"I am one of those who do not believe the national debt is a national blessing...it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country." —Andrew Jackson, letter, April 26, 1824

Happy holidays and new year everyone.

I'll wish for ending the Federal Reserve & ending  the wars (Afghanistan, Pot).

I predict its going to be a hell of a year for those inviting chaos. If you are looking for normality, good luck.

on MSNBC's The Dylan Ratigan Show 12/22/2010

CENK UYGUR, GUEST HOST: First, our exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who sparked a global uproar with his release of hundreds of thousands of pages of secret government documents and diplomatic cables, information ranging from the outrageous -- we had innocent and unarmed reporters and Iraqi civilians being killed by U.S. troops -- to the downright embarrassing, comments about the hard partying and the corruption of different world leaders.

Not long after that latest release, Assange found himself in legal trouble in Sweden. But not for any reasons having to do with the leaks. Instead, he was booked on a series of sex charges.

With the help of people like the American filmmaker and activist, Michael Moore, Mr. Assange is now out on bail and speaking out to us.

Let's now go to Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England, where Julian Assange is currently on house arrest.

Julian, great to have you with us.

JULIAN ASSANGE, FOUNDER, WIKILEAKS: Good evening, Cenk.

UYGUR: All right, the first question I have for you, Julian, is do you consider yourself a member of the press?

Are you a journalist?

ASSANGE: Well, I have been a member of the Australian press union for many years. I co-authored my first book when I was 25 and have been involved in setting up the -- the very fabric of the Internet in Australia since 1993 as a publisher.

So quite interesting that this is something that is being raised.

It's -- it's actually a quite deliberate attempt to split off our organization from the First Amendment protections that are afforded to all publishers.

There's more...

Voting rights groups scored a major victory in their efforts to bring the State of New Mexico into compliance with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) when a judge ruled that the state Human Services Division is violating the NVRA through their policy of only offering the opportunity to register to vote to clients who explicitly request to do so.

Yesterday’s ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought by a coalition of voting rights groups against New Mexico’s Human Services Division (HSD) and Secretary of State Mary Herrera, which cited clear evidence that New Mexico public assistance offices are violating their federally mandated responsibility to offer tens of thousands of New Mexicans each year the opportunity to register to vote. The plaintiff is represented by voting rights groups Project Vote, Dēmos, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Lawyers’ Committee), as well as by the law firm of DLA Piper U.S.

Section 7 of the NVRA requires that public assistance agencies give clients a voter registration application with every application for benefits, recertification, and change of address. New Mexico policy, however, has been to give voter registration application forms to only those clients who explicitly request them, a practice that plaintiff maintains is in violation of the NVRA.

Yesterday, United States District Judge Judith Herrera agreed and the court held that “Section 7 does not make the provision of a voter registration application contingent upon an affirmative request,” meaning that the State’s current policy is a violation of the law.

“This is a huge victory for NVRA enforcement, not just in New Mexico, but all across the country,” said Project Vote’s Director of Public Agency Voter Registration, Nicole Zeitler. “Agencies must give out a voter registration application form to everyone who applies for benefits, recertifies, or changes address. Federal law requires it, the Department of Justice has confirmed it, and now the federal courts are ordering it.”

The voting rights groups are hailing this as the first legal ruling on the issue of whether clients must “opt in” to be offered the opportunity to register to vote. “This should be a wake-up call to other states whose agencies are still refusing to give out voter registration applications unless the client specifically asks for it,” says Zeitler.

The voting rights advocates won on all fronts in yesterday’s ruling. Not only did the court grant plaintiff’s motion for partial summary judgment, but it also denied both HSD’s and the Secretary of State’s motions for summary judgment. In denying HSD’s motion, the court pointed to plaintiff’s allegations of years of widespread non-compliance, noting that “the Court cannot say as a matter of law that HSD has demonstrated that it has the tools in place to be compliant in the future without an injunction and Court monitoring.”

“The Court hit on the exact reasons why we brought this case in the first place,” says Robert Kengle, Acting Co-Director of the Lawyers’ Committee’s Voting Rights Project. “New Mexico’s public assistance offices have been out of compliance with the NVRA for years, and nothing short of comprehensive reform, ordered and monitored by the court, will repair the damage that has been done to the voting rights of low-income New Mexicans.”

In another important decision, the District Court rejected Secretary of State Herrera’s claim that her office is not responsible for ensuring compliance with the NVRA in New Mexico. Relying on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision in Harkless v. Brunner, an NVRA lawsuit filed by the same voting rights groups in Ohio, Judge Herrera agreed with the Sixth Circuit that “each state’s chief election official is responsible for NVRA state compliance,” and that therefore “Defendant Herrera has the obligation to prescribe the actions that the state, including HSD offices, must take to comply with Section 7.”

“Courts now have repeatedly confirmed that state election officials must take responsibility for ensuring that low-income voters receive the voter registration opportunities required by federal law,” said Demos’ Counsel Allegra Chapman. “This decision should encourage chief election officials throughout the country to examine agency practices on voter registration, and take corrective action when needed.”

The coalition of voting rights groups has been advocating for enforcement of the NVRA in several states, and settled a related claim against New Mexico’s Motor Vehicles Division in July of this year. Following the groups’ successful lawsuit in Missouri in 2008, voter registration applications submitted at the state’s public assistance offices skyrocketed from fewer than 8,000 a year to more than 130,000 a year. More than 200,000 clients have applied to become registered voters in Ohio after a similar lawsuit was settled in that state last year.

The groups estimate that proper implementation nationwide of the NVRA’s public assistance provisions could result in 2-3 million additional registrations per year.

cross-posted from Main Street Insider

Last week, in part one of our two-part series on filibuster reform, we examined the Constitutional Option to allow majority approval of rules changes. This week, in the 15th and final episode of Season 1,we look at the most prominent package of rules changes discussed to date. Roughly a month ago, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) circulated a "dear colleague" memo outlining a series of changes that are being strongly considered within current Democratic Caucus deliberations.

Enjoy this first season's finale. It's been a fun season for us and we'll be back in January with a whole slate of brand new bills and other policy proposals to summarize!

*Full disclosure: David Waldman, our Public Affairs Director, is an active advisor to the Fix the Senate Now coalition.

Senate Rules Reform and the 112th Congress
Part 2 of 2: The “Merkley Proposal”
Key Proponent: Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Released 11/16/2010
Click here to download this summary (pdf)

Status: Currently in discussion within the Senate Democratic Caucus, this proposal has emerged as the most prominent and feasible comprehensive rules reform measure. If the Democratic majority exercises the Constitutional Option on the first day of the 112th Congress, they will have an opportunity to reform the filibuster rules with simple majority support. The Democratic Caucus will have 53 members at the time, including Independent Sens. Lieberman and Sanders, so they can only afford to lose three members if no Republicans support the measure. It is currently unclear whether proponents will be able to garner majority support.

Purpose: The Senate has been traditionally known as the deliberative “cooling saucer” of the American government, where the minority right to filibuster can counteract the worst impulses of a majority. But now, in a time of great national distress, many view the filibuster as an enabler of mindless obstruction rather than a tool to promote debate and compromise. Indeed, the percentage of legislation affected by threatened or actual filibusters has risen from 8% in the 1960s to some 70% in the 110th Congress.

Introduced on November 16th in a letter to Senate colleagues, Senator Merkley's proposal is designed to accommodate those who believe the rules must be changed to limit obstruction, but do not support outright elimination of the right to filibuster.

Summary: The reform proposal contains a number of suggestions designed to decrease paralysis, increase deliberation and return the filibuster to its traditional role as conceptualized in the 1939 film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”. It includes suggestions to:

1) Eliminate the ability to filibuster the following:

• Motions to proceed to debate;
• Legislative amendments;
• Appointment of conferees;

2) Shift the burden to the filibustering senators by requiring:

• A petition signed by a “substantial” number of senators to block a majority vote;
• A specific, gradually increasing number of filibustering senators to be present on the floor to keep debate open;
• Continuous debate during a filibuster. If no senator wants to speak at a given time, regular order is immediately restored;

3) Create an similar expedited process for nominations;

4) Establish a minority right to offer legislative amendments;

5) Decrease the partisan segregation of members.

Expected Supporters: Many Senate Democrats, Fix the Senate Now coalition, dozens of constitutional scholars, etc.

• Supporters believe filibuster reform to be crucial to meeting the nation's critical economic, energy/environmental, foreign policy and national security goals. While supporters are split on eliminating the right to filibuster entirely, they all favor provisions that “make them actually filibuster” and limit procedural delay on noncontroversial items of business.

Expected Opponents: Most Senate Republicans, movement conservatives, retiring Sen. Chris Dodd

• Some opponents recoil at the calls to upend longstanding practice in a legislative body primarily defined by its adherence to tradition, believing it is better to change the culture to inspire cooperation than to change the rules for short-term gain. However, others simply wish to preserve the ability to obstruct their political opponents' agenda in the 112th Congress.

Note: For the most part, concrete support and opposition has yet to fully materialize

There's more...

To paraphrase H.L Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating how low a politician will go to gain an advantage.

Exhibit A: Vice President Joseph Biden, who likens Wikileaks honcho Julian Assange to a "high-tech terrorist." 

What a nice marriage of images. Especially for those of us old enough to recall poor Clarence Thomas who, when charged with sexual harassment in his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, so deftly turned defense into offense by calling the accusations a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." 

Now that terrorism is the new communism, why shouldn't everyone the government wants to vilify be labeled a terrorist?

There's more...

I've long been accused of being a Negative Nate, and it's probably deserved. What can I say, my cup is half-empty, half-filled with corrosive bile. 

But here's something very positive that IBM and cities from China to Brazil to the United States, including my hometown of Austin are working on. I've gotten very skeptical of huge global solutions, but smaller steps like this are doable and effective:

By now, you've probably seen those IBM commercials that end with the tag line "building a better planet." Those commercials reference IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge. This is a program whereby IBM will award $50 million worth of technology and consulting services to 100 cities around the world - 50 of them in North America.

The Smarter Cities grant would be helpful in dealing with any number of challenges that Columbus, Cleveland or Cincinnati face, ranging from from finding ways to streamline city administration to helping transit management through innovative technology applications. IBM sends experts to the winning cities to help them address major issues like traffic, public safety, economic development or sustainability - all things that could prove useful to places like Toledo, Dayton, or Akron.

A program like this helps cities foster citizen engagement, services and efficiency through technology, resulting in an better standard of living citizens. It fascinates me because it marries two of my interests: public engagement and technology.

Pericles of Athens - who was perhaps the first mayor of a city - once said: "All things good of this earth flow into the City because of the City's greatness." IBM's Smarter Cities program helps cities foster citizen engagement, services and efficiency through technology, resulting in an better standard of living for the people of the city.

It fascinates me because it marries two of my interests: public engagement and technology, at a level that affects us immediately and regularly: the local level. And this isn't just theoretical.

Already, IBM teams have worked in Austin, TX , Baltimore, MD, Mecklenburg County, NC, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Katowice, Poland and Chengdu, China.

An IBM team helped address disparities between East and West Austin by helping the city coordinate and prioritize infrastructure investments.

I can attest from first-hand experience that IBM's work in East Austin has made a big impact on the city, for the better. Video after the jump.

There's more...

cross-posted from Sum of Change

I was honored today to join folks from DC for Democracy, the local Democracy for America affiliate, to personally deliver over 23,000 thank you notes to Senator Russ Feingold. Shortly after the the 2010 election, Jim Dean asked DFA members from all across the country to send the Senator messages of appreciation. In an email to all members, he wrote:

We lost a lot of bold leaders on Tuesday, but Senator Russ Feingold is in a class all his own. He is one of the great heroes of the progressive movement -- standing up and fighting for the people of his state and Americans across the country time and again -- often when no one else had the courage to lead. When other Democrats in Washington capitulated to President Bush and supported the war in Iraq, Senator Feingold stood up and voted against war. Two years later, he became the first Senator to call a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. When the Bush administration pushed the Patriot Act on Congress, Senator Feingold was the only person is the Senate to recognize the bill as an attack on American civil liberties and vote "No." And when unlimited and unregulated "soft money" threatened to overwhelm our political system, Senator Feingold authored and passed into law the most powerful campaign finance reform in history. Senator Feingold has always been there for us. Please, join me in writing Senator Feingold a short thank you message for all the work he's done for us over the years.

We met up at Senator Feingold's campaign office, a short walk from Union Station, and waited patiently for the Senator to get back from voting on the START Treaty. The staff asked me not to film the meeting so they could have a casual conversation, but I did get the opportunity to catch the DC4D folks at Senator Feingold's office getting their first look at the tens of thousands of thank messages:

Sumofchange - DFA Thanks Sen Feingold

In our meeting, the Senator told us he is looking forward to the coming fights and while his role will change we should expect him to continue to lead on any number of issues. Thank you, Senator, for your years of service, courage, and integrity. To everyone who wrote a thank you message, I wish you could have seen the look on his face when we presented them to him. Know that he appreciate

There's more...

by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

The Virginia federal judge who ruled against a key component of health care reform on Monday has ties to a Republican consulting firm. Judge Henry Hudson is a co-owner of Campaign Solutions, as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reports.

Hudson, a President George W. Bush appointee, has earned as much as $108,000 in royalties from Campaign Solutions since 2003. A cached version of the firm’s client roster lists such vocal opponents of health reform as Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS), the Republican National Committee and the American Medical Association.

In November, Collins and Snowe joined McConnell in signing an amicus brief to challenge the constitutionality of health care reform in a separate suit in Florida. Campaign finance records show that Campaign Solutions has also worked for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who is spearheading the lawsuit. Tiahrt added an amicus brief to Cuccinelli’s lawsuit.

Today, the mandate. Tomorrow, the regulatory state?

Hudson ruled that the individual mandate of health care reform is unconstitutional. The mandate stipulates that, after 2014, everyone who doesn’t already have health insurance will have to buy some or pay a small fine. The judge argues that this requirement exceeds the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

The Commerce Clause gives the federal government the power to regulate commerce between the states and international trade. Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones explains that this clause underpins the power of the federal government to regulate the economy in any way:

But the issues at stake in Cuccinelli v. Sebelius (Ken Cuccinelli is the conservative attorney general of Virginia; Katherine Sebelius is President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, or HHS) are actually far broader. Hudson’s ruling doesn’t just show how the Supreme Court could gut the health law—it shows how the court could neuter the entire federal government.

Is it constitutional?

Chris Hayes of The Nation interviews Prof. Gillian Metzger, a constitutional law scholar at Columbia University, about the merits of challenges to the constitutionality of health care reform. According to Metzger, “the argument that [the mandate] is outside the commerce power is also pretty specious given the existing precedent.”

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly accuses Judge Hudson of committing an “inexplicable error” in legal reasoning. There is a longstanding precedent that the federal government can regulate economic activity under the Commerce Clause. Hudson acknowledges this, but he maintains that this power doesn’t cover regulations of “economic inactivity” (i.e. not buying health insurance). As Benen notes, people who don’t buy insurance aren’t opting out of the market, they’re opting to let society absorb their future medical costs. Everyone who does buy insurance pays more because freeloaders coast without insurance and hope for the best.

Luckily for the Obama administration, the judge did not bar the implementation of health reform while the case works its way through the courts. The Supreme Court will ultimately hear this case. In the meantime, the federal government can continue building the infrastructure that will eventually support health care reform.

This is the third time a federal judge has ruled on the constitutionality of health care reforms and the first victory for the anti-reform contingent.

Mandatory mandate

Paul Waldman reminds TAPPED readers why the mandate is critical to any health care reform based on private insurance. With a single-payer system, you don’t need a mandate because everyone is automatically covered. A mandate only comes into play when you have to force people to buy insurance.

Without a mandate, healthy risk-takers who don’t buy insurance will starve the system of premiums while they are well and bleed the system for benefits when they get sick. Meanwhile, people who already know they’re sick will sign up in droves, and the Affordable Care Act will force insurers to accept them.  Without a mandate, the private health insurance industry would collapse and take health care reform down with it.

Is expanding Medicare the answer?

Matthew Rothschild of the Progressive argues that the legal headaches over the individual mandate illustrate why it would have been legally and procedurally easier to achieve universal health care by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

At Truthout, Thom Hartmann argues universal health insurance in the form of “Medicare Part E” would spur economic growth and innovation because entrepreneurs could start businesses without worrying about how to provide health insurance for their employees.

Meanwhile, Brie Cadman reports at Change.Org, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is trying to defund health care reform by cutting funds for preventive health care. Coburn is urging his fellow Republicans to vote against a House-passed measure that would allocate $750 million for the 2011 Prevention and Public Health Fund. Cadman notes the irony of a medical doctor like Coburn, who also claims to be a fiscal conservative,  trying to scuttle funds to control preventable diseases which would otherwise cost society billions of dollars a year.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

James Fallows writes that while former budget director Peter Orszag may be the epitome of an honest man, personally, the impression cast by his move from the President's cabinet to the Citigroup advisory group is both damaging and shocking:

The idea that someone would help plan, advocate, and carry out an economic policy that played such a crucial role in the survival of a financial institution -- and then, less than two years after his Administration took office, would take a job that (a) exemplifies the growing disparities the Administration says it's trying to correct and (b) unavoidably will call on knowledge and contacts Orszag developed while in recent public service -- this says something bad about what is taken for granted in American public life.

When we notice similar patterns in other countries -- for instance, how many offspring and in-laws of senior Chinese Communist officials have become very, very rich -- we are quick to draw conclusions about structural injustices. Americans may not "notice" Orszag-like migrations, in the sense of devoting big news coverage to them. But these stories pile up in the background to create a broad American sense that politics is rigged, and opportunity too. Why do we wince a little bit when we now hear "Change you can believe in?" This is an illustration.

Certain protections are in place in these situations.  Ethics rules prevent Orszag from having direct contact with federal officials, for example.  Still, the impression cast is damaging, not only to Obama's image -- you can imagine how many Republican 2012 hopefuls are bookmarking Orszag as budget director YouTube clips right now -- but to the faith of the electorate in their political institutions at large.  If you want to understand the increasing fickleness of independent voters shifting from one party to the other, the incestuous relationship between the stateroom and the boardroom might be a good place to start. Orszag's move may not be technically unethical, is by no means unusual, but is another step in a pattern that is dissolving confidence in the justice in or integrity of our institutions.

Solutions?  Via The Economist, there may be no better option but to just muddle through:

The monstrous offspring of entangled markets and states can be defeated only by the most thorough possible separation. But public self-protection through market-state divorce can work only if libertarians are right that unfettered markets are not by nature unstable, that they do not lead to opressive concentrations of power, that we would do better without a central bank, and so on. Most of us don't believe that. Until more of us do, we're not going far in that direction. And maybe that's just as well. Maybe it's true that markets hum along smoothly only with relatively active government intervention and it's also true that relatively active government intervention is eventually inevitably co-opted, exacerbating rather than mitigating capitalism's injustices.

Got this news from Cliff Schecter at the Agonist:

Early this morning, Santa Claus, the jolly icon of the holidays and legendary symbol of Christmas for more than 970 years, was asked to step down from his position as chief manufacturer and distributor of holiday toys and merriment. The announcement was made by a spokesman for GigantiCorp, the private equity firm that acquired Santa's Workshop earlier this year in a historic leveraged buyout.

GigantiCorp went on to announce that Claus will be replaced by "a more cost-effective team of regional Santas" scattered around the globe.

Bruce Kluger, satirist extraordinaire of NPR, USA Today, etc. has written (with David Slavin) an updated 2010 version of 'Twas The Night Before Christmas. A few good laughs might warm some cockles this bleak Xmas season.