blogging the beltway
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Rove: Bush Was Skeptical of Voting Rights Act
(The Root) — During a Q&A at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Karl Rove, the most prominent Republican strategist in the country, admitted that the Grand Old Party will be unlikely to reclaim the White House if it does not find a way to expand support among minority voters. But he also applauded the Supreme Court’s…
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Southern Discomfort? The Future of Voting Rights in the US
(The Root) — Like gleeful children released from detention, officials in Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and other states vowed to enact new voting restrictions just hours after the Supreme Court did their bidding and neutered the Voting Rights Act (pdf). Free at last, they might as well have said. “[Attorney General] Eric Holder can no…
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Clarence Thomas: Race Traitor?
(The Root) — One of the most destructive epidemics plaguing the black community for years is the notion that there is a specific way to “act black” versus “acting white.” The destructive part is the idea that acting white is synonymous with speaking grammatically correct English and having high academic achievement, while “acting black” is…
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SCOTUS' Surprise Prostitution Ruling
(The Root) — While upcoming rulings on same-sex marriage, voting rights and affirmative action have captured most of the Supreme Court-related headlines, one of the court’s most newsworthy rulings has nothing to do with those cases at all. In a blow to the Obama administration, on Friday the nation’s highest court struck down a federal…
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GOP Leader Forced Out Over Racist Email
(The Root) — Just days after his racist remarks in an email sparked a firestorm, an Illinois Republican Party leader has resigned, on the same day the Republican National Committee demanded his resignation. Montgomery County, Ill., GOP Chairman Jim Allen wrote the following about GOP candidate Erika Harold, the 2003 Miss America who is multiracial and…
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Supreme Court Strikes Down Arizona Voting Law
(The Root) — In a 7-2 decision announced on Monday in Arizona v. Arizona Inter Tribal Council, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot require would-be voters to prove that they are U.S. citizens before using a federal voting-registration system. The court agreed with challengers to the law, who argued that the requirement put an…
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More White American Deaths Than Births
(The Root) — According to demographers, more white Americans died last year than were born — the first time this has occurred in the history of the nation. Even more surprising, the shrinking of the white population has begun more rapidly than previously predicted. The decline of America’s white population is being fueled by a…
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Could a Tax Credit Fix the Black Jobs Crisis?
(The Root) — The May jobs report didn’t bring worse news than the April jobs report. But it was still bad news for African Americans, for whom unemployment remains in the double digits. Although unemployment among whites is 6.7 percent, 13.5 percent of black Americans are unemployed. As America slowly recovers from the recession, black America…
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Plan B: Did Fatherhood Influence Obama?
(The Root) — When it comes to President Obama, about the only thing that Republicans and Democrats can agree on is that he has a beautiful family and is a loving father. Even his conservative critics lashed out at the National Rifle Association for referring to Sasha and Malia Obama in an anti-gun control ad.…
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First Lady Was Right to Heckle a Heckler
(The Root) — If you’re a politician, accepting that you are going to be heckled by critics and learning how to handle being heckled are part of the job. But for those married to politicians, the rules of engagement have always been less clear. That may now change thanks to Michelle Obama. It was recently…