This morning’s Politico features another piece (“Obama and Wall St.: Still Venus and Mars“) in a continuing series that present Wall Street people whining about all those times White House higher-ups have ever-so-mildly allowed certain language to slip from their larynxes that makes the financial industry out to be some kind of villain for that time its over-leveraged, incompetent speculation led to the near-collapse of the entire economy and required taxpayers to shovel untold billions of dollars at too-big-to-fail banks so that they could survive. They are sad, you see, and the record-setting profits they have made are no comfort to them, because hey, maybe The Huffington Post will say something really mean! That is literally a thing that appeared in a newspaper, today! [Read more]
This holiday season, while the city sleeps, a mystery man is climbing L.A. rooftops and leaving gifts for urban aesthetes.
Following up his successful debut art show in New York, street artist Alec Monopoly took to the L.A. streets like a freshly stretched canvas. Besides a wave of his Monopoly Man series, Alec made effective use of his art by targeting a working oil rig in West Hollywood, as well as music monopolist Clear Channel. [Read more]
Here is an important NYTimes editorial on Arizona’s campaign finance system, which has been ludicrously — and perilously — challenged by the right; and the Roberts Court has (of course) played along, suspending the key law within that system. Will they restore it? That case is before them now (with the Brennan Center arguing for reinstatement of the law).
Even if the Court does do the right (and therefore unexpected) thing, however, Arizona still has many miles to go before it has elections fit for a democracy. Beyond all questions of campaign finance, there’s also the essential matter of the state’s notoriously shady voting system. That too must be overhauled (like all our voting systems nationwide), or else the campaign finance laws won’t make much difference even if they’re absolutely perfect. (The group doing most to right the voting system in that state is AUDITAZ, at
http://audit-az.blogspot.com/.)
But it’s still necessary to resist the right’s attempt(s) to push the campaign finance system back to those dark days when Richard Nixon could take heaps of secret cash from interested millionaires, including mobsters, former (?) fascists and the generals who ran Brazil and Greece.
Until not long ago, Arizona politics were an open sewer of corruption. But the state adopted a system of public campaign financing in 1998, and, since then, more than half of all candidates for office in Arizona have opted for this money.
Not anymore. Last June, in the middle of a political campaign, the Supreme Court — which seems at times to be on a crusade to remake the American electoral landscape — thrust itself into an ongoing lawsuit and froze the crucial element of the financing system. [Read more]
Former Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor recently appeared to come to a similar conclusion about the majority decision reached by their former colleagues in Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Committee earlier this year: it was a “mistake.”
In an interview between the two in Newsweek, Stevens, who stood on the dissenting side of Citizens United, characterized the final decision in the case as a failure that he would like to see readdressed:
O’Connor: I suppose the court has had occasion to change its view on certain issues over a period of years. Do you see any on the horizon that you think the court might well reexamine as things go on?Stevens: Well, you know, Sandra, I dissented in a lot of cases, and I’d like [the court] to reexamine them all [laughs]. I don’t expect them to, but I think they made a serious mistake in the [Citizens United] campaign-finance case, in which they overruled the portion of an opinion you and I jointly authored [on the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law]. And I think you might share my view. [Read more]
There’s the guy who became a billionaire selling dog food, a couple of sports-team owners and the developer of an international spy museum.
That’s not to mention the convicted felon, the business leader who was the main financier of Bob Ney’s defense fund before the former Heath congressman went to federal prison, or the cowboy-hat-wearing industrialist who supports a mysterious out-of-state entity now delinquent in paying a record $5.2 million election fine in Ohio.
They are among an esoteric baker’s dozen of individuals and families who have led the way in bankrolling Ohio political campaigns during the past decade. Together, those 13 deep-pocketed donors poured more than $25 million into state races since 2000.
Despite limits placed on campaign contributions in the mid-1990s, Ohioans just witnessed the most expensive gubernatorial campaign in state history. In fact, every statewide nonjudicial race this year broke spending records, some of which had stood for 20 years.
When he signed legislation capping donations to candidates, parties and political-action committees in May 1995, Gov. George V. Voinovich said, “I’m confident there’ll be a substantial reduction in the amount of money spent on campaigns.” Others readily agreed.
Instead, the price tag for statewide campaigns in the past decade leaped almost 73 percent from the total for the 1990s, most of which had no limits on political contributions, according to a Dispatch computer analysis of more than 4.3 million state campaign-finance records involving more than $1.7 billion in transactions.
[Read more]
WASHINGTON – The 2010 census report coming out Tuesday will include a boatload of good political news for Republicans and grim data for Democrats hoping to re-elect President Barack Obama and rebound from last month’s devastating elections.
The population continues to shift from Democratic-leaning Rust Belt states to Republican-leaning Sun Belt states, a trend the Census Bureau will detail in its once-a-decade report to the president. Political clout shifts, too, because the nation must reapportion the 435 to make them roughly equal in population, based on the latest census figures.
The biggest gainer will be Texas, a GOP-dominated state expected to gain up to four new House seats, for a total of 36. The chief losers — New York and Ohio, each projected by nongovernment analysts to lose two seats — were carried by Obama in 2008 and are typical of states in the Northeast and Midwest that are declining in political influence.
Democrats’ problems don’t end there.
November’s elections put Republicans in control of dozens of and governorships, just as states prepare to redraw their congressional and legislative district maps. It’s often a brutally partisan process, and Republicans’ control in those states will enable them to create new districts to their liking. [Read more]
WASHINGTON — Almost 40 years ago, a Virginia lawyer named Lewis F. Powell Jr. warned that the nation’s free enterprise system was under attack. He urged the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to assemble “a highly competent staff of lawyers” and retain outside counsel “of national standing and reputation” to appear before the Supreme Court and advance the interests of American business.
“Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court,” he wrote, “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”
Mr. Powell, who joined the Supreme Court a year later in 1972 and died in 1998, got his wish — and never more so than with the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
The chamber now files briefs in most major business cases. The side it supported in the last term won 13 of 16 cases. Six of those were decided with a majority vote of five justices, and five of those decisions favored the chamber’s side. One of the them was Citizens United, in which the chamber successfully urged the court to guarantee what it called “free corporate speech” by lifting restrictions on campaign spending.
The chamber’s success rate is but one indication of the Roberts court’s leanings on business issues. [Read more]
Following the first election since the Supreme Court has struck down limits on election-related advertising, a new poll finds that 9 in 10 voters said that in the 2010 election they encountered information they believed was misleading or false, with 56% saying this occurred frequently. Fifty-four percent said that it had been more frequent than usual, while just three percent said it was less frequent than usual, according to the poll conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, based at the University of Maryland, and Knowledge Networks.
Equally significant, the poll found strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the key issues of the campaign. Such misinformation was correlated with how people voted and their exposure to various news sources.
Voters’ misinformation included beliefs at odds with the conclusions of government agencies, generally regarded as non-partisan, consisting of professional economists and scientists. [Read more]
Crossroads GPS—the conservative group that carpet-bombed Democrats with a wave of attack ads during the 2010 midterm election—is about to launch its first offensive of the 2012 election cycle.
The organization is rolling out a $400,000 radio ad campaign this week in the districts of 12 House Democrats who won reelection by the slimmest of margins.
The ad campaign, which urges the Democrats to support a vote this week on the tax cut package, marks one of the first major advocacy efforts by an outside group since the Nov. 2 elections and provides a clear signal as to which incumbent Democrats are viewed as vulnerable by GOP strategists in 2012. [Read more]
Local New Hampshire member president refuses to use coffee cup with national logo
The backlash against the freewheeling US Chamber of Commerce has begun.
The mammoth pro-business lobby, which overwhelmingly supported Republicans in the 2010 election cycle, is drawing ire from member organizations who believe the panoply of anti-Democratic ads crossed the line.
The Chamber of Commerce spent $75 million on advertising in the election cycle. And now, some members are beginning to walk.
Forty-plus local chambers have now issued statements trying to place distance between their local emphasis and the actions of the national Chamber, Politico’s Jeanne Cummings reported Tuesday.
Perhaps most interesting are statements issued from local chambers in key primary states: Iowa and New Hampshire. [Read more]
The newly created independent political groups known as super PACs, which raised and spent millions of dollars on last month’s elections, drew much of their funding from private-equity partners and others in the financial industry, according to new financial disclosure reports.
The 72 super PACs, all formed this year, together spent $83.7 million on the election. The figures provide the best indication yet of the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions that opened the door for wealthy individuals and corporations to give unlimited contributions.
The financial disclosure reports also underscore the extent to which the flow of corporate money will be tied to political goals. Private-equity partners and hedge fund managers, for example, have a substantial stake in several issues before Congress, primarily the taxes they pay on their earnings. [Read more]
WASHINGTON — The Fox News network has solicited the services of a prominent D.C. law firm and an equally prominent campaign finance lawyer to ward off a suit alleging that it made illegal in-kind contributions to a Republican gubernatorial candidate.
The conservative-leaning network has hired Larry Noble, a well-known attorney at the firm Skadden Arps, to defend itself against a suit filed during the height of the 2010 campaign by the Democratic Governor’s Association.
In a filing with the Ohio Elections Commission in late November, Noble argued that the allegations leveled by the DGA were not just baseless but also designed to have a “chilling effect” on future press coverage.
In early August, the Democratic campaign arm accused Fox of illegally helping to raise money on behalf of incoming Ohio Governor John Kasich (R-Ohio) by running a chyron featuring his website at the same time that he was soliciting donations during an interview on Bill O’Reilly’s show.
Filed shortly after it was reported that Fox’s parent company, NewsCorp. had made a million dollar donation to the Republican Governor’s Association, the DGA’s complaint seemed politically-motivated. And in his response, Noble makes the case that there was little precedent to interpret campaign finance law with such sweeping conclusions. [Read more]
Every week, the Tea Party Nation hosts a weekly radio program, calling itself a “home for conservatives.” Two weeks ago, Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips hosted the program and discussed changes that he felt should be made to voting rights in the United States. He explained that the founders of the country originally put “certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote.” He continued, “One of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community. If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners”: [Read more]
