Here’s a newspaper report of a woman in Tennessee who has voted more than 60 years but who lacks a government photo ID and couldn’t get a “free” one from the state after many hours of ridiculous hassle. It’s a very thorough story, and it will be repeated in NC many times if the Republicans [...]
The NC Center for Voter Education has produced a handy, on-line voter guide for local elections in more than three dozen cities. If you live in Chapel Hill or Mint Hill, Waynesville or Morrisville, Raleigh, Concord, Durham or Greenville, etc., you can see what the candidates for city council and other offices are saying about [...]
The US Census Bureau is out with its biennial post-election survey of who voted - and who didn't. You can see breakdowns of voting in the 2010 election by race, gender, education level, occupation, and so forth, often by state. For example, nationally, people in families that earned $100,000 or more were twice as likely to [...]
The hostility of too many Tea Party fans toward people who don’t look and act like them is alarming - and dangerous. It flows from a sense of beleaguered superiority and it can produce explosive reactions when these true believers are prodded with wild claims that “our culture” (values, family, country, God, etc.) is under [...]
Rotten news and better news from the NC General Assembly: The bad news is that a bunch of NC lobbyists are giving up to $2,500 each for a state legislator’s campaign fundraising event. That’s especially odd because North Carolina law specifically prohibits a lobbyist from giving state legislators campaign donations. It doesn’t matter if the [...]
The racial bias of too many elected white judges and state legislators continues to undermine America’s promise of fair courts and representative government. The opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial is the occasion of a series of essays by the American Constitution Society, including one by Sherrilyn Ifill about elected judges in [...]
The video by Brave New Films about the Wake schools controversy is creating it own tussle. The video says Americans for Prosperity, led nationally by the billionaire Koch brothers, spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to promote resegregation and elect a conservative school board in 2009. Dallas Woodhouse, head of the NC chapter of Americans [...]
The John W. Pope Civitas Institute deserves its reputation for biased polling and twisted thinking, but it can sometimes be a useful place to see statistics from a government source presented in a nifty format – in this case, county-by-county voter registration details. (Ironic, right? Civitas roundly trashes the government, including the State Board of [...]
Here’s an important announcement if you’re connected to a NC high school – as a student, parent, teacher, staff member or administrator. County boards of elections are gearing up to fulfill a new requirement that they conduct voter registration drives in all high schools during September, which is Citizens Awareness Month in North Carolina. Some [...]
A powerful new video from Brave New Films documents the Koch brothers’ takeover of the Wake County school system through Americans for Prosperity and the 2009 school board election. It reveals the links to past segregation rhetoric and the upheaval created by the Koch agenda to destroy public education, equal opportunity, diversity in schools. With [...]