House Gop Votes To Keep Government Health Care For Self, Repeal Health Reform For Everyone Else.posted by ericb at 12:32 PM on January 21, 2011 [24 favorites]
Freshmen Republicans Vote To Hide Government Health Care For Self.
House Republicans Explain Why They Won’t Give Up Their Own Government-Sponsored Health Care.
"We're asking every state legislator in the country to back adopting resolutions supporting the only remedy we have left to correct the Supreme Court's awful Citizens United decision: a constitutional amendment clarifying that corporations are not people.posted by ericb at 11:07 AM on January 22, 2011
It will take a long term campaign but a constitutional amendment is the only way to permanently undo the ruling.
Citizens United has already has a huge impact on our democracy. In 2010 spending on elections topped $4 billion, by far the most ever spent on a midterm election and even matching the total spent in the 2008 presidential election.
We've amended our Constitution before in moments when we needed to make fundamental changes to how our country works. Right now is one of those moments because giving corporations the full First Amendment rights of people is threatening the integrity of our democratic process."
China has a national economic strategy designed to make it, and its people, the economic powerhouse of the future. They're intent on learning as much as they can from us... The United States doesn't have a national economic strategy. Instead, we have global corporations that happen to be headquartered here. Their goal is to maximize profits, wherever they can make the most money... the prosperity of America's big businesses has become disconnected from the prosperity of most Americans... China is eating our lunch. Why? It has a national economic strategy designed to create more and better jobs. We have global corporations designed to make money for shareholders.also btw, since defence and medicare are off limits, wait til they start gutting liberal sacred cows like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Legal Services Corporation, USAID, Amtrak, etc.
In outward appearance [Barcelona] was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist... [E]veryone wore rough working class clothes... All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for... There was no unemployment... you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars... Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machines. In the barbers' shops were anarchist notices... solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves...posted by kliuless at 11:19 AM on January 22, 2011
This Friday marks the one-year anniversary of the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision. We here at Sunlight recognize that if Congress and the Supreme Court are going to make it difficult to follow the money, then we're going to have to follow the action. Now is the time for modern-day lobbying disclosure. We need to fix the current regulations and mandate the tracking of lobbying activities in real-time, online.posted by ericb at 11:20 AM on January 22, 2011
We've seen creative new techniques in the way election money is spent -- and hidden -- by outside groups. We've seen the legislative effort to respond to the decision fail in the Senate. And we've seen lobbying continue on as it always has been, albeit with less hindrances.
As a result of the Citizens United decision, lobbyists now have a powerful new means of persuasion -- the ability to spend corporate money against a member of Congress without any accountability. We need real-time online reporting of lobbying contacts by anyone who lobbies to counter this new radical power lobbyists have to influence public policy through the very real threat of unlimited campaign ads.
Now, a lobbyist can approach a member of Congress and -- by implication or outright threat -- let the member know this said lobbyist can direct millions of dollars into a barrage of ads either supporting or opposing the reelection of that member. Making matters worse, because disclosure rules are so weak, it is possible for lobbyists to do this with no visible paper trail disclosing his or his client's involvement in placing those ads. When the public learns about these new "powers," their opinion of lobbyists is likely to plummet even further. Lobbyists already ranked last in Gallup's 2010 annual poll on professions' honesty and ethics -- below car salespeople.
To follow and neutralize this new influence, Sunlight is stepping up its push for real lobbying disclosure -- the real-time, online disclosure that works at the same pace as money in politics. Our proposal is explained here, and we urge you to go to PublicMarkup.org to comment on a draft lobbying disclosure bill we just posted. Our hope is that by airing the bill publicly and crowdsourcing its review, we can hone an even better proposal, and build support inside and outside Congress for real-time, online lobbying disclosure.
... Our award-winning Sunlight Live platform will continue to showcase money in politics and lobbying activities disclosures along with live events, adding essential context to public events. Our Influence Explorer site is getting more and more vital data, creating an expanding picture of how and where money is flowing, and from whom. And our new OpenGovernment.org site (which we just launched in collaboration with the Participatory Politics Foundation) is bringing the same kinds of data to state legislatures, which are also strongly affected by the Citizens United decision. And soon, you will be able to research state-based lobby expenditure data thanks to the hard work of the National Institute on Money and Politics.
The first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was marked Friday in classically Washington fashion — with protests, press conferences, dueling panel discussions and talk of a new effort by liberal groups to expose some of the conservative nonprofit groups that took advantage of the ruling to spend millions of dollars on political ads.posted by ericb at 11:26 AM on January 22, 2011
Supporters of the decision did a low-key victory lap, praising it in panels, press releases and a slickly produced video featuring majestic orchestral music playing over clips of news footage from the GOP’s landslide midterm election victories interspersed with endorsements from, among others, super lawyer Ted Olson, who argued the case and in the video called it “maybe the most important case in history.”
In fact, a year after the court handed down its sweeping 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the ruling’s full impact still isn’t entirely clear despite impassioned responses from liberals who decry it for empowering corporations to buy elections and conservatives who praise it as a triumph of free speech.
But the rhetoric and tactics in the continuing battle over Citizens United have shifted, particularly in the two-and-a-half months since Election Day.
Republicans, who once downplayed its potential impact or presented it as equally helpful to Democrats, increasingly acknowledge that it has been a major boon to them. And Democrats are privately conceding likely defeat in their legislative efforts to blunt the ruling, and are now concentrating on planning their own groups to both compete with — and investigate — conservative groups such as American Crossroads that sprouted during the 2010 campaign. [more...]
" -- Citizens United spending represented 15 percent of total political spending.posted by ericb at 11:33 AM on January 22, 2011
-- Citizens United spending was responsible for over $85 Million in all U.S. Senate races.
-- New anonymous spending allowed by Citizens United represented 30 percent of all spending by outside groups.
-- Anonymous donations funded over $40 Million in the 10 most costly U.S. Senate races.
-- Anonymous spending groups created by Citizens United spent 20 percent more on negative advertisements than groups required to disclose."
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posted by mrgrimm at 12:15 PM on January 21, 2011