Last Call For Impeach-Moose Proceedings

Incessant attention whore Sarah Palin realized nobody cared about her anymore, and that her old shticks weren't working, so she's going for the Full Enchilada.  WaPo's Aaron Blake:

Sarah Palin on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of Republicans calling for the impeachment of President Obama, writing in a Breitbart op-ed that the influx of young illegal immigrants over the southern border "is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, 'no mas.' " 

Mixed/careless metaphors aside, this is nothing but bad news for Republicans — especially four months until the 2014 election. 

Palin is hardly the first GOP politician to raise the issue of impeachment over the past couple years. Others include Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Reps. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.), Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.), Michael Burgess (R-Tex.), Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), former congressmen Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) and Allen West (R-Fla.), and the South Dakota Republican Party. Not all of these folks called for Obama's impeachment directly, but all of them suggested that it is or should be on the table.

Such lofty company.  Still, as Blake points out, the 'MURICA crowd loves her, and it's clear her "perpetual fundraising for the next election" coffers are getting low, so she needs to remind the hoi polloi why they need to hand over another twenty bucks to her so she can go shoot and pose with a giant squid on the Hardwood Channel.

What none of these folks have, though, is a national following. That's where Palin comes in. She's the first Republican of any significant national stature to make this call. And she's the kind of figure who could potentially recruit others to the cause — people who will want to be heard. Palin surely doesn't carry the kind of weight she once did in the GOP, but she still has a significant tea party following and is highly popular among the conservative base. 

If a significant pro-impeachment portion of the conservative base does materialize — and that's a big "if" — it will put Republican lawmakers in the unenviable position of responding to questions about whether they, too, agree with the idea of impeachment.

Oh please, let's spend the next 28 months talking about how much Sarah Palin wants those Republican wimps to impeach Obama, and reminding America exactly why the next president (or 4) will be a Democrat too.

The Old North State (Of Insanity, Yet Again)

Everything the Republican Party in North Carolina is trying to do right now involves them trying to make sure Democrats never regain power in the state again.  That means voting in the state must be curtailed as much as possible, and the latest GOP scam is reducing the number of places to vote "to save taxpayers money". Of course, the cuts are coming in poorer urban areas where Democrats live.  One such place is Shelby, NC, near where I grew up. Cleveland County is losing 3 or its 5 voting precincts, and they just happen to be in areas where black voters are.

When Alan Langley, a Republican member of the local elections board here, explains a new proposal to consolidate five voting precincts into two, it sounds procedural and well-meaning: He speaks of convenient parking and wheelchair access at the proposed polling places, and of saving more than $10,000 per election. 

Those precincts, however, are rich with black voters who generally vote Democratic. And when the Rev. Dante Murphy, the president of the Cleveland CountyN.A.A.C.P. chapter, discusses the plan, he talks of “disenfranchisement” and “conspiracy.” 

“We know,” Mr. Murphy said, “that this is part of a bigger trend — a movement to suppress people’s right to vote.” 

The bitter disagreement in this city of 20,000 is part of a broader voting rights battle charged by race and partisan politics that is happening in a number of communities, many of them Southern, where changes to election laws no longer require advance approval from the federal government after a year-old Supreme Court ruling voided a key section of the Voting Rights Act.

Mr. Langley here is shocked -- shocked, he'll tell you -- that anyone would attribute racial animus to these precinct cuts.  Cuts in a predominately black part of the county, of course.  He's hurt that the NAACP doesn't trust Republicans in North Carolina.  Republicans who instituted multiple hoops to jump through in order to vote in the worst set of voter ID laws in the nation to prevent "voter fraud" they accused Democrats of perpetrating, and they speak of trust.

Sure.

Voting rights advocates fear that these local changes — combined with a number of new state laws restricting ballot access and requiring voters to show picture IDs — amount to a concerted effort to reduce voting by minority groups. Conservatives say that the laws ensure against voter fraud, and in some cases are more cost-efficient. 

In places affected by the Supreme Court decision, the overt racism of the 1960s is largely a thing of the past: What often lingers is a racial mistrust that can make the moving of a polling place from a fellowship hall to a public park seem innocent to some, sinister to others. 

It's a hard past to overcome.  It's even harder when one party is trying to take the country back to the worst times of that past.

Who honestly believes that the solution to a county's problems is making it harder to vote?

The Old North State (Of Insanity, Con't)

The Department of Justice has finally dropped the hammer of NC Republicans and their odious voter suppression law with a lawsuit announced on Monday by AG Eric Holder.

A North Carolina judge will decide whether portions of the state’s voter ID law, described as “discriminatory” by critics, should be implemented or delayed, following suits filed by the federal government and others. 

The law requires voters to show photo ID at the polls, eliminates same-day registration and pre-registration for students as young as 16, and cuts the early-voting period from 17 to 10 days. Lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice, NAACP, and League of Women Voters will argue for a preliminary injunction against portions of the law in a U.S. District Court in Winston-Salem on Monday. A trial will be held in the case in 2015,according to the Associated Press. 

“The state legislature took extremely aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African-Americans,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit Monday. “This is an intentional step to break a system that was working and it defies common sense.” 

The law, 49 pages long, includes a number of other changes to the state’s elections and campaigns, including increasing the amount of money donors can give to candidates by $5,000, eliminating a one-box straight-ticketing voting option on ballots, and repealing the requirement that candidates appear in their own campaign ads and say they “approve this message.”

This isn't a voter ID law, this is a "help Republicans and their donors" law, and the NC GOP knows it.  It's why the Moral Monday movement in NC has been protesting for over a year now, and are moving now to register as many voters as they can for November.

In 2011, Republicans, with the help of free-spending non-profit advocacy groups, seized both chambers of the legislature, also called the General Assembly, from the Democrats. Republican Pat McCrory won the governor’s mansion two years later, giving his party its first lock on North Carolina’s government since 1870. That set the stage for last year’s overhaul of the state’s election laws: In a single bill, lawmakers eliminated same-day registration, youth preregistration and out-of-precinct voting, and reduced the number of days of early voting. They required voters to show government-issued photo identification starting in 2016; student ID cards from state universities won’t be honored. Republicans say the law was aimed at creating consistency and eliminating fraud. State statistics show almost no documented cases of impersonation fraud at the polls. 

Now, the Moral Monday movement, the NAACP and the League of Women Voters have the DoJ backing them up.  Hopefully, my home state of North Carolina will find a way through this mess and vote out the GOP.

StupidiNews!

• Four people were injured Monday when a roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California derailed after a tree branch fell on the tracks.
• The White House is confirming that most of the unaccompanied children crossing the border from Mexico will not be allowed to stay in the US and will be deported.
• Half a million people were urged to evacuate Monday as Japan's southern coast was battered by Super Typhoon Neoguri, the storm continuing to bring heavy rain across the country.
• Ukrainian forces are not resting on a cease fire as they continue to retake territory from pro-Russian separatist rebels, as EU sanctions against Russia may be expanded as early as Wednesday.
• Dutch-rooted space tourism company XCOR says if the Netherlands can survive the World Cup and win this week, the Dutch team is going to space on the house.