arin's attic | tagged as: politics

Tagged as: politics

good news on the voting rights act!

i’m a bit late with this, but i’ve had a bunch of stuff going on lately, so…

previously, i posted about a supreme court case that could again limit provisions of the voting rights act, which were meant to protect the voting rights of minorities and end racial inequality in government representation.

there is good news...

The court, with only one justice in dissent, avoided the major questions raised over the federal government’s most powerful tool to prevent discriminatory voting changes since the mid-1960s.

The law requires all or parts of 16 states, mainly in the South, with a history of discrimination in voting to get approval in advance of making changes in the way elections are conducted.

The court said that the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 in Austin, Texas, can apply to opt out of the advance approval requirement, reversing a lower federal court that found it could not. The district would appear to meet the requirements to bail out, although the court did not pass judgment today on that point.

the lone dissenter, one does wonder what planet clarence thomas lives on…

Justice Clarence Thomas, alone among his colleagues, said he would have resolved the case and held that the provision, known as Section 5, is unconstitutional.

“The violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains,” Thomas said.

right. DO NOT LOOK AT THE INTIMIDATION OR SUPPRESSION!! IT DOESN’T EXIST. srsly. nothing to see, move along.

in further good news:

Matt Angle, founder of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic group, and a redistricting expert, said the decision ensures that any redistricting plan adopted by the Texas Legislature will have to win advance approval from a Justice Department administered by the Obama administration.

In contrast, Republican political appointees in George W. Bush’s Justice Department in 2003 overruled career staffers who believed that the Republican-drawn Texas redistricting plan discriminated against minorities.

“This is the first time since the Voting Rights Act passed that you have a Justice Department administered by a Democrat reviewing redistricting plans,” Angle said.

perhaps texas can finally fix the fiasco of the republican-drawn redistricting lines. yeehaw :D

Blogged, Current Events, Politics, Texas, Comments (0)
Tagged as: texas,politics,voting July 07, 2009 @ 09:35 am

cool links on a ~hot~ day

nearing 100F again today with humidity around 77%. you could take a bite out of the air, but you’d need to blow on it first to cool it off enough. me, i’m stayin’ inside where it’s ~cool~, lest i spontaneously combust.

anyways, mah collection of neat links for the week:

100+ alternative search engines you should know - (there’ll be a test later.)

50 free resources that will improve your writing skills - (i kin tipe n speel jes’ fine, kthx.)

30 calorie peanut butter - (lick off the spoon? more like leave a spoonful and lick out the jar.)

and to close it out, a coupla ~neat videos~. stoned cats and bill maher, what more could you want?

dude. wait. whut?

“we don’t have a left and a right party… we have a center-right party and a crazy party. over the past 30 years, democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital.” - bill maher

Blogged, Life, Lists, Just for Fun, humor, videos, Current Events, Politics, Tech, Writing, Comments (2)
Tagged as: humor,politics,food,writing,links,lists,webdesign July 03, 2009 @ 02:31 pm

reaganesque tax troubles to hit millions

from U.S. gives too much, but IRS will get it back:

WASHINGTON — Millions of Americans enjoying their small windfall from President Barack Obama’s “Making Work Pay” tax credit are in for an unpleasant surprise next spring.

The government is going to want some of that money back.

The tax credit is supposed to provide up to $400 to individuals and $800 to married couples as part of the massive economic recovery package enacted in February. Most workers started receiving the credit through small increases in their paychecks in the past month.

But new tax withholding tables issued by the IRS could cause millions of taxpayers to get hundreds of dollars more than they are entitled to under the credit, money that will have to be repaid at tax time.

At-risk taxpayers include a broad swath of the public: married couples in which both spouses work; workers with more than one job; retirees who have federal income taxes withheld from their pension payments and Social Security recipients with jobs that provide taxable income.

The Internal Revenue Service acknowledges problems with the withholding tables but has done little to warn average taxpayers.

the same thing happened during the 80s. reagan lauded his “tax cuts” which left more money in taxpayer’s pockets, yet when tax time rolled around, people found out that not enough taxes had been withdrawn from their paychecks to cover what was due to the irs - nasty, nasty surprise for many people. of course, it only affects those who can least afford to pay it at the end of the year, and srsly, who cares about those folks, right?

this is more of that “change we can believe in” - a return to reaganomics.

Blogged, Current Events, Politics, Comments (0)
Tagged as: politics,news,obama,taxes May 19, 2009 @ 09:06 am

dismantling voting rights, one case at a time

in a previous decision this year, the supreme court chose to limit the voting rights act, “ruling that provisions aimed at maintaining black and Hispanic influence at the polling place don’t apply in districts that are less than half minority.”

just a couple of months later, the supreme court could again limit provisions of the act, which was meant to protect the voting rights of minorities and end racial inequality in government representation.

Will the Supreme Court kill the Voting Rights Act?:

The case is Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District #1 v. Holder—shortened to NAMUDNO—and represents the most serious challenge to the act to date, and has become a lightning rod for debate over the role of race and racism in U.S. politics today.

The case started in 2006, when a largely white and wealthy utility district in Travis County, Texas argued that it should be excepted from Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that a handful of states and counties—mostly in the South—must “preclear” any changes to voting procedures with the Department of Justice before they’re implemented.

Section 5 has been battled by conservatives, especially in the South, ever since. The 1966 case South Carolina v. Katzenbach went all the way to the Supreme Court, which affirmed that, while certainly a heavy-handed approach, Congressional action was needed to enforce the Constitution’s 15th Amendment protections against racially-biased voting laws.

The original NAMUDNO complaint made two distinct legal arguments: First, that the Texas district should have the right to “bail out” from the Section 5’s preclearance provision; and second, failing that, the entirety of Section 5 should be struck down as unconstitutional.

It was an odd place for Section 5’s biggest threat to originate. For example, the utility districts’ central claim is that complying with Section 5 is too “burdensome”—even though it has only cost the district about $233 a year. In contrast, last month the attorney generals of six states which face far greater “burdens” in complying with the Act—Arizona, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York and North Carolina—filed an amicus brief arguing that “the burdens imposed by Section 5 on covered jurisdictions are not onerous.”

But whatever its strange origins, NAMUDNO could be fatal to Section 5. The case is structured as an all-or-nothing—as election law guru Richard Hasen points out in Slate:

What’s especially worrying about NAMUDNO is that the case does not provide the court with an easy incremental way out: If a majority of the justices want to side with the challengers to the Voting Rights Act, there’s not much they can do short of holding the act as broadly unconstitutional.

And given the inclinations of the current Supreme Court, a complete take-down of Section 5 is a distinct possibility. As a Reagan lawyer in 1982, now-Chief Justice John Roberts spearheaded an effort to prevent expansion of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court’s Hostility to the Voting Rights Act:

Blogged, Current Events, Politics, Comments (0)
Tagged as: politics,racism,conservatives,voting May 14, 2009 @ 11:44 am

from reddit: an anti-interracial marriage psa parody

This parody takes an anti-gay marriage advertisement by NOM and replaces “gay” with “interracial” to make obvious the underlying prejudice. All of the original audio has been replaced. The voices are those of anonymous users of a social networking site who submitted their voice recordings to another user who mixed and edited them together.

Denying rights and freedoms to any specific group is equated with hate and racism. Work to create a world where every person is guaranteed the same rights, no matter what their race, belief, or lifestyle.