It appears that opensecrets.org isn’t quite the treasure trove I recall it being due to FEC reporting requirements. I went there today to query my own giving and could not formulate a query that would return records for me. It turns out that the FEC does not require campaigns or PACs to itemize contributions of $200 or less, according to a staffer at the Center for Responsive Politics, which runs the website. My contributions are usually $25 at a time.

I think I’m happy to make sure that my contributions never match or exceed that figure (not that there’s really much danger of that anyway).

This is a turning point. I’m not gonna cry that it’s the end of the world, but I think this is the point from which a lot of liberal reforms are no longer possible because they will be killed by the supreme court. I think this is the final nail in the coffin of a political tradition that started with The New Deal. To see the likes of it again, will require a similar period of crisis. I don’t think that would even do it, though. Our civic tradition and our belief in democracy are not nearly so strong in 2005 as they were in 1905. Those bulwarks barely contained the threat of fascism 75 years ago, I have my doubts as to whether they could do so in the future, given their diminished status today.

I’m disgusted by Byrd for voting for him. I’ve lost all respect for the man. Five years of railing against an unconstitutional regime and he confirms a justice who would rule nearly all of Bush’s violations of the law within the president’s authority. Forty two senators felt strongly enough to vote against the guy, but at least a couple of them didn’t feel strongly enough to filibuster.

Someone’s running for president.

Joe Lieberman has announced that he’s going to vote against the Alito nomination. He’s going to do because he doesn’t believe that Alito will protect the constitution. Senator Pot, meet Judge Kettle. Judge Kettle, this is Senator Pot.

This op-ed by Republican Congressman (and former Libertarian Party presidential nominee) Ron Paul is as fine an example as I’ve ever seen of the libertarians looking at a problem, seeing some of the elements of it, and then fabulously failing to understand what’s really wrong. Ron Paul is right that we’ve seen a frightening erosion of real wealth in this country. That doesn’t come from the meagerly redistributive system of capitalism we have in this country. It comes from the kind of neo-liberal dogma that guys like him push that has shuttered our manufacturing capacity as multinational corporations search out a way to cut an extra dollar off of their man hour costs. It’s not our government’s relatively weak powers to redistribute wealth that deters men and women of character from going into government. It’s the ever increasing inequality of wealth in our society and fear of ending up on the losing side of the economy that pushes people of good character to do corrupt things. It’s a culture that tells people that financial success is not only its own reward, but proof of your character and worth as a human being that makes “fuck everyone else, I’m gonna get mine” into a virtual national raison d’etre. What we’re seeing are the inevitable consequences of a rabid sort of socioeconomic darwinism and virulent class warfare that our country has embraced for 25 years. It won’t end so long as we mistakenly equate money with speech and allow a corporate media oligopoly to filter what most americans see and hear.

Harry and Louise were the name of the couple in the ads that were largely responsible for turning the tide of public opinion against Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal in 1993. They sat around their kitchen table, brows furrowed in worry that a big, government healthcare plan would cause shortages, rationing, and a decline in the quality of care. Apparently, we’ve reached the point in our political and economic cycles where the stars are lining up in favor of universal healthcare again. I say this because we’re starting to see propaganda decrying the Canadian system for rationing, shortages, etc. That’s always a sure sign that someone powerful out there is worried that their cash cow may get slaughtered in upcoming reform. The latest example was on Marketplace this morning. Their story started with an anecdote about some poor old grandma who couldn’t get her hip replaced in Canada quickly enough to avoid becoming a cripple, so she came to the glorious and free United States of Aetna and had that nasty ol’ hip replaced quicker than you can say “dadgummit”.

According to an article in Saturday’s Post by Howard Kurtz and Shailagh Murray, the right is now trying to pull a Swift Boat style smear campaign against 38 year Marine and anti-war congressman John Murtha. I hope this despicable tactic backfires against them. The GOP does not have a monopoly on patriotism. That goes doubly so for its current generation of chicken hawk leadership.

According to a story in the Monitor, as many as 500,000 female fetuses are being aborted in India each year because they are female. The numbers are so high because ultrasound technology has reached doctor’s offices in every part of India. Where one might, perhaps stereotypically, expect to find incidents of gender killing of fetuses to occur amongst the poor and “backward”, it is actually most prevalent among India’s educated classes who can afford multiple utrasounds and trips to the doctor.

I’m genuinely perplexed as to what the feminist answer to this is. Do we stand by the abortion rights as an absolute, even if that means a sort of genocide is perpetuated against female fetuses?

I really want to read the book discussed in this article by its author Lance deHaven-Smith, an academic expert on Florida elections, electoral trends, and elections law. He’s written a book on the Florida debacle in 2000. He makes several really interesting points just in the interview, some directly related to the 2000 election and some not.

1. There were 175,000 spoiled ballots. Most of those were not the famous “undervotes” with hanging chads, etc. About 2/3rds were “overvotes” where the ballot was marked for two candidates. From his sampling, it appears that a large portion of those were ballots where Al Gore was selected and then written in, too. Black voters in Florida so often have found their votes disqualified on minor technicalities that they have a tendency to try to make extra sure that their intent is clear. Gore “overvotes” outnumber Bush “overvotes” by nearly 3 to 1.

2. The political elites on both sides no longer really respect democracy and the need to put it ahead of partisan interests, etc. Politics has become more of a win at all costs game in recent decades.

3. The GOP knows that Florida’s demographic trends are working against it. They have a vested interest in seeing that votes aren’t counted, especially when they know those votes are coming from minority precincts. Katherine Harris’s attempt to make the legal standard for a valid vote murky ran counter to all sorts of case law on the subject. Under precedents well established in Florida law, any ballot where Gore’s name was selected and written in should have been counted as vote for Gore because the intent of the voter was clear. When it became clear that their attempts at subverting Florida law wouldn’t stop the votes from being counted and that the legal standards for counting votes was quite clear, despite media portrayals, they went to the partisan U.S. Supreme Court and got it to put the election on ice.

Since there was no way for the court to do that and be consistent with its own rulings and judicial philosophy, they stipulated that the ruling was a one off that would set no precedent for future courts. Gore, doing what our own political tradition would dictate as the right thing, accepted the ruling. And that, too, related to part of what deHaven-Smith wsa saying. Once you get to that stage where one or both sides is willing to do whatever is necessary to win, it becomes an escalating arms race. Gore may have been willing to just submit. In a similar case in the future, Democrats can lay down and take it again or they can escalate. Both are bad for democracy.

When I set up the miniblog “asides” section and decided to devote it, primarily, to links about layoffs, I set up a google news alert for the keyword layoffs. Quite unintentionally, that has been very useful in uncovering a hidden news story. The hidden news story is the Kmart layoffs. Kmart has made no press release about lay-offs. There were enough local stories about it that the AP made a half-assed attempt at reporting on it, but seemed to allow themselves to be stonewalled by noncommittal corporate-speak. Instead, this story has dribbled out in local news stories in papers across the country while Kmart spokespeople have given half assed non-answers to questions that suggest the lay-offs are just part of how individual stores are balancing their workforce. What appears to be happening here is a systematic removal of its fulltime workforce. I don’t have enough evidence yet to accuse them of any worse wrongdoing, but the impression I get from anecdotes in some of these news stories is that they’re getting rid of the longer term workers, perhaps to get out of expensive medical insurance and retirement obligations. It’d be nice if someone who does this kind of thing for living would investigate that.

This entry can be linked at:
http://www.policywank.com/2006/01/07/help-hold-kmart-accountable/

I would really like the big picture on this story to get out. I don’t want Kmart to just get away with this weasle strategy. I’m not a celebrity blogger with hundreds or thousands of readers. I’ve just got a couple dozen of you. I’m going to make a rare request of those of you who read this. I would appreciate it if you’d link to this story in your own blogs or forward a link to this story to people who might care via email. Maybe we can get the word out on this.
A sampling of news stories can be found below. In hindsight, I wish I’d kept links to all the news stories I’ve seen over the last ten days or so.

http://www.roanoke.com/business/wb/wb/xp-47355
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/13549482.htm
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/01062006/business/81457.htm
http://www.wifr.com/home/headlines/2150202.html
http://www.austindailyherald.com/articles/2006/01/07/news/news2.txt