10 minutes on whether Hillary can win (Lessig Blog) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq7VCQO5siU
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Monday, February 11, 2008
The Content of Their Character
Forty years ago the opportunity to transform America fell under the unexpected impact of bullets, the rifle bullet that took the life of Dr. King, the pistol round that slaughtered Robert Kennedy.
For forty years we've been recalling the dream of judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
Dr. Kings last major speech was not about his dream, but his assurance to us that he'd been to the mountain top and had seen the promised land. Assurance that, though he might not get there with us, we would make it to the promised land.
Moses didn't get to the promised land. He too, had to glimpse it from the mountain top. The children of Israel wandered forty years in the wilderness before they got there. Yet it was such a short distance. You'd think they would have made it there much sooner, but they didn't until they were ready as a people.
America has been wandering for forty years now. The people seem, not just ready but, determined to select their candidates for the content of their character.
That isn't sitting well with some. It doesn't seem fair to them. It feels like all their accomplishments are being ignored, while their character is questioned.
They don't understand what character has to do with politics. Their reaction has been countless attempts to muddy their opponent's character, while complaining that scrutiny of theirs is unfair.
They've even begun to complain that the opponent is responsible for a campaign of hate against them. At the same time, they claim their opponent is naive, unprepared to fight evil with its own weapons. They've forgotten how not to swiftboat. They don't seem to know how not to distort. When they play the race card, somehow it's their opponents fault.
Well, whining is a character trait. Dishonesty is a character trait. Cynicism is a character trait. Inability to admit mistakes is a character trait. Like it or not, americans are making their judgments, and day by day, more and more of them are judging character.
When the people look at proposed policy on opposing web sites, they see that claims of no substance just aren't true. They aren't inclined to condemn a candidate for things he never said. They look for evidence backing claims of experience, only to find that they're not allowed to see it until 2012.
They know exactly where one candidate's money came from. The other won't release that information, but, instead tries to tie their opponent to contributers in ways they can't bear any scrutiny at all. (If the Hsu fits, they should stop trying to make others wear it.)
Americans are ready to stop wandering in this wilderness. Americans are tired.
They're tired of being separated, by tribe or race, by faith or politics.
We will choose a President with character, who calls us to express our best character, as one America, united, and after forty uncertain years, finally whole.
A Video on McCains 100 Years - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War - New York Times
Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War - New York Times:
"For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.
Less than two weeks ago she was airlifted into her own, less effective version of “Mission Accomplished.” Instead of declaring faux victory in Iraq, she starred in a made-for-television rally declaring faux victory in a Florida primary that was held in defiance of party rules, involved no campaigning and awarded no delegates. As Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said, it was “the Potemkin village of victory celebrations.”
The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)
Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.
Two days after her town-hall extravaganza, Mrs. Clinton revealed the $5 million loan she had made to her own campaign to survive a month in which the Obama operation had raised $32 million to her $13.5 million. That poignant confession led to a spike in contributions that Mr. Obama also topped. Though Tuesday was largely a draw in popular votes and delegates, every other indicator, from the candidates’ real and virtual crowds to hard cash, points to a steadily widening Obama-Clinton gap. The Clinton campaign might be an imploding Potemkin village itself were it not for the fungible profits from Bill Clinton’s murky post-presidency business deals. (The Clintons, unlike Mr. Obama, have not released their income-tax returns.)
In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).
The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. This was all too apparent in the Hallmark show. In its carefully calibrated cross section of geographically and demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one gay man, one vet, two union members — African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. One black woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was given the servile role of the meeting’s nominal moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. Clinton’s top banana. Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.
The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to chance. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months after the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in Selma, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).
The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American queries.
Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.”
That time went instead to the Hispanic population that was still in play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles had a cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics, especially since Mr. Obama has been behind the curve in wooing this constituency.
But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”
It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”
If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat Mr. Obama by only 3 points.
The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at little. That’s why you now hear Clinton operatives talk ever more brazenly about trying to reverse party rulings so that they can hijack 366 ghost delegates from Florida and the other rogue primary, Michigan, where Mr. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. So much for Mrs. Clinton’s assurance on New Hampshire Public Radio last fall that it didn’t matter if she alone kept her name on the Michigan ballot because the vote “is not going to count for anything.”"
Friday, February 08, 2008
Mrs. Clinton has been an advocate for transparency in campaign finance. Just not her campaign finance
Mr. Obama, speaking to reporters, zeroed in on Mrs. Clinton’s loan and said that her decision not to disclose her income tax returns raised questions about the loan.
“I’ll just say that I’ve released my tax returns,” he said, responding to a question about tax returns. “That’s been a policy I’ve maintained consistently. I think the American people deserve to know where you get your income from.”
Mr. Obama stopped short of issuing a call for Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton to release their returns.
“I’m not going to get into the intricacies of their finances,” Mr. Obama told reporters as he flew to a rally in Nebraska. “That’s something that you’ll have to ask them.”
Obama focused Wednesday on the next primaries and his fund-raising. The $32 million in January, aides said, came from 275,000 people who gave $100 or less. Ninety percent of the money came from online donations. The disparity between his contributions and Mrs. Clinton’s, he said, demonstrate a gap in enthusiasm.
“I think there’s no doubt that she has not generated the kind of grass-roots enthusiasm that we have,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s not for lack of trying. She’s got a former president actively fund raising for her, as well as people like Terry McAuliffe. But what we’ve done is created this base where people send $25 checks, $50 checks on an ongoing basis.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/us/politics/08clinton.html?ex=1360213200&en=f8e853e037eeeb3c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink read more at NYTimes digg storyLawrence Lessig on Barack Obama
Lessig gives a 20 minute talk on why he supports Obama for president. Informative, lucid, comprehensive, and a must see.
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/20_minutes_or_so_on_why_i_am_4.htmlThursday, February 07, 2008
Obama: The Shock of the Red
Barack Obama’s red-state victories on Tuesday suggested that change is afoot in the Wild West, writes Timothy Egan.
In my lifetime, voting rights for african americans drove white men from the democratic party. Now, the opportunity to vote for one, extraordinary african american is bringing them back.
“Take a look at what happened on Tuesday in the nearly all-white counties of Idaho, a place where the Aryan Nations once placed a boot print of hate — “the international headquarters of the white race,” as they called it.
The neo-Nazis are long gone. But in Kootenai County, where the extremists were holed up for several decades, a record number of Democrats trudged through heavy snow on Super Duper Tuesday to help pick the next president. Guess what: Senator Barack Obama took 81 percent of Kootenai County caucus voters, matching his landslide across the state. He won all but a single county.
The runaway victory came after a visit by Obama last Saturday, when 14,169 people filled the Taco Bell Arena in Boise to hear him speak – the largest crowd ever to fill the space, for any event. It was the biggest political rally the state has seen in more than 50 years.
“And they told me there were no Democrats in Idaho,” Obama said.
Okay, so Idaho is the prime rib of Red America. Ditto Utah, where Obama beat Senator Hillary Clinton 56 percent to 39 percent on Tuesday, including a 2-1 win in arguably the most Republican community in America – Provo and suburbs, a holdout of Bush dead-enders. Tom Brady will date a nun before these states vote Democratic in a general election.
But those numbers, and exit polling across the nation, make a case for Obama’s electability and the inroads he has made into places where Democrats are harder to find than a decent bagel. Yes, Hillary-hatred is part of it. But something much bigger is going on among independents and white males, something that can’t all be attributed to fear of a powerful woman in a pantsuit.
Having gone through their Hope versus Experience argument, Democrats are moving on to the numbers phase, looking for advantages in the fall. If they want to parse the Geography of Hope, they can do no better than study what happened in red counties on Tuesday.
Now broaden the picture and look at the vote among white males, traditionally the hardest sell for a Democrat. While losing California, Obama won white men in the Golden State, 55 to 35, according to exit polls, and white men in New Mexico, 59-38.
Overall, Obama won some big, general election swing states: Colorado, Missouri, Minnesota, and a tie in New Mexico, where they may still be counting votes from the 2004 election. All will be crucial in deciding the next president.
His victory in Colorado, by a 2-1 margin, defied most predictions. Four times as many Democrats turned out as were expected, typical of the passion level elsewhere. In Anchorage, Alaska, for example, traffic was backed for nearly a mile from people trying to get into a middle school to become part of an Obama avalanche.
But back to Colorado. Obama won the liberal enclaves, as expected, but then he nearly ran the table in the western part of the state – ranch and mining country — and he did it with more than Brokeback Mountain Democrats. In booming, energy-rich Garfield County, for instance, Obama beat Clinton 72 percent to 27 percent.
Obama has made cynics wilt, and stirred the heart of long-dead politicos in places where Democrats haven’t had a pulse in years. Cecil Andrus, the eagle-headed eminence of Idaho, a former governor and Democratic cabinet member, nearly lost his voice introducing Obama in Boise on Saturday. He recalled a time when he was a young lumberjack who drove down the Clearwater Valley to see Jack Kennedy speak in Lewiston, a day that changed his life.
“I’m older now, some would suggest in the twilight of a mediocre political career,” Andrus said. “I, like you, can still be inspired. I can still hope.”
“We won in places nobody thought we could win,” an exultant Federico Pena, the former Denver mayor, told a victory crowd on Tuesday night. Obama’s audience a few days earlier – more than 18,000 — was so big that thousands who couldn’t get in huddled on a frozen lacrosse field to hear him. ”
President Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, made a small bit of family history on her own. She said that if Obama is the nominee, “this lifelong Republican will work to get him elected.”
http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/obama-the-shock-of-the-red/
read more digg storyTuesday, February 05, 2008
Ask Not What J.F.K. Can Do for Obama - New York Times
Ask Not What J.F.K. Can Do for Obama - New York Times:
…unlike Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama is not hesitant to take on John McCain. He has twice triggered the McCain temper, in spats over ethics reform in 2006 and Mr. McCain’s Baghdad market photo-op last year. In Thursday’s debate, Mr. Obama led an attack on Mr. McCain twice before Mrs. Clinton followed with a wan echo. When Bill Clinton promised that his wife and Mr. McCain’s friendship would ensure a “civilized” campaign, he may have been revealing more than he intended about the perils for Democrats in that matchup.
"That both Clintons are capable of fistfighting is beyond doubt, at least on their own behalf in a campaign. But Mrs. Clinton isn’t always a fistfighter when governing. There’s a reason why Robert Kennedy’s children buried the Iraq war in a single clause (and never used the word Iraq) deep in their endorsement. They know that their uncle Teddy, unlike Mrs. Clinton, raised his fists to lead the Senate fight against the Iraq misadventure at the start. They know too that less than six months after “Mission Accomplished,” Senator Kennedy called the war “a fraud” and voted against pouring more money into it. Senator Clinton raised a hand, not a fist, to vote aye.
You’d never know from Mrs. Clinton’s criticisms of subprime lenders that one of the most notorious, Countrywide, was a client as recently as October of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations giant where her chief strategist, Mark Penn, is the sitting chief executive. Other high-level operatives in her campaign belong to Dewey Square Group, an outfit that just last year provided lobbying services for Countrywide.In what she advertises as 35 years of fighting for Americans, Mrs. Clinton can point to some battles won. But many of them were political campaigns for Bill Clinton: seven even before his 1992 presidential run. The fistfighting required if she is president may also often be political. As Mrs. Clinton herself says, she has been in marathon combat against the Republican attack machine. Its antipathy will be increased exponentially by the co-president who would return to the White House with her on Day One.
It’s legitimate to wonder whether sweeping policy change can be accomplished on that polarized a battlefield. A Clinton presidency may end up a Democratic mirror image of Karl Rove’s truculent style of G.O.P. governance: a 50 percent plus 1 majority. Seven years on, that formula has accomplished little for the country beyond extending and compounding the mistake of invading Iraq. As was illustrated by the long catalog of unfinished business in President Bush’s final State of the Union address, this has not been a presidency that, as Mrs. Clinton said of L. B. J.’s, got things done.
A poetically gifted president might be able to bring about change without relying on fistfighting as his primary modus operandi.
The rap on Mr. Obama remains that he pA poetically gifted president might be able to bring about change without relying on fistfighting as his primary modus operandi.reaches the audacity of Kumbaya. He is all lofty poetry and no action, so obsessed with transcending partisanship that he can be easily rolled. Implicit in this criticism is a false choice — that voters have to choose between his pretty words on one hand and Mrs. Clinton’s combative, wonky incrementalism on the other.
There’s a third possibility, of course: A poetically gifted president might be able to bring about change without relying on fistfighting as his primary modus operandi. Mr. Obama argues that if he can bring some Republicans along, he can achieve changes larger than the microinitiatives that have been a hallmark of Clintonism. He also suggests, in his most explicit policy invocation of J. F. K., that he can enlist the young en masse in a push for change by ramping up national service programs like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.
His critics argue back that he is a naïve wuss who will give away the store. They have mocked him for offering to hold health-care negotiations so transparent (and presumably feckless) that they can be broadcast on C-Span. Obama supporters point out that Mrs. Clinton’s behind-closed-doors 1993 health-care task force was a fiasco.
A better argument might be that transparency could help smoke out the special-interest players hiding in Washington’s crevices. You’d never know from Mrs. Clinton’s criticisms of subprime lenders that one of the most notorious, Countrywide, was a client as recently as October of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations giant where her chief strategist, Mark Penn, is the sitting chief executive. Other high-level operatives in her campaign belong to Dewey Square Group, an outfit that just last year provided lobbying services for Countrywide.
The question about Mr. Obama, of course, is whether he is tough enough to stand up to those in Washington who oppose real reform, whether Republicans or special-interest advocates like, say, Mr. Penn. The jury is certainly out, though Mr. Obama has now started to toughen his critique of the Clintons without sounding whiny. By framing that debate as a choice between the future and the past, he is revisiting the J. F. K. playbook against Ike.
What we also know is that, unlike Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama is not hesitant to take on John McCain. He has twice triggered the McCain temper, in spats over ethics reform in 2006 and Mr. McCain’s Baghdad market photo-op last year. In Thursday’s debate, Mr. Obama led an attack on Mr. McCain twice before Mrs. Clinton followed with a wan echo. When Bill Clinton promised that his wife and Mr. McCain’s friendship would ensure a “civilized” campaign, he may have been revealing more than he intended about the perils for Democrats in that matchup."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/opinion/03rich.html?th&emc=th#
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Friday, February 01, 2008
Lies, Damned Lies, And Why Hillary Voted Against The Levin Amendment
"From Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Domenico Montanaro
*** Did Iraq tip the debate to Obama?
We thought last week’s contentious and (at times) mean-spirited debate nearly resembled that rumble-in-the-rain scene in “The Outsiders.” Yet last night’s Clinton vs. Obama event was quite different. Given their polite exchanges, the cordial tone, and the Hollywood setting, we’d have to say that the debate seemed -- at least to Democrats tuning in -- like one of those feel-good movies in which the protagonists, against all odds, come together and win the day: “Remember the Titans,” “Stand and Deliver,” “Shawshank Redepmtion.”
Cue the slow clap. As far as evaluating the debate, it was tough to pick a winner in the first hour. Both made very professional and nice impressions in what had to be one of the largest debate audiences to date.
Then came Iraq -- an issue that had virtually disappeared from the campaign trail and past debates -- and Clinton once again showed why the issue has been such an Achilles heel for her.
Obama just has an easier time talking about his position, while Clinton has to re-explain why she was for it and why she's not for it now. If the debate were being scored like a boxing match, the first 60 minutes would have been judged as a draw, but the last 30 minutes would have been given to Obama on points, thanks to the Iraq issue."
*** Levin Amendment returns:
Speaking of Iraq, Clinton was asked a question she doesn’t always get: Why she voted against the 2002 Levin amendment, which would have required more diplomacy before the US went to war against Iraq.
At the debate, Clinton answered as she normally does, “The way that amendment was drafted suggested that the United States would subordinate whatever our judgment might be going forward to the United Nations Security Council. I don't think that was a good precedent. Therefore, I voted against it.”
But as Al Hunt recently wrote, “It did no such thing, Levin said at the time and a spokesman reiterates now. The proposal's language explicitly required that Congress ‘not adjourn’ before it ‘promptly considers proposals related to Iraq if the United Nations fails to adopt such a resolution.’ Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who, like Senator Clinton opposed the Levin amendment, said at the time the UN charge was ‘specious’ and that this was a vote about supporting an invasion.”
Rezko became a household name after last week’s debate. Will the same be true of the Levin amendment after last night?
Sunday, January 27, 2008
3,022,030 Health Care Documents Still Held Hostage
The Billary Road to Republican Victory - New York Times: The credibility of a major Clinton campaign plank, health care, depends on it. In that same debate, Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Russert that “all of the records, as far as I know, about what we did with health care” are “already available.” As Michael Isikoff of Newsweek reported weeks later, this is a bit off; he found that 3,022,030 health care documents were still held hostage. Whatever the pace of the processing, the gatekeeper charged with approving each document’s release is the longtime Clinton loyalist Bruce Lindsey.If her candidacy is to be as completely vetted as she guarantees, the time for the other half of Billary to make that decision is here.
"Mrs. Clinton repeatedly talks of how she’s been “vetted” and that “there are no surprises” left to be mined by her opponents. On the “Today” show Friday, she joked that the Republican attacks “are just so old.” So far. Now that Mr. Clinton is ubiquitous, not only is his past back on the table but his post-presidency must be vetted as well. To get a taste of what surprises may be in store, you need merely revisit the Bill Clinton questions that Hillary Clinton has avoided to date.
Asked by Tim Russert at a September debate whether the Clinton presidential library and foundation would disclose the identities of its donors during the campaign, Mrs. Clinton said it wasn’t up to her. “What’s your recommendation?” Mr. Russert countered. Mrs. Clinton replied: “Well, I don’t talk about my private conversations with my husband, but I’m sure he’d be happy to consider that.”
Not so happy, as it turns out. The names still have not been made public.
Just before the holidays, investigative reporters at both The Washington Post and The New York Times tried to find out why, with no help from the Clintons. The Post uncovered a plethora of foreign contributors, led by Saudi Arabia. The Times found an overlap between library benefactors and Hillary Clinton campaign donors, some of whom might have an agenda with a new Clinton administration. (Much as one early library supporter, Marc Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, had an agenda with the last one.) “The vast scale of these secret fund-raising operations presents enormous opportunities for abuse,” said Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat whose legislation to force disclosure passed overwhelmingly in the House but remains stalled in the Senate.
The Post and Times reporters couldn’t unlock all the secrets. The unanswered questions could keep them and their competitors busy until Nov. 4. Mr. Clinton’s increased centrality to the campaign will also give The Wall Street Journal a greater news peg to continue its reportorial forays into the unraveling financial partnership between Mr. Clinton and the swashbuckling billionaire Ron Burkle.
At “Little Rock’s Fort Knox,” as the Clinton library has been nicknamed by frustrated researchers, it’s not merely the heavy-hitting contributors who are under wraps. Even by the glacial processing standards of the National Archives, the Clintons’ White House papers have emerged slowly, in part because Bill Clinton exercised his right to insist that all communications between him and his wife be “considered for withholding” until 2012.
When Mrs. Clinton was asked by Mr. Russert at an October debate if she would lift that restriction, she again escaped by passing the buck to her husband: “Well, that’s not my decision to make.” Well, if her candidacy is to be as completely vetted as she guarantees, the time for the other half of Billary to make that decision is here.
The credibility of a major Clinton campaign plank, health care, depends on it. In that same debate, Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Russert that “all of the records, as far as I know, about what we did with health care” are “already available.” As Michael Isikoff of Newsweek reported weeks later, this is a bit off; he found that 3,022,030 health care documents were still held hostage. Whatever the pace of the processing, the gatekeeper charged with approving each document’s release is the longtime Clinton loyalist Bruce Lindsey.
People don’t change. Bill Clinton, having always lived on the edge, is back on the precipice. When he repeatedly complains that the press has given Mr. Obama a free ride and over-investigated the Clintons, he seems to be tempting the fates, given all the reporting still to be done on his post-presidential business. When he says, as he did on Monday, that “whatever I do should be totally transparent,” it’s almost as if he’s setting himself up for a fall. There’s little more transparency at “Little Rock’s Fort Knox” than there is at Giuliani Partners."
Friday, January 25, 2008
Hacking the Vote
Hacking The Vote: One in 20 people using a DRE machine will have his or her vote counted incorrectly.
"Reliability, more than fraud, bugs voting machines
AS AMERICA’S presidential election process stumbles its way towards November, fears are surfacing of yet another Florida- or Ohio-style voting fiasco. In the New Hampshire primary on January 8th, both independent polls before the election and exit polls on the day itself predicted that Barack Obama would soundly defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Mrs Clinton’s surprising upset cast fresh doubts over the reliability of the computerised machines used to count the vote.
Four out of five votes in New Hampshire were tallied by Accuvote machines from Premier Election Solutions, part of the Diebold Corporation. The remainder were counted by hand. Accuvote machines rely on an optical scanner to read paper ballots completed by voters, who use pens or pencils to fill in little ovals next to the candidate of their choice. The machines read the blackened ovals and tally the result.
When the results were in, Mr Obama had a four-percentage-point lead on the hand-counted part of the ballot. But Mrs Clinton’s three-percentage-point margin on the much bigger machine-counted part made her the overall winner. A manual recount was subsequently abandoned for lack of money.
In 2003, an author doing research for a book stumbled across a website on which a copy of Diebold’s source code for its voting machines along with manuals and memos from technicians were posted for all to see. Word about the machines’ appalling security quickly spread through the blogosphere.The problem with direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems like Diebold’s Accuvote and others from Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Hart InterCivic is their vulnerability to sloppy installation, poor maintenance, shoddy software, infrequent updates and accidental loss of data.
A team of computer scientists—three from Johns Hopkins University and one from Rice University—subsequently published a scholarly critique of the Diebold software. They found hundreds of flaws in the source code, ranging from lack of password protection on the main database to bugs that allowed people with a certain type of smart-card to vote as many times as they liked. The software provided no way to verify that a vote had been correctly recorded, and no permanent record was kept. The company claimed that particular software was out of date, and had never actually been used in an election.
But the biggest indictment of DRE machines yet has come from Ohio. Recall that Ohio was where election officials purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls and illegally derailed a recount during the 2004 election that many believe would have given John Kerry the presidency. The 334-page follow-up report, published last month, paints a disturbing picture.
The independent researchers found numerous design and maintenance flaws. One machine from ES&S known as the M100 even accepted counterfeit ballots. Premier’s AV-TSX allowed unauthenticated users to tamper with its memory. The Hart EMS had audit logs that could be easily erased.
Yet these are the machines that 100m Americans will use to record their vote in the months ahead. The $3.9 billion of federal money allocated to state election boards in 2002 following the Florida fiasco has led to some 40,000 DRE machines being installed across the country. Far from making elections more representative and transparent, the machines seem to have made matters worse.On all machines, the root cause of the poor security was the way standard practices for key and password management, security hardware and cryptography had been blindly ignored. Auditing was virtually non-existent. Logs of events happening during an election could be easily forged or erased by those operating the system. In all cases, the software was deemed “fragile” at best.
This does not mean electronic voting should be abandoned. After all, ordinary ballot boxes can be stuffed or stolen. Indeed, the vote-counting mess in Florida during the 2000 presidential election—the cause of America’s wholesale adoption of electronic voting—was triggered by inadequacies in paper-based balloting.
Bruce Schneier, a blogger on security technology, argues that the failure of electronic voting stems from the way technology invariably increases the number of steps in any process—with each step bringing yet more scope for errors.
Mr Schneier has two suggestions. First, all DRE machines should have a paper audit trail—so the voter can verify the choice of candidate selected and confirm that the vote was, indeed, recorded. The paper audit also acts as a backup copy in case the machine fails and a recount is required. For added security, the voter wouldn’t be allowed to take a copy of the audit home. If they did, unscrupulous individuals might be encouraged to sell their vote.Optical scanners, for instance, have twice as many steps as manual counting, making them at least twice as unreliable. First, the voter reads the ballot paper and fills in the ovals, the optical reader senses the blackened ovals, the scanner passes the vote to a tabulator, the tabulator collects all votes from that machine and then transmits the score to a central totaliser. Each step can have an error of a percentage point or two, giving the system as a whole something like a 5% error. That means one in 20 people using a DRE machine will have his or her vote counted incorrectly.
The second recommendation is that the software used on DRE machines should be open to public scrutiny. Interested parties could then review the software, identify bugs and correct them. That alone would do much to increase public confidence in the process.… (read the rest at the Economist)
http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10573225
And what if the Karl Rove virus does cross the GOP/DEM barrier? (Lessig Blog)
And what if the Karl Rove virus does cross the GOP/DEM barrier? (Lessig Blog):
So Obama said the obvious (that Reagan's administration was transformational). And he also said that the GOP pushed a set of ideas in the 1980s that quickly captured many Dems (including, let's not forget, Clinton (see, e.g., welfare reform)). That too was obvious. But just as it's obvious to anyone with integrity that when Time names Putin as "Person of the Year" (or Hitler for that matter), Time is not endorsing the positions of Putin or Hitler, so too is it obvious (to anyone with integrity) that Obama was not endorsing Reaganomics. (Krugman, in my view, has that integrity. But he's just gone off the deep end here. There's no myth about the success of "voodoo economics" (as Bush the First put it) to be debunked). Indeed, as Obama pointed out in the most flashy line of the debate, he was on the streets of Chicago organizing against Reaganomics. His statement about "ideas" was simply identifying the kind of leadership he wanted his presidency to aspire to. That's precisely the leadership I want a president to aspire to too.
Yet HRC repeated the slander that Obama was endorsing or recommending those policies. I understand the political gain from creating that impression in people. But someone who does that in that way betrays a basic lack of integrity.
"Let's start with the disappointment: Debates are not Obama's forte. If he were running for Prime Minister, I'd have second thoughts. I can't understand why he isn't better prepared for the obvious exchange that was going to happen. It took way too long to get to (w/r/t the Reagan absurdity): 'I obviously don't agree with his ideas and never said I did, and indeed, I worked against them.' It took way too long to get to (w/r/t the 'present vote' issue): 'In the US Senate, voting present would be bad Senatoring. In the Illinois Senate, it is how the system works. My 180 votes out of 4000 is just the same as ....' And w/r/t health care, he never got to 'my plan IS universal because it is made available, in an affordable way, to everyone. I just don't believe in fining poor people. I believe in helping them.' Again and again, the echo of Obama's message was 'it's legitimate for us to disagree about ...' What good is that line doing -- especially given the completely illegitimate charges raised against him by HRC? Someone has go sit him down and force him to spit back 10 second responses to these questions. It isn't rocket science. It is practice and training.
But disappointment is one thing; (this word sounds too harsh, I know, but) disgust is something else. For there was a basic lack of integrity in the Clinton show last night. As a former friend of Clinton put it to me last night, 'I now understand just why people hated the Clintons so.'
For example: The absurdity about the Reagan comments (and slowly the press is coming around to the recognizing the absurdity in the comments, at least if you believe the Obama survey of the sources).
So too with the extraordinarily cheap shot of saying Obama worked for a "slum lord."
As Hillary Clinton of the Rose Law Firm (remember Whitewater?) certainly knows, even assuming (falsely) that Obama represented this "slum landlord," that one gives a client a defense does not mean one has endorsed the ethics or values of the client. And more certainly, the fact that as an associate at a law firm, one spent 4 hours working on a memo does not signal that one has endorsed the ethics or values of the client. Pt the partner of the client. As the Washington Post Factchecker reports:William Miceli, Obama's supervisor at the law firm, said the firm represented the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., a nonprofit group that redeveloped a run-down property on Chicago's South Side with Rezko. He called Clinton's assertion that Obama represented Rezko in a slum landlord business "categorically untrue.""He was a very junior lawyer at the time, who was given responsibility for basic due diligence, document review," said Miceli, adding that Obama did what he was told by the firm. According to Miceli, that was the only time Obama worked on a Rezko-related project while at the law firm.
But of course the irrelevance of this to Obama or his values is not obvious to people outside of legal practice. That means it was an effective charge politically. Clinton knew the truth. It was a plainly unethical charge for her to make. (Recall Advice and Consent: "Sir, have you no shame?")"
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/and_what_if_the_karl_rove_viru.html
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Editing Hillary’s Story - New York Times
Editing Hillary’s Story - New York Times:
The implicit promise of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy was that she had learned from Clinton I. In her, Americans would have a candidate who had been in the very center of White House decision-making. And the very fact that so much had gone wrong was added value. She is nothing if not a good learner, and — the story went — she had discovered at great price where all the landmines lay, both in the presidency and her own character.
"But now Bill is all over the place — campaign guru, surrogate candidate, one-man first response team. By next week, he’ll be designing the bumper stickers.
The Democratic elders are wringing their hands about the ex-president’s rants at Barack Obama, worrying that he’ll alienate black voters. That doesn’t seem all that likely. African-Americans have stuck with the Democrats through a lot worse than a fight over who said what about Ronald Reagan’s legacy.
And you can’t deny the Clintons’ double-teaming is throwing Barack off his game. “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,” he complained during Monday’s debate.
But in the process, they’re ruining the central selling point of her campaign, the story that explains why she’s the one a dispirited country should trust to make things better.
Bill’s role as Chief Attack Dog undermines all that. If he’s all over her campaign, he’s going to be all over her administration. Instead of the original promise of the thoroughly educated Hillary, we’re being offered the worst-case scenario — that the pair of them are going to return to Pennsylvania Avenue and recreate the old Clinton chaos.Every candidacy has one. Barack’s is about the child of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya whose very lineage makes him the vehicle for a transcendent national unity. Hillary’s isn’t how the smart girl from Illinois who overcame every obstacle fate could throw at her to become the first woman president. Instead, it’s a version of the story we love best of all, about second chances and the American capacity to turn failure into redemption.
She admits she messed up during her early first lady years. The health care plan was a disaster. Travelgate is still too embarrassing to go near. “Oh, we made so many mistakes,” she said last summer, waving away the woes of 1993 and 1994 in one fell swoop, all the while referring to the first Clinton presidency in the first person plural.
Her biggest error was taking a major policy role in her husband’s administration. During the 1992 campaign many people, including me, were offended when the public seemed to want to limit Hillary to the adoring gaze and cookie-baking role. But the public was onto something. It wasn’t Hillary’s gender that was the problem, it was her status as spouse.
It’s almost never a good idea for the boss to bring a husband/wife into management. It muddies up the lines of authority, and it lets personal relationships contaminate the professional ones. As every sentient being on the planet knows, the Clintons have an extremely complicated marriage, and sticking it smack in the middle of the chain of command caused chaos."
For someone who is supposed to be running on her record, Clinton, and her campaign are expending a phenomenol amount of effort misrepresenting, muddying and morphing Obama's record into something that it is not now and never was.
The confident, inevitable, candidate has no confidence in her own record, and, apparently not much more in her husband's. The sneak attacks didn't work. Now, there seem to be no limits on what they'll say or do.
They don't believe the voters can handle the truth.…
…They've given up highlighting Hillary's qualifications, policies and aspirations. The message now is "Watch out for that unqualified black guy." The truth is affirmative action is what she's running on. The more desperate the situation, the more she'll play the victim. Dishing it out is the "fun part." Let's see if she can take good dose of truth. It'll depend on "what the meaning of is is."
Monday, January 21, 2008
The Truth About Ethics Reform - New York Times
The Truth About Ethics Reform - New York Times:
"We’ve long grown used to candidates’ cherry-picking each other’s records to score points in a campaign. But the new Congressional ethics law, and the role Senator Barack Obama played in passing it, have been belittled in troubling ways that are worth noting.At a debate before the New Hampshire primary, Charles Gibson, the news anchor, and former Senator John Edwards poked fun at the fact that the ban on lobbyists’ buying meals does not prevent lobbyists from providing food and drinks to lawmakers at stand-up receptions. Mrs. Clinton cited that comment approvingly last week on “Meet the Press.” As they all surely know, there is a big difference between attending a crowded reception and pressing a cause at intimate sit-down meals.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton voted for the ethics measure, but has lately suggested that it was neither a landmark change nor particularly controversial. Wrong on both counts.
No ethics law is perfect, and much depends on the vigor with which the changes are enforced. But there was a big cultural shift in the legislation’s ban on gifts, meals and travel paid for by lobbyists, and provisions requiring greater disclosure of lawmakers’ pet projects and making it harder for former lawmakers to capitalize on their Capitol Hill connections.
The measure ultimately passed the Senate by a lopsided 83-to-14 vote, hardly surprising because few lawmakers want to go on record against cleaning up Congress, especially in the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The hard part was assembling and passing a strong package of rules against intense resistance within Congress and from lobbyists.Mocking the ethics law simply fuels a cynicism that can only make future ethics battles harder.
With Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, Mr. Obama played a central role in this effort. Forcing fellow members of Congress to disclose the names of lobbyists who bundle campaign donations is not the sort of thing that endears you to your colleagues."
Distortion seems to be at the heart of the Clinton strategy.
Why else would they take a hundred of the four thousand votes cast in the Illinois Senate out of context to prove what is demonstrably a lie.
I wonder if Senator Clinton cast four hundred votes in her entire Senate service. Do you think it even approaches a thousand. By her own admission, she's voted for bills she never read.
She's got mud on her face, bloody a disgrace, waving her husband all over the place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/opinion/21mon2.html?th&emc=th
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Good Jobs Are Where the Money Is - New York Times
Good Jobs Are Where the Money Is - New York Times:
“…the people running this country as the mad-dashers, a largely confused and inconsistent group lurching ineffectively from one enormous problem to another.<They’ve made a hash of a war that never should have been launched. They can’t find bin Laden. They’ve been shocked by the subprime debacle. They’re lost in a maze on health care.
Now, like children who have eaten too much sugar, they are frantically trying to figure out how to put a few dollars into the hands of working people to stimulate an enfeebled economy.”
"David Cay Johnston, took a look at income patterns in the U.S. over the past few decades in his new book, “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).”
strong>From 1980 to 2005 the national economy, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. (Because of population growth, the actual increase per capita was about 66 percent.) But the average income for the vast majority of Americans actually declined during that period. The standard of living for the average family has improved not because incomes have grown, but because women have gone into the workplace in droves.Big business and the federal government have worked hand in hand to squeeze the daylights out of working people, stripping them (in an era of downsizing and globalization) of much of their bargaining power while ferociously pursuing fiscal policies that radically favored the privileged few.
The peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans was way back in 1973 — when the average income per taxpayer (adjusted for inflation) was $33,001. That is nearly $4,000 higher than the average in 2005.
It’s incredible but true: 90 percent of the population missed out on the income gains during that long period.
Mr. Johnston does not mince words: “The pattern here is clear. The rich are getting fabulously richer, the vast majority are somewhat worse off, and the bottom half — for all practical purposes, the poor — are being savaged by our current economic policies.”
His words are echoed in a proposed stimulus plan currently offered by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. (The plan is available on its Web site, epi.org.) Stressing that any stimulus package should be “fair,” the authors of the institute’s proposal wrote:
“The distribution of wages, income and wealth in the United States has become vastly more unequal over the last 30 years. In fact, this country has a more unequal distribution of income than any other advanced country.”
But now that the privileged few are threatened (Merrill Lynch took a $9.8 billion fourth-quarter hit, and the stock market has spent the first part of the year behaving like an Olympic diving champion), it’s suddenly time to take action.Economic alarm bells have been ringing in the U.S. for some time. There was no sense of urgency as long as those in the lower ranks were sinking in the mortgage muck and the middle class was raiding the piggy bank otherwise known as home equity.
There is no question that some kind of stimulus package geared to the needs of ordinary Americans is in order. But that won’t begin to solve the fundamental problem.
Good jobs at good wages — lots of them, growing like spring flowers in an endlessly fertile field — is the absolutely essential basis for a thriving American economy and a broad-based rise in standards of living.
Forget all the CNBC chatter about Fed policy and bargain stocks. For ordinary Americans, jobs are the be-all and end-all. And an America awash in new jobs will require a political environment that respects and rewards work and aggressively pursues creative policies designed to radically expand employment."
Within the Democratic party there are the so-called centrists, represented by the Clintons and Lieberman. They believe in market forces. There are populists, like Edwards who believes in close combat with few holds barred is the solution, but still supported NAFTA. Finally, there' span ingenuity.<>
My shorthand for them: Slicers, Throwers, and Bakers.
Only the bakers can make a bigger pie.
Slicers can't alter the recipe as needed because of available resources or changing circumstance.
There's a certain satisfaction in throwing the pie. It messes up the suits, for sure, but crumbs tend to be all that's left over. Dirty crumbs at that.
When slicers hearts are in the right place, they still aren't making anything. They're just marketing their slicing technique.They can make sure everybody gets a slice. Sure.
Only the bakers can make sure everyone gets enough.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/opinion/19herbert.html?ref=opinion#
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Eugene Robinson - A Hand the Clintons Aren't Showing - washingtonpost.com
Eugene Robinson - A Hand the Clintons Aren't Showing - washingtonpost.com
Is it possible that accusing Obama and his campaign of playing the race card might create doubt in the minds of the moderate, independent white voters who now seem so enamored of the young, black senator? Might that be the idea?
“A new Post-ABC News poll shows that black Democrats nationwide support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination by nearly 2 to 1. This striking reversal -- a month ago, Clinton held a big lead among African Americans -- is perhaps why race has suddenly become such a hot issue in a campaign that previously had dodged the subject.”
I'd guess it depends on how calculating (and how devious) you think the Clintons are. After all, occasionally, smart people do dumb things.
At some point though, they get it. They figure out that this isn't working and start doing somwthing else.
On "Meet the Press," Clinton didn't just seek to explain her remarks about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s role in landmark civil rights legislation (she said it took a president to bring about real action) or Bill's "fairy tale" crack about Obama's record on the Iraq war (which some African Americans took as a dismissal of Obama's candidacy as mere fantasy). Instead, she went on the attack, accusing the Obama campaign of "deliberately distorting" her words in a way that was "unfair and unwarranted."
It wasn't just her phrasing. The attitude seemed to be that if you found anything to be upset about you were the one with the problem. It might even be the case, but that's a strange attitude to take when you want someone's support.
A lot of the things associated with their quest for the nomination seem strange. They keep chastising the press for not examining Obama's record. You might think they'd do that. Instead, we get rumors that Barack is a secret muslim, or the elementary school he went to was a madrassah. We're told that he's so ambitious that he wante to be president in kindergarten.
The closest thing to a legitimate attack is a partial, out of context quote from an interview at the 2004 convention. Bill Clinton should be ashamed. A sense of shame is something neither Clinton seems to have.
Race is just one of the fights that the Clinton campaign is pressing with Obama; the other is an attempt to discredit Obama's opposition to the war. It could be that the idea is to engage Obama in so much tit-for-tat combat that his image as a new, post-partisan kind of politician is tarnished.
Is it possible? Have they given up on inclusion? Is destroying Obama more important than building a better coalition?
Bill won in 1992 by a very small margin, but, at least he ran on hope. This time they want us to abandon hope.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402082.html
Monday, January 14, 2008
Race and Gender Are Issues in Tense Day for Democrats - New York Times
Race and Gender Are Issues in Tense Day for Democrats - New York Times:
I get email from the Obama campaign daily. Sometimes as often as five times a day. I've posted my reaction to the Clintons comments so "my" view is clear. I haven't received one single email about her statement from the Obama campaign. No one has called about them. If reporters weren't asking about this, I'm not sure there would be any mention at all. So what's really going on here?"In a tense day of exchanges by the candidates and their supporters, Mrs. Clinton suggested on Sunday that Mr. Obama’s campaign, in an effort to inject race into the contest, distorted remarks she had made about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Obama tartly dismissed Mrs. Clinton’s suggestion, adding that “the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous.”"
The Clintons seem to need so desperately hurt Obama, that in the context of the interview she said something that many of us found offensive. Instead of apologising, she blamed her opponent for distorting what she said and then spreading the distortion. In fact, he's done neither. In fact, they've distorted what he said in the 2004 convention. In fact, theyve taken his statments out of context and deleted the part of the statement that proves their argument an outright lie.
Before this, like most African Americans, I had respect for the Clintons. While I'm for Obama, I didn't see a Clinton win as bad thing. That's no longer true. The uneasiness I've felt about their tactics has hardened into opposition. I now believe that they will do and say anything they think they'll get away with. While the mainstream media fails to ask hrd questions of any candidates democratic or republican. They think this is spinoff of American Idol.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/us/politics/14campaign.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
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