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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (75053)	10/21/2009 4:43:24 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

Forget all that post-partisan hooey By Betsy Newmark If you had any doubt that all that talk about Obama leading in a post-partisan world, you can just put that in the trash with his leading us to a post-racial America and all the other Obama campaign promises. In the Obama administration partisanship actually trumps everything. One little decision from the Justice Department about a small town in North Carolina's desire to have nonpartisan elections where the candidate's party is not on the ballot tells us everything we need to know about the Obama team's phony talk of post-partisanship. Kinston, North Carolina would like to transform its local elections to being non-partisan. What could be better for trying to end all that evil partisanship? But the Holder Justice Department has denied approval. Why? Because they think that black voters need to be told that a candidate is a Democrat in order to vote for him or her. <<< Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party. The Justice Department's ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their "candidates of choice" - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black. The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters' right to elect the candidates they want. >>> Just think of that. The Justice Department thinks that black voters are too dumb to be able to listen to candidates and decide on their own and so need the little D beside their names in order to know whom to vote for. This is despite the fact that voters in the town voted to approve the measure. <<< The measure appeared to have broad support among both white and black voters, as it won a majority in seven of the city's nine black-majority voting precincts and both of its white-majority precincts. But before nonpartisan elections could be implemented, the city had to get approval from the Justice Department. Kinston is one of the areas subject to provisions of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires the city to receive Justice Department approval before making any changes to voting procedures. Kinston is one of 12,000 voting districts in areas of 16 states, almost exclusively in the South, that the Voting Rights Act declared to have had a history of racial discrimination. In a letter dated Aug. 17, the city received the Justice Department's answer: Elections must remain partisan because the change's "effect will be strictly racial." "Removing the partisan cue in municipal elections will, in all likelihood, eliminate the single factor that allows black candidates to be elected to office," Loretta King, who at the time was the acting head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, wrote in a letter to the city. Ms. King wrote that voters in Kinston vote more along racial than party lines and without the potential for voting a straight Democratic ticket, "the limited remaining support from white voters for a black Democratic candidate will diminish even more." >>> What an endorsement for thinking that somehow the law of the land should be jiggered to preserve partisan differences. And who is this Loretta King of the Justice Department? She's the same woman who oversaw the dismissal of the Black Panthers voter intimidation case in Philadelphia. Figures. And what Kinston wants to do isn't that odd for North Carolina. <<< Partisan local elections are a rarity in North Carolina. According to statistics kept by the University of North Carolina School of Government in Chapel Hill, only nine of the state's 551 cities and towns hold partisan elections. >>> Somehow Democrats manage to get elected in a many of those localities. But the Justice Department has decided differently for this one town. And they've made it clear that, when it comes to electing Democrats, there is no post-partisanship in the Obama Justice Department. betsyspage.blogspot.com