Saturday, August 30, 2014

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Always remember that you are absolutely
unique...just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead
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Restricting the Vote
The concerted national effort to restrict Americans' voting rights in 2012 was met with an equally dramatic pushback by courts, the press, and engaged citizens.

By Election Day, the worst laws had been blocked, blunted, postponed, or repealed.

The Center* was instrumental in leading this fight.

Representing civil rights groups, Center attorneys helped win court rulings to block harsh voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas that could have made it harder for hundreds of thousands to cast ballots.

The Center’s suit on behalf of the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote blocked Florida’s new law, which had forced nonpartisan groups to end voter registration in the Sunshine State.

Thousands of voters were registered after the federal court ruled.

The Center led an extensive public opinion research project on attitudes toward voting.

Over 300 organizations used this cutting edge research to help win victories in Colorado, Minnesota, and elsewhere

*Center For American Progress

Megyn Kelly explains why Nancy Pelosi is sexist and Hobby Lobby is not

By Laura Clawson

Friday July 11, 2014--Nancy Pelosi's objections to the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision are sexist, according to Fox News host and noted “sexism expert” Megyn Kelly.

Pelosi, of course, noted correctly that the five justices who put the religious beliefs of corporations over the health care rights of actual people (though women people, who obviously matter less than others) were all men, and suggested that this was a problem.

Here is Kelly's impeccable logic demonstrating that Pelosi is ignorant or intentionally misleading:

    “First of all, the gender of the justices in the Hobby Lobby majority is totally irrelevant,” Kelly said, pointing out that the justices who ruled in the majority for Roe v. Wade were also men. “Does Ms. Pelosi think those justices were ill-equipped to fairly decide that case? Or is it only when a judge disagrees with Ms. Pelosi that his gender is an issue.”

Or else, it's an issue when a group of one type of people acts to remove rights from a group of another type of people, but it's a different thing when one group of people acts to expand rights to another group of people.

Just a thought.

Kind of like how it was white people who enslaved black people, and that was bad, and it was also white Abraham Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation and mainly white politicians who passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and that was good.

Funny how that works, eh?

    She added, “If Speaker John Boehner made a similar comment about the female Supreme Court justices, Nancy Pelosi would be crying sexism—and that’s what she is guilty of here.”

Yes, and this is happening in a fictional land in which there are five female Supreme Court justices acting unanimously to harm men, while insisting that their decision should in no way ever be applied to women.

This is where I point out that Megyn Kelly is one of the smartest, most-making-sense people hosting shows on Fox News.

And then we all choose one of the following responses: cringe, facepalm, or wearily disgusted head shake.

At least she's pretty.