Independet Voting

OK, I NEVER give money on the phone now. Although I do enjoy chatting with the NRA,RNC, Tea Party Express and so on when they call. Anyway, this group, http://independentvoting.org/, actually kept me on the phone long enough to wring out an online donation. I would like to see a whole set of electoral reforms, but open primaries is at least one good start.

She was a very informed called. The emphasis on structural reform sounded smart and good. She said there is a PA chapter. I thought this kind of electoral reform is something CSCC can get behind. Maybe fold into a set of issues for the 2012 cycle about improving the workings of democracy. Also get after bad redistricting, camp finance, and so on.

House Dems did Better than Obama

Yglesias points out a strange deflation of praise for how well House Dems did.

All told, 56 percent of Americans voted for a House Democrat whereas only 52 percent voted for a Republican in 1994. That’s a larger majority than Obama got and, indeed, would have been considered a pretty crushing landslide on the presidential label.

Before I read this, I definitely thought house Dems did well, picking up seats for second straight cycle which is rare, but not as bone crushingly well as I would have hoped given the overall political contex.

What is even weirder about house races going well is that public approval ratings for congress are very low.

Carney Interview

Here is Chris' interview with a blogger. It is more in depth than much that I have seen. I don't know what he is saying about the FISA bill and retroactive immunity...

I'd like as much face time for our little blog!

Jordi

An excerpt:

There is a provision of the Military Commissions Act that says the government can declare a United States citizen an enemy combatant and hold them without habeas corpus.

When you suspend the constitution you have to be little bit nervous about that. I swore a couple of times to protect and defend the constitution both as a military officer and as a member of Congress. You can hold people in this country by charging them under the 5th amendment and charge them with a crime and they get due process. American citizens should not be deprived due process.

So do you favor repealing that provision of the act?


As long as there is a legal way to cover them if they are an American citizen they get full rights as an American citizen.

Is that a yes?

That’s a yes. When we ignore our own rules we hurt ourselves as a nation. We hurt our ethic, we hurt what we stand for in the eyes of our people and the eyes of the world.

How the right will try and steal the election

I think the chances that they can actually change the outcome of the election are small. But they will try through a variety of means. I hope our local UCDC and state party is on top of this. Furthermore, these kind of stories point out why election reform should be a constant issue for the progressives and CSCC.

The Right, and I don't know how much it is the official Republican party or a shadow party that operates as a network of activists in the party and in various outside groups, have a variety of tools at their disposal

- Confuse the issue of fraud in registering and fraud at the ballot box. If Mickey Mouse registers, Mickey Mouse will not vote.
- Invoke false history about how Kennedy did it in 1960, so we it all ends justifies means this time around.
- Push laws or execution of laws that result in purging people from polling registers. Sometimes this is legal, think FL felons being purged by law. In that case, we need to fight those laws. Other times they use such laws to purge many people who should not be.
- Use direct marketing data, like change of address cards, to cross reference voting registers so they can challenge voters at the polling place. Even if the voter is eventually cleared, or given a provisional vote, this tactic drums up fear that there is something "afoul" with the voting process since X number of people were challenged. It also has the benefit of making people nervous that they have done something wrong. The whiff of criminalization probably makes some voters antsy (especially those historically subjected to disenfranchisment efforts like poll taxes).
- Invoke the FL 2000 mess as the frame that the 'systems is broke." Where broke for them means that too many Americans who "don't think like us" are trying to vote.
-Systematically underfund poorer or more dense areas to create long lines.
-Fight a national work holiday for elections (I mean, good grief!).

Even if none of this yields them the election, it does allow them to sulk for 8 years and claim that the Obama and the Democrats "stole" the election for the "true" Americans. Yes, and with all the racist and nativist undertones that feeling carries.

We need a landslide not just to win, to reverse policies, to change course. We need a landslide to so utterly crush the conservative movement that it is forced to rethink itself and its ideas.

They are drowning. Throw them an anvil.

This very good piece from Huffington Post addresses the ACORN lies:

The facts about ACORN are worth getting out. ACORN is an organization that, among other things, registers low-income people to vote. One of the ways they do this is to hire door-to-door canvassers from the neighborhoods they are working in. This sort of work is tightly regulated. So, when one of the thousands of people they give jobs to doesn't do their work right and brings back bogus or phony voter registration cards, the law REQUIRES that ACORN turn the forms in to the voter registration office. The law, rightly, doesn't want anybody throwing out voter registration forms for any reason.