voting rights

-by Tracy B AnnWhen I was diagnosed with breast cancer I chose the treatment I felt had the least side effects. I declined Chemo, Radiation and a nasty drug called Tamoxofin. It may indeed help with breast cancer but it’s been proven to cause other types of cancer. Umm..., no thanks.I did consent to two surgeries though, I mean, I had a malignant tumour in my body, of course I wanted it out. During surgery blue dye was injected into me to trace the cancer. Had it spread anywhere? Particularly lymph nodes?Turns out it had, so 2 lymph nodes were removed and sent to pathology.

-by Dr. F. Reid, Jr.90 for 90 is a website and a grassroots movement. It's a voter education and advocacy project, started in Virginia, in anticipation of Virginia's 2015 elections for state legislative offices. It honors and acknowledges the work of a man who, at 30 years of age, in 1955, began helping and educating voters, as well as potential voters, in Richmond, Virginia. Uh huh... Yeah... Right...

I’m learning one thing good,” she said. “Learnin’ it all the time, ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.
— Ma Joad, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

Last week, writing for Vox, Sean McElwee offered a big reason why "Congress ignores the poor: they don't vote." He argued that turnout has a determinative effect on who we elect and, more important, what policies are enacted.

Now that I've sworn off voting for the lesser of two evils, I'm still willing to go to great lengths to exercise my right to vote. I don't know if I'd ride down from the Hindu Kush to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on a horse again so I could do it, but even when I decided I couldn't vote for Obama in 2012, I still walked to my polling station so I could cast a protest vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.I believe in voting.

George W Bush signs the 2006 Voting Rights Act renewalIn July 2006 George W. Bush signed a bill to renew the Voting Rights Act. Earlier that same month it had passed the House 390-33. All 33 NO votes were right-wing Republicans. More than a few of them are still in the House and one, Nathan Deal (R-GA), is now the governor of his state. These 14 racists are still Members of Congress:

Above is a 10-minute highlights video of President Obama's speech yesterday at the Selma 50-year anniversary memorial. The White House has also released the entire two hour and thirteen minute speech. After the speech, the President and his family led the march-- which included 100 Members of Congress and former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura-- across the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate general and later KKK Grand Dragon and Alabama senator.

Voting rights was a priority of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. The struggle to secure these rights achieved real traction and impact in the early 1960s. While the Jim Crow South was rife with voter suppression, there was no place more in need of voting reforms than Mississippi. Although black Mississippians comprised nearly 50 percent of the state’s population in 1960, less than 7 percent of its eligible black constituency was registered to vote, representing the lowest percentage in the union. In some counties, no blacks were registered to vote.

Monday is Martin Luther King Day.

I suspect Sammy Alito, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy don't read The Nation.