People remember 1929 as the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, the global economic disaster which remains the only one in history that dwarfs the one in which we now find ourselves. It was also the year Martin Luther King Jr. was born, who wouldn’t live to see 40 years. And it was the year that Langston Hughes graduated from Lincoln University, outside Philadelphia.

Hughes, the grandson of abolitionists and voting-rights activists, was an African-American writer. His poem “A Dream Deferred” begins:

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?”

Hughes left Lincoln University, one of the 105 historically black colleges and universities in the U.S., and spent the rest of his life campaigning for civil and human rights. He died in 1967, two years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

Almost 80 years after his graduation, Lincoln students eagerly awaited the opportunity to cast their vote, many no doubt for the first major-party African-American candidate for president, Barack Obama. For years, the Chester County Board ...

They wrap themselves in a constitution we were taught to revere, a constitution they secretly hold in contempt.  They are subversives in Armani suits, and they are far more dangerous to the survival of this creaky, old republic than communists and terrorists ever were. 

News that a Republican leader recently boasted that Pennsylvania’s new voter identification law will boost Willard Mitt Romney’s chances of winning that key state in the November election is causing a stir among progressives and liberals.  Why? 

First, a few facts:  The loquacious protagonist in this story is a tool named Mike Turzai.  Not exactly a household name, unless you happen to live in the state founded by William Penn – you know the state where the “Miracle at Philadelphia” (aka the Constitutional Convention of 1787) happened, where the Liberty Bell proudly displays its crack, and where the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross famously helped launch a revolution.

Turzai is the Republican House Majority Leader in Pennsylvania’s state legislature.  As such, he was instrumental in getting House Bill 934 – otherwise known as the Pennsylvania Voter Identification Protection Act – passed.  The bill, which was recently signed into law by Republican Governor Tom Corbett, will require Pennsylvanians to show valid photo identification each and every time they vote.  Think of it as a form of contraception: like safe sex, this bill is for the voters' "protection".

Imagine:  Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross could not vote in Pennsylvania without a valid ID.  Something tells me that under the new rules few of Franklin's contemporaries could have voted back then.  One can't help but wonder how many eligible white male property owners would have ...