(link) Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine has granted voting rights to nearly 1,500 felons this year, bumping up the voter rolls ahead of next month’s presidential election and putting himself on pace to exceed the record-setting pattern of his predecessor.

During his four years as governor, Mark Warner, a Democrat now running for the U.S. Senate, restored voting rights to 3,414 ex-convicts in Virginia. That exceeded the combined total for all Virginia governors during the previous 20 years, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Mr. Kaine, a Democrat in the third year of his term, had restored voting rights to 2,633 people with felony convictions as of Monday, including 1,445 this year.

“It’s not something that was just handed to him,” Kaine spokesman Gordon Hickey said. “He believes in it.”

Felons in 38 of the 50 states and the District automatically regain their voting rights once they have completed their prison terms or completed any parole. Two states - Maine and Vermont - permit convicts to vote while imprisoned.

Eight states - Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming - deprive felons of their voting rights for life in certain circumstances such as the nature of the crime. Only in Virginia and Kentucky are all felons disenfranchised for life unless the governor restores those rights.

Voter registration in Virginia is of special significance this year because the presidential campaigns of Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama consider the state crucial for victory.

Though Virginia has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, Democrats have been winning an increasing number of state elections. Polls in the past week have been divided: Three show Mr. Obama ahead by three to nine points and two show Mr. McCain ahead by three.

Mr. Kaine is a strong supporter of Mr. Obama, whose campaign has set a goal of registering tens of thousands of voters prior to the election. Virginia has recorded a net increase of more than 306,000 voters since the beginning of the year, according to statistics released Wednesday by the State Board of Elections.

David Kernell, a 20-year-old University of Tennessee-Knoxville student and son of Tennessee state representative (D-Memphis), has been contacted by the Secret Service and FBI as part of a formal investigation into the hacking of the private email account of Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

In less than a month, Sarah Palin has gone from the well-liked governor of a remote state to the most slurred and slandered politician in America today.

In the concerted effort to destroy Sarah Palin, her husband, and her children, we’ve seen the progressive blogosphere and professional media adopt the no-holds barred, street-fight viciousness of a community organizer fighting for scraps. The petty brutality has trickled down from the man they idolize, a man cool enough to befriend and use aging terrorists and racist ministers as they can help him, and callous enough to discard friendships decades old if it suits him, without a backward glance.

For all his eloquence behind a teleprompter, Barack Obama is still at heart a thug, and his disciples learned well from their master.

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Also Check Out at CY: Media Ignores Obama’s Undermining His Own Country, Because They Want The Same Things

More Che worship…
From Powerline

Jay Ambrose in the Examiner provides some of the details underlying my previous post about Che Guevara and those who celebrate him.

Prominent U.S. hip-hop executive Russell Simmons on Monday recommended eliminating the words “bitch,” “ho” and “nigger” from the recording industry, considering them “extreme curse words.”The call comes less than two weeks after radio personality Don Imus’ nationally syndicated and televised radio show was canceled amid public outcry over Imus calling a women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.”

Simmons, co-founder of the Def Jam label and a driving force behind hip-hop’s huge commercial success, called for voluntary restrictions on the words and setting up an industry watchdog to recommend guidelines for lyrical and visual standards.

“We recommend that the recording and broadcast industries voluntarily remove/bleep/delete the misogynistic words ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ and the racially offensive word ‘nigger’,” Simmons and Benjamin Chavis, co-chairmen of the advocacy group Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, said in a statement.

“These three words should be considered with the same objections to obscenity as ‘extreme curse words’,” it said.

Ho is slang for whore and commonly used in hip-hop music while nigger, a derogatory term for blacks, is among the most highly charged insults in American culture. The slur “nappy,” used by Imus, describes the tightly curled hair of many African Americans.

Monday’s statement changed course from another one by Simmons and Chavis dated April 13, a day after Imus’ show was canceled, in which they said offensive references in hip-hop “may be uncomfortable for some to hear, but our job is not to silence or censor that expression.”

The Imus controversy stoked a debate in the United States about how to deal with inflammatory words that are widely considered highly offensive but at the same time commonly and casually used in youth culture.

Hold on, what changed since his appearance on Oprah, when he was defending these thugs as poets and blaming society for the fact that we created a racist culture that FORCED these “poets” to use such derogatory language.

If you eliminate “bitch,” “ho” and “nigger” from rap music half of the rap industry will be out of work.

If you missed the discussion check it out here.