Hi, I'm Jim Crow. I won the 2004 presidential election and I'm running again in 2008.

Hello folks. It has been brought to my attention that about half of you think that Bush won in 2004, while the other half think that Kerry won. You are probably under this misconception, because I never gave my acceptance speech. So, here I am tonight, delivering my acceptance speech for my 2004 victory and announcing my intention to run in 2008.Who am I? Surely you recognize my face. I’m an old friend from the past, Jim Crow.

Can my buddies in the press turn down the spotlights? You know I don’t like being the center of media attention. And all those lights make my makeup run. Wouldn’t want the black face to start dripping on my white patent leather shoes.

First, I would like to thank all the people who helped me, Jim Crow, win in 2004. Thank you John Ashcroft for doing nothing about the illegal purge of African-American voters in Florida by the Republican Secretary of State (and Bush Campaign Chair) Katherine Harris. That purge cost Gore thousands of votes. John, you set a precedent that made it legal to suppress the minority vote once again. Had you chosen to enforce the Voting Rights Act, Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in Ohio might have thought twice before conducting his own, even more extensive purges of African-American voters. He might have considered himself in legal jeopardy for providing unequal voting facilities for minority precincts.

Thank you Congress, including the Democratic Senate that was in power from 2000-2002, for holding no investigations into the Voting Rights violations that occurred in Florida. Had you acted on behalf of the citizens who were stripped of their rights in the early days of my efforts to overturn the civil rights movement, you might have deterred the copy cats and given hope to disenfranchised voters. For that is one of Jim Crow's secret strengths. For every voter I actually strip from the rolls, there are half a dozen more that I discourage from voting by convincing people "You are powerless. Your vote has no meaning. The government does not care about you. Why bother voting, when your Democratic elected officials do not even stand up for you?"

Thank you, Ken Blackwell, for taking the work of Katherine Harris and John Ashcroft and expanding upon it. Your state cast the deciding electoral votes in 2004 that determined which party controlled the Department of Justice for the next four years, so your efforts were crucial in the fight to make voting unfair in this country.

Thank you, corporate media for refusing to release the exit polls from Ohio. One count ought to be good enough, especially when it is conducted from behind closed, locked doors, with no one watching. Thank you for covering the phony-baloney election in the Ukraine but saying not a word about the election here. That took real guts, especially with 25% of the American public openly skeptical of the Ohio results. A less resolute news media would have been tempted to pander to that 25% in order to garner ratings. But you stayed strong. You refused to report on the news that people wanted to hear.

Thank you, John Kerry for being more concerned with whether or not you won than with whether the nation’s most vulnerable citizens got deprived of their vote. That “me first” attitude is what makes America so great!

Thank you Republican Congress, especially Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio, for having the brass balls to claim in the fall of 2004 that you would hold hearings and get to the bottom of the minority vote suppression. Jim Crow is mighty proud of the way you turned those hearings to my advantage. You and Bill Frist’s attorney dreamed up a whopper about how the real problem in Ohio 2004 was all about the NAACP handing out crack cocaine to blacks to get them to vote for Kerry. You managed to get the Ohio legislature to pass laws to make it even harder for people to vote in that state. I can’t believe they sent you to jail. You’re an American hero!

Thanks to the hard work of these and so many others, I, Jim Crow, am able to announce my candidacy for 2008. Alberto Gonzales and his Department of Justice have done some truly remarkable work for me. Gonzo will be sorely missed, but I’m sure Karl Rove’s hand picked federal attorneys will be there, harassing voter registration organizations, intimidating minority voters, suing local and state agencies (in Democratic states) to force them to strip voters from the rolls and in general making it damn difficult for people to vote. States with Republican Secretary of States and Governors will do these things without being told, which will save the Department of Justice a lot of work.

Poll Taxes are back. We call them Voter ID’s now. Literacy tests are back, too. We call them “If it is a white precinct, voter intent is the rule. If it is a Black precinct, the letter of the law had better be followed or into the trash the ballot goes.” I hear we have a few new tricks up our sleeve. In 2006, in Fort Worth, the Teamsters tested out a new strategy. They called a bus strike in a major urban area on a general election day. It worked wonders there to cut down Democratic voting. Maybe we will try the same in a few big cities in Ohio or Florida. Keep the people without cars home. There are still paperless electronic voting machines. We all know how easy those are to hack. As long as the exit pollsters can be kept far enough away from the polls to invalidate their results, the e-voting machines can be manipulated to give whatever results Jim Crow wants. And the press will say “only tin foil hat conspiracy theorists would ever suspect that anyone would tamper with an electronic voting machine.” We can design special ballots in Hebrew for minority voters. Or ballots that self destruct. Dan Rather can report on them in six years when it no longer matters.

Best of all, we have the press and the Department of Justice working hand in hand to vilify Black Folks, so that if anyone happens to notice that African-Americans are getting disenfranchised, they will say to themselves “Well, it’s just a bunch of Black people. It isn’t as if it was happening to white people like you and me. It’s just not worth making a fuss about.”

Jim Crow is on a roll. If we could keep a third of a million people from voting in Ohio in 2004, imagine what we can do in 2008 with the nation’s Republican Governor’s, Attorney Generals, Secretaries of State and Karl Rove’s hand picked federal attorneys working together and the mainstream media dutifully reporting "There is nothing to see here. Move along."

Jim Crow feels very optimistic about 2008. He has not seen much of anything out of this Democratic Congress that would make him worry, and even less out of the press.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

:P

SO SO SO SO SO TRUE... I can't tell you how many people I've come across who refuse to vote for this very reason.

we know that we are a clear majority - but many don't vote because of the dirty GOP's filthy ways!

I struggle not to HATE the rethuglicans.

We really need to watch for this in 2008, because what's been going on with our electoral system has been truly frightening.

Perhaps we could tour together?

Jim Crow for President. Homophobia for Vice President.

So what happened to Terrah, Terrah, Terrah? Can't you at least let him head up Defense?

This is what I meant when I said that candidates never propose their defeated rivals for cabinet posts. If they're so good (like T,T,T) why can't they continue to serve the Administration?

It's not a well know document to many but it was the Magna Carta of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. People just don't learn their history, which is good for the racists who run the election system. It came about after the Compromise of 1876 when the Republicans swapped the Reconstruction program in the former Confederate states for the presidency. "We'll just pull those federal troops out of the South if you fellas will give us the presidency." That was the deal and, without the troops, the KKK and others took back the South and white supremacy ("exceptionalism") was again the dominant influence.

Then we got the Mississippi Constitution of 1890. Among other things, it codified felon disenfranchisement. Never before in our nation's history had we excluded those who "paid their debt" from voting. But the authors of this document had it all figured out. Make it much more likely that blacks will get arrested, then strip them of their right to vote because of the arrest and certain convictions.

There's a direct line from the 1890 document to every state felon disenfranchisement provision in the country today. Wonder how all those legislators feel about enacting and continuing a plan first put forth by the KKK? Probably not too bad, I suspect.

And speaking of my greatest hits, not many people remember that in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education I got states like Virginia to write laws that did things like require all teachers who had received state funds for their education to teach at all white private academies, and establish state scholarships to send white pupils to all white academies and abolish the public school system and the requirement that students attend schools. That was only 50 years ago. With school vouchers, we can see those great days come again!