Civil & Human Rights

Budget’s almost done, what mischief can we expect? Plenty!

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Cross posted from the Arizona Eagletarian

By no means will it be a slam dunk getting Gov. Brewer to sign the FY2015 budget that is all but finalized by the legislature, extra $900,000 gift to the private prison industrial complex notwithstanding.

Scuttlebutt at the capitol has it that Senate President Biggs and Brewer may have a deal anyway, with Biggs possibly undoing some of the changes made by the House last week. What the bills will actually say by the time they are delivered to Brewer is still anyone’s guess, however.

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GOP war on voting: a strategy for voter suppression

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A big investigative piece in the New York Times today by Steve Yaccino and Lizette Alvarez, Measures by G.O.P. Aim to Limit Voting in Swing States:

Voting-RightsPivotal swing states under Republican control are embracing significant new electoral restrictions on registering and voting that go beyond the voter identification requirements that have caused fierce partisan brawls.

The bills, laws and administrative rules — some of them tried before — shake up fundamental components of state election systems, including the days and times polls are open and the locations where people vote.

Republicans in Ohio and Wisconsin this winter pushed through measures limiting the time polls are open, in particular cutting into weekend voting favored by low-income voters and blacks, who sometimes caravan from churches to polls on the Sunday before election.

Democrats in North Carolina are scrambling to fight back against the nation’s most restrictive voting laws, passed by Republicans there last year. The measures, taken together, sharply reduce the number of early voting days and establish rules that make it more difficult for people to register to vote, cast provisional ballots or, in a few cases, vote absentee.

In all, nine states have passed measures making it harder to vote since the beginning of 2013. Most have to do with voter ID laws. Other states are considering mandating proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or a passport, after a federal court judge recently upheld such laws passed in Arizona and Kansas. Because many poor people do not have either and because documents can take time and money to obtain, Democrats say the ruling makes it far more difficult for people to register.

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Appeal filed in Arizona proof-of-citizenship voter registration case

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Voting rights groups filed an appeal on Friday from the order of a judge of the U.S. District Court for Kansas,  ordering federal election officials to help Kansas and Arizona enforce state laws requiring new voters to provide documentation proving their U.S. citizenship. Voter rights groups appeal Kan. citizenship ruling – Salon.com:

Screenshot-15A court filing sent to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals challenges a ruling earlier this month by U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren in Wichita. Melgren had ordered the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to immediately modify a national voter registration form to add special instructions requiring proof of citizenship for Kansas and Arizona residents.

The appeal was filed by more than a dozen voting rights groups and individuals who had earlier intervened in the case on behalf of the election commission. They include the League of Women Voters of the United States, Project Vote Inc., Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Common Cause, Arizona Advocacy Network, League of United Latin American Citizens Arizona, Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, Chicanos Por La Causa and others.

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“Hey, Conservative Trolls, Its More Complicated Than That!”

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By Tom Prezelski

Re-blogged from Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

michael_and_cesar_chavezWe have been hearing about a forthcoming Cesar Chavez biopic since at least the 1990s, when an El Vez lyric plugged a rumored project by Moctezuma Esparza which never materialized. Today, a mainstream feature film about the legendary Arizonan finally opens nationwide.

Predictably, this has brought out the trolls, the same trolls who tell us that Martin Luther King Jr. would support the TEA Party if he were alive today and that Ronald Reagan was the real hero of the civil rights movement. This time, the claim is that Chavez was a registered Republican and a vocal and dedicated opponent of immigration.

First, his one-time voter registration is irrelevant. The Republican party of the 1950s and 60s was a very different animal than the one which is familiar to us today, and his political loyalties have to be considered in the context of his contentious relationship with some prominent Democrats like California Governor Pat Brown. His well-recorded support of Democrats like Bobby Kennedy and lifelong work for causes like civil rights and organized labor, however, would seem to imply that his Republican registration was nominal at best.

As for his immigration stand, I first heard this one from some of my Republican colleagues as a member of the legislature. As strange as it seems, despite the fact that many people at and around the capitol had actually worked with Chavez, not one of the folks telling me these things bothered to ask around before repeating the talking points.

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Protest Planned to Greet Boehner at $500/plate Fundraiser for McSally & Tobin

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Boehner
As announced earlier this week, the worst-ever Speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, is coming to Marana on Saturday to be the headliner at a $500/plate fundraising dinner for CD2 candidate Martha “I got no opinions” McSally and gubernatorial candidate Andy “I heart the Christian Right” Tobin.

These three Regressive knuckle-draggers are perfect for each other: anti-abortion, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-education, anti-immigration-reform, anti-healthcare-reform, pro-military-industrial-complex, pro-NRA, pro-Christian-Taliban, pro-Wall-Street. It’s a menage-a-tois made in heaven… er… backroom deals with the Koch Brothers.

By refusing repeatedly to offer opinions on just about any issue except the fate of her old aircraft,  the A10, McSally has been playing it even safer with her campaign in 2014 than she did in 2012. But actions speak louder than words. Her alignment with Teapublican Tobin (who has been in the thick of Arizona’s anti-gay and anti-woman legislation and personally tried to stop the Equal Rights Amendment this year) speaks volumes. Campaigning with one of the Arizona Legislature’s Christian Taliban adds to McSally’s street cred as a Teapublican “Regressive”. 

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