Americans ready for direct democracy

I try to avoid posting about polls, but this one is worth mentioning. It's a sentiment that predates the debacle of the 2000 election and is now gaining traction even with Republicans. A majority of Americans want to eliminate the Electoral College.

Nearly 11 years after the 2000 presidential election brought the idiosyncrasies of the United States' Electoral College into full view, 62% of Americans say they would amend the U.S. Constitution to replace that system for electing presidents with a popular vote system. Barely a third, 35%, say they would keep the Electoral College.

The EC is a relic that was originally enacted to appease those who didn't want direct elections by the people at all. It's long outlived any utility, if indeed it ever had any. The President is elected to represent all the people. It only makes sense that this office be determined by a majority vote. In fact, if we had a truly representative Congress, it would have eliminated long ago.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Point and Click Activism

It's been a while since I posted one of these and this one is a worthy cause. President Obama has been making a case for reining in corporate influence on our elections in the wake of the recent SCOTUS decision making corporate billions the equivalent of free speech. They're putting an ad together that will highlight signers to this petition calling for a change. Sign the petition for fair elections here. It only takes 30 seconds.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

The Chair recognizes Rep. Murray Hill Inc.

I love this. First corporation to cut out the middle man and run directly for office.

Taking the implications of Citizens United to their logical extreme, a Washington, D.C.-based firm, Murray Hill Incorporated, has announced that it is running for Congress in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.

“Until now,” the company said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.”

In a campaign video posted on YouTube, Murray Hill Inc. tries out campaign slogans like, “The best democracy money can buy,” “Democracy’s next step,” and “The way we see it, corporate America has been the driving force behind Congress for years. But now it’s time we got behind the wheel ourselves.”

Why not? It's not like the corporations aren't already buying elections through trade associations. On some level, this feels more honest.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

Hand me the tinfoil, honey...

GOP IT "guru" Mike Connell, has been killed in a plane crash in Ohio. He wasn't just any guru, he was deeply connected to every GOP related scandal from the stealing of the vote in Ohio, to the "lost emails" related to the Attorney Purge, to the fraudulent prosecution of Don Siegelman. In fact he had just been deposed in the Ohio vote fraud case and was ready to testify despite having been threatened by Karl Rove, if he "didn't take the fall."

It's also useful to remember that the court just ordered the White House to take steps to retrieve the "lost emails" that covered the period of Katrina, the attorney purge and the outing of Valerie Plame. Connell is said to have hosted some of the accounts on servers in Chattanoga, TN through another of his related companies Coptix. Which leads me to recall that odd alleged April Fool's joke that had the distinct feel of a distraction tactic at the time.

My co-blogger at Newshoggers, Ken Anderson collects the relevant links to the backstory and the analogy to Forrest Gump is apt. Connell was literally present at the scene of every Bush family related crime for at least a decade. Details of the crash are sketchy but Connell is reported to have been alone in the plane and an experienced pilot. That reminds me of the death of Paul Wellstone who died in a similarly odd crash just as he was winning a race against Norm Coleman.

Add to that the other mysterious plane crash deaths listed at the last link and excuse me while I put on my tinfoil suit. I don't think just a hat is enough for this one. Further, considering that Al Franken is now winning the recount against the same Norm Coleman, let me give Al a bit of unsolicited advice. Stay the hell out of small aircraft.

[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]

Where do we go from here

So we managed to elect an adult as president and hopes are high but although we sweat blood and tears to get this far, the real work to take back our country is just beginning. President Obama is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and make the damage of the last eight years just go away. Cup of Joe has an excellent post on how we as responsible citizens can help. It should certainly be read in full, but here's two points I think are especially important.

Free And Fair Elections

The biggest, but not the only, reason for expanding the 50-state strategy is to take control of the machinery of how elections are run in this country. As liberals, we believe that the right to decide who our leaders are is the most fundamental principle of a democratic society, and we should work to get as many people to participate in that process as possible by simplifying it and making it less intrusive. Making election day a federal holiday, moving it to Monday and having voting on the weekend before, early elections, these are just a few ways to accomplish this.

We should also get rid of all electronic voting and counting machines and establish the secret, paper ballot as the official ballot of record. We should count the ballots by hand, in full public view, at the precinct where they were cast, and establish a clear and open chain of custody for the paper ballots throughout the entire procedure. Accuracy and accountability are the primary goals.

Break Up The Media Monopolies

Another reason we got into the mess we are, and why people often vote against their own self-interests or for politicians that place corporate interests over the good of the nation, is the massive amounts of corporate propaganda that stifle free and open debates. The role of the news media is to keep people informed, and when that is subverted by the desire for profits, no one is served. Re-regulating the industry so that the power of corporate interests is diluted will go a long way into improving our political discourse.

In essence most of Joe's suggestions boil down to breaking the corporatocracy's control of the system. Our country has served corporate interests over the common good for far too long. At a time when many multinational corporations have a annual revenue greater than the total GDP of at least a third of the world's countries, the task seems almost impossible. But we have to at least try if for no other reason, to leave the world a better place for our children and grandchildren. Joe's list is a good place to start. [Via Avedon]

[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]

Raiders of the lost recount.

By Capt. Fogg

I've yet to read any reviews of HBO's latest creation Recount. It's about the deep, wide and muddy river of corruption that runs through Southern politics and about how democracy was torn from the banks and washed away while America looked the other way or snickered or gloated -- or participated in what may have been the most shameful election meddling in the last 50 years.

The reviews, I'm certain, will fault it for bias, because it damns the Bush organization and the Florida political machine of Jeb Bush. They're certain to say that it's fiction, loosely based on the truth and that there are (hold your nose) always two sides to a story.

There aren't, of course. There's the truth and as many lies as there are liars to tell them and truth is not to be found by bracketing it with lies or finding the mean between the false extremes. It's not fiction that Katherine Harris, who represented both the State of Florida and George Bush's campaign, used $4 million dollars to commission a list of names similar to the names of convicted felons and without confirming the data or informing anyone on the list, used it to turn away tens of thousands of registered voters from the polls without letting them cast provisional ballots. It's not bias to assert that she used every trick she could employ to stall and obfuscate the recount she was required by law to make.

It's not fiction that 80 years of precedent was overturned and replaced by contrived new rules for counting ballots. It's not fiction that minority voters in Florida were warned by people identifying themselves as State Police to stay away from the polls. The infamous butterfly ballots that the nattering nitwits on Fox told us were without problems had major problems. I have 20:20 vision and had difficulty making them line up properly and difficulty making the worn and dull stylus punch cleanly and even in being sure the beat up machine was holding the ballot properly. If you want to believe I can't read or that I think Pat Buchanan is a Democrat or that I'm just plain stupid, go ahead -- but you know better. This is, however, the age of marketing magic and with a wave of the wand and a flap of the jawbone it all becomes the result of stupid, old (the same thing) grandmothers who can't follow instructions and unsavory far left liberal America hating effete Volvo driving welfare abusing Democrats.

It's not fiction that recounts weren't performed as requested, that gangs of Republican thugs, flown in from out of state by courtesy of Bush's best friends at Enron, physically halted the Miami-Dade recount or that the legally mandated recount was deliberately stalled by Republican operatives so as to run out the clock.

It's not fiction that The Republicans on the US Supreme Court recognized the unconstitutionality of this mess, but none the less permitted it "just this one time."

The 2 hour production did cover the invalidation and subsequent re-validation of absentee ballots that had no postmarks, no witnesses and no dates by Republican election commissioners anxious to obtain as many military votes as possible. It didn't mention my county where the Republican commissioner actually took the ballots home without supervision and decided on her own that they must have been valid. There were never any repercussions.

"Democrats go wah. They go wah wah wah" said Ann of the Thousand Lies. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a snicker.

2000 was the year I gave up on the United States of America and although I've since repented to a degree, I will never again have faith in the ability of our democratic Republic to operate as it was designed to do, free of the ability of entrenched power to bend it to their will and against the will and control of the electorate. Since that day, the ability of our government to control what we know, what we believe, and whether or not our votes get counted has grown further. Their power to know what we read and who we talk to has grown and their power to create false history is unmitigated and all but unchallenged.

Recount ends with a dolly shot of a vast warehouse full of boxes containing all the Florida ballots and perhaps it deliberately parallels the famous final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, slowly revealing, as the camera recedes, the vastness of the endless stacks of crates of artifacts relegated to the dust and official oblivion. It's a metaphor -- a powerful one.

It's not hard to look at history and see the pivotal moments when civilizations begin to fail, governments begin to fall and liberty begins an inexorable slide into the spider hole of authoritarianism and corruption. So far, the presidential election of 2000 seems likely to feature as such in some future volume of the Decline and Fall of the United States of America.

Cross posted from Human Voices

Rescue democracy first

By Libby

Truthout posts a good interview with Robert Reich, who offers some sage advice to progressives.

Stop trying to get corporations to be socially responsible. Stop trying to achieve any particular social objective like global warming or a national healthcare system ... Put all of our efforts into a citizen's movement for democracy. That would include the public financing of campaigns and would require any network, any broadcaster using the public airwaves to provide advertising for all candidates.

It's a long piece that arises out of Reich's new book on supercapitalism. He floats a lot of ideas including setting up blind trusts for political donations so the candidates don't know where the money comes from, eliminating the quid pro quo factor and analyzes where we went off track.

Yes, but look again at what I talk about as the not quite golden age, the period 1945 to 1975, when 35 percent of Americans were unionized in the work force - you had industrywide bargaining, you had pluralist interest groups and regulatory agencies. You had political parties that were not just sump pumps for campaign financing but were political organizations that reached down to the community level. In those days corporate investors were not kings, consumers were not kings. The power was divided in a way that gave us much more say as citizens.

However, the most valuable exchange for progressive activists was this:

TM: I've been saying since the 2004 election that we need a Restore Democracy Trifecta: media reform for a more informed democracy - stop (and reverse if possible) media consolidation, offer less false balance (i.e., global warming skeptics are equal to global warming scientists) and more statements of fact. Campaign reform - public financing, free TV time. Election reform - transparent, accurate, inclusive and verifiable.

RR: Absolutely. I keep telling progressives who have particular issues they want to advance [that] nothing is going to happen on your issue or any other progressive issue unless you get together with everybody else who wants change and rescue democracy first.

I've often thought that was the problem with the big tent progressive movement. We're in the majority but we tend to be fractured in where we spend our energies and overwhelm the public dialogue with such a multitude of views that in a way, it impedes our progress. Maybe we could learn something from the message discipline of the GOP.

I'm not saying we should agree on everything, but I wonder if we wouldn't be more effective in changing the system if we could band together around a couple of core issues at a time and thus move our agenda forward incrementally. Media and elections reform seem like a good place to start to me.

Justice Dept targets NC for voting integrity

By Libby

The Justice Department civil rights division scandal has just hit home. Justice is apparently targeting the state for having what NC officials say is a "maintenance of voter rolls [that] is among the most careful and comprehensive programs in the country."

Justice and the local GOP operative, State Auditor Les Merritt, allege widespread irregulariities including "24,821 invalid driver's license numbers in the voter registration database, 380 people who appear to have voted after their dates of death and others who were under age 18 when they voted." However, neither Justice or Merritt were able to provide a single specific instance of actual voting fraud and failed to mention the reasonable explanations for the data discrepancies.

Gary Bartlett, executive director of the elections board, responded Wednesday with a stinging 10-page letter declaring many of the findings invalid. He accused Merritt's office of misleading the elections board and of rejecting its help.

"(Y)our office appears to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the data that was reviewed or about the federal and State laws governing the voter registration process," Bartlett wrote in the letter, which he provided to lawmakers Thursday.

For example, Bartlett said, many of the people who appear to have voted after their dates of death voted absentee and then died prior to Election Day. At least some people under 18 who voted did so legally, Bartlett said, because state law allows 17-year-olds to vote in a primary election if they will be 18 the day of the general election.

Bartlett said the state's regular maintenance of voter rolls resulted in 725,499 names removed during a recent 19-month period. Most had been inactive, moved or died.

Merritt's office declined to provide the Observer with a copy of its findings Thursday, saying it is adjusting them based on Bartlett's objections.

"This is a typical process we do in refining our findings," said Merritt spokesman Chris Mears.

Right, only remove the false allegations after somebody notices them. Merrit's deliberate politicalization of the process was noticed after he tried to derail legislation designed to make it easier for voters to participate in the process.

Bartlett said he never received such complaints from federal officials until 2005. "Since then, he has received three." A local expert on voting issues puts his finger on why.

"We're learning that this department has a record of harassing state-level officials who take their responsibility seriously and who don't act in a partisan way to depress voter registration or reduce the voting rolls," Hall said.

I might note that although NC is considered a "red state," we have a large population of African-Americans and a Hispanic community that is growing by leaps and bounds, not to mention a deluge of Northerners who are migrating to the Raleigh-Durham triangle and bringing their liberal sensibilities with them.

Justice Department spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson says the department "enforces the law without prejudice." Right. They'll disenfranchise anyone who's likely to vote Democratic.

Repairing the primary process

By Libby
Updated below

I hate to link to David Broder but he touches on a subject I addressed briefly the other day and while he gets it mostly wrong, he's right about one thing -- our primary selection process is broken and needs to be fixed.

Broder proposes some convoluted rotating schedule of contests, with decisions being made by the the two major party chairs. Right. Just what we need is to give the political machine more power to manipulate the process. That's what got us into this mess in the first place and Broder's protestations about the inability of candidates to appear personally in all the states is a crock anyway. The way the system is set up, unless you live in a key state, most voters make their choice without getting a chance to personally glad-hand the candidates anyway.

Most people that actually show up and vote get the majority of their information from the internet and there's no dearth of it. For the elderly and others who aren't wired, there's no reason the candidates couldn't be given a series of televised forums in which they could present their platforms, other than it might slightly interfere with corporate profit making. And I'm not talking about these miserable excuses for "debates" they are currently foisting off on the public. Those are little more than showcases for the talking heads on whatever station snags the event. Give every candidate a set amount of time to present their creds. Can the stupid questions and limit the moderation to quelling interuptions and enforcing time limits on the talk.

That's the trouble with aging pundits, they don't understand that it's a new age in communication. Technological advances have made the conventional wisdom obsolete. It's possible and indeed practical to level the playing field and hold a national primary -- a simple solution that would serve the public best. Of course that's precisely why dinosaurs like Broder and his fellow Beltway media elite would never support it. It would make their pompous pontificating obsolete as well.

Update: Surprisingly Moe Lane at Redstate agrees with me.

Florida to allow felons to vote?

My dear friend and nearly constant critic, Tobacco Joe at Cadillac Tight is now blogging under his real name, at least of most of it -- D.G. Hall. He reminds me I've been wanting to remark on the push in Florida to restore voting rights to felons. Although D.G. is a [former*] unrelenting Republican, unsurprisingly, he supports the bill. I say I'm unsurprised because he's one of the most reasonable and polite conservatives I've ever known, hence our ability to form a friendship. I loved his take on it.

Oh, boy, is it about time for this. It's yet another strange facet of life in the deep South that although I'm no felon (nor even guilty of any misdemeanors), I have quite a few family members and friends/acquaintances who are. Now, there are a few of these folks I'd willingly have denied their right to swill liquor and/or carry handguns in the future, but I really can't see what harm it would be to allow them to vote again. OK, wait. They would probably vote for Democrats, but other than that, no harm, no foul.

As they say, read the rest of the post for yourself, but I'd agree that this is long past due. As D.G. notes, for one thing, they have paid their debt to society and shouldn't be disenfranchised from the electoral system for a lifetime and for another, so many of our present day felons found themselves on the other side of the law not for violent crimes, but for violations of the drug laws which many of us consider to be wrongheaded and downright destructive in the first place.

In effect, disenfranching drug defendants is just one more way the prohibitionists protect their territory. It seems unlikely that anyone who has been victimized by these unjust laws would vote for those who enact and support them.

UPDATE: *D.G. emails to note he forsake the Republican party when Bush nominated Miers is now a non-doctrinaire libertarian.

Putting the kibosh on K Street

Walmart now hearts Democrats. It isn't exactly news that deep pocket corporate contributions aren't based on ideology. They traditionally hedge their bets and spend the money according to who is in power and as such serve as something of a barometer on the conventional wisdom over who's hot and who's not. But it does serve as a reminder that any politician can be bought. Payola is non-partisan and so unfortunately is political backscratching. I think it's another good argument for mandating public financing for campaigns.

For instance, would the dismal Medicare "reform" bill have been enacted without the undue influence of the pharmaceutical lobby? I think not when they essentially wrote the bill and sheparded it on the floor. And before you argue against my point, take a look at the numbers.

Lobbyists have effectively become unelected legislators. It's clear we're not going to be able to clean up the ethical mess inside the Beltway from the inside out. We won't negate the influence of lobbyists unless and until we remove the avenues through which they finance election and especially re-election campaigns. I can't think of a better reason to consider mandating public funding instead.