Citizens' Daily Lobby

A Maryland-based non-profit consulting corporation has announced its intention to run for Maryland’s 8th Congressional seat.     In a press release, Murray Hill, Inc. announced its intention to run in the Republican primary.    The decision to run for office is based on the historic Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission decision of last month.

“Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.”

Says the company, “It’s our democracy.  We bought it, we paid for it, and we’re going to keep it.”

To keep things legal, the corporation’s “designated human,” Eric Hensal, will carry out the necessary but antiquated “humans only” details, like signing forms and physically filing.  In a show of enthusiasm, Hensal says, ““We want to get in on the ground floor of the democracy market before the whole store is bought by China.”

The corporation plans to run an “an aggressive, historic campaign that ‘puts people second’ or even third.”  Campaign manager William Klein plans to use “automated robo-calls, “Astroturf” lobbying and computer-generated avatars” to get out the vote.

Check them out on Facebook and YouTube.

Mark Pryor, Mike Ross, and Blanche Lincoln have each issued statements opposing the new Ouachita National Forest Travel Management Plan.    This plan is being implemented as part of a nation-wide revision of travel use, including the use of off-highway vehicles (OHVs) in our National Forests.   Ross and Pryor sent a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack asking him to suspend any implementation of the new rules until local, state, and federal officials can study the plan’s economic impact.    It may be easy in this election year  to forget that the plan  had an extended period of public criticism and comment prior to its adoption.  Beginning in 2007, several open houses were held to discuss the issue,  and “interested parties” were provided with a detailed description of the proposed plan in 2008.  Legal notice of a formal 30-day notice and comment period was placed in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in February, 2008.  Over  150 comments were received in response to the letter to interested parties.  Over 750 comments were received during the public comment period.  It seems to me that the issue has been heard.

Just what are these onerous new regulations?  The two that seem to be generating the most angst are  that 1)cross country travel (where there are no existing trails) has been specifically prohibited and 2)use of the Wolf Pen Gap trail system has been limited to weekends and holidays from May to September.   According to our elected officials, a substantial tourism economy exists in Mena and elsewhere in the region that absolutely depends on having access to the trails for OHV use year-round with no restrictions.  It should be pointed out that the new plan gives some additional use of forest land to hunters who can now retrieve big game from regions where they previously could not.

The plan was designed in order to provide some balance to ecological and environmental concerns as well as public use issues.

A 45 day period for appeal of the plan went into effect on January 4, 2010.  To find out more about the appeals process, you may contact Lisa Cline at the Ouachita National Forest, phone 501-321-5202.  To read more about the proposed plan changes, please check out the Ouachita National Forest website.

As the President prepares for the State of the Union Address, Progressives across the country are still waiting for Gobama.  Wake us when he shows up.

In better news, it looks as if Trijicon, marketers of tactlessly evangelical rifle sights to the US Marine Corps will stop putting Bible verse references on its weapons of war.  Score one for human decency.  The company has graciously agreed to provide 100 free kits to remove existing Biblical references.  Of course, there are thousands of these weapons already in action…

It’s time to check in with Arkansas candidates for 2010.

Rick Crawford wants to serve as a “check and balance” to a “liberal congress.”    All by himself.   Unlike most conservatives, he doesn’t seem to be looking for a team victory.   (and would someone please define “liberal congress” for me?  I just don’t see it. )

Mr. Crawford espouses the Tea Baggage economic plan, including the “Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights” which would limit federal spending growth to the percentage in population growth plus the rate of inflation.”   I wonder if this includes military spending?  That’s hardly a bill of rights.  That’s a mandate to privatize.  It’s also heavily supported by the industry stooge group Americans for Prosperity.  To make privatization even easier, Crawford supports immediate reduction of the corporate tax rate to 15% and ending the capital gains tax altogether.  Do you think he would mind cutting my middle class tax rate to 15%, too?

He also favors ending tax funded abortions.   This means that he would take away funding even where it is currently legal:  in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger.

He wants to “end generational theft” by “allowing” younger workers to put more of their money into stock market retirement plans.    That’s a great plan.  Run that one by those people who lost their behinds in stock market accounts just before they were due to retire.

Tim Griffin gave some money away at the Big Buck Classic.  It’s easy to see who his target group is.  Check out the cheesy photos of Tim with his kids.  It should be illegal to use a military uniform to seek office.

Joyce Elliott and Robbie Wills don’t appear to have websites for their campaigns yet, a bad prognosticator for success.  ( If I’m wrong, someone please send me the link.  Neither of them had a campaign site come up on the first page of a Google search.  Bad Karma.)  They are both going to be at a significant disadvantage given that they can’t raise money during the legislative session.

Kim Hendren doesn’t have much to say.   Given what tends to come out of his mouth, that’s probably a sound strategy.

Blanche Lincoln still supports the Murkowski Amendment.   How big does the Big Tent need to be, Democrats?

A short post today, as I am suffering from Friday Fatigue and What’s the Point-itis.

A friend of mine passed me a great link today that provides some valuable insight into the MA special election, with nice graphics.  It seems that overall voter turnout in the state was down, but Republican turn-out was up.   Maybe this makes sense in light of the fact that most people only vote if they really think their vote will make a difference.  Democrats turned out heavily for Barack Obama in 2008, largely because of the promise of change, the sense that things could be different.  After observing the first year of Obama’s presidency, with a “majority” of Democrats in Congress,  those of us who were “Hope Democrats” are almost completely demoralized.  No wonder so many stayed home.

I will get back to Blanche Lincoln soon, but I am currently busy wrapping my head around the Supreme Court Ruling on the Citizens United Case.   This is the ruling that has, as expected, affirmed the right of corporations to spend virtually unlimited funds in electioneering for/against specific political candidates.  (Corporations are people, too, and their speech is protected under the First Amendment.)  As I understand it, the ruling is extraordinary (meant here in the general, not legal sense because I am not a lawyer) because the Court ruled well outside the actual scope of Citizens claims.   The dissenting opinion, by Justice Stevens, firmly establishes this point.

The Irrationality:

“Essentially, five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

“The Court operates with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel when it strikes down one of Congress’ most significant efforts to regulate the role that corporations and unions play in electoral politics. It compounds the offense by implicitly striking down a great many state laws as well.  The problem goes still deeper, for the Court does all of this on the basis of pure speculation. Had Citizens United …argued that there are virtually no circumstances in which BCRA §203 can be applied constitutionally, the parties could have developed,through the normal process of litigation, a record about the actual effects of §203, its actual burdens and its actual benefits, on all manner of corporations and unions.

Laws such as §203 target a class of communications that is especially likely to corrupt the political process, that is at least one degree removed from the views of individual citizens, and that may not even reflect the views of those who pay for it. Such laws burden political speech, and that is always a serious matter, demanding careful scrutiny. But the majority’s incessant talk of a “ban” [on protected free speech] aims at a straw man.

It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.

It is an interesting question “who” is even speaking when a business corporation places an advertisement that endorses or attacks a particular candidate. Presumably it is not the customers or employees, who typically have no say in such matters. It cannot realistically be said to be the shareholders, who tend to be far removed from the day-to-day decisions of the firm and whose political preferences may be opaque to management.

The Probable Effects:

Going forward, corporations and unions will be free to spend as much general treasury money as they wish on ads that support or attack specific candidates, whereas national parties will not be able to spend a dime of soft money on ads of any kind. The Court’s ruling thus dramatically enhances the role of corporations and unions—and the narrow interests they represent—vis-à-vis the role of political parties—and the broad coalitions they represent—in determining who will hold public office.

Corporate “domination” of electioneering… can generate the impression that corporations dominate our democracy. When citizens turn on their televisions and radios before an election and hear only corporate electioneering, they may lose faith in their capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy. A Government captured by corporate interests, they may come to believe, will be neither responsive to their needs nor willing to give their views a fair hearing. The predictable result is cynicism and disenchantment: an increased perception that large spenders “‘call the tune’” and a reduced “‘willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance.’” McConnell, 540 U. S., at 144 (quoting Shrink Missouri, 528 U. S., at 390).

To the extent that corporations are allowed to exert undue influence in electoral races, the speech of the eventual winners of those races may also be chilled. Politicians who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances may be cowed into silence about that corporation. On a variety of levels, unregulated corporate electioneering might diminish the ability of citizens to “hold officials accountable to the people,” [from the majority opinion], and disserve the goal of a public debate that is “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,”   New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 270 (1964).

At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.

(Emphasis is mine.  References have been omitted (…) for the sake of brevity.  This is a brief compilation of quotations from throughout the dissenting opinion).

In a corporate snub to the Agape Jesus (you know, the one who urged his followers to love their neighbors as themselves),  a gunmaker holding a hefty government contract is mixing guns and religion in a uniquely ultra-Evangelical way.  Trijicon is putting Biblical references onto the high-powered rifle scopes they sell to (who else?) the US government.  The Marine Corps pays Trijicon $600 million to supply the scopes.   ABC describes the inscriptions as “secret code,” but anyone even remotely familiar with the Bible would recognize them.  For instance, one code ends with 2COR4:6 (Second Corinthians chapter 4, verse 6 :  “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of the darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”)  The company freely admits that it places the Biblical references on the weapons.  .

The inappropriateness of these references on weapons of war goes far, far beyond the separation of church and state.    Has America really descended to the level of the Crusaders, who went to war with crosses on their chests and on their swords?  Evangelical Christianity has become an ideological and theological front for those who would seek to convert non-believers by the sword.  How is this different, really, from a jihad?  The US government, in not only allowing, but actually paying for these messages, is promoting Evangelical Christianity, and opens itself up to criticism from the Arab world over its own Holy War.

I wonder if this reference shows up on any gun sights:

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. — Isaiah 2:4 & Micah 4:3

As Democrats in Arkansas face opposition from within their own party,  I am still ambivalent about the effectiveness of the protest vote.   Maybe it works in the primaries (and I’m supporting the idea of a Democratic challenge to Blanche Lincoln), but I’m not sure it’s effective as a tactic in the general election.   I have a very hard time even contemplating the bitter reality of a win by any of the Conservative contenders for the open seats in 2012, and I am not convinced that the party will get the right message.   The Massachusetts special election is a case in point.  The Conservative mass messaging consortium and rightward-leaning Democrats wasted no time in spinning the election results as reflecting a Massachusetts (and entire country) exasperated by the policies of the Left.    Momentum, and an additional vote in the Senate, is with them, but they have misrepresented the meaning of the  election.

Immediately after the election, Research 2000 conducted a poll of 500 Obama voters who either switched to vote Republican in this election (!) or sat out the vote.   Given the hypothesis that Americans are lashing back at the policies of the Obama administration, we would expect that these voters would lean to the Right on issues like Wall Street regulation or health care reform.  The poll results are exactly the opposite.  A pluarilty of these voters think that Democrats in Washington are not fighting hard enough against the Republican policies from the Bush years.  They say that they would be more likely to vote Democratic in the next election if Democrats laid down stronger rules for Wall Street companies that got government bailouts.  They think Democrats are on the side of lobbyists rather than the public, and they do not support the current health care reform legislation because it does not go far enough.  =    It would seem that these voters represent Progressives who are desperately (and I mean desparately) trying to get a message to the Democratic party.

The message is falling on deaf ears, and those people aren’t going to be better off by one whit for having cast (or not cast) their symbolic vote.   They have unwittingly given the Right a gift that goes far beyond the Senate seat.

How much worse would a similar vote be here in Arkansas, where voters overwhelmingly rejected Obama and are widely viewed as being far more conservative than their Congressional delegation?  Progressives certainly need to protest and certainly need to send a message to the Democratic party that we are disgusted by the “same as it ever was” politics of the current Congress.   What is more certain is that we must act with wisdom and conviction, and we must act now.  Primary Blanche Lincoln now, but do it sensibly, and only with a credible, viable candidate.  Vounteer for a Progressive candidate this year.  Speak up often, loudly, and eloquently.    If you donate politically, donate  to Progressive candidates, and let the Democratic Party know you will not donate money directly to their coffers until the party’s actions reflect its platform.

(additional commentary at HuffPo and cross-tabulated poll results here)

Update: 1-20-10 8:00pm:  You can reinforce the message by signing petitions urging Congress to give us the “change we can believe in” or support health care with a public option at CREDO action, MoveOn.Org, and Democracy for America.

Overheard at a local eatery this afternoon was a discussion on the merits of the MLK day holiday.  (When the people at the next table are virtually shouting, I think that the rules against eavesdropping must be applied leniently, at best).   As most of my readers know, there are still schools in Arkansas that do not recognize the holiday, and the appropriateness of this omission was under consideration.  One man suggested that it’s not a very good holiday because “the post-office is closed, the libraries are closed, and the banks are closed.”  I suppose the reasoning is that a holiday is no good if you can’t cash a check, mail a package, or get a book.  By this reckoning, Christmas must be the worst holiday of the year, because even some Wal-Marts are closed on Christmas.    Another diner suggested that the day is just not important to “us” (presumptively the good white folk of Arkansas).  In a state that officially recognizes MLK day as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert E. Lee’s Birthdays (Observed), this type of attitude should come as no surprise.  Some state agencies actually put a sign on the door stating that the agency will be closed in observance of MKL and REL’s birthdays.   Where is the outcry over recognition of Robert E. Lee?   If my knowledge of American history serves me, General REL was not an Arkansan. If our state really wants to attract businesses from more progressive regions of the country, it probably should downplay the rampant racism among its populace. Celebrating Robert E. Lee day is not helping our image.

Rep. Alan Grayson is sponsoring legislation in a pre-emptive response to an anticipated Supreme Court decision to extend corporate personhood to the political arena.  The Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act and four other bills would seek to limit direct corporate participation in American politics.  According to the Huffington Post:

Grayson introduced a handful of bills on Wednesday — the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, the Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act, the End Political Kickbacks Act, and two other measures.

The Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act would impose a 500 percent excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees and on corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns. The Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act would require public companies to report what they spend to influence public opinion on any matter other than the promotion of their goods and services. The End Political Kickbacks Act would restrict political contributions by government contractors.

The other measures would apply antitrust regulations to political committees and bar corporations from securities exchanges unless the corporation is certified in compliance with election law.

“This case is basically about an effort to get around that. Citizens United took corporate money and tried to influence an election,” said Lisa Gilbert of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “These are all pieces of good policy. I hope they draw attention to the potential frightening implications of Citizens United.”