In 2010, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott shut down the offices of Texas voter registration group
Houston Votes with an armed raid that seized computers and other group equipment looking for "voter fraud". None was ever found, but
Houston Votes was forced to close soon afterwards after funding withered in the face of the "scandal." (Their equipment and documents were never returned, and were finally destroyed by Abbott's office in 2013.)
The story of how this particular low-income voter registration effort came to the attention of the Republican attorney general is intriguing; it was based seemingly entirely on an overtly racist conspiracy theory started by a Houston tea party group that opposed the voter registration effort. That there was no evidence of wrongdoing was not a particular problem for the group.
By that summer, Houston Votes had come to the attention of the King Street Patriots, a Houston-based tea party group. At the group’s regular meeting in Houston, its leader, Catherine Engelbrecht, talked about the New Black Panther Party. She then played a Fox news clip of an unidentified black man saying: “We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet.”
The clip was 5 years old. It came from a forum in Washington about media coverage of Hurricane Katrina. But after the clip ended, Engelbrecht showed a picture of a house in Houston. She said it was the office of the New Black Panthers, at Main and Dowling streets.
Dowling Street is infamous for a 1970 gun battle between police officers and African-American militants, one of whom was killed.
“Houston has a new neighbor,” Engelbrecht said. She added that a person outside the house appeared to be an employee of Houston Votes.
The house shown on the screen was the office of Houston Votes. It had nothing to do with the New Black Panther Party. And it was about 9 miles from Dowling Street.
Catherine Engelbrecht would go on to her current notoriety as the head of far-right "voter integrity" organization
True the Vote, which spearheads and supports Voter ID laws in various states. Laws which are, as it happens, predominantly burdensome to lower-income voters.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Another "wonderful" day in Iraq:
Rumsfeld gushed at the "wonderful start" to the Iraq occupation, and he's proven increasingly correct every day!
A suicide bomber killed himself and an Iraqi child and wounded more than 50 people, including six U.S. personnel, according to local people and the U.S. military on Wednesday.
In the fifth bomb attack in Iraq in as many weeks, a four-wheel drive vehicle stopped suddenly in front of a house in the Kurdish city of Arbil in northern Iraq on Tuesday evening and exploded with the driver inside, residents said.
They said the house was being used by U.S. intelligence agents. A military spokeswoman initially said it had been a "safe house." Later, military press officers became tightlipped, confirming only that a blast had taken place in Arbil [...]
A U.S. soldier became the 68th to be killed in action in Iraq since the official end of major combat when his vehicle ran over a homemade bomb northeast of Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon, the military said. Another soldier was wounded.
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If the house was indeed being used as a safehouse by US intelligence services, then its attack would signify an inside job. It seems doubtful Al Qaeda agents (or its Ansar al-Islam allies) or Baathists would know of the safehouse's location without having been tipped off.
But whatever, the bombing is another wonderful victory for the US "War on Terror" according to Bush. You see, every time US forces are killed in Iraq we should celebrate, because those very sameterrorists would otherwise be killing Americans here in the US.
See? Killing Americans in Iraq is good. Killing Americans in the US is bad.
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Tweet of the Day
Mitt Romney is on Fox News again tonight. I think they may finally tell their viewers he lost.
— @LOLGOP
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: Yet another "Uber, but for..." gets funded.
Greg Dworkin reminds us that "makers" make money, not jobs, and rounds up ISIS strategy news in advance of the president's speech.
Joan McCarter tells us Ted Cruz says the Citizens United amendment would outlaw
Saturday Night Live. Meanwhile, Daily Kos joins in delivering 3 million petition signatures in support, and SF Bay Area Kossacks head to Sen. Feinstein's office to lobby for net neutrality. We also discuss Daily Kos Elections coverage of yesterday's primary election results, and Republican plans for yet more Benghazi investigation, and another Obamacare repeal vote. Because new ideas!
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