policy. Following the Supreme Court’s June 26 ruling, gay rights proponents and some economic development officials say states with gay-friendly laws can leverage them for financial gain, while those with prohibitive policies will miss out. 

The Supreme Court ruling will force some states to examine whether it’s worth losing out on talent and businesses that are attracted to areas that allow same-sex marriages, said Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management. Acceptance of gay communities signals cultural openness and attracts highly educated people and innovators, Florida wrote in his 2002 book “The Rise of the Creative Class.” 

Welcoming all people is necessary for states that want to “flourish economically and be an engine for innovation,” Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook Inc. and a native of Hickory, North Carolina, said in an e-mail. Hughes, now the editor-in-chief and publisher of the New Republic magazine, wrote an open letter to the North Carolina General Assembly in 2011 opposing the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. 

“Entrepreneurs are very careful when deciding where to start a company,” said Hughes, who now lives in Shokan, New York, with his husband Sean Eldridge. “Building a business in a state that denies basic rights to LGBT couples is difficult to justify to potential employees -- straight or gay.”

It all is actually common sense.  Not that common sense means much to lunatics like Cuccinelli and the hate merchants at The Family Foundation.

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North Carolina: GOP Extremism Unrestrained

If one wants to see what the GOP agenda for America, North Carolina offers a pretty good glimpse as a GOP controlled legislature and GOP governor run rampantly out of control and enact far right dream legislation that does everything from further restricting abortion to disenfranchising a significant percentage of voters.  Voters in Virginia would be wise to look southward to see what a GOP victory in Virginia in November would usher in.  A piece in the New York Times looks at what is happening in North Carolina - things that should have been foreseen by the cretins who either stayed home on election day or who stupidly believed GOP lies.  Anyone familiar with today's GOP base should have seen all of this coming.  Here are article excerpts:

When Pat McCrory, a Republican former mayor of Charlotte, was elected governor last year, he pledged to “bring this state together,” and to focus on bread-and-butter issues amid an ailing economy.

But with Republicans controlling all branches of the state government for the first time in more than a century, the legislature pushed through a wide range of conservative change. The Republicans not only cut taxes and business regulations, as many had expected, but also allowed stricter regulations on abortion clinics, ended teacher tenure, blocked the expansion of Medicaid, cut unemployment benefits, removed obstacles to the death penalty, allowed concealed guns in bars and restaurants, and mandated the teaching of cursive writing. 

Just this week, Mr. McCrory signed into law strict voter identification requirements, prohibiting same-day registration and cutting early voting.
Lawsuits have been filed — including one on Monday by the N.A.A.C.P. — and protests are taking place almost weekly in Raleigh, the capital, and other cities, leaving North Carolinians across the political spectrum worried that the state’s often-hailed political pragmatism may have given way to the ideological warfare of Washington. 

[I]n the 2010 elections, a cycle deeply unfavorable for Democrats nationwide, North Carolina Republicans won both houses of the legislature for the first time in a century. More critically, they also won control of redistricting. One year later, they drew districts guaranteeing safe seats for a Republican majority for years to come. 

In 2012, with Ms. Perdue’s late decision not to run again, Mr. McCrory won the governor’s office easily. Naming Mr. Pope as his budget director, he promised an agenda focused on economic growth, even pledging not to sign into law new restrictions on abortion. But Republicans in the legislature were not interested in half-measures. 

Doug Clark, a columnist for The News and Record of Greensboro, welcomed the partisan change, but he now sees the state’s Republican leadership as fostering “extreme partisanship and abuse of power.” He questioned why the legislature, after passing laws governing abortion, guns and voter identification, and frequently trying to exert control over issues traditionally left to local governments, never got around to passing the governor’s plan to overhaul job recruiting. 

While the number of North Carolina voters over all has risen since 2008, the number who are registered as either Republicans or Democrats has shrunk.  Unaffiliated voters now make up more than a quarter of the voting population. 

“Honest, I’m not much into North Carolina,” said Cyril Seacat, 78, who moved here decades ago to work in a Glen Raven-owned mill and was sitting in his truck outside a Walmart. “I don’t think they’re doing much of anything right.”

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Justice Ginsburg Reacts To Epidemic Of Voter Suppression Laws: Told You So

In the wake of the U. S. Supreme Court ruling striking down a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republicans in Texas and other states where they control the state legislatures are stampeding to enact voter ID laws aimed at disenfranchising minorities and to a lesser extent college students whom they see as more likely to be Democratic voters.  None of this should be a surprise and, indeed, it is precisely what Scalia, Alito and other conservatives on the Court - including Clarence "Uncle Tom" Thomas - wanted.  Justice Ginsburg forcefully dissented from the ruling and is now saying "I told you so."  Here are highlights from Think Progress:

“I didn’t want to be right,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says about her prediction that striking a key prong of the Voting Rights Act will lead to a wave of minority voter suppression, “but sadly I am.” In an interview with the Associated Press’ Mark Sherman, Ginsburg reiterated one of the core points of her dissent from the five Republican justices’ voting rights decision — “The notion that because the Voting Rights Act had been so tremendously effective we had to stop it didn’t make any sense to me,” Ginsburg said. “And one really could have predicted what was going to happen” once the law was struck down.

What has happened is a rush of voter suppression laws in states once subject to federal supervision under the provision gutted by Ginsburg’s Republican colleagues. Just two hours after the decision was announced, Texas’ attorney general announced that a common voter suppression law would take effect in Texas — and several other states are right behind Texas. In Arizona, Republicans want to redraw district lines to make them less “competitive,” now that federal supervision of the state’s redistricting has lifted. North Carolina Republicans are on the verge of enacting the worst voter suppression law in the country.

In her dissent, Ginsburg warned that “the evolution of voting discrimination into more subtle second-generation barriers is powerful evidence that a remedy as effective as preclearance remains vital to protect minority voting rights and prevent backsliding.” One month later, it’s already clear that Ginsburg was right.

The GOP only wants angry elderly, racist whites to be able to vote since increasingly that is all that remains in the GOP base.

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Weekly Protests Against Republican Extremism in North Carolina - Deja Vu for Virginia?

If Virginians want a glimpse of what a Cuccinelli/Jackson/Obenshain administration would look like - especially with the GOP controlling the House of Delegates - they need only look across the border to North Carolina where the North Carolina GOP is busy implementing a Christofascist/Tea Party agenda which is a wet dream for the extremists in today's Virginia GOP.  Programs for the poor and unemployed are being slashed, voter disenfranchisement and extreme restrictions on all abortions are the rule of the day.  The Daily Beast looks at how some North Carolinians are waking up to the nightmare that has swept North Carolina and taking to the streets in weekly protests.  I hope Virginians are watching and will not make the mistake of trusting the Virginia GOP with Virginia's future.  Here are story highlights:

The protests are called Moral Mondays, and are staged by a coalition led by the NAACP and other progressive groups to speak out against the Republican legislature that they say is working behind closed doors to push an extreme agenda.

But Moral Mondays have also attracted a grassroots collection of teachers and students, retirees, stay-at-home moms, and blue collar workers from across the political spectrum who told me Monday the same thing I heard from Tea Party protesters in 2009-- that they did not recognize the government representing them and that they were tired of doing nothing about it.

In a state that had come to be known as a swing state in the Deep South, which Barack Obama won in 2008 but lost narrowly in 2012, the first Republican legislature in more than 100 years has moved to cut funding for public education, unemployment and Medicaid; added new requirements and funding for voter-ID laws; eliminated the earned income tax credit and worked to loosen laws limiting fracking in the state.  Earlier this year, the legislature added major new restrictions to abortion services, first as a rider on a bill outlawing Sharia, and then as a clause on a motorcycle safety bill.

"We may not all agree on the issues, but the fact remains (the legislators) did not ask us.  It's like we don't matter," she said. "I guess they think we're all stupid and we're not seeing them and we're just going to sit back and not do anything, but I'm not sitting back."

Before the protests, the women went to Christian Faith Baptist Church, where the Rev. William Barber, the president of the North Carolina NAACP, led a training session on civil disobedience and instructed protestors on the finer points of getting arrested. But he also put the agenda of the North Carolina legislature, especially the new voter-ID laws, in what he saw as the context of history for his audience, which was mostly white.

"We know we are in a war for the ballot," he said."Raleigh is our Selma.The general assembly is our Edmond Pettus Bridge."

There's more that deserves a read.  What is happening is ugly, but then ugliness and greed and heartlessness are the norm in the GOP today.  Virginia soccer moms need to stop worrying about PTA meetings and childrens' sports teams and get out an vote against the GOP ticket here in Virginia if they want their children's schools to have future funding.

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GOP Voter Suppression Efforts Increasing in South

Perhaps realizing that their longs for a return of the Old South when blacks were chattel and obviously could not vote, Republicans in legislatures across the South are making frantic efforts to limit the ability of minorities and liberal leaning younger voters to vote.  Rather than facing the fact that what the are peddling is not wanted by more and more citizens, the GOP's last stand effort will be to limit voting to angry white Christofascists and Tea Party members.  It's disgusting to watch, but such is the nature of today's increasingly hideous GOP.  A column in Talking Points Memo looks at the phenomenon which is occurring here in Virginia.  Here are column excerpts:

In an era of declining white majorities in America, Southern Republicans in charge of state legislators are moving hard while they feel they still have the chance to clamp down on the right to vote and if at all possible restrict minority voting. Here’s the latest example. 

Republicans in the North Carolina state Senate introduced voter identification legislation Thursday that's even more restrictive than a version passed by the state House earlier this year, the Charlotte Observer reported.

The state Senate bill, which would take effect in the 2016 election, removed half of the forms of identification allowed under the state House's legislation, such as cards from the University of North Carolina system of colleges, state community colleges, local governments, private employers and law enforcement agencies. 

Under the proposal outlined by state Senate Republicans, seven types of government-issued identifications would be accepted, namely driver’s licenses, passports, non-driver IDs and military or veteran cards. The state's legislative session ends next week.

As is the norm and as occurred here in Virginia during the last session, the Republicans whine about voter fraud even thought there are almost no documents cases.  The seek to take away citizens' right to vote while fixing a problem that doesn't exist.  I ask again, when are GOP city and county committee meetings doing to start with white robes and hoods being passed out to all members (or will the members simply bring their own)?

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The GOP Fueled Driven Decline of North Carolina

The southern boundary of the Hampton Roads area is the North Carolina/Virginia border.  Indeed, my office is less than 25 miles from North Carolina and I've spent a great deal of time in the Outer Banks surfing.  Hence, I thought I knew the state.  Yet, since the Republican Party took control of the North Carolina legislature and governor's mansion, North Carolina has veered off into insanity.  One has to wonder how long it will be before its reputation as a moderate and pro-business state is destroyed by the GOP/Christofascist extremism.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the rapid decline of that state.  Here are excerpts:

Every Monday since April, thousands of North Carolina residents have gathered at the State Capitol to protest the grotesque damage that a new Republican majority has been doing to a tradition of caring for the least fortunate. Nearly 700 people have been arrested in the “Moral Monday” demonstrations, as they are known. But the bad news keeps on coming from the Legislature, and pretty soon a single day of the week may not be enough to contain the outrage.

In January, after the election of Pat McCrory as governor, Republicans took control of both the executive and legislative branches for the first time since Reconstruction. Since then, state government has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot. 

The cruelest decision by lawmakers went into effect last week: ending federal unemployment benefits for 70,000 residents. Another 100,000 will lose their checks in a few months. Those still receiving benefits will find that they have been cut by a third, to a maximum of $350 weekly from $535, and the length of time they can receive benefits has been slashed from 26 weeks to as few as 12 weeks.

At the same time, the state is also making it harder for future generations of workers to get jobs, cutting back sharply on spending for public schools. Though North Carolina has been growing rapidly, it is spending less on schools now than it did in 2007, ranking 46th in the nation in per-capita education dollars. Teacher pay is falling, 10,000 prekindergarten slots are scheduled to be removed, and even services to disabled children are being chopped. 

Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics. 

And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters.

North Carolina was once considered a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness. In a few short months, Republicans have begun to dismantle a reputation that took years to build. 

Two things strike me: (1) what the GOP is doing in North Carolina is a blue print of what the Virginia GOP wants to do in Virginia, and (2) while the GOP claims to be the party of Christian values, its actions are the antithesis to the Gospel message of Christ.

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North Carolina GOP: Anti-Sharia Bill and Extreme Abortion Restrictions

Republicans had not controlled the North Carolina legislature for 100+ years until recently.  Now, with the GOP in control, the flood gates for far right and Christofascist (a/k/a Christian Taliban) extremism and batshitery of all kinds have been opened.  Abortion, gay marriage and Sharia law are but a few of the North Carolina GOP's obsessions.  One can only wonder what is going to happen to the state's former pro-business atmosphere now that the culture wars seem to trump all else.  As Think Progress reports, an insane anti-Sharia law bill is being used to assault abortion rights as well.  Here are some story excerpts:

The North Carolina legislature is advancing a package of stringent abortion restrictions that appeared in the Senate this week without any public notice. The anti-abortion measures popped up on Tuesday night, tacked onto a controversial measure to ban Sharia law, and caught women’s health advocates completely off-guard.

House Bill 695, which would prohibit the recognition of Sharia law in family courts — an increasingly popular conservative tactic that essentially serves to demonize the Islamic faith — was slated for consideration in a Senate committee on Tuesday. As soon as that committee convened, it quickly approved several abortion-related amendments to the legislation. HB 695 now combines several different anti-abortion measures that were in different stages in the legislature into one omnibus measure.

The new amendments would prevent insurance plans on Obamacare’s health marketplaces from covering abortion services, ban “sex-selective” abortions, impose unnecessary restrictions on doctors administering the abortion pill to women, and require the state’s abortion clinics to adhere to complicated new regulations that would likely force most of them to close. 

As the News Observer reports, several supporters of the bill — like lobbyists and representatives from the N.C. Values Coalition, the N.C. Family Policy Council, and N.C. Right to Life — were present during the committee meeting when the new amendments were proposed. But the pro-choice lobbyists in opposition to the measure “were not told it was being debated.” A few hours after the committee agreed to tack on the amendments, Senate Republicans decided to bring HB 695 to a floor vote.

Women’s health advocates, who had no idea these measure would be taken up on Tuesday, denounced the last-minute legislative move. They pointed out that state lawmakers are attempting to avoid massive outcry by quietly sneaking through unpopular abortion restrictions right before a holiday weekend.

Now that the abortion amendments are folded into an entirely unrelated measure on Islamic law, some Republican lawmakers are already claiming that “a vote against the abortion restriction bill is vote for Sharia law.”

Even if North Carolina Republicans may have hoped to avoid mass protests against HB 695, activists in the state are already loudly voicing their disapproval with the GOP-controlled legislature. Over the past several weeks, thousands of people have been participating in a series of “Moral Monday” protests to stand up against ongoing conservative attacks on the poor, minorities, women, and the environment.

Attacks on the poor, minorities, women, and the environment.  That is today's GOP agenda.   And what makes it all so dripping with hypocrisy is that these "godly folk" wrap themselves in Christianity even as they betray virtually every aspect of Christ's Gospel message.

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