Civil & Human Rights

GOP candidate forum for Secretary of State was a joke

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Politics Unplugged on azfamily.com channel 3 hosted a candidate forum for the Tea-Publican candidates for Secretary of State on Sunday. The video segments do not embed in WordPress, so here is the link. Politics Unplugged: June 15, 2014. The moderators threw softball set-ups to the candidates, and did not challenge their statements. It was a joke.

In the first segment, state Sen. Michele Reagan tried to take credit for her weak-tea bill dealing with “dark money” campaign organizations. What she fails to mention is that her bill did not get past the Senate Elections Committee, which she chairs.  She had such little influence with her GOP colleagues, she couldn’t get a vote. I wrote at the time:

“Sen. Reagan’s bill “to include the names of the three largest contributors” will only result, at best, in the disclosure of “Kochtopus” alphabet soup 501(c) organizations — Russian nesting dolls — set up to hide the true identity of the actual contributors, who are millionaire and billionaire plutocrats. It is not a serious attempt to regulate the dark money organizations corrupting our elections. It is pure posturing by her for her campaign to become Arizona’s next Secretary of State. We can do better than Michele Reagan, the co-author of the GOP Voter Suppression Act, HB 2305.

 That would be the GOP Voter Suppression Act that the Arizona legislature repealed earlier this year because they were terrified of the voters turning out this fall for a “citizens veto” of their handiwork dirty work.

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“Polarization” is the new “incivility”

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pew chart

Pew recently released a survey that showed Americans to be (holy shit!) polarized on a variety of issues. Predictably, this has set off a flurry of pearl clutching and smelling salt huffing in Upper Elitist Punditopia about the nettlesome yokels. Here’s the Washington Post fretting over it.

There was a time in the not too distant past when conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans made up significant parts of their respective coalitions. Northeastern Republicans moderated the GOP, while Southern Democrats pulled their party to the right.

Those days are over. A new mega-survey conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that the percentage of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades. At the same time, the ideological overlap between the parties has shrunk to historic lows: Now, 92 percent of Republicans are to the right of the average Democrat, while 94 percent of Democrats are to the left of the average Republican.

Both Sides™!!

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Senate hearing set for Voting Rights Amendment Act

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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has scheduled a June 25 hearing on the Voting Rights Amendment Act, his bill aimed at updating those sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) deemed by the high court to be unconstitutional. Senate panel to examine voting rights fix:

VoteThe date marks the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision, which Leahy characterized as a “disastrous” threat to voting protections. He’s urging lawmakers to adopt his bill ahead of November’s midterm elections.

“It is time for Congress to act,” Leahy said Monday in a statement. “Just as Congress came together 50 years ago to enact the Civil Rights Act, Democrats and Republicans should work together now to renew and strengthen the Voting Rights Act, which has always been bipartisan.

“This year should be no different, and I hope all Republicans will work with us to enact the meaningful protections in the Voting Rights Amendment Act.”

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Obama to use executive order for ENDA protections for employees of federal contractors

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You will recall that last November, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act on a vote of 64-32. Senate votes to ban discrimination against gay and transgender workers.

The TanMan, Weeper of the House John Boehner, the “Worst. Speaker. Ever.” promised that he would never allow a vote on ENDA in the House . . . “because I’m Speaker, that’s why.”

Pride-Flag-Thumbnail-Friday-3x2-256x171Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have laws prohibiting workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation, while 17 states and the District also bar discrimination based on gender identity. Hundreds of the nation’s largest companies also have similar bans.  But there is no federal civil rights protection, despite widespread belief among Americans that such a law already exists. Most Americans Don’t Know People Can Be Fired For Being Gay, Only Half Support Law Preventing It.

With Boehner refusing to budge, the White House has been under pressure to issue an executive order. As of this afternoon, President Obama is prepared to do just that. Obama Drafting Executive Order On LGBT Job Discrimination:

President Barack Obama has directed his staff to draft an executive order that would ban workplace discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees of federal contractors, a White House official told The Huffington Post.

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Immigration Blow-up: 1000s of Children Flood the Border

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In Tucson, we live on the front lines of the battle for immigration reform. As the Congress rushes to further militarize the US-Mexico border with more Border Patrol officers and expensive high-tech gadgets, we imprison thousands of innocent people in for-profit jails, we turn a blind eye to the exploitation of undocumented workers, we regularly … Read more