Last Call

I know mocking John Hinderaker is about as difficult as finding attraction discount coupons in an Orlando hotel, but it still must be done.  The putative Cato think tanker has drawn a thick red line with his Crayon Of Justice and he will be damned if the United Nations crosses it on his watch.

This is really the last straw. It is time to get out of the United Nations: “UN rights council delves into US voter I.D. laws.”

What follows is Hinderaker screaming at the FOX News article in the link there that basically completely mischaracterizes the situation.  That's really the entire post, to be honest.  Let's take a non-FOX News look at the UN's investigation, shall we?  First of all, there's no investigation right now, only the NAACP asking for one.

The leadership of the United States' oldest and largest civil rights organization is in Geneva, pressing a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council for help battling what the organization views as forces attempting to push back voting rights.

Four leaders from the NAACP and two citizens who say their voting rights have been threatened by laws requiring would-be voters to produce identification made statements before the meeting.

The UN Human Rights Council hasn't responded and most likely it will not respond.   That's where it stands right now.  It's also not the first time in its history that the NAACP has turned to the United Nations, either.

The Geneva appearance is part of an NAACP strategy rooted in the 1940s and 1950s, when the group looked to the United Nations and the international community for support in its domestic battle for civil rights for blacks and against lynching.

"It was in 1947 that W.E.B. Dubois delivered his speech and appealed to the world at the U.N.," NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous said Thursday. "Now, like then, the principal concern is voting rights. The past year more states in this country have passed more laws pushing more voters out of the ballot box than any point since Jim Crow."

And NAACP national head Ben Jealous knows there's nothing the UN Human Rights Council can actually do from an enforceable, international law standpoint.

Jealous acknowledged that the Human Rights Council has no direct authority over American states, but he hopes that it can exert influence through public pressure.

"The power of the U.N. on state governments historically is to shame them and to put pressure on the U.S. government to bring them into line with global standards for democracy, best practices for democracy, that's where we are," he said. "There are plenty of examples — segregation of the U.S. to apartheid in South Africa to the death penalty here in the U.S. — of global outrage having an impact."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/08/141250/naacp-to-challenge-state-voting.html#storylink=cpy

So yes, it's a valid tactic as far as getting the word out that GOP voter suppression is a very real and ongoing threat in several US states.  It's the most important political issue of 2012.  But the FOX News machine wants to instead characterize it as the UN having already decided to condemn the Republican party, and that we should disband the organization for daring to even hear the NAACP's complaint.  Score one for the tinfoil brigade.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/03/08/141250/naacp-to-challenge-state-voting.html#storylink=cpy