Tom Reed, Fix Thyself

September 25th, 2012 | Posted by jclifford in Election 2012 | Politics | Republicans - (0 Comments)

An award for the Most Obtuse Campaign Advertisement goes out to Tom Reed, who is running for Congress in Western New York. The advertisement reads”

campaign advertisement 2012“Working to Fix Washington. Washington is Broken. Hardworking Taxpayers Deserve Honest Accountable Solutions. Join Our Team as We Work Together to Take Back Washington.”

There’s just one thing that Tom Reed’s advertisement doesn’t say: Tom Reed is not separate from Washington. He’s a part of it.

Tom Reed is a sitting member of Congress. In fact, he’s a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, which is controlled by his own political party. Tom Reed is working to support the very same politics that are at the center of the Washington D.C. establishment, and have been for generations.

Tom Reed isn’t working to fix anything in Washington. He’s working to protect the old system from political reform.

Tom Reed is against fixing the system of special tax favors given to millionaires and billionaires that’s thwarting economic growth.
Tom Reed is against fixing the corrupt system of campaign finance that props up Washington elites.
Tom Reed is against fixing wasteful Pentagon spending.
Tom Reed is against fixing the industrial establishment that’s blocked action to confront climate change.
Tom Reed is against fixing the system of expensive and excessive Homeland Security bureaucracy that’s turned the United States of America into a big government surveillance state.
Tom Reed is against fixing America’s energy infrastructure, working to protect the big oil and coal interests instead.

Tom Reed is defending the status quo in Washington D.C. He’s had his chance to help fix things, but at every opportunity, Reed has thwarted genuine efforts at reform.

If voters really want to fix Washington, the best thing they can do is to vote to kick establishment politicians like Tom Reed out of office.

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The Paul Ryan Plan To Reform Medicare

August 14th, 2012 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Election 2012 | Legislation | Politics | Republicans - (0 Comments)

I’ve been seeing a lot of headlines over the last couple of days about the plan by Republican congressman and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to “reform Medicare”. Every time I see that phrase, I wince. It’s language straight from Paul Ryan’s own political playbook.

Paul Ryan’s legislation was not Medicare reform. It was Medicare destruction. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan was to completely destroy Medicare and replace it with something completely different. His plan was to take the medical insurance currently offered to senior citizens as Medicare, and kill it, then put in its place a system of vouchers with which senior citizens could not possibly hope to pay their medical bills.

Using the word “reform” to refer to Paul Ryan’s attempted murder of Medicare is absurd. We might as well say that John F. Kennedy was not assassinated, but was merely reformed into Lyndon B. Johnson.

Don’t let the mainstream media spin Paul Ryan’s plan to destroy Medicare. Use the following political postcard design to tell the truth about the Paul Ryan plan to reform Medicare

cuts with a battle axe

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ACLU Joins Push to Stop FISA Surveillance Renewal on the Sly

July 30th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Barack Obama | Homeland Insecurity | Liberty | Mail | Politics - (4 Comments)

This week is the last week of the summer in which Congress plans to meet and pass bills. It’s a dangerous week for America because members of Congress know that Americans aren’t paying attention. This is the week when our leaders on Capitol Hill will try to pass laws that would embarrass them if we were looking. Such bills will be withdrawn from consideration if and only if people pay attention and raise their voices.

One of the measures that Congress is keen to slip through in August is a five-year reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act, a law which is ostensibly designed to stop terrorists in their tracks but which critics have long noted contains loopholes to allow massive electronic spying on law-abiding Americans and even physical searches of their property — all without the probable-cause warrants required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Although Barack Obama promised as a 2008 presidential candidate that he would reform the FISA Amendments Act to strengthen civil liberties protection, this year the Obama administration has been pushing for a five-year renewal of the Act — without a single reform.

Within the past two weeks, Senator Ron Wyden has gotten President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence to acknowledge that FISA spying has violated the constitutional rights of Americans, and subsequent to that admission has rallied a small but growing coalition of senators to stand in the way of FISA renewal until reforms are incorporated and the Obama administration offers more complete information about the violations of our rights under the law.

In another sign that the tide may be turning against renewal of the FISA Amendments Act, the American Civil Liberties Union has sent out a letter, mobilizing its membership to stop FISA reauthorization. The letter reads:

There is a bill before Congress right now that would rubberstamp the National Security Agency’s authority to spy on Americans’ international communications without a warrant and with limited oversight. A House vote could come at any time with an even more critical Senate vote to follow.

The 2008 FISA Amendments Act (FAA) ratified and expanded President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program and gave the NSA almost unchecked power to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and emails.

Now, the Act is up for reauthorization — and there’s a big push to force it through with no public hearings; no public oversight; no thorough debate about how this law has been used and how it has affected Americans.

Act now. Urge your representative to demand answers and fix FISA.

What little information has emerged about the FAA suggests that the program has gone off the rails, being used to collect all sorts of information that was supposed to be off-limits. Just last week, the Director of National Intelligence publicly acknowledged that the government has violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions on unlawful search and seizure.

It’s time for a full public vetting of the FISA Amendment Act and for meaningful amendments to better protect our privacy. Urge your representative to reject calls for Congress to rubberstamp an out-of-control FISA Amendments Act reauthorization.

I agree with the ACLU — and now is the time for you to act. Not next week, when Congress is in recess. Not tomorrow, after members of Congress have had their last consultations with their staff. The time is now. Call the U.S. Congressional Switchboard at 202-224-3121 to get in touch with your two Senators and one Representative. Tell them to vote NO against passage of H.R. 5949 in the House and S. 3276 in the Senate — the two reauthorization bills. Tell them at the very least to demand more information from the Obama administration, and a hearing on violation of Americans’ rights, and a full floor debate before any vote takes place.

Don’t let the Congress get sly during summer’s silly season. Give your members of Congress a call right now.

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Americans Elect Lawyer Inadvertently Calls for Reform of Americans Elect System

July 23rd, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Alternative Parties | Americans Elect | Election 2012 | Election 2016 | Politics - (0 Comments)

In February 2012, Republican state representative and Americans Elect chief legal counsel Dan Winslow said you know it’s time to reform the presidential election system when technical difficulties interfere with democratic process:

MT@politico: Maine GOP lost votes because emails went to spam folder.

Dan Winslow’s right that the Maine Republican Party experienced significant technical difficulties with its caucus, interfering with the vote. But the solution Winslow proposed to reform the presidential selection system — Americans Elect — suffered from just as many if not more technical errors, from granting special website features to some candidates but not others, to glitches that prevented significant proportions of interested Americans from having their voting status verified to inflated delegate counts to undisclosed forms. These technical errors, made on top of strategic and ethical errors, brought Americans Elect to a crashing halt in the month of May.

If we take the Dan Winslow of February seriously, then certainly the Dan Winslow of today can’t be an advocate for the return of an Americans Elect presidential selection system in 2016 — not without a top-down reform.

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AE Transparency Starts Petition to Reform Americans Elect’s Anti-Democratic Process

March 20th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Alternative Parties | Americans Elect | Election 2012 | Ethics | Politics - (14 Comments)

There are approximately 276 ways in which Americans Elect has degraded the standard for transparency, accuracy and democracy in presidential politics, from suppressing votes to less-than-factual representations to the media and on and on, Americans Elect is playing a lords’ game with the vote.

That’s why AE Transparency has created a petition to “Make Americans Elect A Model of the Reform It Seeks”:

Americans Elect Corporation claims to seek to provide American voters with the first exclusively online political convention to select and nominate a centrist, non-partisan, third-party ticket for the 2012 Presidential election, and to win that ticket a place on all 50 states’ ballots.

Excited by the potential for what non-partisan, internet-enabled democracy might be able to do to repair America’s increasingly dysfunctional two-party political system, over 400,000 “members” have joined Americans Elect. A smaller (but not publicly known) number have further attained “delegate” status qualifying them to vote in the online primary later this summer.

Sadly, despite its purported goal of promoting democracy, the Americans Elect’s corporate organization is, itself, surprisingly (and discouragingly) undemocratic. The corporation’s Board of Directors, which possesses enormous power to determine the conduct and outcome of the online primary, is unelected. The Board’s members appointed themselves at the founding of the corporation, and new Board members are appointed only by existing Board members, without a vote of or even consultation with Americans Elect delegates.

The Board’s unelected, self-appointed status is particularly worrisome because it is an all-powerful body: the corporation’s Bylaws reserve for the Board “extraordinary power and authority to take or compel any action,” including arbitrarily disqualifying candidates whom the Board does not favor, and even including rejecting the primary-winning ticket and crowning a ticket of the Board’s own choice, instead.

Further insuring that the primary convention will go strictly in accordance with Board members’ wishes, members of the important Rules and Candidate Certification committees are appointed by the Board (not elected by the delegates) and “serve at the pleasure of the Board.”

Such inattention to democratic principles in its own governance might be less troubling if all Board members were independent-minded paragons of life-long moral rectitude…but that may not be uniformly the case. Americans Elect’s founder, multi-million dollar donor, and self-appointed Board chairman, Peter Ackerman, is widely alledged to have been convicted felon Michael Milken’s right-hand-man at Wall Street investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert during its insider-trading and junk bond scandal. Four other members of the Board are in what appear to many to be positions of financial dependence upon Ackerman’s continuing goodwill, either as Americans Elect employees or otherwise, giving chairman Ackerman an apparent 5-4 majority control of the corporation’s Board. The enormous power of this self-appointed Board, rigidly controlled by Ackerman, has led some doubters to disparagingly refer to Americans Elect itself as “Ackerman Elects”.

According to information provided by Americans Elect corporation itself, a large fraction of the organization’s founding “Leadership” are current or former executives of Wall Street hedge fund, private equity, or wealth management firms, tending to cast further doubt on the corporation’s true intentions. Americans Elect refuses to identify its major donors, and has claimed 501(c)(4) status with the IRS, enabling it to accept unlimited donations while keeping its donors’ identities a secret.

We, this petition’s sponsors — Americans Elect delegates committed to advancing the organization’s avowed goal of promoting American democracy through the application of non-partisan internet technology — believe that all of these unresolved issues of undemocratic governance and lack of transparency are harming Americans Elect and impeding its mission. For the sake of its self-proclaimed noble goals we and other signers of this petition demand:

1. That the Americans Elect Board of Directors resign in favor of a Board to be elected by a democratic vote of the delegates.

2. That the current members of the Rules and Candidate Certification committees resign in favor of members elected by a democratic vote of the delegates.

3. That Americans Elect’s corporate Bylaws be amended (and ratified by a democratic vote of its delegates) to permit the above two changes, as well as to rescind the Board’s “extraordinary power and authority to take or compel any action.”

4. That Americans Elect promptly reveal the names of all donors of $10,000 or more, and the amounts they have lent or donated.

And, further, that all four of these actions be completed before an online primary convention is conducted.

You are NOT required to be a member or a delegate of Americans Elect to sign this petition; all are welcome!

Are you inclined to sign the petition today? I just did.

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Senator Harry Reid Contradicts Himself to Push Patriot Act Surveillance

May 26th, 2011 | Posted by Jim Cook in Democrats | Homeland Insecurity | Legislation | Politics - (2 Comments)

A tip of the pen to Spencer Ackerman of Wired for uncovering Senator Harry Reid’s bald hypocrisy on the use of fear to push reformless reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, May 25 2011, explaining why the Patriot Act must be reauthorized immediately without amendments or reform:

If the Senator from Kentucky refuses to relent, the government will be unable to fully pursue these leads. That would increase the risk of a retaliatory terrorist strike against the homeland, and hamper our ability to deal a truly fatal blow to al Qaeda.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, February 28 2006, explaining why Patriot Act reauthorization must not run roughshod over the need to offer amendments and make reforms:

I rise to explain why I will oppose cloture on the PATRIOT Act Amendments Act. In brief, I will vote against cloture to register my objection to the procedural maneuver under which Senators have been blocked from offering any amendments to this bill….

Of course even a good bill can be improved. That is why we have an amendment process in the Senate. The junior Senator from Wisconsin has tried to offer a small number of relevant amendments that I believe would make this bill even better. I am disappointed that he has been denied that opportunity by a procedural maneuver known as “filling the amendment tree.”

This is a very bad practice. It runs against the basic nature of the Senate. The hallmark of the Senate is free speech and open debate. Rule 22 establishes a process for cutting off debate and amendments, but Rule 22 should rarely be invoked before any amendments have been offered. There is no reason to truncate Senate debate on this important bill in this unusual fashion.

I will vote against cloture to register my objection to this flawed process.

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BORDC Asks: Will you call Barack Obama on the Patriot Act today?

April 5th, 2011 | Posted by Jim Cook in Activism | Barack Obama | Homeland Insecurity | Liberty | Politics - (1 Comments)

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee is asking Americans to call President Barack Obama at

During his campaign, the president repeatedly criticized the PATRIOT Act and promised to implement reforms to protect law-abiding Americans from unchecked surveillance. But now, for the second time since taking office in 2009, Obama has taken the same position on the PATRIOT Act as President Bush. Today, call the White House and tell President Obama to keep his campaign promises by vetoing any bill to reauthorize PATRIOT Act powers unless it imposes new checks and balances to prevent abuse.

White House Phone Number: (202) 456-1111 (call between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern time)

Civil liberties groups across the country are demanding that Congress and the White House restore constitutional checks and balances by extending the rule of law to our nation’s intelligence agencies.

Protect the privacy of your Internet and financial records by requiring that secret national security letters and Section 215 orders can only be used to obtain records linked to suspected spies and terrorists, not innocent Americans.

Protect the free speech of those who receive such secret demands by ensuring that they can speak freely unless the government can demonstrate to a court that national security would be seriously harmed.

Stop blank-check “John Doe” roving wiretaps by requiring foreign intelligence investigators to name their surveillance target before they can get a “roving” wiretap order that lets them spy on unspecified phone and Internet accounts—just like criminal investigators have to.

Let the “lone wolf” wiretapping provision expire. This dangerous authority unconstitutionally allows the government to bypass traditional protections to spy on people inside the U.S. who have no link to any foreign organization. This provision has never been used—nor should it ever be used.

Restore the First Amendment by fixing the “material support” standard. Charities have been shut down without due process, even when pursuing projects such as promoting non-violent conflict resolution in war-torn areas, and hundreds of grassroots donors are in prison because organizations to which they contributed conducted activities the donors never intended to support. Prosecutors should have to prove that the target of an investigation intended to support violence in order to convict someone of “material support” of terrorism.

Call the White House TODAY and tell President Obama to stand up for civil liberties by vetoing any PATRIOT Act reauthorization that doesn’t include these reforms.

It just took me five minutes. It’ll take you just 5 minutes. Will you commit to take this small action today? You’ll feel better afterward — consider it political therapy. Give it a try: call (202) 456-1111 right now.

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Why Patriot Act Reform Matters: 767 Days and Counting Without a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board

February 25th, 2011 | Posted by Jim Cook in Activism | Barack Obama | Homeland Insecurity | Liberty | Politics - (2 Comments)

In 91 days, three central search, seizure and surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire again. The period between now and then is an opportunity to drum up support for reforms to these provisions.

Why is it so important to reform the Patriot Act?

From a legal point of view, the Patriot Act is an affront, standing in violation of the supreme law of the land, our Constitution. Because the Patriot Act allows for surveillance of law-abiding Americans, because it allows searches and seizures of their property and papers without a demonstration of probable cause of a crime, without specification of person, place or things to be searched, it is a ten-year old glistening spit on the text of the Fourth Amendment, which clearly states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

If the United States Government can do anything it wants in this regard, regardless of the limitations specified in the U.S. Constitution, then the United States Government can do anything it wants, period. The rule of law is a principle that should not be chucked aside like an old cigarette butt.

Secondly, it is important to reform the Patriot Act because, despite the frequent insistence of politicians that it is a tool against the evil terrorists lurking invisibly in the shadows, in the last two years for which data is available Patriot Act powers were used for reasons not related to terrorism more than 99% of the time. Unreasonable search and seizure (“unreasonable” means without demonstrated reasons) powers of the Patriot Act are being used to target your neighbors for reasons that have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden.

Thirdly, it is important to reform the Patriot Act because the legally-required oversight of the use of Patriot Act powers is absent. President Barack Obama is required by federal law to appoint five members to sit on a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent body with full subpoena power and public reporting duties. The job of the PCLOB is to find out how the government is using its surveillance, search and seizure powers, to determine whether the use of these powers is in line with the Constitution, and to release its findings to both the Congress and the public every six months.

We are now 767 days into the presidency of Barack Obama, more than halfway through his term in office. President Obama failed entirely to nominate anyone to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board until December, when he submitted the names of Elisabeth Cook and James X. Dempsey — two people — in nomination to sit on the board.

Since then, the Senate Judiciary Committee has failed to proceed with hearings or a vote to confirm these two, leaving the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board completely unstaffed. Even if the Cook and Dempsey were confirmed tomorrow, the PCLOB would have no power to proceed with its activities, because by law in order to meet and carry out its duties three members must be present. As a review of White House communications shows, no third member of the board has been nominated.

Do you think it is a good idea to reauthorize an unconstitutional law used without oversight against your neighbors for reasons having nothing to do with terrorism? Or do you think it’s finally time to restore the rule of constitutional law and reform the Patriot Act?

If your answer to the first question is NO and your answer to the second question is YES, then your window of opportunity to act is the next 91 days.

Contact your Senators and your Representative, by all means. Write a letter to the editor of your paper, yes.

But consider doing more.

At noon on Saturday March 12, Americans will gather on the West side of the U.S. Capitol Building with one aim: to protest the Patriot Act. Millions of Americans live within easy traveling distance of Washington, DC. If you are one of those millions of people, will you sit on your hands in the face of the triple injustice of the Patriot Act? Will you slouch on your couch, watch college basketball on the TV, and eat chips while your liberty drains away?

Or will you be there?

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