Conservative commentator Ann Coulter advocated for the administration of literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting on Wednesday during an appearance on "Fox & Friends."Hmm, let's see: On August 17, 1999, Coulter said this on Fox's Hannity & Colmes:
During a segment on how poorly informed American voters are, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked Coulter whether it bothered her that her vote counted just as much as someone who knew nothing about politics.
"More than I can say," Coulter said. "I just think it should be, well for one thing, a little more difficult to vote. There's nothing unconstitutional about literacy tests."
I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.On September 29, 2006, again on Fox, she told Neil Cavuto:
Way too many people vote. We should have fewer people voting. There ought to be a poll tax to take the literacy test before voting.
New material, Ann: try writing some.
In the Fox & Friends appearance today, there was also this:
Throughout the discussion, Coulter maintained that voting was too easy.I'd love to know where she got that number. The Voting Rights Act requires ballots to be printed in languages other than English when a certain percentage of voters in a voting subdivision are insufficiently fluent in English but fluent in another language -- but the number of other languages in which ballots are required to be printed isn't 124, according to this 2011 notice from the Federal Register -- it's only 21. And 12 of those 21 languages are Native American languages.
"We have ballots being given in 124 different languages," Coulter said. "And I'm pretty sure Senate debates will not be taking place in Urdu. So what are they voting on?"
Maybe Coulter has a source for that 124 figure that I don't know about. I'll stand corrected if so. But I'm skeptical.
Oh, and let me note for the record that this bilingual ballot requirement was expanded by Congress in 1992, and the expansion was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. It was a different country then.
6 comments:
It's not as if any of them (or us, for that matter) have had anything really new or original to say in the last thirty or so yrs.
"There ought to be a poll tax to take the literacy test before voting."
Although the idea of paying a tax just to take the literacy test is new to me.
Coulter doesn't have a source for that number, she made it up. This is typical Coulter, Al Frankin pointed this out years ago by looking atr random footnotes in her book. Surprise: virtually none were accurate.
Coulter is absolutely the worst spokesperson to have for this issue due to her hostility and her xenophobia polemics.
See “Ann Coulter’s Xenophobic Anti-Gospel of Hate” at http://t.co/aQGhLuWwtD.
Where did Coulter get that number from?
From the same source, the GOP's and every conservatives, source:
Otto Myass!
Oh, and let me note for the record that this bilingual ballot requirement was expanded by Congress in 1992, and the expansion was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. It was a different country then.
Bush pere was so much smarter than Bush fils.
He overruled his neocon White House flunkies and refused regime change in Iraq when he certainly could easily have made that error.
What was that war really about, anyway?
First a US official tells Saddam we wouldn't mind if he invaded Kuwait, then he invades and we tell him to get out or else, then we crush his military in about a week and leave him in power - after Bush the Elder imposes on a startled world the idea that the American president does not need the permission of the Congress to make a war, but does need the permission of the UN Security Council.
What the heck?
Comment I inadvertently deleted, from Lawrence (sorry, Lawrence!):
"I have here a list of 57 known communists..."
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