#ncpol: Dan Blue channels his inner Farrakhan / Sharpton / Obama / Barber / Laura Leslie

Dan Blue used to be a pretty reasonable guy.  When he was speaker of the NC House, he was a guy Republicans could actually do business with.  But, as time went on, and the GOP started taking over, and the Democrats careened far to the left, and the Obama era kicked in — something changed for the worse with him.

Our *post-racial* president has made it OK to make excuses for rioting in the streets and shooting at cops.  The Democrat establishment — recognizing that its platform has actually shoved its base deeper into poverty — has decided that it needs to pull its chestnuts out of the fire by focusing its base’s rage on, you guessed it, WHITEY.  And those foot soldiers for WHITEY — the Republicans. 

The Round Rev has been making the case to a slobbering, compliant media that making people PROVE WHO THEY ARE before they vote is an outrageous, totalitarian form of racism and repression.  On Twitter, senator Blue has picked up that ball and run with it:

Hmmm.  Ensuring peope (1) are who they say they are, and (2) actually reside where they are trying to vote is SUPPRESSION?   Mr. Blue is one of those very gung-ho at making me, and folks like me, show an ID and jump through all kinds of background checks and other legal hoops to partake in my constitutional right to BEAR ARMS.   But NOT for partaking in my constitutional right to vote? 

Here’s the article Blue and Bob Hall’s Democracy NC linked to: 

On Election Day in 2014, Joetta Teal went to work at a polling station in Lumberton, North Carolina. Like all poll workers, she was required to stay until voting booths closed, so she decided to cast her own vote there.

That was a mistake, she later discovered. What she didn’t know was that under a 2013 state law she had to vote in the precinct where she lived. The polling station where she voted was not in her precinct, so her vote was not counted.

    A Reuters review of Republican-backed changes to North Carolina’s voting rules indicates as many as 29,000 votes might not be counted in this year’s Nov. 8 presidential election if a federal appeals court upholds the 2013 law. Besides banning voters from voting outside their assigned precinct on Election Day, the law also prevents them from registering the same day they vote during the early voting period.[…]

Work at your home precinct! We used to have actual residents of the local community working at the polling place.  It’s much easier to detect vote fraud when you KNOW the

folks — at least by sight – coming in to vote.  (Of course, that is probably one of the reasons that practice is discouraged.) 

Holy crap.  We have absentee ballots.  All kinds of early voting days and polling places.  You can register to vote at the DMV.  You can get the forms ONLINE from the state board.   There are all kinds of voter registration drives in every community.  If you can’t figure out how to utilize the very generous system we have in place to cast your vote, your IQ is likely too low for you to partake in the making of major decisions affecting the future of our cities, counties, state, and country.  

Sensible reforms like voter ID, ending same-day registration, and voting in your actual polling place protect the integrity of ballots and elections for blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, men AND women.  Everyone.  It’s arguable that vote fraud — generated by things like same-day registration, lack of voter ID, and voting outside of your own precinct — has done more damage to the integrity of elections in majority-minority precincts.

For Bob Hall and Dan Blue to be whipping up a racial frenzy over very sensible reforms like these — it’s outrageous.  But, in the Obama era, with radical racists and cop killers being celebrated at The White House, the bar for outrageousness is moving faster and farther than ever.