I would like someone to define the political “center.” Is it possible to come up with a series of centrist propositions, precisely midpoint between the left and the right?

Logic requires that in order to define the center, we must first define the left and right and then (if politics is what mathematicians call a metric space) find the average or mean of the two positions. The aggregate of average positions on major issues would, by definition, be the “centrist” position.

The political space, however, is probably not a metric space—the latter roughly defined as a mathematical structure that includes a way to measure the distance between two elements of the structure—and thus there really is no way to be sure that any policy described as centrist is actually in the political center.

There is only one thing of which we can be certain: a majority of the voters have become so dissatisfied with the direction of this nation that they are willing to elect a person they perceive to be significantly different from the incumbent, in the hope that he will bring about positive change. The closeness of the popular vote, however, makes it clear that a sizable percentage of the voters who believe that the country is going in the wrong direction still voted for a candidate virtually certain to keep it going in the same direction and to continue unchanged the policies of the Bush administration. This segment of the electorate bears careful watching and study. Some of it can be attributed to racial prejudice, pure and simple. The Moslem-sounding name may have alarmed some voters too lazy to inquire any further, perhaps the same voters that chose to remain ignorant of Bush’s questionable past when they voted for him in 2000 and 2004.

But now that Obama has become the president-elect, we would be wise, in our celebrations of electoral victory, to remain mindful of the powerful forces that make it very difficult for a chief executive to bring about substantial systemic change. Too many institutions have grown fat on the generosity of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and there is nothing to which they will not stoop to retain what they are now getting. This is particularly true of the beneficiaries of the Iraq invasion and occupation but it is also true of all well-connected businesses and organizations that have been favored over their less Republican competitors. In addition, the promiscuous number of governmental agencies, particularly those related to “national security”—a term that has now become a euphemism for the maintenance and extension of the American Empire—with powerful constituencies in and out of government, have come to regard their fiefdoms, often concealed behind the shield of secrecy, as sacrosanct.

That Obama is not a wild-eyed radical was clearly revealed by the faces lined up behind him the other day when he delivered his short press conference on the economic crisis. Dinosaur Paul Volcker, Carter’s appointment as chair of the Federal Reserve System, appears to be in the forefront of Obama’s economic advisors. Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, Wall Street operatives who played a major role in deregulating the securities and banking industry, and who thus bear considerable responsibility for the present crisis, are said to be on the short list for Treasury secretary. Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen legitimately described as a diehard Likudnik, will be Obama’s chief of staff, so the likelihood of justice and a real homeland for the Palestinian people appears to be off the table.

A friend writes: “I predict that Emanuel and Summers will be the least of what’s objectionable about the new White House crew. Zion siegt! Apparently neither perps nor victims ever learn, only historians.”

By definition, historical perspective is ex post facto. I recently read that President James Garfield could write Latin with one hand while simultaneously writing Greek with the other. He died too quickly from an assassin’s bullet for his performance as president to be assessed.

Obama likewise is an intellectual. He taught constitutional law for years at one of the finest law schools in the nation. He reads; he reflects. The most influential philosophers in his life are Reinhold Niebuhr and Nietzsche, which puts him an unusual category. This guy carries in his head a substantial quantity of apperceptive mass.

It remains, however, to be seen whether he—or anyone, for that matter—can stand upright in the face of the tsunami of late-stage finance capitalism, broken and corrupt as it may be. But if he fails—and failure is likely—his fall will at least have a tragic component.

Tragedy is always preferable to farce, at least when the future is at stake.

Emerson wrote that the great confide themselves childlike to the genius of their age. Augustus became the first Roman emperor because the time and circumstances demanded a monarch. Peracles led Athens because Athens had reached a point in its development (empire) that demanded a person with his talents. Like a surfer catching the right wave, Lincoln rode the tide, the Zeitgeist, into greatness, but at the cost of his own life. Roosevelt swept into power on a wave of suffering and revulsion at the crookedness and predations of Wall Street, and enacted the New Deal.

The question today is not so much Obama, but the direction of the tide. Jimmy Carter was a good and able man, I believe, but from the viewpoint of career-enhancement, he was swimming in the wrong direction. The right wing think-tanks, foundations, and mass media in the service of the corporate and rentier class had changed the mindscape of the nation. The delusions of supply-side economics—an intellectual fraud of the first water—conditioned the voters to accept the systematic dismantling of much of the New Deal that has occurred since January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president.

In the wake of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the increasing third-worldization of our nation, together with the burst of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial meltdown, this nation might be ready to listen to someone who can articulate alternative paths, who doesn’t mouth uncritical hymns to the virtues of laissez faire capitalism while filling the coffers of the wealthy out of the public purse, who doesn’t believe that social Darwinism is the answer to all the problems of the world, and, perhaps most important of all, doesn’t believe that the only path to national prosperity lies in plundering the rest of the world, especially the poorer nations who cannot resist.

Maybe.

It is, however, already beginning to look as though the financial elite may succeed in keeping the genie of real change in the bottle this time around. Clearly, they saw the crisis coming, and probably were intending for the collapse to happen after the presidential election, when an increasingly senile Republican president-elect and his raptorial vice president-elect would offer no resistance to whatever plans that had already been made to complete the transfer of vast public wealth into private hands. It will not be as smooth as originally planned, but when Obama takes office on January 20, 2009, he will still be presented with a fait accompli that will require years to undo, that is, if it is even possible to undo all the damage. In this quest, he will be bitterly opposed by all those powers that profited from the previous regime.

So, dear reader, the question we must ask is not whether Obama is ready to be president, but whether the time is right for the changes that must be made to preserve our republic, and ultimately human life on the Earth. Is it we who are ready, in other words? Absent this precondition, the most able and prepared president hasn’t a chance.

Remember Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Brutus participated in the killing of Caesar, but when he afterwards explained to the mob that he killed his friend and benefactor Caesar to save the republic, there were immediate calls from the mob to make him king. Brutus was resisting a current that ultimately swept him away on the plains of Phillipi. The Roman republic had already ceased to exist in the hearts of the people; there was no republic to save.

So far, I have not seen the kind of willingness that makes for positive revolutionary change, but I live in Mississippi, which is hardly a representative sample of the U.S. Nevertheless, I still suspect it will require something far more serious than the current public discomfiture to render the collective psyche capable of accepting what every sensible and knowledgeable individual knows should have been done twenty years ago. It would have been easy then. Too bad.

My expectations today are not high, but I would like to be pleasantly surprised.

Update: If you think Obama is a socialist, read what the socialists are saying about him.

Tags: Obama

At 10:00 PM this evening, CNN announced that it projected Obama elected the next president.

We can now hope that things will improve, both domestically and internationally. So many things have been neglected, so much deliberate wreckage to our republic, Obama is faced with a titanic task to repair the damage.

He is a person of intelligence, depth and integrity. It is reasonable to trust him and to hope that he will fulfill our highest expectations.

According to the Associated Press, the government-chartered mortgage company Freddie Mac “secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.” The target of the lobbying effort was a bill by Senator Charles Hagel that would have strengthened oversight and tightened regulation over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The bill was supported by Republicans and (sad to say) opposed by Democrats. The lobbying campaign, focused on 17 Republican senators, was successful in turning enough of them around to keep the bill from passing or even coming to the floor. The “turned” senators were Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Christopher "Kit" Bond and Jim Talent of Missouri, Conrad Burns of Montana, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and George Allen of Virginia.

S. 190 - Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005

It is possible that all this was perfectly legal—but it stinks of corruption. In fact, it was corrupt.

I’m a lawyer, and I know how easy it is to find a way to violate the spirit of a law without violating the letter, and that is particularly true of criminal statutes, which must be strictly interpreted to avoid running afoul of the due process requirements of the U. S. Constitution. On the other hand, using corporate funds to lobby lawmakers for the specific purpose of passing legislation to keep the investigators away from an ongoing crime (or a conspiracy) ought to be a crime, both for the corporations and their officers, and for the lobbyists that do the actual dirty work. It is obstruction of justice, pure and simple.

Although it is from the chit-chat after the second presidential debate, Carville’s conclusion seems even more spot-on after the third one:

Tags: Carville

Part of the problem with our national government is a weak alignment in interest between high government officials in all three branches and the guy on the street.

Here’s a proposal for part of the solution: Pass a constitutional amendment fixing the salaries and pensions of the president, vice president, senators, congressmen and all federal judges at a multiple (not necessarily the same multiple for all of them, however) of the 20th percentile of family income. These are folks who are struggling hard to stay in their houses and put food on their tables, so if our congresscritters continue what they have been doing since 1981, their income will either stagnate or decline. Make the salary generous.

Interestingly enough, the income of the president and members of congress have actually been going down as a multiple of the 20th percentile’s family income. For instance, the president’s pay in 1951 was 51.2 times the 20th percentile’s family income (100,000/1953), whereas the multiple in 2003 was 16.6 (400,000/24,117). A fair multiple would be 25.

Congressional salaries, on the other hand, have moved less but still ought to be raised to at least a multiple of 10 times the 20th percentile.

Year Salary 20th per. multiple
1951 12500 1953 6.4
1969 42500 5000 8.5
1979 60662 8000 7.6
1994 133600 17949 7.4
2003 154700 24117 6.4

In order to reinforce this alignment, forbid all outside income, gifts or speculative earnings, irrespective of the source, to all these officials. All outside income goes into the treasury, period. No exceptions. That includes income from blind trusts and retirement income. Officials must live on their government salary as long as they remain in the government. If you happen to own a private jet, you can use it, but you must make the payments for it, maintain it and pay for fuel out of your government earnings. You get the idea ....

There are other provisions that could further strengthen that alignment. For instance, we could add an additional factor - the Gini ratio, a measure of income inequality that has been climbing ever since Ronald Reagan became president. Zero is perfect equality and 1 is total inequality. Subtract the Gini ratio from 1 and multiply the difference by the multiple above, increasing the multiple to meet the initial income target. Then the more unequal society becomes, the higher the Gini index goes, and the folks ultimately responsible for the increasing inequality get a taste of what it is like to see their incomes decline.

Another possibility would be to tie executive and legislative income to the minimum wage. The president’s income has declined compared the minimum wage, but Congress’s income has grown almost twice as fast as the minimum wage since 1951.

Establish a retirement system that enables public servants to retire with a generous stipend, on the condition that they do not lobby or work for the federal government or a corporation that does business with the government until they have been out of office at least 6 years.

Establish progressive tax brackets that are multiples of the 20th percentile of family incomes. In 2007 the 20th percentile earned $27,864, so any family earning less than $27,864 pays nothing, which is a good thing; at that income, taxes literally take food off the table. The brackets would then go $27,865-55,728; $55,729--83,592; $83,593--111,456, etc. If everyone’s income rises in the same proportion, then the brackets would proportionately expand and no one’s tax bite would change. If the income at the bottom stagnates, however, then the brackets stay put and the higher earners suffer tax bracket creep as their income increases. This would have the effect of aligning the interest of the wealthy with the welfare of the far-less-wealthy. It would then be in everyone’s interest to adopt policies to pull up the income at the bottom.

Needless to say, such an arrangement would have to be done by constitutional amendment, as no congress would vote to tie their incomes to the fortunes of the less well-off.

Finally, the money-chase for campaign contributions must cease. It is unrealistic (I originally wrote idiotic) to expect our representatives in Washington to do their job if they must spend most of their time begging the rich and powerful for campaign contributions. All elective federal offices simply must be financed by public funds and those funds must be dispensed in a way that will shorten the campaigns to a reasonable length. Television, radio and cable must, as a condition of doing business, furnish adequate prime time at no cost for the candidates to put their messages before the voters. If it takes a constitutional amendment to make this work, then enact it.

References:

http://www.uscourts.gov/judicialpay.pdf
http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/97-1011.pdf
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f01AR.html
http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/fedprssal.html
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/blminwage.htm
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f04.html

The bailout of Wall Street went down in the House of Representatives this afternoon. A majority of Republicans opposed it and a majority of Democrats supported it. Shame! The Federal Reserve has announced massive support of banks to maintain liquidity, which is what it is in the business of doing.

The proposed bailout was a gift to a gang of thieves.

Back to the drawing board. No mitigation without regulation.

Upon sober reflection, the bailout is beginning to look more and more like a huge gift to the banks and Wall Street.

Dean Baker in the Huffington Post writes that The Banks Have a Gun Pointed at Their Head and Are Threatening to Pull the Trigger:

The basic argument for the bailout is that the banks are filled with so much bad debt that the banks can't trust each other to repay loans. This creates a situation in which the system of payments breaks down. That would mean that we cannot use our ATMs or credit cards or cash checks.

That is a very frightening scenario, but this is not where things end. The Federal Reserve Board would surely step in and take over the major money center banks so that the system of payments would begin functioning again. The Fed was prepared to take over the major banks back in the 80s when bad debt to developing countries threatened to make them insolvent. It is inconceivable that it has not made similar preparations in the current crisis.

In other words, the worst case scenario is that we have an extremely scary day in which the markets freeze for a few hours. Then the Fed steps in and takes over the major banks. The system of payments continues to operate exactly as before, but the bank executives are out of their jobs and the bank shareholders have likely lost most of their money. In other words, the banks have a gun pointed to their heads and are threatening to pull the trigger unless we hand them $700 billion.

Michael Moore puts it even more bluntly on his mailing list:

Let me cut to the chase. The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this. Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.

As usual, the taxpayers are getting screwed.

Remember, Mississippi Republicans, you voted this gang of thieves into office and kept them there. Now all of us are going to pay hell for this folly.

Obama, in my opinion, came off as far more presidential than McCain, and therefore Obama won the debate. He held his own against a snarky and condescending veteran senator whose only real points were his Hanoi Hilton stay, Obama’s relative inexperience, and the fact that he received military briefings when he visited Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and therefore is an expert on the middle east.

What a candidate promises in a debate, however, can come back to haunt him years later, and Obama’s emphasis on capturing bin Laden and pacifying Afghanistan has exactly that kind of potential. The idea that our military forces should be doing in Afghanistan what they have been doing in Iraq, that is, propping up a corrupt and unpopular regime in the middle of even more difficult terrain, against some of the world’s toughest fighters in their own homeland halfway around the world, is precisely what the voters are rejecting.

Just as Sun Tzu predicted—that fighting a remote war impoverishes the people—we have already been watching the wealth of this nation squandered in an illegal foreign war. Only those profiting from war and a few out-and-out wingnuts want this nation to engage in needless combat. No citizen who loves his country wants to see its blood and wealth wasted on a war that can be avoided or that has no compelling cause, which is why the population must be manipulated by lies and propaganda into supporting military adventurism.

Sinking further military resources into Afghanistan is a trap that could sink Obama’s presidency, much as it did Lyndon Johnson’s. Obama has already stepped into the trap but its jaws have not quite closed around him. Let us hope that he does not doom his presidency even before he takes office.

The Kyber Pass

Photo by John Burke 1878. From the Wikimedia Commons.

Tonight, Bush once again told the American people to be afraid. Everything’s at stake. All is lost unless the nation goes along with what we want to do. We know what is best. Trust us. Give us unlimited power with no accountability or limitations.

Sure.

To think that in 1962, it took federal troops to force the entry of James Meredith, a black man, into Ole Miss. With McCain’s threat to cancel the presidential debate with Obama scheduled Friday at Ole Miss, the folks around here are highly pissed off that a black man might not be debating there.

Times have changed, haven’t they?

Social Security is a moral issue, not an exclusively economic or financial one.

Read the article. PDF version.

Wordle is a free web-based tool to create artistic word clouds by pasting text into a window and selecting the style, font, color and a number of other attributes. I created 4 wordles below the fold for the acceptance speeches of Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin at the Democratic and Republican conventions. I leave it to the reader as to whether Wordles of these highly-processed and vetted speeches tell us anything about the character of the speakers, but it was fun creating them.

For those not familiar with tag and word clouds: The relative size of each word in the cloud is based upon the number of times the word appears in the text. Unfortunately, the software does not take into account the various forms and inflection of a word, so the Wordle may understate the number of times words with the same stem appear in the text. Read More...

Governor Palin disappeared this afternoon, purportedly to work on her VP acceptance speech. My guess is that she will withdraw this evening or in the morning.

The revelations about Palin’s abuse of the gubernatorial power in Alaska (Troopergate) will be the impetus and the desire to be with her family will be the public reason.

The biggest casualty of the Palin matter: McCain’s judgment.

If he insists that she stay on the ticket, and she agrees, then McCain will confirm not only his lack of judgment, but his inability to change course in the face of disaster.

Update (9/20/2008): Time to eat crow. I grossly overestimated the intelligence of the Republican rank and file, as well as its leadership. Its embrace of McCain and Palin simply goes to demonstrate the utter unfitness and unworthiness of today’s Republican Party to lead the nation.

I haven’t blogged the primaries, mainly because so many other first-class bloggers have been doing that job very well. In a few more days, however, John McCain and Sarah Palin will become the official nominees of the Republican Party and the battle will be joined in earnest.

In the absence of a coup or massive vote theft, Barak Obama and Joe Biden will be president and vice-president of the United States come next January 20.

I’ve always felt that Biden had many good qualities, but I have been concerned for many years at his support of U.S. imperialism in South America (and yes, imperialism in exactly the correct word for a century of military and economic support of right-wing dictators friendly to U.S. business interests). He supported the corrupt and oppressive bankruptcy act that, while allowing millionaires to discharge their debts, forces middle class debtors into Chapter 13 plans, keeping them in bondage to credit card companies for as long as 5 years.

Given the realities, however, Biden is as good a running mate as Obama could have gotten. Biden is the ultimate insider and his senate seat is not in danger of falling to a Republican when he leaves. Besides, given Obama’s relative youth and good health, Biden is very unlikely to become president in the next 4 or even 8 years.

McCain, in announcing his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, certainly managed to upstage Obama the day after the close of the Democratic convention, but I think he will pay a heavy price for it. The closest I can come to a similar choice was George H. W. Bush’s choosing Dan Quayle or perhaps Ronald Reagan’s choosing Richard Schweiker as his running mate in his attempt to unseat Gerald Ford as the incumbent in 1986. Palin has virtually no qualifications to be president, and preliminary reports on her background reflect very little interest on her part in Federal governance prior to McCain’s inviting her to be his running mate.

It is hard to believe that McCain is even serious about running for president, having chosen a running mate with such patently obvious limitations.

But I thought Ronald Reagan’s limitations were obvious. Boy, was I mistaken!

Southerners are the most crazy, dysfunctional folks in the nation, perhaps in the world. I sometimes think that we love our guns so much because without them, we couldn't shoot ourselves in the foot so often and with such devastating consequences.

Along with the dysfunction, however, occasionally comes insight. You acquire it at the cost of leaving home and settling in a strange land for a time and then returning to live. That is the plot of the modern southern novel, and it is nothing more than a retelling of a journey that repeats itself in real life over and over. The south is a mother one must leave in order to grow up.

Joe Bageant has made that journey. Here is a recent interview of his on Australian TV:

Click here for video of Joe Bageant interview on Australian TV.

P.S. Posting will be infrequent for another week while I finish what I hope will be my last legal brief and become more proficient on the Dvorak keyboard.

George Lakoff of the Rockridge Institute explains the difference between the conservative, progressive and neo-liberal approach to healthcare reform. Progressives should read and heed.

The Logic of the Health Care Debate

Children can't vote. That's the beginning and end of it. Quit listening to what Republicans say and watch what they do.

Bush, Barbour, Cochran, and Lott can count the votes. That's all that matters to them.

Update 10/18/2007 20:02: The House of Representatives failed to override Bush's veto of the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act.

Rep. Bennie Thompson did the right thing and voted to override the veto.

Robo-republicans Wicker and Pickering predictably voted to sustain the veto, but amazingly Gene Taylor, a Democrat, also voted to sustain. How representatives from the poorest state in the U.S. can square their consciences voting for gigantic tax cuts for the rich and an illegal and costly war but not for the health of Mississippi's children is a mystery.

But children can't vote. That's all that matters to them. They apparently have no consciences to square.

Clowns, puppets, songs and street drama are no longer effective means of protest, at least not when the purpose is to mobilize public opinion against a war. Their effectiveness depends upon media coverage and the reactionary powers that presently command our media have learned to ignore not only the public spectacles but also the thuggery the demonstrators frequently experience at the hands of the police. In the '60s, the protesters manipulated the media; now the media make demonstrations look more like civil unrest by broadcasting only unfavorable video coverage and by refusing to inform its audience what the demonstration is all about.

Television, radio and newspapers are very profitable. Profits require scarcity. A television or cable franchise is valuable precisely because both air and cable channels are limited, and until the growth of the Internet, there were no electronic alternatives. Now that there is an alternative, the issue of net neutrality has become one of the most important issues of our times, since the outcome of the battle will determine whether the owners of the physical network will either be common carriers, like the phone companies, or gatekeepers, like the media networks.

The mainstream media and the political elite have been implacably hostile to the independent web-based news organizations that have arisen since the advent of the Internet and the Worldwide Web, and have used every stratagem in their arsenal to limit and even destroy their power and independence. One of the best-known of these web-based news organizations, the Indymedia Network, has been the target of police raids, government harassment, and criminal prosecutions as a result of its broadcasting news, audio and video that governments and multinational corporations want to suppress.

Once the Internet can handle full-screen video, channel scarcity will cease to exist, and an independent media, provided with news contributed by both volunteer and professional reporters, will reach into the vast majority of the nation's homes. This will not only diminish the profitability of the networks, which will be faced with serious competition, but the Corporatocracy that secretly controls our nation and much of the world—deriving much of its power by virtue of the public's ignorance of what is really going on—will find itself directly threatened, much as the medieval church found itself threatened by the invention of the printing press and the rapid spread of literacy spawned by the availability of inexpensive books written in the vernacular.

These corporate media folks take the matter of net neutrality very, very seriously, and have consequently spent many millions, both in campaign contributions and media advertising, to wrest control of the Internet away from the public and concentrate it into the same hands that now control the mass media. In an nation already being seduced and frightened into authoritarianism and all the evils that invariably accompany an authoritarian regime, a neutral Internet, protected by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, may be one of our last opportunities to arrest what is increasingly looking like a slow-motion coup by the extreme right-wing.

So it's time to put away the clown suits, the puppets and the street theatre. In the early Sixties, protesters wore suits and dresses. They looked serious and respectable. They made an impact. They changed the nation.

The media couldn't make them into hoodlums, communists or wild-eyed radicals because they looked and dressed like the viewers, or, even more significantly, their children. Respectable clothes may or may not be the answer today, but the current approach isn't working most of the time. Now that the Bush administration appears to be set on a course to attack Iran, the stakes have become too high not to rethink our approach. If Bush paid no attention to the millions of demonstrators around the world who opposed the invasion of Iraq there is no reason to believe that ten times as many demonstrators will make the slightest difference in his plans to invade Iran.

Here is an IndyMedia NewsPaper. No wonder the powers-that-be oppose them.

Update: Clowns can have a powerful impact, under the right circumstances:

In light of the present difficulties of Congress in obtaining information from the executive branch, I propose the following constitutional amendment:

1. The executive branch shall, upon the request of any senator or congressman, promptly produce all documents and information requested within its possession or control to the requesting member, irrespective of classification, sensitivity, or any other danger to national security that might result from the disclosure of such documents or information to the member or to third parties. Such requests may be directed to any employee or officer of the executive branch, irrespective of position, rank or contractual provisions that may require non-disclosure. The duty of the executive branch to respond fully and completely to such requests shall extend to testimony by officers, employees and contractors of the executive branch before either house of the legislature and their committees

2. The agency receiving such request may, within 7 days, object to the production of the documents or information or any portion thereof by serving its objection upon the requesting member, setting out in detail the reasons for its objections, and unless 55% of the members of the house of Congress to which the requestor belongs votes to sustain the objection, the agency must comply with the request. The vote to sustain shall be privileged and each member is limited to 30 minutes of debate.

3. Each house of Congress may, by a two-thirds majority adopt rules limiting the access of all members to certain categories of documents and information, but may by a two-thirds majority exempt individual members from any or all such limitations. Any rules adopted under this section must be drafted with specificity as to the documents and information protected and any ambiguities shall be interpreted in favor of disclosure.

4. Executive privilege is hereby abolished. No member of the executive branch, including the president or vice president, may refuse to provide any information or documents required to be produced under this amendment.

Any other ideas for constitutional amendments? Put them in the comments.

Update: Upon further consideration, it occurred to me that it is usually the minority party that is refused information by the executive branch. Requiring a super-majority to sustain the objection of the executive branch creates a presumption that the information should be produced.

Finally, a program on PBS featuring Greg Palast and his groundbreaking reporting (for the BBC) on how the Republican Party stole the 2004 presidential election.

One of the most effective means of stealing the 2004 election was voter caging—sending letters to newly-registered voters in Democratic areas with instructions not to forward. The Republicans then challenged the voters whose letters came back, including soldiers serving in Iraq and students who had been sent letters while on summer break.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/330/video.html

The mainstream media in the U.S. have avoided this topic as they would a contagious disease.

There was, however, far more skullduggery going on in 2004 than just vote caging. Palast's book (see sidebar), which sets out detailed, virtually conclusive evidence that the election was stolen, is a shocker.

Not long ago I posted an article on the JP explaining how I would want the State of Mississippi to be different after my term of office had I been elected governor (fat chance).

http://www.jacksonprogressive.com/issues/misspolitics/electedGovernor050907.html

Since it appears that the campaign for the U.S. Presidency is already in full swing, I am asking you, dear reader, a similar question: "If you were elected president, what would be your first official act?"

In other words, what do you think is the single most important thing our next president should do immediately?

Robert Bork, former Harvard Professor, former U.S. Soliciter General, U. S. Court of Appeals judge, U. S. Supreme Court nominee (rejected), fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, public scold, and, most importantly for our discussion, the sworn enemy of large tort recoveries by injured plaintiffs, especially punitive damages, has filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Yale Club of New York City, alleging wanton and reckless negligence on the latter's part which caused him permanent injuries to his leg. Bork fell off a dais from which he was to speak.

Bork is demanding actual and punitive damages. He must believe that he is exempt from following his own principles.

It reminds me of a fundamentalist preacher's hellfire and brimstone sermons that terrified his congregation with predictions of the end of the world until they discovered that he was planting trees around his house.

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy has a short article on Bork's previous opposition to large personal injury judgments.

See also Blomberg.com, and Bork's paper on Congress's power to enact tort reform.

Bork is another "intellectual" darling of the right-wing whose writings and influence over the past 50 years helped make this nation, weaker, poorer, nastier and more divided than before. I once thought of exposing this conceited windbag with a book of the same title as this article, a parody of the title of Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, but decided that it wasn't worth the time. Others have done an excellent job.

The Democratic leadership caved in to the Bush administration on benchmarks and deadlines on Iraq. When the nation is overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq they have folded instead of raising. Of course, the Blue Dog Democrats didn't help either.

It's a bad day for Congress. And America.

Mississippi's own senator Thad Cochran again demonstrated where his loyalties lie: the pharmaceutical industry.

Not the people of Mississippi who elected him.

The issue before Congress was whether Americans should be able to purchase prescriptions medicines sold by American manufacturers abroad at a fraction of the price charged for the identical medicines here in America. It is a fact that pharmaceutical companies charge Americans far more than they charge the citizens of other nations. Naturally, the industry is resisting any change that would cut back on this profitable racket, and it backs up that opposition with an army of lobbyists and a fortune in campaign contributions.

Cochran introduced a poison-pill amendment that for all practical purposes crippled a bill that would have made it possible for Americans to purchase medicines from other nations. It is amazing that the people of this poorest state in the union continue to elect to the Senate a person with so little regard for their health and welfare.

Yahoo: Senate Blocks Bid to Allow Drug Imports

All the Republican presidential wanabes want to be like Reagan. This is understandable, since Reagan's ability to read naturally from a teleprompter was legendary.

For those folks who think the Reagan administration brought economic salvation by lifting the nation out of the high interest rates and high unemployment blamed on Jimmy Carter, the following article should show them their error:

The Reagan Years: A Statistical Overview of the 1980s

Reagan left the country meaner, more unequal, less stable, and less free than it was when he became president.

How do we convert the electoral system into a presidential election by nationwide popular vote without a constitutional amendment? There is a way.

One state, Maryland, has already enacted into law the National Popular Vote Bill, that, if enacted by enough states whose combined electoral votes equal or exceed 270, automatically gives their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. No constitutional amendment is required.

A National Popular Vote Bill was introduced in the Mississippi Senate this year, but failed to gain traction. New ideas take a long time to penetrate our state's legislative skull.

The mechanics of the bill are simple. Until a sufficient number of states to create a majority in the electoral college have enacted the bill, nothing happens. But when the magic 270 electoral votes are reached, every participating state, including Mississippi if it enacts the bill, automatically chooses electors pledged to vote for the winner of the popular vote. It doesn't matter which states choose to participate; once an electoral majority is reached, the winner of the popular vote will be automatically elected president.

The Jackson Progressive thinks this is a good idea. Congratulate its sponsors, and if your senators or representatives didn't sponsor it, tell them you think it is a good thing.

Read the National Popular Vote web site for a more comprehensive explanation and for the latest news on the national campaign.

Addendum: Here are the sponsoring Mississippi state senators: Gloria Chisholm Williamson, Robert L. Jackson, Deborah Dawkins, David Lee Jordan, Johnnie E. Walls, Jr., Willie Lee Simmons, and Joseph C. Thomas. Let them know that you appreciate what they have done.

Now that the Democrats have won the 110th Congress, a chorus of Washington wise men have suddenly decided that the new majority should embrace bipartisanship.

<snark>
How appropriate! After twelve years of demonstrating their commitment to collegiality and bipartisanship, the Republicans have much wisdom to impart to the incoming Democrats on how to go about being bipartisan:

Tom DeLay could instruct on mid-decade redistricting;

Newt Gingrich on impeaching presidents of the opposite party;

Dick Cheney on courtesy towards senators of the opposite party;

Mark Foley on youth outreach;

Dennis Hastert on transparency and openness in government;

Duke Cunningham on honesty and integrity in government;

Trent Lott on coiffure;

Chip Pickering on net neutrality;

Virgil Goode on religious tolerance;

John McCain on how to fool people into thinking you are moderate and bipartisan;

The Washington common wisdom is correct; the Democrats have much to learn from their Republican colleagues.
</snark>

Judicial nominee Michael Wallace has announced that he will ask President Bush on Tuesday to withdraw his nomination for appointment to the 5th Circuit.

Wallace is a highly intelligent lawyer, eminently qualified intellectually for the position. Unfortunately, he is a right-wing extremist who clearly lacks judicial temperament and who could not be expected to impartially rule on cases involving civil rights and similar fields of law about which he has never attempted to conceal his opinions and beliefs. Wallace was appointed by Reagan to head the Legal Services agency of the federal government with the intention that he would do his best to destroy the agency entrusted to him, a pattern Reagan and his Republican successors have followed many times since. He nearly succeeded. There is no reason to believe that he would behave any less ideologically as a federal appellate judge. The American Bar Association obviously felt the same way.

Extreme right-wing lawyers, wrong-headed as they may be, do not possess the ability to damage persons, institutions, and the law itself in the way a judge can. The American people have repudiated what Wallace stands for and we are all better off that he remains a very successful practicing lawyer.

According to TPM Muckraker, our own Thad Cochran benefitted from the largesse of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and in turn helped Mr. Abramoff's client, the Mississippi Choctaws, by quietly inserting language in legislation that exempted the Choctaws from supervision by the National Indian Gaming Commission and by supporting on the floor of the Senate a federal grant of $16.3 million to the Choctaws to build a jail which the Justice Department said that the Choctaws could afford to build themselves.

Which is to say that while Senator Cochran may not have done anything illegal, it seems awful sleazy.

Email: Abramoff Associate Urged Funds for GOP Sen. Who "Never Said No"

Cryptography expert Bruce Shneier makes a compelling case for abandoning electronic voting and using only paper ballots, whether filed out by the voter or printed by a touchscreen laptop. His argument: it's just too easy to fix the vote without a paper trail.

Electronic voting is like an iceberg; the real threats are below the waterline where you can't see them. Paper