Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Supreme Court Decision Against Racial Gerrymandering Hailed

Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie today hailed a new U.S. Supreme Court decision prohibiting the use of the Voting Rights Act to supercede other laws to create predominantly black voting districts, saying the decision is a new protection against the abuse of civil rights laws for potential partisan gain.

"It continues to confound me that those whose party is responsible for preventing blacks from voting until 1964 now want to illegally redefine voting districts because it serves their best interest," said Massie. "It should go without saying that creating special black voting districts - for partisan gain or otherwise - is against the spirit of civil rights."

In the case of Bartlett v. Strickland, a 5-4 decision by the Court struck down the redistricting of District 18 in North Carolina. The prevailing concern among lawmakers involved in the redistricting process after the last census was adherence to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This requires the political process to be "open equally" to minority voters. In doing so, a state law prohibiting the division of counties to create voting districts was violated to raise the percentage of blacks of voting age in the new District 18 from 35 percent to over 39 percent. One of the affected counties challenged the North Carolina General Assembly's process.

This decision is important because it can prevent the political manipulation of voting district boundaries based on race. In his majority opinion, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: "Section 2 does not guarantee minority voters an electoral advantage."

More here

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BrookesNews Update

Obama's economic train wreck gathers speed: It's becoming increasingly clear to market players that Obama and his merry band of economic vandals are completely clueless about economics and the role of markets. These people are purely political. For them, economics is simply a matter of tax, spend and regulate. The thought that their economically and socially destructive policies could also rip the electoral ground from under them has yet to materialize
Green fanatics attack economic growth : The two great power cults of the last century were Marxism and Naziism. Between them they probably killed some 150 million people. Another power cult has now emerged and it's called green movement and it has already killed millions of Third World peasants
Obama's economic policy: the same Old New Deal : The reason the New Deal didn't work was not that government didn't do enough, but that it did too much. The economic growth and job creation that this country so sorely needs now must ultimately come from the private sector. Obama doesn't understand this nor does he care to. He a fanatical statist who is determined to massively expand the power of the state regardless of the economic consequences
Israel: Netanyahu, Carpe Diem : Obama has ordered that from now Israel's purchases from the US will be limited to defensive armaments and systems aimed at preserving its "qualitative edge" against its enemies. Can you imagine this happening to our only friend in the Middle East? In the meantime, other so-called world leaders fund terrorists who bomb Israeli schoolchildren. Perhaps they hope Islamic fanatics will finish Hitler's work
Why do Liberals rally for terror and tyranny?: Why do Liberals side with evil, failure and error? Because they have come to believe that rational and moral thought are acts of bigotry and that as "multiculturalists" all cultures are equally right and equally valid, then, in the words of Dinesh D'Souza, the multiculturalist must de facto become an apologist for tyranny
The Arab-Israel Conflict: 25 forgotten facts : As a matter of policy Arab refugees were not absorbed or integrated by the rich Arab oil states that control 99.9 per cent of the Middle East landmass. They are kept as virtual prisoners by the Arab power brokers with misplaced hatred for Jews and Western democracy. Moreover, Pan-Arabism or the doctrine of Muslim Caliphate declares that all land that used to belong to Muslims must be returned to them. Thus, Spain, for example, must eventually be re-conquered

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ELSEWHERE

The 10 Biggest Amateur Mistakes By the Obama Administration So Far : "During the 2008 presidential campaign, people speculated whether someone like Barack Obama, who has never really run anything or had any major achievements other than winning political office, could handle a three AM crisis call. Well, as it turns out, Obama has been such a bumbling incompetent that he probably couldn't handle a trip through a Wendy's drive-in window without a teleprompter telling him what to order and whether he wants a Coke or a Mountain Dew. Even though Obama has been in office less than two months, he has already made more boneheaded errors than most Presidents do in an entire term."

Oath keepers: Orders we will not obey: "We are a non-partisan association of currently serving military, reserves, National Guard, peace officers, and veterans who swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic . and meant it. Our oath is to the Constitution, not to the President, and that oath will be kept. We won't `just follow orders.' Below is our declaration of orders we will NOT obey because we will consider them unconstitutional (and thus unlawful) and immoral violations of the natural rights of the people. Such orders would be acts of war against the American people by the government and thus acts of treason. We will not make war against our own people. We will not commit treason. We will defend the Republic."

More charges for Palin hacker : "A University of Tennessee student who was indicted last year for allegedly hacking into the private e-mail account of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, is facing new charges. A federal grand jury added three charges to the one count that 21-year-old David Kernell was previously facing. Kernell was indicted in October on one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Now in addition to that charge, Kernell faces one count of identity theft for allegedly impersonating Palin to access her e-mail account; one count of wire fraud related to posting information from and about Palin's account on a web forum; and one count of obstruction of justice for destroying evidence."

Well-run banks to be ripped off: "FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair announced last week that the quasi-public insurance monopoly would become insolvent in the next few months if it is not allowed to implement a one-time, draconian surcharge on all U.S. banks. This charge will, in some cases, wipe out last year's profits. At the same time, the FDIC has requested an additional $500 billion `loan' from Congress. Small, solvent, well-run local and regional banks have objected. They rightly claim that they are not the problem. These banks have a solid and growing deposit base and many of them service their own loans and so did not get caught in the trap of originating bad loans and dumping them on the secondary mortgage market in federally-guaranteed bundles. Whether they know it or not, these banks intuit that, like Social Security, there is no FDIC `fund.'"

Obama's weak snort at pork : "Earmarks buried in a $410 billion spending bill now before Congress aren't all `pork' - spending of dubious value. And they total less than 2 percent of the bill's cost. So why would their passage be such a rite of passage for President Obama? Many Americans seem ready for Mr. Obama to veto this bill as proof he will exercise the fiscal discipline he so often promised in his campaign and continues to advocate. They already have doubts about his $787 billion stimulus bill that received scant review in Congress before being passed and is likely laced with poorly thought-out mandates to spend. These earmarks add insult to injury. When will the president stand up and say thus far and no farther to such dubious spending?"

Remember the war on drugs? : "In times of economic and political unrest, reforms that stood little chance of passage sometimes get a second look. One idea that deserves careful consideration is ending the war on drugs. Even a prosperous nation cannot afford the hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year in law enforcement outlays and losses to drug-related crime in our fruitless quest to ban recreational drugs. It's an especially foolish waste of resources in times of economic distress and high national security anxiety."

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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