DOJ - Civil Rights Division Voting Rights Section Chief Is A Buckwild Racist

[Makkonnen]

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004414.php

Excerpts-

To buffer that statement, Tanner seemed to rely on a similar brand of anecdotal evidence in the Georgia speech, according to the AP:

He suggested that was due to the vestiges of racism that are still at work in the United States.

"You think you get asked for ID more than I do?" Tanner, who is white, asked the black audience members.

"I've never heard anyone talk about driving while white."

And Tanner said it is wrong to assume that the poor lack photo IDs.

"When someone goes to a check cashing business God help them if they don't have a photo ID," he continued.

"People who are poor are poor. They're not stupid. They're not helpless."

The House Judiciary Committee is currently seeking to have Tanner appear at a Congressional hearing, but has so far been rebuffed by the Justice Department.

A transcript of Tanner's remark last Friday:

Tanner: It's probably true that among those who don't [have photo ID], it's primarily elderly persons. And that's a shame. You know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance. Of course...that also ties in to the racial aspect, because our society is such that minorities don't become elderly. The way white people do. They die first.

There are inequities in health care. There are a variety of inequities in this country. And so anything that disproportionately impacts the elderly, has the opposite impact on minorities – just the math is such as that. And then Georgia, the fact was and the court found that it was not racially discriminatory. That was the finding of the initial court. And that was the clear information from our analysis in the office, my analysis, that was not affected by any other person. And I think that the memorandum which was leaked, which was a breach of legal ethics, was incomplete, was not the complete staff version and ultimately you come up against a hard fact, the minorities in Georgia statistically, slightly, were more likely to have ID, are today, and Georgia -- as far as ID and voter registration and voter participation go we've been straining at gnats and swallowing camels because there are a couple of million people in Georgia who have IDs, who went there and, repeatedly in many cases, to drivers license offices and other offices to get the ID and apparently either said they didn't want to register to vote, which is a very high number, or were not asked as the federal law requires. And as I say we are trying to work with the NAACP there to document a violation of federal law. Federal law does not do everything you want- Yes, sir?
{ }
Off screen woman: We have a question.

Question: The panels mentioned earlier -- you haven't spoken to what is the problem, why do we need voter ID? I've heard Duncan Hunter on the GOP debate say one thing, you know, and we always hear, oh all these people are illegally voting, but the government did its own study and they've never found -- there's, you know, miniscule cases of people voter fraud so why is it that we need this voter id requirements in the first place?

And also on that, you mean all these cases that you brought, are all those cases about voter fraud, individual voter fraud, like people voting when they're not eligible because they're felons or whatnot? Because I don't know anything about these cases that you're bringing, this multitude of cases.

Tanner: Well I (camera shakes / muffled)… do policy. We do not, we cannot, use our policy judgment under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to do what I think is right. If we did that the law would be struck down by the Supreme Court in a New York minute, and that's not gonna happen on my watch. We follow the law, we follow the facts, we've always done that and you know, there's not much else we can do without going into court and getting beaten up badly.

The, on the ID, there have been a number of ID cases, there have been a number of efforts to prove disparities in it in court – all have failed. And they largely, actually in Georgia most recently, and in Indiana, the effort to prove a disparate impact of the ID was based on the same list matching procedures that so accurately have been criticized, trying to match names on two lists, and as the court in Indiana says, garbage in, garbage out.

Im going to scan a recent piece from The Nation about the bullshit math used by another Stanford scumbag to claim Black Lawyers are hurt by affirmative action. These assholes are totally out of hand with this shit.

 

[muckraker10021]

"Minority Voters Don't Become Elderly, They Die First"



http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5145

Unbelievably, the Chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice,

John Tanner, contends that while it's "a shame" that elderly voters may be disenfranchised by new Photo ID restrictions at the polls because many don't have driver's licenses, minorities don't have to worry quite as much. Why? Because "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first."

Yes, that's what Tanner said last Friday at the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles


[flash]http://www.youtube.com/v/ArxQfsVqhRE&rel=1[/flash]

The core element of RepubliKlan election strategy has always been, with not even the pretense of denial by the RepubliKlan elites, the denial of the franchise to “non-republiklan” voters; this tactic is more commonly called voter suppression.

Using a variety of tactics such as the use of intimidating armed goons roving about Black neighborhoods, the use of erroneous convicted felon list and the insidious & illegal ‘caging list’ , the RepubliKlan has used any and all methods to prevent “non-republiklan” voters from reaching the polls.

Play the video below and you will hear RepubliKlan strategist Paul Weyrich, who bush’s brain Karl Rove met with every week, addressing the RepubliKlan zealots in 1980 extolling the necessity to make sure Everyone DOES NOT VOTE.

[flash]http://www.youtube.com/v/8GBAsFwPglw[/flash]

Under the control of bush-Rove-Gonzales, the US Department of Justice was committed to disenfranchising as many “non-republiklan” voters (Blacks, single-women, seniors, Hispanics, reality-based liberals, etc.) as possible.

Read - Bush Government to Poor Voters: We Don't Want You to Vote

 

[muckraker10021]

Im going to scan a recent piece from The Nation about the bullshit math used by another Stanford scumbag to claim Black Lawyers are hurt by affirmative action. These assholes are totally out of hand with this shit.

Here's the article from the NATION

Playing With Numbers

Patricia J. Williams, is a professor of law at Columbia University, was born in Boston in 1951 and holds a BA from Wellesley College and a JD from Harvard Law School.

by Patricia J. Williams

October 1, 2007

http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20071001&s=williams

The Bush Administration's manipulation by special interests is easiest to see in broadly accessible situations, like a decision to open federal lands to strip mining. It's harder to grasp when the interest is buried in a mountain of regression analyses, like global warming or the approval of drugs. So let me try to run through some basics. Let's say you have an exclusive political club of 100 members. Ninety are Whigs. Ten are Tories. Mary, a Whig, is married to Tom, a Tory. After a particularly personalized debate, Mary and Tom get divorced and drop out of the club. This means that 10 percent of the Tories have dropped out, but only about 1 percent of the Whigs. The next day, the Fox Planet Post publishes a breathless story that Tories are failing to thrive at the club in shockingly disproportionate numbers compared with Whigs and that therefore Whigs are clearly the more politically adept.

The problem with the Planet's story is that it fails to account for the relationship between rates and real numbers, or percentages and proportions. Moreover, it inflates the significance of the disproportion by assigning a social meaning to the percentages belied by the situation on the ground. It's not mathematically wrong, in other words, but it's factually absurd. The Planet chooses to focus on a binarism of Whig and Tory that fails to tell the whole story, or perhaps the most important part of the story. What might the data look like if they examined a full spectrum of reasons for which club members might drop out: i.e., by married versus nonmarried status or by ability to pay alimony versus the hefty club dues?

I say all this to get to the following: The Administration's Civil Rights Commission--reconstituted with neocons like Abigail Thernstrom--just issued a major report endorsing a 2004 article by UCLA law professor Richard Sander, in which Sander asserts that affirmative action hurts capable but less qualified black students by setting them up for lifelong failure. He starts with a theory that affirmative action actually harms black students by putting them in situations where, supposedly, they can't keep up. It's called the "mismatch" hypothesis: To wit, if only these poor lost souls had gone to second-tier schools where they belong, they'd have more self-confidence to compete against comparable second-tier peers, and the world would be a better place. Based on this, the Civil Rights Commission recommends that California publish black bar-exam-passage rates; that the National Academy of Sciences start studying the disparity of black-white graduation rates and that Congress deny federal funding to any law school that does not specifically track the progress of black students.

Sander's arguments rely on mountains of data analysis, but it's available to anyone willing to wade through it on the commission's website. I don't have space to discuss it in depth, but let me recommend two of the most comprehensive rebuttals: "Does Affirmative Action Reduce the Number of Black Lawyers?" by Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks and "A Systematic Response to Systemic Disadvantage" by David Wilkins, both in Volume 57 of the Stanford Law Review. Meanwhile, in order to illustrate a very tiny but crucial part of this material, let me point to some of the numbers with which Sander is working. In one table illustrating "Black-White Academic Indices at Tier 1 Institutions, 1991 Matriculants" the number of black students in the sample is 147; the number of white students is 1,843, more than ten times more.

Again, let me tease this out: Let's assume there are ten schools in Tier One. Let's assume that the nearly 2,000 students in the sample are divided evenly among those ten--rounding it out so that there are 200 at each school; fifteen of whom are black, 185 of whom are white. If five students catch the plague, that's 2.5 percent of the student body. If we spin it as five white students, then that's still only 2.7 percent of the white student population. If, alternatively, we look at it as a black plague, then it's 33 percent or fully a third of the black students! Stunning! What's wrong with them? But there are choices in this analysis: We could see the plague as an affliction affecting an organic component of the entire student body--a statistic that reflects a vulnerability of the whole institution. Or we could segregate it in taxonomic ways that isolate or even blame those five--and race is certainly the easiest of taxonomies by which to accomplish this cynical end. (We could also just make sloppy categories, as Sander does--for example, he counts as white all those who do not indicate their race.)

What a very different picture might emerge if we looked at money rather than race. Wealth is the single most consistent predictor of academic success; indeed, disproportionate poverty is a key reason black students drop out of schools at any tier. Does this mean that the mismatch hypothesis really should be advising that "capable" poor students attend second-tier colleges because it harms them to have to compete against their wealthier, privately tutored "betters"? What if we broke it down by ethnicity, region and class rather than race and income? One wonders if the commission's stated antipathy to "diversity" as any part of admissions criteria would lead it to conclude that Tier One schools should be peopled exclusively by, say, multilingual upper-class women with perfect scores from an exclusive academy in a small corner of Beijing, while "capable" WASP men from Iowa should find satisfaction in the ever so serviceable second tier--lest they hurt themselves, poor overambitious little ducks.

The commission's message has fanned out: Peter Kirsanow's article in National Review is titled "Affirmative Damage: Students sacrificed in the name of 'diversity.'" Stuart Taylor bemoans the "tragedy" and the "curse" that "plague" young black lawyers who are so "embittered" that they leave big firms "at two or three times the rate of whites," and Gail Heriot worries that below-average minority students must struggle with "the loss of several years of their lives." Ambition kills, I guess. But here's the bright side, all you capable young black lawyers: By Bush's math the situation in Iraq is three times better than ever.

 

[Makkonnen]

thanks muck

 

[VegasGuy]

Washington is full of em and we got work to do.

-VG

 

[D-Nice 1]

*bump*

D-Nice 1 (The Nice One)

 

[Makkonnen]

yoooooooooooooooooooooooo

read this http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004920.php

its an article talking about how Obama wants this guy Tanner fired- instead of moved to a new job

read the comments section - people from the DOJ Voting Rights Section are posting anonymously and breaking shit down!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tanner was talking BIG SHIT about black people - calling black philadelphians illiterate and he also has been harassing sistas

 

[Makkonnen]

examples


IceJustIce wrote on December 14, 2007 8:22 PM:

Barry Scholtzman?!? Bradley Schlozman, maybe, but not Barry Scholtzman.

And this guy ain't Schlozzie, though I don't doubt that he knows him.

Since his name has been mentioned on other threads, his name is Sean O'Donnell, and he's an attorney in the Voting Section. He accused a civil rights analyst of being a lesbian and being "too pro-black."

Imagine! A Civil Rights Analyst who enforces the Voting Rights Act, pro-black! Whoda thunk it? And the funny thing about the lesbianism "allegations" is that the particular person concerned has at least one gay person who is very close to her -- though she, herself, is not gay -- and neither she nor anyone she respects would give a damn if she WERE gay.

This same attorney, when talking about our "Spanish surname analysis," computer program which tries to identify Hispanic voters so that language assistance can be targeted to them, also said we should have an "African-American given name analysis" to pick out black voters.

Don't get me started on this dude. Even the Republicans in the Section don't like him.



The Real Desperate Housewives of the DOJ wrote on December 14, 2007 8:38 PM:

I wonder if they would be interested in investigating the illegal performance appraisal that Yvette Rivera wrote on behalf against the only remaining objector of the GA ID team, criticizing this career individual's work on the project that was completed prior to Ms. Rivera's employment with the DOJ. Hmmm, writing performance appraisals when you haven't been in your position long enough to be authorized to do so pursuant to OPM policy and the bargaining unit agreement, assessing work based on political bias and not substantive fact, and refusing to give employees information contained in their personnel file... seems pretty problematic to me. It looks like a lot more housecleaning is necessary.

 

[Makkonnen]

IceJustasIce wrote on December 14, 2007 8:52 PM:

Again - if any more members of Congress are interested in the racist behavior of Big Man Litigator - otherwise known as, well you know by now - email icejustice1@gmail.com. Not only have comments been made about gays, blacks, and a wide variety of minorities, the man has cheated the system and violated numerous leave policies. It gets even better than that which I am willing to publically post. In addition to the racist comments and violation of HR policies, the guy spreads rumor and innuendo about EVERYONE. Imagine someone who would go to the office of A. He might say, "I think C is a faggot. I'm sick of working with him." Then he goes to the office of B and says, "A is an idiot. He spends too much time going to coffee with C." Then he goes to [faggot] C and says, "B is a fruit loop, John Tanner doesn't like him." Ok, ok, ok, I know Congress isn't interested in bad behavior. But it sure demonstrates why nobody covers this guys back... well except John Tanner - HA HA HA HA HA!!!!

-------------------

yo QueEx, Muckraker

any journalists or friends of journalists or congressmen in here???????????????

 

[Makkonnen]

Young and Fresh wrote on December 14, 2007 9:06 PM:

There are folks who are probably new to the section or young that think Tanner got a raw deal. If you think that you should talk to the 24 people over the years who's lives and careers have been ruined by John Tanner. Talk to
the current housing section chief. Talk to Bob Berman, David Becker, even Becky Wertz got shafted by his games. There are few people he hasn't lied about at some point to sully them, overtly or subtly. There are people who think this was just political, a game played in Washington. In part you are right. But this is a game Tanner has played for a decade - to stick knives in people's backs without them knowing where it came from. This isn't about egos or office politics. This was about ruined careers. People having to uproot their lives and family and move across the country because a Section Chief told lies about them. This is about people laboring for years and not being promoted because a Section Cheif made up stories about them and whispered the stories to managers that wouldn't know any better or heard what they wanted to hear. This is about shody lawyering resulting in the humilating loss of a high profile 203 case and then the world discovering that the lead attorney was building sandcastles at the beach all summer while collecting THOUSANDS in expenses and taking no vacation. This is about so much more than the man who likes to come around and pat you on the back will ever admit. It would be right for him to apologize to everyone, not to glad hand. But we all know how good he is at apologizing. If you are young and really didn't understand what was going on, just realize you saw that Karma exists, even insided the beltway.

 

[Makkonnen]

man I dont have time right now to post all the good shit

turns out Tanner punched a DOJ lawyer- sucker punched him and got away with it- it was an old man who didnt complain about it

maaaaaaaaaan this shit is totally fucked up - this is the place and these are the people who are protecting our voting rights