Today, President Bush addressed the NAACP for the first time in his presidency, narrowly avoiding becoming the first president since Warren G. Harding not to speak to the organization. At the same time the Senate was preparing to pass the extenstion for 25 years of the 1965 voting act. Among other things, this act prohibits literacy tests for voting, places voting procedures in certain states and counties, mostly in the South, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Justice Department, and requires that these regions provide bilingual ballots to those who have trouble speaking English. The Act was set to expire next year. With Jesse Jackson looking on from a gallery, it passed last week in the House of Representatives by a vote of 390-33. After it had passed there were efforts to amend the extension to only ten years, which were also defeated by a healthy margin. (more…)