Remember a year ago, when the world was simpler? Children were younger, the air was fresher, morons were out in your local VA hall screaming their fucking heads off about how the President was going to inject them with AIDS just so that they would have to get off their Medicare and buy insurance to cure it.
Oh, those were the days...
Anyway, this summer's new Thing The Crazies Are Angry About is the New Black Panther voter intimidation case. Video below:
Adam Serwer has the rundown of it, but the short version is this: the section of the Voting Rights Act under which three black men and the organization to which they belonged is Section 11(b). The main problem with the prosecution's case in this instance is that it would have been incredibly difficult to successfully prosecute the New Black Panther Party as a group (because the whole group wasn't there and nobody else did anything else), which essentially means that the DOJ would be left trying to prove systematic voter intimidation based on the actions of two guys.
To parallel this, imagine that you tried to prosecute the Republican Party for voter caging...but the entirety of their congnizable efforts was two guys at a single polling place making nasty comments for a half hour. It's not that those men weren't trying to suppress the vote. It's that they did such a shitty, disorganized job of it, and did so little, that pressing a claim against them would be fruitless.
Alas, we're dealing with the modern Tea Party, which has basically decided that it's the modern heir of the civil rights movement, and so they have deigned to follow Martin Luther King's example of showing up in a public forum and yelling half-coherent sentences at people who have actual shit to deal with. Look forward to a summer of white people dressed up like Angela Davis, threatening to take down the hegemony of black power that's ruining their lives and making the drive-through at Taco Bell so inefficient.
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