VWOTW Part Deux

Gordon thinks it's criminal. Me too. This is another part of the same article at AlterNet (I read it after reading Gord's post) that got me. You know, it's bad enough they let Tom DeLay and his cronies gerrymander the fuck out of Texas using the census, now they're using it for something I doubt the Founding Fathers intended. The Farmer at Corrente has more on this too.

[. . .]

Michigan is the state that Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, mentions as a potential trouble spot. On July 16, the Detroit Free Press quoted John Pappageorge, a Republican state representative from Troy, Michigan, who said, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle." Detroit is 83 percent African American.

Pappageorge later told the Associated Press that he was not advocating suppression of the black vote but that "you get it [the Detroit vote] down with a good message."

Cecelie Counts, AFL-CIO director of civil, human, and women's rights, says she thinks Pappageorge was acknowledging the truth the first time around. "That is the political reality in most of these swing states," she says. Democrats "can't win Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania without the African American vote, without a tremendous African American vote." And, she says, by using census numbers, Republican strategists "can pinpoint places" where minority voters are likely to influence an election. "They know it's Detroit. They know it's Kansas City and St. Louis. They know it's Las Vegas." [my emphasis]

[. . .]

Swing state-by-swing state details here.

Update: 19:05:

More on DeLay from Kos:

A Capitol Hill Democratic source tells me that your calls last week, demanding the ethics committee investigate DeLay, made a difference.

It wasn't so much that committee Democrats want to punt on the investigation, nor that they are more interested in maintaining the ethics truce. Rather, they have been seeking a way to move forward that doesn't invite retaliation from the other side. Of course, given who they're dealing with (DeLay), retaliation seems all but assured if they do anything other than punt.

[. . .]

Call the members of the ethics commmittee and keep pushing. Kos even gives you their numbers. Maybe we can get this shyster out of there.