Barbara's Sharebook 

This is a copy of an article from "Z Magazine".

      Color Lines.com forwarded their concern about voting rights. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as five million eligible voters could meet difficulties on Election Day 2012 due to new, imposing voter laws. [FIVE MILLION FORMERLY-ELIGIBLE VOTERS!!!!!] There are currently eight states with photo voter ID laws containing specific criteria for what qualifies as "identification" for voting purposes. Some states require that identification be state-issued and only for the state a person is voting in; some prohibit college IIDs; some demand that the full name and address on the card be current; while others require that an ID card has an expiration date. 

      Looking at those stipulations, it's not hard to imagine how low-income citizens, African Americans, Latino Americans, college students, and elderly voters might get tangled up or turned away on voting day.

      The Center estimates that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters lack proper identification right now. For African Americans, it's 25 percent. Other groups like Native Americans, transgendered people, newly divorced, newly married couples or people who've recently lost their homes could all have information on their drivers licenses that reflect names, address, and faces that aren't current. The costs for these groups will be more than an inconvenience: fees for new birth and marriage certificates, hours lost waiting in lines for updated materials, and transportation costs to handle it all.

      Republicans in state legislatures around the country have tried to pass these laws for years. In 2010, when Republicans not only took over Congress, they became majorities in state legislatures across the country, one of the chief items on their agendas was changing the rules of the voting game. An example is Tennessee, which for the first time since the Civil War saw its House of Representatives, Senate, and governor's office all controlled by Republicans. They quickly passed new voter ID laws and last year made headlines when a 96-year-old African American was denied an ID to vote.

      A great deal of funding comes from the Koch Brothers, who've vowed to remove President Obama from the White House by any means and billions of dollars if necessary. Another player is ALEC -- the American Legislative Exchange Council -- a body that includes banks and corporations working alongside Republican legislators to craft laws that would dismantle not only voter rights, but also environmental and labor protections.

      The states are perverting and exploiting civil rights laws in order to pretend that racial discrimination has been completely eradicated. Some even point to the election of the first black president and the record turnout of voters of color in 2008 as evidence that no traces of discrimination are left in the system. Instead, they claim to trace voter fraud to "people voting with the names of other displaced, deceased, or fictionalized voters" and argue this is why voter IDs are needed.

      All the data shows that instances of voter fraud are negligible at best. The voter fraud argument is in many cases a ploy to disguise the racial animus that fuels the voter ID push as well as to keep "illegal immigrants" from voting.

Pentagon Restricting Testimony In Congress Blocks Staff Of Lower Rank

 May 10, 2007 By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe Staff [Excerpt]

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has placed unprecedented restrictions on who can testify before Congress, reserving the right to bar lower-ranking officers, enlisted soldiers, and career bureaucrats from appearing before oversight committees or having their remarks transcribed, according to Defense Department documents.

The guidelines, described in an April 19 memo to the staff director of the House Armed Services Committee, adds that all field-level officers and enlisted personnel must be "deemed appropriate" by the Department of Defense before they can participate in personal briefings for members of Congress or their staffs; in addition, according to the memo, the proceedings must not be recorded.

REPLY:

Anyone who has served in combat in the armed forces of the United States has the right to say anything anytime to anybody, no exceptions whatsoever.  Someday, we will make that so again, as it used to be. 

The soldiers who served in 1776 elected their officers and did not hold their tongues.  Of course, that was a revolutionary army fighting an army of occupation. 

Which is, among other reasons, why we won.

The Pentagon idiots who came up with this one really know how to take an indefensible position in order to insure their opponents counterattack with redoubled ferocity.  

Gee, that sounds like Bush and Rumsfeld designing Iraq.

FYI, the publication does not print a comment or letter without taking off the writers IDs, if the writer is serving in the armed services that is, unless the writer wants to be publicly known.

That's to insure there is no harassment whatsoever for writing in. 

Respect for your service,

contact@militaryproject.org

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