Confederate Control of Polling Places?

Writing in the Atlantic magazine, Ari Berman says that, on a recent visit to Chapel Hill NC, he discovered that Southern states are planning to suppress voting by requiring a valid photo ID card! In an article entitled "Voter Suppression: The Confederacy Rises Again," Berman writes:

Eight of eleven states in the former Confederacy have passed restrictive voting laws since the 2010 election, as part of a broader war on voting undertaken by the GOP. ... [It's] breathtaking to consider the different ways Republicans have sought to suppress the minority vote in the region.

Not sure exactly what the Confederacy has to do with this. Of the myriad complaints liberals make about the Confederacy, I can't remember them ever claiming that Jefferson Davis demanded photo ID cards to vote.

And what is the big issue about photo ID cards anyway? The North Carolina DMV doles them out to everyone, even non-citizens.

And there's this:

North Carolina Democratic Governor Bev Perdue twice vetoed efforts by North Carolina Republicans to pass a strict voter ID law before the 2012 election. If GOP gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory wins in November, it’s all but certain a tough voter ID law will be among the first pieces of legislation he signs.

That sounds like the strongest endorsement yet for McCrory in 2012.

Abolitionists Exposed in Asheville

In the Asheville (NC) Mountain XPress, Lara Terstenjak berates the Asheville City Council for not supporting her "Go Topless" movement for women, and somehow ties the City Council's decision to North Carolina's support for the Confederacy:

North Carolina contributed more soldiers (with gun rights) to the Confederate cause than any other state. I hope you do not continue to make the same relative mistake regarding women's rights.

Mistake? Gun rights? While reasonable minds may differ on the issue of topless women, surely Ms. Terstenjak understands that it was the Confederacy that fought to uphold a woman's right to ... to ... Well, what exactly does the Confederacy have to do with public nudity? Ms. Terstenjak says:

City Council members, your North Carolina predecessors voted to keep slavery. What could be more immoral than the buying and selling of human beings? Yet in 2012 you oppose women being topless on moral grounds.

Of course - it's all about slavery. The Confederacy was all about slavery. The Asheville City Council is enslaving women, not by requiring them to cover their breasts, but by encouraging others not to look!

We suspect Ms. Terstenjak will ultimately learn the hard way that there is no constitutional right to public nudity. At that time, we can suggest some appropriate attire for her exhibitionism.

Until then, if you'd like to educate Ms. Terstenjak, please respond with a letter to the editor at PO Box 144, Asheville NC 28802, via fax to (828) 251-1311, or via email to letters@mountainx.com.

"Studies" without Study

It's now clear that the University of North Carolina should be forced to forfeit its national basketball championships from 2005 and 2007, and probably even 1993. This is due to the latest revelations that the UNC Department of African and Afro-American Studies, since its inception, has been nothing more than a fraudulent shelter to keep athletes eligible.

And why is anyone surprised? Remember, the African and Afro-American Studies department was created in response to protests by UNC football players in 1992. (See Charlotte Observer, “Fight for Black Cultural Center Spills into UNC Stadiums,” 17 Sep 1992.) It's been all about athletics from the beginning, and any academic administrator worth his salt would have known that. While African and Afro-American Studies may be a worthwhile specialization for a few undergraduates majoring in Social Studies, it's hardly the sort of broad curriculum that can support an undergraduate major all by itself. Julius Peppers' transcript - loaded with courses like Black Nationalism, Black Experience (twice!), Blacks in Film, etc. - attests to that.

But the real tragedy here is not the fraudulent national championships won by the Tar Heels with their "student-athletes." It's the fact that the African and Afro-American Studies Department has been fully subsidized by North Carolina taxpayers - not just UNC athletics boosters. Meanwhile, real students in real academic disciplines at our state universities continue to suffer ever higher tuition payments to these "public" universities, who fritter away those tuition dollars on such complete wastes of time as African and Afro-American Studies and UNC basketball.

Verbalizing in Valdese

People in Valdese are up in arms over a speech made at its Founders Day Festival by Archdale pastor Herman White. One of the "credible" witnesses claims "he heard White saying things like black people should still be slaves and that the races should not mix."

Since there's absolutely no chance that those things were actually said, what is motivating the false claims? Apparently, White's "racist remarks" were the fact that he criticized Abraham Lincoln and called the Gettysburg Address "political garbage." As libertarian commentator Britt Combs sees it, "The mere suggestion that federal power is anything less than divine marks the speaker irrefutably a racist."

Nail on the head. As another libertarian, Rand Paul, recently discovered, as soon as the feds discover that someone with a microphone is onto them, the klan-watchers come out and start discovering [planting?] white sheets in closets.

Unfortunately, Combs takes his analysis one step farther:

What White, the SCV, the League of the South, the Southern Party and all the other pro-South groups miss is this: The Confederate government was evil too. ... If there is a future for freedom, if libertarians succeed in resisting the growth of Washington's empire, if Americans regain an interest in individual liberty, property rights, human rights and all that, it won't have anything to do with the C.S.A.

Evil? What exactly was "evil" about the closest thing this world has seen in the past 150 years to a true American constitutionalist government with respect for states rights? Of course, the answer is slavery, under which "priceless individuals were murdered and ruined." Murdered?

Like Paul, who was eventually convinced to denounce the South of the 1960s, Combs has fallen for the media manipulations and distortions about the South of the 1860s -- the same manipulators and distorters that rose up to attack Herman White last week.

Yes, the Confederacy wasn't perfect, and it's a good thing that slavery is gone. But it was hardly a unique institution to the Confederacy [a nation that only lasted about four years]. And equating the institution to murder is downright ignorant.

What Combs and other small-government types should understand immediately is this: The Confederacy is attacked, not because it promoted slavery, but because it promoted freedom. And that's the same reason White was attacked last week, and the same reason Paul was attacked the week before that. The same fate will meet Combs or anyone else who comes remotely close to helping "Americans regain an interest in individual liberty, property rights, human rights and all that." Anyone who doesn't have the stomach for it needs to get out of the fight right now.

Self-Reliance, Kennedy-Style

Billy Kennedy, candidate for US Congress from the 5th District of North Carolina, says his campaign is about "self-reliance" and "us governing ourselves." Sign us up!

On second thought, don't. Kennedy's bizarre concept of "self-reliance" and "people governing themselves" apparently involves massive federal intervention into every corner of our lives--from healthcare to education to the environment to the economy to the transportation system!

Kennedy says he has a real problem with "these people that bash government day in and day out, and then, on their own, take advantage of it." As if we're not allowed to criticize the size of government if we use the services that are paid for by our own money through the confiscatory federal income tax system.

Maybe Kennedy should consider running for Congress in Massachusetts.

Capitol Monuments Challenged (Again)

Spring is coming soon, so it's time for the annual attack on Confederate monuments at the North Carolina State Capitol. This time around, the N.C. Historic Commission is concerned about the "underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities at the State Capitol and on the grounds." The Historic Commission, apparently run by the same crowd who is trying to "diversify" history education in the public schools, now wants to "diversify" the monuments at the Capitol.

While the Historic Commission claims that it does not plan to [immediately] remove any existing monuments, we can expect them to be diluted as new monuments are erected to relatively insignificant ethnic minorities from North Carolina's past. The News & Observer has already begun the process of deriding the existing monuments: "There are already monuments honoring Confederate soldiers killed in the Civil War and white supremacy activist Gov. Charles Aycock." [Question for the N&O: When did Aycock transform from "the education governor" to "white supremacy activist"?]

You have the opportunity to speak in favor of keeping the Capitol grounds as they are by attending public hearings in Asheville (at the YMI Cultural Center) on Monday, 15 February; in Raleigh (at the State Capitol) on Thursday, 18 February; and Greenville (at the Carol Belk Building on the ECU campus) next Monday, 22 February. All of the meetings will be at 7PM. If you can't attend one of these events, please post comments in favor of maintaining the existing Capitol grounds on the blog of the Capitol Memorial Study Committee.

Tea Party Takeover

A columnist for the Durham Herald-Sun compares the "Tea Party" movement to the Ku Klux Klan. Paul Scott says the Klan was formed because "following the end of the Civil War, there was a dramatic surge in African American political power." Since Barack Obama is now President, history must be repeating itself. Oh, and both the Klan and the Tea Party held their first conventions in Nashville!

Actually, Nashville has pretty much been a consistent harbinger of death for independent political movements in recent history. It was where the famed Southern Party split in two in 1999, and where the Reform Party was forever fractured just one year later.

Scott says that what the Tea Party considers a "patriot" is "the dude with the Confederate baseball cap and the gun rack in the back of his pickup blastin' Lynard [sic] Skynard [sic]." Sounds like our kind of patriot! But then he writes, "The Dixiecrats of yesterday are the Ultra Right Wing Republicans of today." And that's the rub.

Disparagement of Dixiecrats aside, the convention that took place in Nashville over the weekend is not a product of the same movement that held the Tea Parties across the country last April, or took part in the march on Washington in September. No, this "convention" was just another example of the neoconservatives appropriating honest middle-America dissent for Repubican purposes.

Truth be told, "Tea Party" was a bad name for a 21st-century movement. While we would always encourage people to look to history for inspiration and guidance, yesterday's issues are not today's issues. And after the leftist media began lewdly referring to the protesters as "Teabaggers", the name should have been dumped.

Hopefully, the real American dissenters (taxpayers, independents, libertarians, conservatives) who founded the Tea Parties will not be fooled by the Republican Party's attempt to get them back in line. Let the Republicans be the Teabaggers, while the rest of us keep working for real change.