This week in the War on Voting: A new Republican Southern Strategy, a lot like the old one

[Galraedia]

Ari Berman has another must-read article on the systematic effort of the GOP to disenfranchise millions, focusing in this installment on redistricing—and resegregation—in the South.

In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.

Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/04/1061596/-This-week-in-the-War-on-Voting:-A-new-Republican-Southern-Strategy,-a-lot-like-the-old-one-?via=blog_1

[barbtries]

1. the fucking bastards.

i don't think i've mentioned today just how much i despise republicans.

[xfundy]

2. It's all part of the ancient "divide and conquer" tactic

And obviously it still works.

I *think* that through the repig-owned hate radio channels, they've convinced the conspiracy theorists that live all over the nation in every state by repetition of a set of talking points geared to an already paranoid subset that whatever/whoever scares them (or lives near them, or is in the family) is out to get them, take their money, attack their god (same thing in most cases), talk rationally to their children; or exist, like gay people.

The messages may as well be on a round board that is spun so that whichever pricks up their ears gets attention and demonification daily.