GREETINGS FELLOW DEMOCRATS!





Block Walking

If you are block walking on Saturday, please bring a cell phone.

We will need as many as 20 people to block walk on Saturday. This is 6 groups of 3 and a couple left over to fill in. Two to walk and one to drive on each team. So if you can bring a friend, do it.

No one goes alone!

9:45—short set of directions and map passing out. 10:00 hit the road.

Corbet Perkins will be in the office, so if you come late he will be here to give you a list.

If you have to work Saturday and would like to walk during the week—with a buddy—let us know. That is a possibility.





A huge thank you...

...to everyone who has helped staple flyers on to the door hangers. This has been a true team effort. You are appreciated.





KAMU Candidate Forum

February 13
TBA





Former Congressman, and current America Votes President, Martin Frost, has accurately portrayed the cynical motivations and dishonest claims behind the partisan Republican effort to enact voter photo ID laws. Please take a moment to read the column below by Congressman Frost from the widely read, daily political newspaper, The Politco.

- Matt Angle

Photo ID laws are snapshots of an ugly past

By: Martin Frost
January 29, 2008

Once upon a time, in the dark ages of American politics, white Southerners conspired to prevent blacks from voting by passing a series of restrictive voter registration laws, including poll taxes and literacy tests.

These practices were outlawed by Congress with passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The figurative descendents of the people who tried to restrict black suffrage are here.

Their tack is to require a picture ID to be shown by anyone seeking to vote.

An Indiana law imposing such a requirement has been challenged, and its fate will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that was argued before the court on Jan. 9.

Challenging the adoption of this and other voter photo ID laws is the single-biggest civil rights issue facing the country today.

Let’s take a close look at the Indiana law passed on a straight party line vote by the state’s Republican legislature and signed into law by its GOP governor.

The Indiana law requires a prospective voter to show a current photo ID that has been issued by the United States or by the state of Indiana.

Further, the ID must have an expiration date, and the name on the document must conform to that on “the individual’s voter registration record.”

This sounds reasonable on its face. Not so.

This law, in fact, discriminates against people who do not drive and do not otherwise need a state-issued photo ID.

Who are we talking about? Elderly, disabled, poor and minority voters, to be specific. Most of these, coincidentally, are Democrats.

This case is intertwined with an unpopular law passed by Congress several years ago called “Real ID,” which requires states to dramatically increase the documentation required to obtain a driver’s license.

A number of states are resisting implementation of this new law because it is an “unfunded mandate” that would force states to spend millions of dollars of their own tax revenue (no federal funds provided) to comply with its provisions.

In those states that are complying, citizens are finding it much harder to obtain a driver’s license, thus further reducing the pool of individuals who will have the type of state ID required to vote by laws like the one being challenged in the Supreme Court.

According to the brief submitted to the Supreme Court by the individuals challenging the constitutionality of this Indiana law, the statute clearly is aimed straight at these groups.

The brief notes that “about 12 percent of voting-age Americans lack a driver’s license.

"And about 11 percent of voting-age United States citizens — more than 21 million individuals — lack any form of current government-issued photo ID.

"That 11 percent figure grows to 15 percent for voting-age citizens earning less than $35,000 per year, 18 percent for citizens at least 65 years old and 25 percent for African-American voting-age citizens.”

This is what is called in the law a “disparate effect.”

What’s the other side of the argument?

An amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on behalf of a group of Indiana and Southern state election officials notes, “Political power is, unfortunately, a proven inducement to corruption.

“As James Madison noted in Federalist 51, men are not angels, and sound government must be structured in light of that unfortunate, but realistic, understanding.”

Madison, of course, helped draft our Constitution, which counted Negro slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes.

The government-sanctioned racial discrimination of our founding fathers took a civil war and almost 200 years to reverse.

The peculiar nature of all this is that no one can cite examples of in-person voter fraud, which is what a photo ID theoretically is designed to prevent.

The only examples of voter fraud ever cited involve absentee ballots where no photo ID would be necessary.

Trying to impose a photo ID requirement as a condition to vote is a step backward in time.

It is an effort that will suppress the vote of minorities and the elderly.

It has been vigorously opposed by all the civil rights organizations in the country and by fair-minded people of both parties.

We should be doing everything possible to make it easier for eligible people to vote in this country, rather than making it more difficult.

The United States has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the world.

Every time we erect barriers to casting votes, we erode our image as a great bastion of democracy.

There is no question that anyone involved in voter fraud should be prosecuted.

But you don’t eliminate voter fraud by making it harder for honest people to cast their votes.

There are plenty of other ways besides requiring a photo ID to ensure that the person who shows up to vote is the person on the registration rolls.

Establishing a system that discriminates against low-income, elderly and minority voters is not a reasonable response to this particular problem.

Many middle-class and wealthy white people can’t understand why someone would not have a current photo ID.

These are the same people who didn’t understand why poor blacks and the elderly weren’t able to get out of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit.

It was because many of these unfortunate victims of the storm didn’t have a car and, of course, also didn’t need a driver’s license with a photo ID.

This is not the bad old days, when the government tacitly or explicitly excluded blacks and others from the polls.

Let’s hope the Supreme Court doesn’t take a big step back in time.

Martin Frost, a Democrat, represented the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Congress from 1979 to 2005. He rose to caucus chairman and head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He is now an attorney with Polsinelli Shalton Flanigan Suelthaus PC in Washington and serves as president of America Votes, a grass-roots voter mobilization and education effort.

The Lone Star Project is an activity of the Lone Star Fund. Contributions or gifts to the Lone Star Fund are not tax deductible. All contributions are subject to the prohibitions and limitations of the Federal Election Campaign Act. Federal Law requires us to use best efforts to collect and report the name, mailing address, occupation and name of employer of individuals whose contributions exceed $200 in a calendar year.

Paid for by The Lone Star Fund, 6 E St, SE, Washington, DC 20003. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.





TOM DELAY CASE BECOMES ISSUE IN DA RACE

Austin American Statesman
January 30, 2008

The decision to seek a grand jury indictment against then-U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay — and the discussions among Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle and his assistants on the matter — has emerged as an issue in the campaign to replace Earle, who is retiring. DeLay, who has been charged with money laundering, stands accused in Travis County of turning corporate donations, which cannot be used in state campaigns, into campaign donations to seven state House candidates in 2002. He resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives after he was indicted, although he has denied wrongdoing.

click here for more





BROOKS: THE KENNEDY MYSTIQUE

New York Times
January 30, 2008

Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party. Last week there was the widespread revulsion at the Clintons’ toxic attempts to ghettoize Barack Obama. In private and occasionally in public, leading Democrats lost patience with the hyperpartisan style of politics — the distortion of facts, the demonizing of foes, the secret admiration for brass-knuckle brawling and the ever-present assumption that it’s necessary to pollute the public sphere to win. All the suppressed suspicions of Clintonian narcissism came back to the fore. Are these people really serving the larger cause of the Democratic Party, or are they using the party as a vehicle for themselves? And then Monday, something equally astonishing happened. A throng of Kennedys came to the Bender Arena at American University in Washington to endorse Obama. Caroline Kennedy evoked her father. Senator Edward Kennedy’s slightly hunched form carried with it the recent history of the Democratic Party.

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Brazos County Democratic Party
P.O. Box 4568
Bryan Texas 77805
979-779-5600 Fax 979-779-5601

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
Harry S. Truman, Democrat, President of the United States of America