OpEdNews - Article: The Implosion Of The American Political Consciousness

OpEdNews - Article: The Implosion Of The American Political Consciousness
...
In fact, the health of this country is tenuous, and that's on a real good day. All the obvious and tangible manifestations are there: massive unemployment, polarized wealth suitable for any banana republic, broken government and political system, environmental catastrophe and more. It's almost as if our goal is to commit national suicide in order to keep a whole next generation of Jared Diamonds employed or something.

These are huge problems, they are nigh on intractable, and they are destructive in the extreme. Indeed, so grim is our situation that the only real hope looking forward is for a resurgence of common sense and mutual sacrifice allowing for at least the possibility of finding the national will to address these crises.

But I'm afraid that's where things really start to get grim.

If you're under the age of forty, you might not realize that things weren't ever thus in American politics. The current ugly nature of our political discourse is perhaps simultaneously the greatest "victory' and greatest tragedy of the regressive revolution in America these last thirty years. Not only has the state itself been captured for purposes of thorough looting by oligarchs, but the very political consciousness of the nation has been diluted and polluted all while our faux patriotism is saluted beyond recognition.

Government is bad. Government always screws up. Corporations are heroic. Greed is good. Conservatism is about protecting freedom. Personal sacrifice for national improvement is for fools. Personal destruction is an appropriate form of politics. Hypocrisy is even more acceptable. There is one set of rules for elites, another for the rest of us.

All these form the fabric of our national ethos today, woven deeply into our political consciousness.

Regressives understand in ways that progressives tend to be clueless about, the simple idea that, who narrates governs. The explanation for the right's visceral appreciation of this wisdom is likely rooted in the survival instinct at the core of the human creature's very DNA. When you're peddling an absolutely absurd and destructive pile of bullshit, even dressing it up in pretty pink ribbons isn't going to be enough. If you hope to have any prayer of making the sale, you gotta teach people from their earliest days that turds are really, really valuable. Get yours now!

This was one of Orwell's most powerful perceptions in 1984, a book loaded with crucial insights about society, politics, government and human nature. The state could expend endless resources battling for the supremacy of a certain type of politics. That's one option. Or, far more cleverly, it could just remove the possibility of imagining alternatives from the public's consciousness. Much easier. Much cheaper. This is why Orwell concentrated so much on language in his novel. He understood that action requires desire, desire requires imagination, and imagination requires language.

American politics and political culture have descended into a grim visage from what they once were, to something taking a form today of which Big Brother could be proud. ...
...
What could be more basic than removing gushing profits and massive bureaucratic waste from a country's healthcare system, especially one that is groaning so clangorously under the burdens of runaway costs? What could be easier to figure out than nationalized healthcare, when every other developed country in the world already does it? And yet such ideas were nowhere remotely near consideration throughout these long months of tortuous negotiations over "reform' of what actually amounts to the care of corporate health in America. And yet even the most pathetic feints in the direction of real solutions a public option or the extension of Medicare benefits were immediately dispatched with, so that the profiteers' victory could be unequivocally complete.

Military spending is another excellent example. This country drops twice as much on "defense' as what is spent by every other country in the world combined, and we do that despite having not a single state enemy (you know, the kind you could actually use such a military against) anywhere on the horizon....
...
Our problem isn't that the Obama administration is socialist, but rather that it is a captive of the worst elements of capitalism.

Our problem isn't that our politicians make awful decisions that have nothing to do with advancing our interests, but rather that we keep tolerating politicians who do that.

Our problem isn't that we chose the wrong ideological alternative, but rather that we have so little to choose from.

Indeed, our deepest problem is that we can't even imagine anymore that there could be real choice. ...

Felons In Prison Should Be Able To Vote In Washington State, Federal Judges Rule

Felons In Prison Should Be Able To Vote In Washington State, Federal Judges Rule

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Incarcerated felons should be allowed to vote in Washington to ensure that racial minorities are protected under the Voting Rights Act, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means the more than 18,000 felons behind bars in the state could get back their right to vote – without having to wait until they are released from prison and are no longer on probation or parole. The ruling also could open the door to similar lawsuits in the 9th Circuit's eight other states and two territories.

The issues it raises about racial bias in the justice system are not unique to Washington, said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., group promoting sentencing reform.

"They are issues that permeate the justice system and are relevant in every state," he said, adding that an estimated 5.3 million people nationwide are ineligible to vote because of felony convictions.

The panel's ruling overturned a 2000 decision by a district judge in Spokane. That judge had found that Washington's felon disenfranchisement law didn't violate the Voting Rights Act, and had dismissed a lawsuit filed by a former prison inmate from Bellevue.

The two appellate judges ruled that disparities in the state's justice system "cannot be explained in race-neutral ways." ....

...

Farrakhan's lead attorney, Gonzaga University School of Law professor Larry Weiser, equated some disenfranchisement laws to poll taxes and literacy tests of the past. He said Washington state's criminal justice system "is biased against African-Americans, and the impact has been a violation of their voting rights."

The state argued the lawsuit should be dismissed because the law was not intended to discriminate against minorities.

...

In her dissent, 9th Circuit Judge Margaret McKeown wrote that the majority "has charted territory that none of our sister circuits has dared to explore." She noted that three other appellate courts – the 1st Circuit in a Massachusetts case, the 2nd Circuit in a New York case, and the 11th Circuit in a Florida case – "have all determined that vote denial challenges to felon disenfranchisement laws are not cognizable under the Voting Rights Act."

Felon voters were central to a Republican court challenge to the results of Washington state's 2004 gubernatorial race. The challenge focused heavily on votes cast by felons who hadn't had their rights restored. Gov. Chris Gregoire beat Republican Dino Rossi by 133 votes after two recounts and the unsuccessful court challenge.

OpEdNews - Article: American Justice is Blind, But the Scales are Rigged

OpEdNews - Article: American Justice is Blind, But the Scales are Rigged

By Dave Lindorff

When it comes to justice in America, the scales definitely badly need a visit by an inspector from the Department of Weights and Standards.

Consider the recent decision by Federal Judge Ricardo Urbina tossing out the federal indictment of five Blackwater (Now Xe) mercenaries for the 2007 slaughter of 14 innocent Iraqis in Baghdad.

The judge found that federal prosecutors had improperly used incriminating statements which he said had been "compelled" from the Blackwater personnel under "threat of job loss."

Let's compare that to how the courts have handled other cases. We might start with John Walker Lindh, the young American captured in the first days of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Indicted on charges of conspiring to kill Americans, Lindh, currently serving a 20 year sentence after a plea agreement reached with the government, never had his case thrown out, though the government's main evidence was a statement allegedly made by him (this on the word of an FBI agent) that he had been a member of the Taliban and Al Qaeda--a statement that even if actually made, had come at a time that Lindh was being kept duct-taped to a gurney and held in an unheated, unlit metal shipping container, with an untreated bullet wound in his leg, and denied access to an attorney....

Or compare the Blackwater case to the case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on Pennsylvania's death row now for 27 years for the 1981 killing of a white Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal was convicted largely on the basis of testimony by two alleged "eye-witnesses": an African-American prostitute named Cynthia White and a white taxi driver named Robert Chobert. White gave wildly different accounts of what she had "seen" from her position on the sidewalk several car lengths away from the shooting. ....

...

Although it is clearly anathema to any kind of fair trial, coercion is commonplace in American "justice." Whether a judge will decide that the coercion of confessions or of witnesses requires the tossing out of an indictment, or the overturning of a conviction, though, appears to have more to do with the political connections of the defendant than with the merits of the case.

...

There is really no doubt that Blackwater "security guards" working for the US military and State Department, perhaps fearing they were under attack, went on a shooting rampage in a Baghdad intersection, mowing down 14 civilians, including women and children, and wounding many more. One of the group initially charged even confessed and is currently serving jail time for his actions. But in the view of a federal judge, the fear on the part of his colleagues that they might lose their jobs if they didn't tell investigators what had happened makes their initial confessions "coerced," and since those statements were used by federal prosecutors as a basis for their indictment of the men, the indictment was flawed and had to be tossed out.

American justice at work.

The scales are not balanced.

Washington's Blog

Washington's Blog

MONDAY, JANUARY 4, 2010

Abandon False Hope

It is easy to be skeptical.

Virtually all of our politicians are corrupt. See this, this and this.

The giant banks are running the show.

The healthcare bill being rammed through Congress "is just another bailout of the financial system", and law school professors say that it is unconstitutional.

America is on a permanent war footing, when the people (and soldiers) are sick of war.

Our civil rights have been eroded, and yet we are not being made any safer.

Top scientists, economists and environmentalists all say that cap and trade being pushed through in American and around the world is a scam which won't significantly reduce C02 emissions, and will only help in making the financial players who crashed the economy even more wealthy.

Obama has sold us out.

So there's nothing we can do, right?

Well, actually - as I have previously documented, things would actually change very quickly if enough people started raising a ruckus.

The ironic thing is that if all of the people who think of themselves as cynics or skeptics made noise, things would instantly change for the better. In other words, the millions upon millions of cynics/skeptics/self-described "realists" aren't raising a ruckus against the fraud being committed by the giant banks, the corruption of our political system, or the lawlessness and imperial arrogance of our military-industrial complex because they think things can't change.

But by staying silent, they are actually creating the conditions in which nothing can change. ...

Why Democrats Are Trying to Commit Electoral Suicide | CommonDreams.org

Why Democrats Are Trying to Commit Electoral Suicide | CommonDreams.org

by Ian Welsh

Forty-five percent of the Democratic base now says they aren't going to vote in 2010 or are thinking of not voting. This is a direct result of Democrats in Congress and the Presidency doing things the base disagrees with or not doing things the base wants to see done. It appears politically stupid to act as they have, and yet, they did. So why?

Elected Democrats at the Federal level are members of the national elite. If they weren't a member when they were elected, they are quickly brought into the fold. They are surrounded by lobbyists, other members and staffers who were lobbyists, as a rule. They learn they need to raise immense amounts of money in the off years when normal people aren't giving, and that the only way to raise that money is for corporate interests and rich people to write the checks. They also receive the benefits of elite status, very quickly. It's not an accident that the every Senator except Bernie Sanders is wealthy.

Whatever Americans think, whether they support a public option or single payer; whether they're for or against Iraq or Afghanistan; whether they agree with bailing out banks or not, elite consensus is much much narrower than American public opinion. It starts at the center right and heads over to reactionary (repeal the entire progressive movement and the New Deal, taking America back to the 1890s).

The elites are convinced they know what has to be done. Not necessarily what's "best", but what is possible given the constraints they believe America operates under and the pressures which elected officials work with. So Obama can say, and mean, that if he were creating a medical system from scratch, he'd go with single payer. But he "knows" that's impossible, not just for political reasons, but because there are huge monied interests who would be horribly damaged or even destroyed by moving to single payer. On top of that, he looks at the amount of actual change required to shift all that money away from insurance companies and to reduce pharma profits, and to change which providers get paid what, and he sees it as immensely disruptive to the economy. In theory, it might lead to a better place, but to Obama, the disruption on the way there is unthinkable.

The same thing is true of the financial crisis. The banks may be technically insolvent, but the idea of nationalizing them all, or shutting them down and shifting the lending to other entities would mean that the most profitable (in theory, not in reality) sector of the economy would largely be wiped out. Add to that the fact that Obama was the largest recipient of Wall Street cash of the major candidates for the Presidency, and the immense influence the banks wield through their alumni who are placed throughout the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other departments, and the idea of actually radically reforming the banking system becomes unthinkable. Virtually every technocrat giving Obama, or most Senators advice, will be against it.

Moreover they understand that with a few exceptions, the financial economy is the American economy. It's what the US sold to the rest of the world: pieces of paper in exchange for real money which could be used to import real goods, so Americans could live beyond their means.

Shut that down and what's going to replace it? How are you going to avoid an immediate meltdown of the US standard of living? How are you going to avoid a large part of the elite being wiped out? You or I may have answers to that, except to wiping out a large chunk of the elite, which is something which needs to be done, but those who grew up under the system, who believe in the system, and who ran the system don't. What they've done all their lives is what they understand. And more to the point the system has been good to them. The last 35 years may have been a bad time to be an ordinary American, but the elite has seen their wealth and income soar to levels even greater than the gilded age. The rich, in America, have never, ever, been as rich as they are now.

And if you're a member of the elite, your friends, your family, your colleagues-everyone you really care about, is a member of the elite or attached to it as a valued and very well paid retainer. For you, for everyone you care about, the system has worked. Perhaps, intellectually, you know it hasn't worked for ordinary people, but you aren't one of them, you aren't friends with them, and however much you care in theory about them, it's a bloodless intellectual empathy, not one born of shared experience, sacrifice and the bonds of friendship or love.

So when a big crisis comes, all of your instincts scream to protect your friends, your family, and the system which you grew up under, prospered under and which has been good to you. Moreover, you understand that system, or you think you do, and you believe that with a twiddle here and an adjustment there, it's a system you can make work again. Doing something radical, like single payer or nationalizing the banks or letting the banks fail and doing lending direct through the Fed and through credit unions: that's just crazy talk. Who knows how it would work, or if it would work? Why take a chance?

And so, until disaster turns into absolute catastrophe, the elites will fiddle with the dials, rather than engaging in radical change. When the time comes when it becomes clear even to them that radical change is required, they are far more likely to go with their preconceived notions of what's wrong with the US, which are very reactionary, than to go with liberal or progressive solutions.

So you're far more likely to see Medicare and Social Security gutted, than you are to see the military budget cut in a third or Medicare-for-all enacted. You're far more likely to see a movement to a flat tax (supported by idiot right wing populists) than you are to see a return to high marginal taxation.

To the elites, ordinary Americans are pretty much parasites. It's not the bankers, with their multi-trillion dollar bailouts who are the problem, it's old people with their Social Security and Medicare. The elites made it. They are rich and powerful. They believe that their success is due entirely to themselves (even if they inherited the money or position). If you didn't, then that means you don't deserve it.

Democratic party elected leaders, as a group, are members of this elite, or are henchmen (and some women) of this elite. They believe what the elites believe, and they live within a world whose boundaries are formed by those beliefs.

They have no intention of engaging in radical change which threatens elite, which is to say, their, prosperity and power. The financial industry must be saved, the medical industry must be saved. Social Security and Medicare, which they don't need and don't benefit from, not so much. The military, which funnels huge amounts of money to them, must continue to expand (in real terms military spending is now twice what it was in 2000.)

As long as elected Democrats at the Federal level are members of this elite, or identify with the elite they are not going to make fundamental changes against the interests of that elite.

And so, no, there is no "change" you can believe in from this class of Democrats. There is no "hope" of an America which is better for ordinary people.

That doesn't mean things are hopeless, but it does mean there's little hope for anything radical from this Congress or President.

As Adam Smith pointed out, there's a lot of ruin in a nation. America's going to have to endure a lot more of it before things actually change.

© 2010 Open Left

The Cash Committee: How Wall Street Wins On The Hill

The Cash Committee: How Wall Street Wins On The Hill

..

Auto dealers seemed like an obvious target for the new agency; nearly every time someone buys a car, the dealer also sells them an auto loan, complete with promises like zero per cent interest and a pile of cash back. Americans hold some $850 billion in car debt and dealers are responsible for marketing roughly four-fifths of that amount. They pocket lucrative commissions with little oversight, and the committee seemed poised to change that.

Enter Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), a former Saab dealer from Orange County, who according to his latest financial disclosure statement still collects rent from some of his former auto dealer colleagues. Campbell downplayed the importance of his industry partners and proposed an amendment to the bill exempting dealers from the new agency's purview. On October 22, it came up for a vote.

As usual, the members filed into the high-ceilinged first-floor hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building. Committee Chairman Barney Frank oversaw the vote atop four tiered rows of seats, a full story above the witnesses and the audience. The longest-serving Democratic members of the panel -- informally known as the banking committee -- sat to the right or just below the chairman; it can take years, if not decades, for a freshman representative to ascend up the risers.

The clerk called the roll, starting from the top. Senior Democrats roundly rejected Campbell's amendment. It appeared as if the Democrats would beat back the effort and apply the same standard to car dealers that was applied to everyone else.

Then came the bottom two rows, the place where reform goes to die. Despite the disapproval of the powerful chairman and nearly every consumer group in the country, the Campbell amendment passed by a 47-21 margin.

Good Riddance to Decade That Began With Theft of the Presidency

Good Riddance to Decade That Began With Theft of the Presidency
...

The original sin of the good-riddance decade came in December of 2000, when the United States Supreme Court intervened to stop a complete recount of the votes in Florida and then declared George Bush to be the president.

This extreme judicial activism was not merely a devastating assault on American democracy. It set in motion the Bush presidency, and with it the pathologies that the Bush-Cheney administration imposed on the country in the form of unnecessary wars, failed economic policies, assaults on civil liberties and crudely divisive and hyper-partisan governance.

Bush, Dick Cheney and aides are surely to blame for much of what ailed America during the 2000s, and for what will ail America for decades to come.

But it was the U.S. Supreme Court's unprecedented meddling in the presidential election process – an intervention that would have horrified the founders of a republic that was supposed to enjoy a separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers – made the Bush-Cheney interregnum possible.

Bush, it must be remembered, did not win the popular vote nationally.

In fact, the American electorate favored Democrat Al Gore over Republican Bush by more than 540,000 votes.

Of course, because the United States has a convoluted electoral system that does not award the presidency to the candidate who wins the most votes, the contest came down to a fight between the Bush and Gore camps for Florida's decisive 25 Electoral College votes.

Florida ran a confusing and disorderly election on November 7, 2000, and then conducted a ridiculous review of the close result that followed no standards except those imposed by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Bush campaign co-chair.

When the Florida Supreme Court finally ordered a full and consistent recount of all 6.1 million ballots cast by the state's voters, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the process and then declared Bush the winner of Florida's electoral votes and the presidency.

The problem with this unprecedented move by a conflicted high court was that more Floridians went to the polls with the intention of electing Gore than Bush.

This is not some radical notion, not some conspiracy theory.

It is the reality that was evident to scholars of voting behavior from the start.

As University of California at Irvine political scientist Anthony Salvanto, who conducted some of the first and most exhaustive examinations of contested ballots, noted: "There's a pretty clear pattern from these ballots. Most of these people went to the polls to vote for Al Gore."

Salvanto was not an outlier.

Even the media consortium that tried -- after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ensuing spike in presidential approval ratings -- to suggest a scenario under which Bush might have won produced more scenarios under which Gore would have won.

Media outlets that looked beyond the partisan spin to the reality of what the ballots revealed acknowledges as much.

As The Associated Press noted, "Under any standard that tabulated all disputed ballots statewide, however, Gore erased Bush's advantage and emerged with a tiny lead that ranged from 42 to 171 votes."...

� Ridding America Of The Warmongers������ : Information Clearing House -� ICH

� Ridding America Of The Warmongers : Information Clearing House -� ICH
...
One way to reform Congress is to stop elected officials from accepting donations, (i.e., bribes,) and instead to conduct their business exclusively with public funds. In “Free Lunch”(Portfolio), Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnston writes, “Let each member of Congress spend however much he or she deems necessary to do his or her job. If we can imbue representatives and senators with the power to make laws, surely we can give them the authority to manage their own expense accounts.”

Johnston explains, “This would come at a price: No more free trips, no more free meals, and no more gifts. Senator, if you need to inspect the cleanliness of the sink behind the bar at a resort in Tahiti, go right ahead, just give us the receipts with an explanation of the costs. We will collect the receipts from every elected representative monthly and post it all on the Internet in a format that makes for easy analysis.”

Johnston urges, “Every dollar, and every meeting, must be disclosed. And we will pay for it all, subject only to the usual penalties for embezzling, the punishments accorded by the full House or Senate because of their exclusive right to judge the fitness of members, or the decision by voters to oust a spendthrift.”

“The time for preventive action is now,” writes Francis Boyle in “Protesting Power,”(Rowan & Littlefield). Civil resistance is one important strategy. People power can overcome power politics. Popular movements have succeeded in toppling tyrannical, dictatorial, and authoritarian regimes in former Communist countries throughout Eastern Europe as well as in Asia, Latin America, and recently in the Middle East. It is time for Americans to exercise people power here in the United States.”

Boyle explains that under the First Amendment, civil-resistance protesters are exercising their right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” He writes that amendment “does not require their assembly to be ‘lawful’ in a positivist technical sense, only that it be peaceable. Certainly ongoing criminal activity committed by officials of the U.S. government itself is the type of grievance the American people should have a right to petition for the redress of by means of civil resistance.”
...

marmar's Journal - National coordinated campaign unites to revoke corporate "constitutional rights"

marmar's Journal - National coordinated campaign unites to revoke corporate "constitutional rights"

ReclaimDemocracy.org and a broad alliance of grassroots pro-democracy groups are preparing to make 2010 a breakthrough year for the Democracy Movement. To accomplish this, we're building the broadest coalition yet to confront and revoke runaway corporate power. The focus: amending the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Court-created notion of applying constitutional rights to corporations.

While we have been calling for this action for almost the entire decade of our existence, we now find the idea reaching a "tipping point" among many other organizations.

A Teachable Moment

The Campaign to Legalize Democracy will debut publicly the day the U.S. Supreme Court announces a ruling in the potential landmark case, Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. Despite enormous anger over public subsidies, systematic credit card rip-offs, and more, it's widely expected the Court will give corporations even greater power over our government by allowing company funds to be spent in efforts to elect or defeat political candidates. If this happens, we will work quickly to channel anger where it needs to go: overruling the Court.

And after campaigning to bring “change” to Americans that included public health insurance and taking on Wall Street, President Obama and Congress have demonstrated they either are unwilling or unable to challenge the power of pharmaceutical, insurance, and financial corporations to correct our nation's most urgent problems.

We don't celebrate this failure, but we recognize the opportunity created by this disillusionment. When people believe in illusions, they are not receptive to confronting reality. One year ago, millions of Americans believed democracy could thrive and some of our worst crises improve if we elected Barack Obama and shifted control of Congress. That illusion is dead, but its demise gives birth to great opportunity.

We provoked debate over corporate "free speech" and personhood in dozens of media outlets that never had previously explored the issue when the Nike v Kasky case reached the Supreme Court. This time, however, we'll have a broad alliance amplifying the message, with a collective reach many times greater than ReclaimDemocracy.org alone. ...

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_spee...

Analysis: Filibuster adds to cynicism about Senate

Analysis: Filibuster adds to cynicism about Senate
...

That's why filibuster tactics, once rare, have become so regular that the crucial number in getting anything enacted is not a 51-vote Senate majority. It is 60, the votes it takes to end debate and force action.

Long delays are the rule, not the exception. So are the kind of deals Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, made to line up the votes he needed to get the health care overhaul passed. He said the dealmaking was no more than the legislative process at work, calling it compromise and suggesting that most senators probably had some provision tucked into the measure to serve state interests back home.
...

In 1975, the rules were changed to make it easier to end filibusters, with 60 votes instead of 67.

Enter the rule of unintended consequences. Making it easier to stop filibusters also made it easier to conduct them, or threaten to. That's almost automatic. One Republican or another has done it more than 100 times this year. Democratic leaders have filed 67 cloture motions, and there have been 39 votes to end debate, 35 successful.

In the last Congress there were 112 Senate cloture votes, far and away the record as the Democratic majority tried to fend off Republican delaying tactics. Democrats know the system; they used it themselves when they were outnumbered. But Republicans have made more of it since they lost control in 2007.

There will be more filibuster ploys on health care and, once that is settled, on issues such as climate control and finance industry regulation.

Where will it end? Probably, it won't.

Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa has suggested a system in which the 60-vote cloture requirement be reduced gradually to a 51-vote simple majority after successive votes on ending debate. But the complexity of getting anything like that done is evident in the name of his co-sponsor when he first proposed it 15 years ago - Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who said then that filibusters were a symbol of what ailed Washington. ...

Who's running the TSA? No one, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint | McClatchy

Who's running the TSA? No one, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint | McClatchy: "By Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there were one.

The post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama's nominee in opposition to the prospect of TSA workers joining a labor union.

As al Qaida claimed responsibility Monday for the thwarted attack and President Barack Obama made a public statement about it, Democrats urged DeMint to drop his objection and allow quick confirmation of nominee Erroll Southers, a counterterrorism expert, when the Senate reconvenes in three weeks."

Scholars and Rogues � $45 billion: a sour-tasting decade of out-of-control political spending

Scholars and Rogues � $45 billion: a sour-tasting decade of out-of-control political spending

Add up every nickel and dime recorded by the Federal Election Commission and state election commissions in this decade now ending. Result: Americans have given more than $24.2 billion in campaign contributions to federal and state incumbents and challengers.

Contributions to all federal candidates for House and Senate seats and the presidency from the 2000 through 2010 election cycles totaled $9.7 billion, according to an S&R analysis of records aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Contributions to candidates and committees in all 50 states, from 2000 through 2009, totaled about$14.5 billion, according to records aggregated by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

In this decade, thanks to computerization of records and a few top-notch, non-partisan organizations, we’ve learned how to follow the money. Well, so what? Has vastly increased public visibility of political money changed the way politics operates?

The $24.2 billion spent on campaign contributions is only part of the story. Over the past decade, $23 billion has been spent by corporations, labor unions, and other special-interest entities to lobby Congress and federal agencies, according to records aggregated by the center.

More than $45 billion has been spent in the decade now ending to influence legislation and regulation at state and federal levels of government. It’s only conjecture, of course, but it’s hardly likely that the bulk of those billions of dollars was intended to improve the lot of the 99 percent of adult Americans who did not make campaign contributions or made gifts of less than $200.

Where did the $24.2 billion in campaign donations come from? Only a tiny fraction, generally in the tenths of 1 percent, of Americans over age 18 make campaign contributions of more than $200. Those who give more than $1,000 are even fewer — but the amounts given by those latter donors total significantly higher.

The bulk of the decade’s nearly $10 billion in donations to federal candidates came from special interests and individuals associated with specific special interests who gave $200 or more. According to the center, the top special-interest givers in the election cycles in this decade, generally in this order, were

the finance, insurance and real-estate industries; lawyers and lobbyists; miscellaneous business; ideological and single-issue donors; the health industries; communications and electronics; labor; agribusiness; energy and natural-resource interests; transportation; and the defense industry.

Corporations and individuals associated with these special interests donated more than $8 billion this decade to federal candidates. And the leader in campaign largesse for the decade and in each election cycle, at $1.62 billion, or more than 16 percent of all campaign contributions to federal candidates? The winner, by a wide margin, are the finance, insurance and real-estate industries.

The number of lobbyists has increased from 10,641 in 2000 to 13,426 this year. Now, that’s the number of people who have legally registered as lobbyists. There are plenty of revolving-door people (those who have left the Hill or the executive branch to become lobbyists and vice versa) who are not registered as lobbyists but are as influential. Consider the example of former Sen. Tom Daschle, who claims he’s a “resource” for his health-care industry clients and not a lobbyist.

...

Over the decade, corrupt politicians have been imprisoned for a variety of crimes. Convicted of crimes such as fraud and bribery, they were selfish and for sale. What they did was illegal.

But what remains unabated in the American political system is legalized corruption. The heightened ability to track political money does nothing to prevent the dramatic increase in legal campaign giving and the host of ethical and moral conflicts that so much money places in front of incumbents, challengers, and regulators.

We’ve seen the amounts of money spent to legally attain and maintain political power grow to such amounts that billionaires now spend tens of millions of dollars to finance their own campaigns. Modern elections trivialize issues and maximize dependence on name recognition. That costs money, which forecloses the possibility that better-qualified candidates who are not as wealthy can prosper at the ballot box.

We’ve seen how those with money to spend and an agenda to enact gain access to the levers of power, as did players in the health-care reform debate behind closed doors in the Obama White House.

Consider the consolidation of media, its threat to competitiveness, its anti-trust implications, and its potential to maintain unreasonably high consumer prices for news and entertainment. When Comcast announced its intended $30 billion purchase of NBC Universal from General Electric, its lobbyists flooded the Hill. Through September of this year, Comcast has spent $9.1 million on lobbying. The Federal Communications Commission must approve the sale.

Comcast’s 20-member D.C. lobbying team, reports Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel, includes “former aides to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), former Senate Majority Leader and Obama confidant Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Democratic Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps.” (Oh, look: There’s “confidant” Daschle acting as a “resource” again, “aides” notwithstanding …)

Continual increases in media consolidation by conglomerates reduce the likelihood that Americans’ monthly bills for cable, Internet, satellite, and telephone services will decrease. ...

After health care, we need Senate reform - washingtonpost.com

After health care, we need Senate reform - washingtonpost.com

On Dec. 8, 1964, Mike Manatos wrote a letter that explains what's wrong with the Senate in 2009. This wasn't, of course, the subject of his letter. Manatos was no futurist; he was Lyndon Johnson's liaison to the Senate, and he was writing to update his bosses on Medicare's chances in the aftermath of the 1964 election. Surveying the incoming crop of senators, Manatos counted a solid majority in favor of the president's effort. "If all our supporters are present and voting we would win by a vote of 55 to 45," he predicted.

That letter would never be written now. In today's Senate, 55 votes isn't enough to "win," or anything close to it; it's enough to get you five votes away from the 60 votes you need to shut down a filibuster. Only then, in most cases, can a law be passed. The modern Senate is a radically different institution than the Senate of the 1960s, and the dysfunction exhibited in its debate over health care -- the absence of bipartisanship, the use of the filibuster to obstruct progress rather than protect debate, the ability of any given senator to hold the bill hostage to his or her demands -- has convinced many, both inside and outside the chamber, that it needs to be fixed.

...

To understand why the modern legislative process is so bad, why every Senator seems able to demand a king's ransom in return for his or her vote and no bill ever seems to be truly bipartisan, you need to understand one basic fact: ...

... in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, then the minority whip of the House, and Bob Dole, then the minority leader of the Senate, realized they did have both. A strategy of relentless obstruction brought then-president Bill Clinton to his knees, as the minority party discovered it had the tools to make the majority party fail.

Unfortunately, both parties have followed Gingrich's playbook ever since. According to UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, about 8 percent of major bills faced a filibuster in the 1960s. This decade, that jumped to 70 percent. The problem with the minority party continually making the majority party fail, of course, is that it means neither party can ever successfully govern the country.

...

But members of both parties have become attached to this idea that they can block objectionable legislation even when they're relatively powerless. This is evidence, perhaps, that both parties are so used to the victories of obstruction that they have forgotten their purpose is to amass victories through governance. Either way, a world in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one, a place where the majority party is held accountable for its ideas and not for the gridlock and inaction furnished by the Senate's rules.

Law professor Lawrence Lessig often compares the dysfunctions of the Congress to the woes of an alcoholic. An alcoholic, he says, might be facing cirrhosis of the liver, the loss of his family and terrible debt. Amidst all that, the fact that he drinks before bed at night might not seem his worst problem. But it is the first problem, the one that must be solved before he can solve any of the others. America, too, is facing more dramatic problems than the Senate rules: A coming budget crisis, catastrophic climate change and an archaic and inefficient tax system, to name a few. But none will be solved until we fix the dysfunctions of the Senate.

Daily Kos: "Corporatism"

Daily Kos: "Corporatism"
..

Without sounding too dramatic, I believe that the survival of the Democratic Party depends largely on whether or not the base agrees or disagrees with the following statement:

Whether you call it "a government takeover of the private sector" or a "private sector takeover of government," it's the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else's expense. Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.

This quote is from a recent post by Glen Greenwald, and it makes the case, in so many words, that concern for "corporatism" has fundamentally changed the political landscape in this country--forever.

...

There is no left vs. right. There is only inside vs. outside.

Alliance Based on a Moment of Consciousness
Now, buried within Greenwald's argument are a series of other claims that are difficult to present for the simple reason that they offer judgment about key aspects of the Democratic Party, including the netroots.

So before I present them, I just want to make clear that unless these claims are understood and evaluated, it is impossible to avoid the total collapse of the Democratic Party--that may seem dramatic, but I believe it's true. Therefore: Try not to feel judged by these claims--instead focus on evaluating whether they are true or false.

Implicit Claim 1: Most Supporters of the Democratic Party are living in a state of false consciousness
Because most supporters of the Democratic Party see the political landscape in terms of left vs. right, which is the model produced by and for the benefit of corporations and the ruling party, ergo, most supporters ofthe Democratic Party are currently living in a state of false consciousness. This means that most supporters are arguing, campaigning, donating, and otherwise working for a party that directly runs counter to their personal and collective interests.

Implicit Claim 2: The Only People With Consciousness are those who See the Battle Against "Corporatism" as the True Political Landscape
According to Greenwald's logic, those who no longer see the political landscape in terms of left vs. right, but not see it in terms of insider vs. outsider--they are the only people who are truly awake or conscious, meaning: they see reality for what it is, not for what the corporations and the ruling party want them to see. Right now, these people include so-called "right-wing" (obsolete term) Tea Bag Party adherents who fought against the bailouts and are now fighting against the current health care bill, and so-called "left-wing" (obsolete term) bloggers and activists who fought against the bailouts and lobbyists and are now fighting against the Senate health care bill. These groups are conscious, whereas other groups are not, because they reject the left vs. right political fighting as a distraction, and focus instead on the inside vs. outside fight.

Implicit Claim 3:Those Fighting Against "Corporatists" are Fighting against Fundamental Negative Change, Those Fighting To Uphold the Parties are Fighting to Put in Place Fundamental Negative Change
This is a difficult claim to summarize neatly, but the logic is this: given the split between those who are awake and those who are not, it follows that those who are not awake are advancing--with their advocacy, blogging, donations, volunteering, etc.--the "corporatist" agenda. In other words, the "corporatist" agenda is being advanced by those who are doing it consciously (larger corporations, ruling party elites) and by those who are doing it unwittingly through their support for what they believe to be the correct side in the left vs. right split. Those who unwittingly support "corporatism" will continue to do so until they wake up or gain consciousness about the true nature of the political landscape.

Implicit Claim 4: Political Activism No Longer About Support for Party, Is Now About Raising Consciousness RE: "Corporatism:
This last claim follows on from the first three, is also implicit, and is the most sweeping of all. In essence, if we follow Greenwald's argument to it's logical conclusion, our political orientation extends beyond critique of the Senate health care bill--beyond critique of the TARP bailout or the Fannie Mae funds or the Afghanistan Policy--to a unifying critique of "corporatism." By seeing the truth in the corporatist argument we are pushing towards a broad recalibration of political understanding of the world--a geological shift away from seeing the surface of things, towards seeing what is really real underneath the surface. In that new fight, the battle over party candidates, media pundits, cabinet positions--all of that is trivial, compared to the truth that lies beneath it all: that if corporatism is allowed to entrench itself, the fundamental nature of American society will change, citizenship as we understand it will be a farce, and democracy will be little more than a fiction produced by the ruling party marketing arm and private corporations.
...

The reality of the world we live in is extremely messy. That means that we must chart a path that banks short-term gains and long term gains.

Millions gaining access to community care via the Sanders amendment--is a short term gain. It will directly improve millions of lives right away.

Millions being able to cut health care costs due to access to health insurance---however bad those policies may be objectively--is better than millions not being able to cut those costs in half without any health insurance. That will improve lives right away.

Millions being forced to purchase health insurance from the very companies that have terrorized them for decades with a sinister system of coverage denial bureaucracies--that is a terrible step to take that will effectively force middle class people down the economic ladder like people trapped in an elevator that suddenly drops ten floors. The cruelty of telling people who are already being abused by the system that they are now required by law to be abused by the system--is unethical.

The difficulty is that neither the current political organization nor the current economic concepts in the debate are anywhere close to developed enough to offer a viable alternative. Even with the existence of the elegantly effective "single payer" idea, there is no equivalently effective model of political organization to achieve it. And so we are stuck with messy. ...

Arianna Huffington: The Senate Health Care Bill: Leave No Special Interest Behind

Arianna Huffington: The Senate Health Care Bill: Leave No Special Interest Behind
...

This typifies the current thinking of the "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" crowd. Unfortunately, there are three faulty premises at work in this line of reasoning. First, that those who oppose the bill do so because it's not perfect (as opposed to because it's a hot health care mess). Second, that the bill is, well, good (as opposed to a total victory for Pharma and the insurance industry -- witness the spectacular spike in health care stocks following Monday's vote).

Third is the premise that this is as good a bill as we can get right now, and we can always go back and improve it later.

It doesn't work that way. We heard the same kinds of sentiments about No Child Left Behind when it passed in 2001. Backers on both sides of the aisle had problems with it, but both sides celebrated it as a major step forward -- and promised to make it better in the future.

...

If the miserable Senate health care bill becomes the law of the land, it's only going to encourage the preservation of a hideously broken system. Just how broken the system is is summed up in the fate of Byron Dorgan's drug re-importation amendment.

This is an idea that Obama co-sponsored when he was in the Senate and unequivocally championed on the campaign trail: "We'll allow the safe re-importation of low-cost drugs from countries like Canada."

But when Dorgan introduced an amendment that would do just that, the White House, sticking to the deal it made with the pharmaceutical industry, lobbied against it -- and the commissioner of the supposedly non-political FDA just happened to release a letter citing "significant safety concerns" about all those dangerous drugs from Canada. Big Pharma's many congressional lackeys trumpeted the letter and the amendment was killed.

But that didn't stop David Axelrod from insisting in an interview with John King this weekend that "the president supports safe re-importation of drugs into this country. There's no reason why Americans should pay a premium for the pharmaceuticals that people in other countries pay less for."

No reason other than our broken system surrendering to the special interests.

From start to finish, the insurance and drug industries -- and their army of lobbyists -- had control over the process that resulted in a bill that is reform in name only. The postmortems of how they pulled it off have already begun. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune published an exhaustive front-page analysis by Northwestern University's Medill News Service and the Center for Responsive Politics of how it was done. The main culprit: "a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with a stake in health care legislation."

The study found that 13 former congressmen and 166 Congressional staffers were actively engaged in lobbying their former colleagues on the bill. The companies they were working for -- some 338 of them -- spent $635 million on lobbying. It was money extremely well spent -- delivering a bill that, by forcing people to buy a shoddy product in a market with no real competition, enshrines into law the public subsidy of private profit.

As we approach the end of Obama's first year in office, this public subsidizing of private profit is becoming something of a habit. It is, after all, exactly what the White House did with the banks. Just as he did with insurance companies, Obama talked tough to the bankers in public but, when push came to shove, he ended up shoving public money onto their privately-held balance sheets.

This is not just bad policy, it's bad politics.

Sharp-eyed opponents are already seizing on the opportunity to rebrand Obama and the Democrats as the party beholden to special interests. ...

Op-Ed Columnist - A Dangerous Dysfunction - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - A Dangerous Dysfunction - NYTimes.com

...

It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.

After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?

Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

...

So now that hard choices must be made, how can we reform the Senate to make such choices possible?

Back in the mid-1990s two senators — Tom Harkin and, believe it or not, Joe Lieberman — introduced a bill to reform Senate procedures. (Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.) Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.

But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster — which it almost surely would be — reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority — not supermajority — rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen — for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

Poll: U.S. too politically divided - Andy Barr - POLITICO.com

Poll: U.S. too politically divided - Andy Barr - POLITICO.com

Three out of four Americans fear that their country has become too politically divided, according to a new poll released Tuesday by Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies.

The poll, conducted for USA Network, shows that Americans are very concerned that the country is growing too divided along political, economic and racial lines.

Seventy-five percent of those polled said the country is too divided by politics, while 73 percent said economic lines separate too many Americans. Additionally, 53 percent said the country is too divided along “racial and ethnic lines” and 52 percent said the same about religion.

The numbers were especially dramatic among African-Americans, 82 percent of which said the country is too divided economically and 65 percent who believe the same about race and ethnicity.

Concerns about a divided country may be reflected in the high percentage who said they were worried by levels of prejudice and discrimination.

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they believe “the amount of prejudice, discrimination and intolerance” is either a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem.

Only 5 percent of respondents said that race relations are “no longer a problem in the United States,” while 30 percent said they still remain a problem and that “we have a long way to go.” Sixty-five percent believe race relations are still a problem, but that the country has “come a long way.” ...

Matthew Filipowicz: Obama Quits, Cedes Presidency to Lieberman

Matthew Filipowicz: Obama Quits, Cedes Presidency to Lieberman

You might think that Joe Lieberman is happy. And he is.

With his threats of a filibuster, he successfully got Harry Reid and Barack Obama to remove the public option and Medicare buy-in from the Senate health care bill.

But, as you will see in this exclusive video, those are not the only capitulations that Joe is happy about. Take a look. ...

Time for change's Journal - Extravagant CEO Salaries and Ballooning Income Inequality in the U.S.

Time for change's Journal - Extravagant CEO Salaries and Ballooning Income Inequality in the U.S.
...
Inside of Gabriel Thompson’s article is a graph titled “Plutocracy Reborn – Re-creating the Gap that Gave us the Great Depression”. Here it is:



This chart plots income inequality, measured as the ratio between the average income of the top 0.01% of U.S. families, compared to the bottom 90% (that would be most of us at DU). Note that preceding the great stock market crash of 1929, which plunged us into depression, the ratio rose from about 250 at the start of the 1920s to a peak of about 900 by 1929. The ratio then plunged, and by the start of WW II it had declined to about 200, where it remained with some relatively minor ups and downs until the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. It then began another precipitous climb, with a sharp decline beginning during the last year of Clinton’s Presidency, but then another sharp increase beginning at about the time that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy first went into effect, so that by the end of 2006 we’ve exceeded even the peak ratio of 1929 that preceded the Great Depression. The three green bars in the chart represent the stock market crash of 1929, the last pre-Reagan year, and two years preceding our current recession/depression.


Poverty

Consider the graph on page 11 of the U.S. Census Bureau publication, “Income Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006”. That graph shows that beginning with President Lyndon Johnson’s much maligned “War on Poverty” in the early ‘60s, poverty in the United States declined precipitously, from about 22% to 12%, before leveling off beginning around 1970. Then, with the onset of the “Reagan Revolution” starting in 1981, poverty began to rise again, reaching a maximum of about 15% twelve years later, just prior to the Clinton Presidency. The poverty rate then began a slow steady decline, to about 11% by the end of Clinton’s presidency, followed by another rise with the onset of the Bush II administration, to 12.3% by mid-year 2006. It then climbed to 12.5% in 2007 and 13.2% in 2008. However, that is not the end of the story, by any means. The current recession/depression will in all likelihood (and it’s probably already started) send another 5-10 million Americans into poverty, thus raising the poverty rate in our country another 1-4%.

These statistics are no accident. They are the result of federal legislation and policies meant either to help the poor or to help the wealthy. President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” reduced poverty substantially in our country. The only rises in poverty rate we’ve seen in our country since FDR’s New Deal (which decreased poverty) began with the Reagan and Bush II administrations, which are the only two presidential administrations since that time to substantially lower the top marginal tax rate, along with other fiscal policies that favor the wealthy at the expense of the poor and the working and middle class. ...

Poll: U.S. too politically divided - Andy Barr - POLITICO.com

Poll: U.S. too politically divided - Andy Barr - POLITICO.com
..

Three out of four Americans fear that their country has become too politically divided, according to a new poll released Tuesday by Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies.

The poll, conducted for USA Network, shows that Americans are very concerned that the country is growing too divided along political, economic and racial lines.

Seventy-five percent of those polled said the country is too divided by politics, while 73 percent said economic lines separate too many Americans. Additionally, 53 percent said the country is too divided along “racial and ethnic lines” and 52 percent said the same about religion.

The numbers were especially dramatic among African-Americans, 82 percent of which said the country is too divided economically and 65 percent who believe the same about race and ethnicity.

Concerns about a divided country may be reflected in the high percentage who said they were worried by levels of prejudice and discrimination.

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they believe “the amount of prejudice, discrimination and intolerance” is either a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem. ...

[Phony democracy. ed.] GOP erupts over Reid slavery, segregation remarks - Glenn Thrush - POLITICO.com

GOP erupts over Reid slavery, segregation remarks - Glenn Thrush - POLITICO.com
..

Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Reid blasted GOP leaders who have urged Democrats opt for a slower, incremental approach to reform instead of the mega-bill the majority hopes to push through the Senate by Christmas

Reid started by mimicking Republicans whom he claims have said: "'Slow down, stop everything, let's start over."

"You think you've heard these same excuses before? You're right," he continued. "In this country...there were those who dug in their heels and said, 'Slow down, it's too early. Let's wait. Things aren't bad enough' " - about slavery.

When women wanted to vote, he went on, opponents said, " 'Slow down, there will be a better day to do that -- the day isn't quite right.' "

He finished with: "When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

...
Reaction was swift. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who is black, questioned Reid's state of mind -- and demanded an apology.

“Harry Reid is under immense pressure to pass this 2,000 page experiment on our nation’s health – an experiment that creates a new $1 trillion dollar federal entitlement program by cutting $500 billion from Medicare, all at a time when our country is in miserable debt and facing an extreme job crisis. The pressure has apparently led Senator Reid not only to make offensive and absurd statements, but also to lose his ability to reason... Having made this disgraceful statement on the floor of the United States Senate, Mr. Reid should immediately apologize on the Senate floor to his colleagues, to his constituents, and to the American people. If he is going to stand by these statements, the Democrats must immediately reconsider his fitness to lead them.”

Senate Republicans were also furious, reported POLITICO's Meredith Shiner, who went to their Q-and-A Monday.

...

Reid's aides weren't apologizing -- referring to the GOP's "feigned outrage" and a "ploy" to distract voters from the lack of Republican alternative.

"It is hard to believe Senate Republicans are making these charges with a straight face," said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. "For the past eight days they¹ve done nothing but obstruct health care on the Senate floor and throughout this year have played politics with this and virtually every other issue of importance to the American people.

Did Reid go too far?

It's an old debate - 40 years old, to be precise.

Martin Luther King drew similar criticism - equating social reform with racial justice - when he tried to expand the civil rights movement into a broader call for economic justice during his Poor Peoples Campaign and his final trip to Memphis in support of the sanitation strike.

Reid, of course, doesn't have a monopoly on harsh pronouncements.

On Sunday, NRSC Chairman John Cornyn (R-Texas) invoked Stalin-era Soviet prison to describe Reid's reform plan on Fox News. "It will limit people's choices to, in many cases, to a government-run program like Medicaid which is essentially a health care gulag, because people will not have any choices but to take that poorly performing government plan," he said. ...

The only thing worse than the tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority.

Mark Green: Filibuster Illogic: Why Allow 10% to Veto 90%? - Politics - Air America
...

As the Senate begins its historic floor debate on health care this week, let's glance at history.

To reach unanimity at the Constitutional Convention, the 1787 “Connecticut Compromise” created a House of Representatives allocating seats by population (favoring big states) and a Senate allocating seats by state (favoring small states). That was one thing when states were somewhat similar in populations, not now when California is 68 times the size of Wyoming. So today each California senator represents 68 times the number of people as a Wyoming senator. Or 10 times that of each Connecticut senator.

At the same time, the filibuster is nowhere in the Constitution and is merely a rule of the Senate. To end debate and allow a majority vote on a bill used to require 67 votes, which changed to 60 votes in 1975. But this rule violates at least the spirit of the Constitution which specifies those very few instances – treaties, impeachment, among others – that alone require a two-thirds super-majority vote. And it used to be invoked sparingly in less partisan times – an average of once a year in the 1950s but 139 times by Republicans in 2008.

The result? Only 10% of Americans living in 20 small states have nearly the votes needed to continue a filibuster and kill any essential health care reform – or any policy reform for that matter. 10% can in effect veto 90%, something the Founders never desired or expected.

It gets worse than that.

The campaign finance system (notwithstanding 1974 post-Watergate reforms and the McCain-Feingold soft money restrictions) still allows special interest money to flow to special friends in the Congress– like the insurance industry’s affection for Lieberman – to make sure that such members throw monkey wrenches into the legislative process on big ticket items as health care.

...

The problem is not the hollowness of his arguments but the political fact that he has the power to sink the Public Option or other popular reforms because of an Achilles heel in our system – two of them really. The only thing worse than the tyranny of the majority is a tyranny of the minority.

...

Since there's no possibility that small states will ever agree to a constitutional amendment to weaken their power in the U.S. Senate, what options exist for Majority Leader Harry Reid on the health care bill in particular or in the Senate generally?

• *Campaign Finance Reform? One is radical campaign finance reform so that big corporate interests don’t compound the problem of the filibuster. Unfortunately it appears that, if anything, America is headed in the opposite direction given the imminent Supreme Court decision in Citizen’s United, which I will discuss in a separate blog post next week.
• *Reconciliation? Second, if health care fails this go-around with “only” 58 or 59 votes, Reid should consider using the so-called Reconciliation route next year which allows budget bills to be enacted by simply majority vote. This would eventually require the Senate Parlimentarian to rule on what parts of the current health care bill qualify as in effect budget bills. That would be legislatively problematic but still possible.
• *55 not 60? Third, by agreement between the Senate leader and the vice president sitting as presiding officer, the Senate at the start of the next session in January, 2011 could reduce the number required to cut off debate (“vote cloture”) from 60 to 55, which would be the difference between minority rule and minority rights.

Republican critics will loudly complain that Reconciliation would violate Senate tradition and reforming the filibuster would be a “nuclear option” risking a breakdown in Senate business. But isn't their recent incessant use of the filibuster an undemocratic violation of tradition and a slow-motion nuclear option that, in effect, vetoes the results of the '06 and '08 two elections? If 67 votes for cloture could shrink to 60, why not to 55? And speaking of tradition, what was wrong with an era that, when Senators say they want to keep debating, they would have to keep debating, like the filibuster of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?

sharp decline in enforcement of a section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits electoral rules with discriminatory effects

Report Examines Civil Rights Enforcement During Bush Years - NYTimes.com
...

The 180-page report, obtained by The New York Times, is densely packed with statistics about civil rights enforcement by the division’s sections. The accountability office also examined a sampling of matters that were closed without further action, finding several cases — including the curtailed voter intimidation inquiry — in which supervisors rejected the recommendations of career lawyers to go forward.

The report represents a comprehensive review of the division’s litigation activity in the Bush administration. When compared with the Clinton administration, its findings show a significant drop in the enforcement of several major antidiscrimination and voting rights laws. For example, lawsuits brought by the division to enforce laws prohibiting race or sex discrimination in employment fell from about 11 per year under President Bill Clinton to about 6 per year under President George W. Bush.

The study also found a sharp decline in enforcement of a section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits electoral rules with discriminatory effects, from more than four cases a year under Mr. Clinton to fewer than two cases a year under Mr. Bush.

Joseph Rich, a civil rights lawyer who has been invited by Democrats to testify and was among those given an early copy of the report, said it provided hard data that the division was politicized in the Bush years.

...

Democrats and civil rights groups said the Republicans were seeking to distract from the new evidence. During the Bush years, such criticism was based on anecdotes and incomplete data. But a report released in January by the department’s inspector general, citing internal e-mail and personnel files, confirmed that political appointees sought to hire conservatives and block liberals for career positions, contrary to civil service laws.

Similarly, the new Government Accountability Office report presents comprehensive data that demonstrates a fall-off in certain kinds of civil rights enforcement during the Bush years.

The office also found that case files often had no information explaining why supervisors had decided to close cases, sometimes against the recommendation of career officials. In a companion report, it also found that six years of internal audits about the division’s case-tracking system were missing.

In a prepared opening statement, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas E. Perez, said the reports about hiring and enforcement activity “underscore the point that the division, in recent years, was not doing all that it could to fulfill our responsibility to enforce all the civil rights laws fairly and aggressively.” ...

Report Examines Civil Rights Enforcement During Bush Years - NYTimes.com

Report Examines Civil Rights Enforcement During Bush Years - NYTimes.com
...

The 180-page report, obtained by The New York Times, is densely packed with statistics about civil rights enforcement by the division’s sections. The accountability office also examined a sampling of matters that were closed without further action, finding several cases — including the curtailed voter intimidation inquiry — in which supervisors rejected the recommendations of career lawyers to go forward.

The report represents a comprehensive review of the division’s litigation activity in the Bush administration. When compared with the Clinton administration, its findings show a significant drop in the enforcement of several major antidiscrimination and voting rights laws. For example, lawsuits brought by the division to enforce laws prohibiting race or sex discrimination in employment fell from about 11 per year under President Bill Clinton to about 6 per year under President George W. Bush.

The study also found a sharp decline in enforcement of a section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits electoral rules with discriminatory effects, from more than four cases a year under Mr. Clinton to fewer than two cases a year under Mr. Bush.

Joseph Rich, a civil rights lawyer who has been invited by Democrats to testify and was among those given an early copy of the report, said it provided hard data that the division was politicized in the Bush years. ....

...

Democrats and civil rights groups said the Republicans were seeking to distract from the new evidence. During the Bush years, such criticism was based on anecdotes and incomplete data. But a report released in January by the department’s inspector general, citing internal e-mail and personnel files, confirmed that political appointees sought to hire conservatives and block liberals for career positions, contrary to civil service laws.

Similarly, the new Government Accountability Office report presents comprehensive data that demonstrates a fall-off in certain kinds of civil rights enforcement during the Bush years.

The office also found that case files often had no information explaining why supervisors had decided to close cases, sometimes against the recommendation of career officials. In a companion report, it also found that six years of internal audits about the division’s case-tracking system were missing.

In a prepared opening statement, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Thomas E. Perez, said the reports about hiring and enforcement activity “underscore the point that the division, in recent years, was not doing all that it could to fulfill our responsibility to enforce all the civil rights laws fairly and aggressively.” ...