Posted on 07/07/2002 10:00:04 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
Veteran civil rights leader Julian Bond opened the 93rd annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on Sunday night with an uncompromising attack on the Bush administration, Attorney General John Ashcroft and what Bond called "a right-wing conspiracy."
"We have a president who owes his election more to a dynasty than to democracy," said Bond, chairman of the NAACP board, in an ardent opening address at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
"When he spoke to our convention in Baltimore in 2000, he promised to enforce the civil rights laws," Bond said. "We know he was in the oil business. We just didn't know it was snake oil.
"We have an attorney general who is a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Jerry Falwell. And too often, one political party is shameless and the other is spineless."
In a spirited mass meeting replete with Gospels and prayer, members of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group gathered for a weeklong convention under the theme "Freedom Under Fire."
In a speech frequently interrupted by applause, Bond, a former Georgia legislator and civil rights activist who was elected NAACP chairman in 1998, was crystal clear about the meaning of the theme.
Calling the attorney general "J. Edgar Ashcroft," Bond compared new FBI anti-terrorist guidelines to COINTELPRO, a controversial counterintelligence program implemented by Hoover, the late former director of the FBI.
"The FBI tried to disrupt the civil rights movement," Bond said. "They wanted to smear Martin Luther King Jr. They not only wanted him discredited, they wanted him dead, threatening him with the release of damaging information if he did not commit suicide.
"We thought we had put a stop to Hoover's program of spies and lies in the 1970s after its abuses were exposed. Now under the guise of fighting terrorism, the FBI is going back to spying on law-abiding citizens."
Bond was especially harsh on President Bush, saying he has appointed racially hostile, conservative Republicans to key civil rights positions, including the voting rights section of the Department of Justice.
"While the administration is busy asserting sweeping police powers over the American people, it is sweeping voting rights violations from the 2000 election under the rug," Bond said. "The Justice Department whittled 11,000 election complaints down to five potential lawsuits, including a mere three in Florida. Those focus on Florida's failure to provide language assistance to Spanish- and Creole-speaking voters in three counties."
The Florida debacle that threw Bush's election into question was triggered, in part, by a massive NAACP voter-turnout effort that propelled blacks to the polls in record numbers.
A U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on the state's election results found that blacks were nearly 10 times more likely than non-blacks to have their ballots rejected.
Only 537 votes separated Bush from Democrat Al Gore, who was supported by 90 percent of Florida's blacks.
"We support language assistance to voters, but most of the thousands of black Floridians who were denied the right to vote speak English," Bond said. "The margin of their disenfranchisement surpassed the margin of victory for candidate Bush.
"There is a right-wing conspiracy, and it is operating out of the United States Department of Justice."
Sparked by the NAACP's sophisticated turnout drive that hammered candidates on issues like racial profiling and affirmative action, 1 million more blacks voted in 2000 than in the 1996 presidential election.
"We've got to ensure a massive turnout of minority voters in this year's elections," Bond said. "Our future is on the ballot in every state.
"If we don't vote, we lose, and our children and grandchildren will lose, too."
Last year, the NAACP commissioned the first scientific survey of its 500,000 members. According to the findings that Bond cited, 20 percent of the members are under age 35 and 30 percent are over age 65. Half of the members live in cities, and 35 percent live in suburbs. Thirty percent have advanced degrees, and 49 percent have white-collar jobs. Half of the membership earn between $30,000 and $100,000 a year, and 20 percent earn more than $100,000 a year.
"We are a force to be reckoned with: well-educated, well-informed and strongly committed to social justice," Bond said. "And we vote."
In a separate address, Dallas Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, echoed Bond's criticism of the Bush administration.
"Nearly two weeks ago, the caucus convened a hearing and town hall meeting to call attention to how civil rights protections under the Bush administration have been rolled back," Johnson said.
"Under the current administration, the protections of many of our most cherished civil rights have received scant attention," she said.
She said the Department of Justice under Ashcroft has become a partisan institution that has politicized the decisions of the department's voting rights section.
At the convention today, NAACP leaders will release a report card on state officials based on what they have done to end voter abuses. Another report card Wednesday will rate members of Congress on key issues and votes.
This is the second story she's done in the Comical since Houston was invaded by the convention of the nation's largest and oldest race hustling political vomit organization. Yesterday's was all the great things the "non-partisan" NAACP had done under the vision and leadership of Bond and Kweise Mfume. She listed among the accomplishments that they had actively supported candidates of choice in 80-something races in the 2000 election. Never once did she mention they were all Democrats, or how vile and disgusting the advertisements they ran against Republicans were. Talk about complete vomit and bilge writing.
Wanna bet this is pretty close to the plot of the next 007?
No .. I believe the FBI is searching for terrorist who are hell bend on destroying America and killing as many American's as they can
Gee Mr. Bond .. are you trying to tell us members of the NAACP are terrorist??
NO reparations for the Jackasses!
"There is a right-wing conspiracy, and it is operating out of the United States Department of Justice."
Refresh my memory again -- who was in charge of the Justice Department when the 2000 elections took place?
Ok, I'll bite... Since ballots are "anonymous" once they're dropped into the ballot box (which voter cast which ballot is *not* recorded), just *how* did they allegedly determine how many of the invalidated ballots were cast by blacks, and how many were cast by non-blacks?
Good question ... Let me guess .... Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Don't you know? All the ones that had hanging chads to prevent their tabulation had to have been cast by black people. This is because the paper on which the ballots were printed was racist.
Exactly. All of Lee Brown's volkswagon swallowing pot holes combined with Metro's red white and blue double length death machines on wheels make downtown dangerous enough as it is on any given day. Add the Mfume-Bond celebration of racial hatred in the middle of all that and the risk is simply too great.
Julian Bond is a former legislator and newspaper editor from Georgia. He was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and has been a leading figure in the civil rights movement since the 1960s. He currently teaches history at the University of Virginia. (Article NOT dated)
What draws you to Thomas Jefferson?
Bond: The familiar phrase that all men are created equal makes him the fascinating figure that he is.
Does this disqualify the positive? (Thomas Jefferson owning slaves)
Bond: No, I don’t think slaveowning or a relationship with Sally Hemings strikes Jefferson off the list of favored Americans or heroic Americans or Americans who set us on the path we’re on today. It’s a blot, it’s a stain, it’s a bad mark, it’s a disgraceful part of his life but... You know, we think Martin Luther King plagiarized his Ph.D. thesis, but when we think about Martin Luther King, we don’t say, “Boy, what a great Ph.D. thesis that man wrote” ; we think no, this guy was a freedom fighter and led a movement for human liberty. And the thing about Jefferson is that although this is an awful part of his life, these words and the ideas behind the words just rise above that, at least they do for me. This calling of the best of us rises over what was the worst of him and I think makes him a better person than he might have been.
Bond gives SOME people a break no matter what they do!(as long as he thinks they have "feelings").
Found my own answer -- a partisan statistician (one guess which party he's aligned with) did some shaky statistical assumptions on data he refuses to show anybody, including the Commission itself, and found what he claims to be a correlation which allows him to make such a conclusion...
How do I know this? The dissenting members of the Commission itself ripped the methodology in no uncertain terms, and wrote:
This charge made the headlines, but it is nothing more than a wild guesstimate.And:Dr. Lichtman’s statistical analysis is badly flawed, strongly slanted to support preconceived conclusions that cannot withstand careful scrutiny. The assertion that votes by African Americans were nine times as likely to be rejected as those by whites, we will show in detail below, is completely unsubstantiated. Dr. Lichtman’s other estimates are not much more reliable, and he fails to examine the impact of variables that were of great importance in determining the outcome. Below we provide a broader and more sophisticated regression analysis prepared for us by an econometrician, an analysis which clashes with that provided in the majority report on virtually every important point.
Most recently, a request for basic data to which we—and indeed, any member of the public—were entitled was denied to us. The Commission hired Professor Allan Lichtman, an historian at American University, to examine the relationship between spoiled ballots and the race of voters. We asked for a copy of the machine-readable data that Professor Lichtman used to run his correlations and regressions. That is, we wanted his computer runs, the data that went into them, and the regression output that was produced. The Commission told us that it did not exist—that the data as he organized it for purposes of analysis was literally unavailable. Professor Lichtman, who knows that as a matter of scholarly convention such data should be shared, also declined to provide it.The *huge*, fantastically thorough and well-reasoned dissent by two members of the eight-person commission can be found here: THE FLORIDA ELECTION REPORT: DISSENTING STATEMENT BY COMMISSIONER ABIGAIL THERNSTROM AND COMMISSIONER RUSSELL G. REDENBAUGH .Even now, five weeks after our first request, we still have not received the multiple regressions and the machine-readable data that were used in them. They are the foundation upon which the Commission’s report largely rests.
It should be required reading, you can use the contents to blow away any liberal who starts whining about the "bias" or "conspiracy" in the 2000 Florida election. For example, remember the famous stories about alleged "police intimidation"? Here's what the dissent has to say about that:
Despite clear and direct testimony during the hearings, as well as additional information submitted by Florida officials after the hearings, the report continues to charge the Florida Highway Patrol with behavior that was “perceived” by “a number of voters” as “unusual” (and thus somehow “intimidating”) on election day. In fact, only two persons are identified in the report as giving their reactions to activities of the Florida Highway Patrol on election day. One testified regarding a police checkpoint, and the other testified that he found it “unusual” to see an empty police car parked outside of a polling facility. Neither of these witnesses’ testimony indicates how their or others’ ability to vote was impaired by these events.
And so on. It's one of the best rebuttals of the various kinds of nonsense claims about the Florida elections that I've ever read.
The entire report (which includes the dissent) can be found here: Report on Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election .
It's a classic case of a result-oriented process (deciding your conclusion in advance, and then doing whatever it takes to "prove" it).
As an article in the UK "Guardian" admits, "The commission, which consists of four Democrats, three independents and one Republican, is charged with investigating possible violations of the federal Voting Rights Act and other civil rights legislation."
One Republican out of eight members, eh? Ah, how fair and balanced...
SURPRISE .. SURPRISE ..
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