Much as I hate to post two clips from the same show, Stephen Colbert was really on a roll last night. This was pretty funny, wasn't it?
But, oddly enough, he didn't even show the worst from North Carolina Republicans. For that, we need TYT:
North Carolina has been slowly turning blue. Barack Obama actually won the state in 2008, and he lost to Mitt Romney by only 2% in 2012. Well, North Carolina Republicans are determined to stop that by... keeping Democrats from voting.
And they can do this thanks to the five Republicans on the Supreme Court, who just recently threw out the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which had been renewed in 2006 by Congress - 98 to zero in the Senate and 390 to 33 in the House of Representatives. (Yeah, Justice Scalia had no problem overriding the will of Congress in this case, did he?)
The Confederacy is rising again. Or really, really trying, at least.
After the Democratic Party took a stand for racial civil rights (starting with Harry Truman, actually, but especially when Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act), the Republican Party started to deliberately woo white racists in their notorious 'Southern strategy.'
And it worked. It was a huge success, as all those old Dixiecrats joined the GOP. But now, those people are the Republican base. Now, they control the party. Parts of it are still Republican (after all, the GOP already had the John Birchers and other fringe elements), but this is essentially the Dixiecrat Party now.
And they've gone into complete hysterics with the election of our first black president. Well, they would, wouldn't they?
They're also losing young people, women, and Hispanics, among others (by deliberately wooing Southern white racists, they'd already lost African Americans), and the supply of elderly white men - elderly white bigots, at least - is dwindling.
So their solution - certainly in the Deep South - is to prevent Democrats from voting. Or, at least, to make it as difficult as possible. (If you make it hard to vote, fewer people will vote.)
In 2012, many Democratic voters in the South faced long lines at their polling places - much longer than corresponding Republican precincts. That was deliberate. But there wasn't too much Republicans could do to suppress minority voting until their colleagues on the Supreme Court threw out the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Instantly, they started up their old tricks again.
The Republican Party just can't convince enough of us Americans to support their loony policies, especially after the complete and utter failure of those policies during the Bush Administration. So what do they do? Do they change their policies? Ha! Do they just work harder at convincing people they're right (despite the evidence)?
No, they just work harder at keeping Democratic-leaning constituencies from voting. (Don't worry. If you're a white billionaire, you won't have any problem at all.)
Disgusting, isn't it?
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