People are Registering to Vote. Oh My!
Tom Pauken dredges up a staple Republican scare story, telling Dallas Blog readers about a voter registration table at Parkland Hospital. Pauken says "local citizens" have expressed concern that non-citizens might be registered. Pauken neglects to say who these "local citizens" are. He neglects to solicit comments from other "local citizens" who might applaud voter registration efforts. He neglects to say that Parkland's operation is hardly unique. Every post office has a stack of voter registration applications available for the taking, no questions asked, to be filled out and mailed in. He neglects to say whether voter fraud is even a problem. As reader HSH points out in a comment to the story, people registering to vote declare, under penalty of perjury, that they are citizens. Pauken doesn't cite cases of non-citizens being prosecuted for illegally registering to vote. It's a non-issue.
So why does Tom Pauken keep dredging it up? Perhaps to suppress the vote among minorities, the poor, the elderly, the young, the disabled, the kinds of demographics that typically vote Democratic. If the same voter registration table had been set up at a Highland Park garden club meeting, Tom Pauken would not be trying to scare us with the news.
May I have a word? Mulatto
Scott Bennett of Dallas Blog speculates on the status of the 2008 race for Presidential nominations. One comment stuck out. He says Hillary Clinton benefits from Democratic white working class voters not voting for a mulatto. Why does Scott Bennett feel the need to describe Barack Obama as a mulatto, instead of African-American? It's not a word used by either the Clinton or Obama campaigns. Clinton played the race card in the campaign during the South Carolina primary, but the race card was always white versus black. (Now, as the race moves to the Southwest, the race card might include black versus brown, too.) Obama is drawing the African-American vote in huge numbers, so any lingering questions whether Obama is "black enough" for black voters have been dispelled. Even before, the questions had more to do with his cultural background than his skin color.
So, what was Scott Bennett thinking when he described Obama as a mulatto? Darned if I know. Possibly nothing. Maybe he never gave it a thought. If so, there's no reason to accuse him of racism. But, then, there's no reason to read him, either. I prefer to read columnists who think.
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