Those in power like to provide reassurances to their political donors regarding the outcome of any election. It is called cronyism and it is backed by corrupt discriminatory practices. These practices have to end. No more toying with our democracy.
December 30, 2014
By Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
County lawmakers on Monday (click here) forcefully rejected a proposed settlement to a three-year-old voting rights lawsuit, sending the case back to federal court with an emphatic rebuke of County Executive Dan McCoy.
The settlement would have ended the complex and increasingly costly case alleging racial imbalances in the county's political map by, among other things, establishing a fifth legislative district in which minority voters are a majority.
And while several of the majority Democratic lawmakers said that they support that goal, they blasted McCoy for freezing the legislature out of the settlement process and accused him of overstepping his authority in trying to dictate how the new lines would be drawn.
High on the list of grievances is that the settlement would have prescribed the makeup of the county's redistricting commission, a task legislative leaders said is clearly lawmakers' prerogative.
The vote was 34-3, with even some of the Democratic executive's Republican allies opposing it.
"I think everybody believed that legislative process should be a legislative process," legislature Chairman Shawn Morse, a Cohoes Democrat, said after the vote....
December 27, 2014
By Vanzetta Penn McPherson
In two weeks, (click here) we will begin a 365-day observance of two American milestones and the imperatives that triggered them - imperatives and milestones that no one wants to talk about. On this eve of 2015, 50 years after the Selma-To-Montgomery March and the 60 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it is critical that we plan observances that reflect the serious, revolutionary impact of the Voting Rights Act, the legislative progeny of 1965's mass protests.
Before the VRA was passed, African Americans were systematically and ruthlessly disenfranchised by murders, lynchings, employment terminations, poll taxes, and curious other machinations. It took two constitutional amendments, several Supreme Court decisions, countless lower court decisions, and serial protests during the Civil Rights Movement simply to create a playing field upon which blacks could reasonably expect to participate in the American democracy....
By Vanzetta Penn McPherson
In two weeks, (click here) we will begin a 365-day observance of two American milestones and the imperatives that triggered them - imperatives and milestones that no one wants to talk about. On this eve of 2015, 50 years after the Selma-To-Montgomery March and the 60 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it is critical that we plan observances that reflect the serious, revolutionary impact of the Voting Rights Act, the legislative progeny of 1965's mass protests.
Before the VRA was passed, African Americans were systematically and ruthlessly disenfranchised by murders, lynchings, employment terminations, poll taxes, and curious other machinations. It took two constitutional amendments, several Supreme Court decisions, countless lower court decisions, and serial protests during the Civil Rights Movement simply to create a playing field upon which blacks could reasonably expect to participate in the American democracy....
