“The best thing to do when faced with voter suppression – and my friends, this is what voter suppression looks like – the best thing to defeat it is to go vote. The best thing to do is fight back.”
Dana DeBeauvoir, Travis County, Texas District Clerk, offering advice to voters
“Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump have all been closely involved in the transactions in question, so we won’t tolerate their attempts to evade testifying in this investigation.”
Letitia James, New York State Attorney General, in a statement released January 18 in which she alleges former President Donald Trump and his family inflated the value of his properties and misstated his personal worth in representations to lenders, insurance brokers and other players in his real estate empire
“History will not remember them kindly.”
Martin Luther King III, the son of the late civil rights leader, comparing Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to the White moderates his father wrote about during the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s – who declared support for the goals of Black voting rights but not the direct actions or demonstrations that ultimately led to passage of landmark legislation
“COVID is real; COVID is a threat. But even more serious than COVID, as real and scary as it is, is to see thousands and thousands of thousands of voters not being able to vote, and it was on our watch. We refuse to stop. We refuse to turn around.”
Rev. Adolphus Lacey, a pastor in New York’s Brooklyn borough, announcing ongoing voter registration efforts despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic
“This case is a disaster for the rule of law and a grave disservice to women in Texas, who have a right to control their own bodies. I will not stand by silently as a State continues to nullify this constitutional guarantee. I dissent.”
Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Supreme Court Justice, condemning severe abortion restrictions established by the state of Texas
Chief Writing Wolf 
Stupid Quote of the Week #2
The usual suspects?
“You’ve got African-Americans. You’ve got Hispanics, and you’ve got a bag full of money. Does that tell you – a light bulb doesn’t go off in your head and say, ‘This is a drug deal?’”
– Sam L. Ponder, assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, in reference to the case of Bongani Charles Calhoun.
Calhoun, who is Black, went on a road trip with some friends who planned to purchase cocaine. The drug dealers turned out to be undercover Drug Enforcement Agency operatives. Calhoun was arrested along with the others, but insisted he had no knowledge of the drug buy. Ponder questioned the validity of Calhoun’s ignorance. Calhoun filed suit, claiming his arrest was racially motivated.
Ponder’s comment incited a strong retort from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Hispanic member. “By suggesting that race should play a role in establishing a defendant’s criminal intent, the prosecutor here tapped into a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation,” she said.
I suppose, if I saw a group of Caucasian folks at a shooting range (and there are plenty of them in Texas), I could reasonably assume they’re White supremacists out to assassinate President Obama. If you know anything about Tea Party Republicans in Texas, that’s not too outlandish a scenario. But, it’s still a racist assumption. It’s the kind of bigoted crap Blacks and Hispanics have had to deal with for decades; that we’re criminally inclined and – if we’re groups especially – it should be assumed we’re up to no good. It doesn’t matter that Calhoun probably knew what his friends were doing. But, a federal prosecutor should know better than to make such a blatantly racist comment like that. But, if he’s a Republican from Texas, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
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