The Fight Goes On

Sometimes if we forget history we may be condemned to repeat it. Those of us who care about the protection of the civil rights of minorities, those of us who empathize when any of us is treated unfairly, those of us who CRINGED at Republican attempts in swing states to pass and implement laws in a clear attempt to suppress the African American and other minorities’ right to vote must ensure not only the maintenance of the 1965 Voting Rights Act but the expansion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act prevail.  

 

Thankfully, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was used by attorneys across the nation to fight these dastardly attempts at voter suppression.  The happy news is in most cases those who fought these unfair laws won. Not only did that law stop a suppression of the vote in our time it ensured an even larger minority turnout in 2012 than it did even in 2008.  Yes, thank God for the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

 

HOWEVER, understanding US history where its people of color are concerned is to be aware that discrimination on the basis of one's minority status did not end with the Civil War.  Indeed, it did not even end with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act mandating those states of the Confederacy stop Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and literacy tests which were meant to significantly undermine the most basic right of African Americans or any American, the right to vote.   We can see, though, even now that very necessary law is in danger of erosion.

 

The Supreme Court with its conservative five members has accepted a challenge to this all important law.  It is ironic that the Court accepted this case because of the vicious attempts by the Republican Party in this 2012 presidential election to do that which the Confederacy could not do and that is suppress the minority vote in northern so called swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and others in order to deny the nation's first African American president a second term and to ensure a win for the Republican Party of White’s pawn Mitt Romney.

 

A negation of the 1965 Civil Rights Act is unthinkable and MUST NOT happen.  I urge you to STRONGLY object to this ugly attempt by Republicans to subvert our democratic process.  Make your voice heard by any means necessary to ensure that the Supreme Court not only re-affirm the 1965 Voting Rights Act but EXPAND it to ensure ALL 50 states comply with it. 

 

Be VIGILANT, NEVER surrender and NEVER acquiesce to this evil attempt to deny any person his/her right to vote.  

 

Fall from Grace

Mr. Bruni of the NYT yet again offers a fabulously written opinion entitled "The Siren and the Spook" here and below. I shake my head in dismay that powerful men who could have had such a positive impact on national policy ruin their own legacies. The list is endless.  Some, too, never could have gotten away with now with what they did sexually in their time. Now we are a media soaked nation insatiable in its quest for the next big sex scandal. It is why the musical "Chicago" to me had so much appeal. It spoke the truth. One day's headline is tomorrow's trash then on to the next story. In several months the present one will be if not meaningless then forgotten.

When looking to assign blame, if one who has not sinned can be found to assign it, I place it at both participants' feet. I place it at the Director's feet for having the temerity to think he is above playing by the rules of fidelity in marriage making himself vulnerable to blackmail or worse if his location or travels through the emails is revealed to the enemy. I assign blame to Paula Broadwell because it appears she went to great lengths anonymously to harass a women she, perhaps, thought her rival. She is NOT an extension of former Director Petraeus and appears to have delusions of grandeur that she is. 

Paula Broadwell had no right to be near classified information nor should she be talking to a University of Colorado audience about what the CIA knew or did not know about the attack on the American Libyan embassy in Benghazi. Shame on both of them. They SHOULD have known better. Like man's symbolic fall from grace in Eden clearly they did not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/bruni-the-siren-and-the-spook.html?hp#h[PcsSbh,1]