The Republican definition of shameless: Using the anniversary of a famous civil rights march—and infamous violence in response—to advocate for new voting restrictions.
After Alabama’s Secretary of State John Merrill promoted the state's voter ID law at a church service held Sunday to commemorate the anniversary of a civil rights milestone in Selma, patrons walked out.
The service at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Alabama was held to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the "Bloody Sunday" march that erupted in police violence on Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, according to a video posted to Rev. William Barber's Facebook page.
Rev. William Barber:
"We can't be polite about this. We can't be casual or cavalier," Barber told a reporter. "We have more voter suppression in recent years than we've seen since Jim Crow." [...]
"You cannot have a democracy where voter suppression is normalized, where people will politely let people say to them what they're doing, in their face and in their church, and it's okay," Barber said. "To respect injustice is to be a part of it."
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—EPA Chief to CA: We've all got problems:
EPA head Stephen Johnson has finally released his official statement on why he denied California the emissions waiver needed to set tougher standards on cars. Prominent scientists at the EPA have been vocal in saying California had not only met the requirements to get the waiver, but that the law did not allow it to be blocked.
Johnson, already in the hot seat for overruling staff advice that he was legally required to grant California's requested waiver to regulate greenhouse gases, faces a litany of charges that he has also been duplicitous on an array of other scientific integrity, information suppression and workplace relations issues, said PEER.
So what was Johnson's justification for violating the law and -- for the first time in history -- not granting a waiver? His reasoning comes down to things are bad all over.
But Johnson wrote: "While I find that the conditions related to global climate change in California are substantial, they are not sufficiently different from conditions in the nation as a whole to justify separate state standards."
In other words, because we face global warming everywhere, Johnson isn't going to allow it to be addressed anywhere, even though an internal study conducted by the EPA showed that California does suffer disproportionately from the effects of global warming.
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