Don’t Forget To Check Your Liberties Along With Your Luggage

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When will it end?  The Transportation Security Administration, the organization that mans the airport security checkpoints, appears to be just throwing new regulations and procedures at us, the American public, with the usual national security excuse.  Seriously, the conduct that the TSA now considers Standard Operating Procedure is so offensive, it was difficult to think of a title for this post that wasn’t equally outrageous.  Remember those new enhanced scanners that I wrote about several months ago?  They’re rolling out nationwide, and contrary to what I thought would happen back in January, the controversy just seems to be spreading.

In fact, I think we’re at the point where the snowball effect is starting to kick in; when I was originally trying to write this earlier this week, the outcry was largely limited to the blogosphere and other internet communities.  Now, however, it’s hit the mainstream media, and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down any time soon.  Given that they are subjected to the scanners much more frequently than you or I, the airline pilots have a slightly different, and perhaps slightly stronger, argument than the general public.  However, the peoples’ argument is just as strong, and just as insidious.  Just how big?  Read on, my friend, read on…

Welcome to the Corporate States of America?

Sorry for the long absence from writing; I’ve had too much work so far this semester, and as always, I care about the quality of these posts.  I do not just randomly throw whatever up here; I take time to research these posts.  As a result, yes, I am starting to write this on a Saturday night; this issue is too important to not write about.  Remember the Citizens United ruling?  We’re now seeing its full effects, and they are disturbing.  Several weeks ago, Target was called out for donating to a Minnesota candidate’s campaign based on his economic platform; this same candidate, it turns out, is against gay marriage.  Though the grassroots campaign against Target was successful, it turns out we were barely scratching the surface with the issue of corporate funding of campaigns.

Much larger than Target’s six-figure donation to MN Forward is the $10 million that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent this past week trying to elect Republicans in recent weeks.  Now, the idea of the Chamber funding political attack ads is nothing new, and is even, albeit tacitly, accepted in American politics.  I don’t think special interest groups on either side of the political spectrum should be involved in politics, but that’s another post for another day.  What is really getting at me is the question of whether the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending foreign money on campaign ads, which is a violation of Federal law.

What You Should Know About Missouri’s Proposition C (And Others Like It)

Well here we go: as Congress goes to its month-long August recess, we have a full slate of primaries and other developments in the midterm election races to keep us engaged in politics.  This Tuesday, the August primaries began in earnest with three states choosing their general election matches.  Now, I could just give you another long and detailed roundup of the results as I have for, well, just about every other primary this year, but Missouri gives us the first challenge to the health care law at the ballot box, so I thought I’d look at that instead.  Not to mention the fact that I go to college in Missouri, meaning I care about the results of this contest a bit more than just political curiosity.  Of course, because I know just how much you guys love to find out who won what, here’s what happened in Missouri, in a nutshell.

UPDATED: The Benefits Are Restored, But At What Cost?

Update is below

Ladies and gentlemen, the wait is finally over.  Today, unemployment benefits are on the verge of finally being reauthorized after nearly two months of the nation’s unemployed having nothing to rely on other than whatever savings they might have had left.  Technically, the benefits have not been restored, but with today’s successful cloture vote in the Senate, passage is essentially guaranteed.  Once again, the vote split along party lines, with the exception of Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) joining the attempt to maintain the filibuster, and Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins siding with the Democrats.  We know tonight the cost of the legislation, and other important specifics, so the “cost” in my title is of course beyond the actual dollar amount.

Playing With Fire

Ah, another Congressional recess without addressing the unemployment benefits crisis.  According to the Huffington Post’s count, it’s now been 37 days since the impending specter of that final benefit check was hung over the collective heads of the millions of unemployed Americans.  I hate to say it, but it doesn’t look like it will be resolved any time soon.  Of all the issues dotting the political landscape these days, the sad tale of the fate of the unemployed is perhaps the one that affects the most people and is also one of the most pressing.

It may not be as flashy an issue as health care reform, or more recently the Arizona law that was officially challenged by the Obama Administration this week, but at its core, the unemployment issue needs to be dealt with or the economic recovery will not happen for a while at least.  With our economy based so heavily on consumer spending, we cannot recover until the unemployment problem is addressed.  Of course, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman points out in his New York Times editorial, there’s a simple catch-22, a version of the classic “chicken or the egg” question: we can’t have much of an improvement in consumer spending until unemployment is addressed, but many companies won’t feel like hiring again until there are signs that consumer spending is rebounding.  I believe that at the core, unemployment benefits are the key to breaking into this loop; by giving the unemployed a lifeline and a bit of cash they can use to buy groceries, pay bills, and so on, they are able to put money back into the system and contribute to a rebound in spending which should hopefully lead to more job openings.  Even beyond that, lawmakers are playing with fire by not renewing the unemployment benefits.

Congressional Dems, It’s Time to Stand Up to the GOP

A brief note before jumping into this week’s post: I love writing the longer posts, though they take so much time to do the way I would like to do them that one or two of them a week is about all I could do with the longer ones.  Therefore, I will be putting more of a focus on the “Brief Thoughts” posts than before.  I’ll still do the longer ones of course; you can expect a big one on financial reform sometime after Independence Day, likely timed to the Senate vote on the bill.  However, here’s a shorter piece involving a bit of financial reform, and a whole lot of Congress.

If there’s one narrative that can be told about the current Congress, it is a story of weak leadership that is too willing to compromise and settle for less than what the majority of Democrats want.  Of course, compromise is an integral part of politics, and it could be argued that the unwillingness of Republicans to budge from blanket opposition is even more reason to compromise, but seriously it’s getting annoying at this point.  Indeed, on just about every piece of legislation that has come up in the last year, as far as the Senate goes we have seen the same “try to appease the same three Republicans (Senators Snowe, Collins, and more recently Brown) so they’ll vote for the bill” storyline.  The result is pretty much the same: the bill gets watered down significantly and there’s still a desperate scramble for votes at the end.

In other words, the Republicans in the Senate keep bluffing, and the Democrats keep falling for it.  The fact is, we still need 60 votes in the Senate to get anything done, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the rest of the Democratic leadership is content to just give the Republicans every last concession possible, with no guarantee whatsoever that the effort will translate into votes.  The prime example of this is the Wall Street reform bill, with Senator Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts) having almost single-handedly carved out of the conference report the $19 billion fee on banks that would have helped pay for the whole thing.  Instead, Senator Brown wants the money to come from the savings found by winding down the TARP program.

You know, for a party so worried about the deficit, they seem to be doing all they can to avoid taking concrete steps to pay it down (other than passing unemployment benefits, of course).  We’ve known for a while that the Republicans were going to try and be the “party of no”, but still, you’d think they’d be a bit more open to at least debate instead of just falling in lockstep with the GOP leadership.  This absolute black-and-white that we have seen is just about unnatural.  Politics (and life in general) is about shades of gray, at least normally, and the kind of behavior we have been seeing from Congressional Republicans is quite frankly childish.

The  casualties of this nonsense are just about everyone in this country; health care reform, climate legislation, unemployment benefits, the DISCLOSE Act, and now Wall Street reform have all been completely torpedoed or otherwise weakened by the Republican obstructionism.  Enough is enough.  Assuming the Democrats manage to maintain control of the Senate through the midterm elections, one of the first orders of business next January should be to significantly rework the filibuster.  I don’t think the Senate should eliminate it completely as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests, but rather they should substantially alter it so that business can actually get done in the Senate and we can have programs that actually have teeth.

The Fix to the Citizens United Ruling?

It’s been a crazy week in politics, particularly in Texas; the “silly season of politics”, as various people have called it, is in full swing.  Unfortunately, as much as I’d love to repost that video, I have no activists in chicken suits, nor do I have anything connecting certain politicians to chickens at all.  As much as I’d like to lazily put up a hilarious video on a Friday night, I’m not going to do that; plenty of people have already talked about that particular story, so I’ll give it a rest.  You might have heard about the recent Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission; decided in January, this case effectively eviscerated the existing McCain-Feingold campaign finance restrictions and has remained controversial since.

Finally, a proposed solution is almost done making its way through Congress.  According to the Huffington Post, the bill known as the DISCLOSE Act, or for those of you who love these crazy acronyms as much as I do, the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act, is intended to fix the mess that the Supreme Court started.  On a side note, if there’s one thing I particularly love about Congress, it’s when they come up with these epic acronyms.  Of course, the Patriot Act is still the reigning champion of legislation having an acronym as its name, but this one is still pretty good.

Anyway, campaign finance regulations: the details pertinent to this discussion is that in ruling for Citizens United, the Supreme Court essentially enabled the corporations and special interests to spend money on campaigns without restriction, whereas before there was a forest of restrictions that more or less was effective at keeping corporate and special interests at the very least regulated, if not outright restricted.  Faced with the possibility of unlimited spending in an election-year free-for-all, Congress came up with this legislation to try and plug the holes.

Did President Obama Waste His Oval Office Address?

Insert memorable quote here.  Seriously, I just finished watching President Obama give his first televised speech from the Oval Office, and with all the hype comparing the speech to JFK’s “ask not what you can do for your country” speech and FDR’s famous inaugural address (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself”), I was left feeling a bit underwhelmed.  Don’t get me wrong, President Obama is a great speaker, and while the jury’s still out on a public opinion reaction to it, I have a feeling it will have an effect on public perception of the recovery effort.

Though it was a great speech, and doing it in the Oval Office certainly added the sense of urgency, but to me this speech felt more like a normal Presidential speech, as in nothing truly special.  The Oval Office address is supposed to be the game-changer, the speech that incites the nation to action.  For instance, George W. Bush spoke from the Oval Office right after 9/11; though other Presidents have each addressed different issues from the Oval Office, this is the best example of the kind of speech the occasion is meant for.  Coming out of the speech with no memorable quotes to throw up here makes me wonder if this speech would have been better if it had been made from the Gulf coast.  Then again, successful speeches are not determined solely by their memorable quotes, but also by their policy implications.

Brief Thoughts: Just Who the Hell is Alvin Greene?

Oh, South Carolina, just when we thought you’d given us all the political scandals you could muster, you just keep them coming.  One of the more interesting developments out of the primaries last Tuesday was the shocking win of Alvin Greene over heavily favored former state lawmaker Vic Rawl.  Okay, so upsets happen all the time; what’s so special about this one, you ask?  Where do I start?  According to the article, Alvin Greene is unemployed, making me wonder how he found the more than $10,000 required by the state to be on the ballot in the first place.  In addition, from what anyone can tell, Greene did not campaign anywhere, and yet managed to garner more than 100,000 votes to secure the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.  Ladies and gentlemen, here we go again.

Of course, scandals of this caliber are nothing new in South Carolina.  This last year has been particularly good for scandal aficionados; as you may remember, a little more than a year ago disgraced Governor Mark Sanford gave us the wonderful little euphemism “hiking the Appalachian Trail” for sneaking off to visit one’s mistress.  Remember Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress?  He’s from South Carolina too.  This year, more allegations of infidelity surfaced in the run up to the GOP gubernatorial primary.  Nikki Haley ultimately won her primary, but the dust-up in which a blogger accused Haley of having an affair with him.  Much has been said about that scandal, and since this is meant to be one of my shorter posts I won’t go into all of the…er saucy details of it.

After Mr. Greene won the primary and burst into the national spotlight, he hasn’t yet inspired confidence in the electorate or national Democrats, who seem to be quickly and rather publicly distancing themselves from his campaign.  In fact, Representative Clyburn, also of South Carolina and the House Majority Whip, has called for an investigation into the election, and who can blame him?  Now, he’s not the only one calling for an investigation; according to a new report from the Huffington Post, groups are quickly lining up calling for one.  Early on Monday, government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, echoed the calls for an investigation, with South Carolina State Democratic Chair joining in as well.  It would be all fine if the only reason Greene was being investigated was for not filing his paperwork, but there’s more.

A day or so after the primary, the article goes on to explain, the Associated Press found that Greene had been charged with showing porn to a college student, and his military discharge was “involuntary” according to the New York Times article.  Indeed, the charges alone should be grounds for him to step aside.  Not only do they raise even more questions about him, do we really want someone like that in Congress?  While many senior Democrats are wondering if he’s a Republican plant in the race, it seems that Senator DeMint is headed to an easy re-election this year.  Perhaps that’s the point: DeMint was worried, so they got Greene into the race. With every part of him not quite fitting the profile of a typical candidate for higher office, eyebrows should be raised.  It is possible that Greene is legitimate, but honestly, what are the odds?  Then again, this is South Carolina…

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And They’re Off! General Election 2010 Gets Underway

Well, this week another big set of primary elections was settled.  Other than a few remaining primaries and run-off elections, the field for the 2010 midterm elections is now set.  Sorry this post took so long to come out; there are so many different narratives that emerged on Tuesday, both new and ones we’ve seen earlier this year, that it is tough to generalize the results.  The midterm elections and the results of these primaries are a topic I write about fairly often.  While health care reform, financial regulation, global warming legislation, and the other major initiatives Congress takes up affect all of us, the midterm elections have the potential to have far-reaching implications.

Certainly, they will determine whether we get the same level of partisan deadlock as we’ve had- or worse -in the next Congress, thus determining how difficult the fights on climate change legislation, further confirmations, and other measures Congress may take on will be.  But that’s just Congress; in November, several Governorships and state legislatures are up for grabs.   The primaries last night underscore the often-unpredictable nature of public opinion, and political campaigns in general.  Overall, there was one narrative that seemed to run stronger than the rest.