flynn23 wrote:
That's what you would put at the top of your list? What about reversing the Constitutional damage caused over the last 6 years? Bolstering our resolve on torture, wire tapping the populace, detaining 'illegal combatants', and reforming the Patriot Act to make some sense would be at the top of my list.

What do you expect to see here? I think things will be more reserved, and I'm very happy about that, but the President will veto anything substantial. The debate over the Surveillance bill ought to be very different. They might even let the court challenge proceed. The President cannot force them to stop it. But they won't impeach him for violating FISA. More process around National Security Letters would be nice, but they might let the court challenge complete. If the President has to come back to Congress they'll be more likely to be able to do what they want than if they pass a modification he doesn't need and doesn't want. I don't think they will reverse the recent suspension of haebus for green card holders, as much as I think they should. The President would veto that.

Basically, I think they'll now begin serving their Constitutional role as a check upon the President. But I don't think they're in a position to do much more, and worse, I don't think a Democratic President would do more. Politicians only advocate civil liberties when they aren't in power.

Follow that with a reasonable exit plan for Iraq and a strategy for North Korea and Iran. It would also be helpful if we could work out a deal with Pakistan. How about 'unilateral trade' in exchange for one dead 6'4" diabetic?

I think these are things that the administration mostly does. They will start asking hard questions about Iraq, and thats good, because the administration will have less room to ignore smart advice. Again, a check, but no more.

Next on the list would be massive educational reform to give our society the tools and training necessary to be competitive for the next 40 years. Closely followed with a rebuilt health care system that is outcomes and quality aligned, rather than pockets lined. A new resolve around alternative energy, with a 10 year mandate of reducing dependance on foreign petroleum by 50% seems like a reasonable goal. Probably not as hard as putting a man on the moon in 10 years.

All of these things would be nice, but my pessimism says that I don't think they'll get any further with heathcare than the Republican's got with social security. You're asking for real leadership on domestic issues!

To cap it off, campaign finance and voting procedure reform - call it the Democracy for the 21st Century Bill - would be in order. Open source and peer reviewed tools and processes for elections as well as stricter campaign finance laws closing the loop holes and getting the corporations and lobbyists out of the process.

We just had a round of cf reform. I'm not convinced it did well. I don't think I should be able to go on the Internet and figure out which political party my coworkers donated money to, and I'm not convinced the restrictions on speech aren't, well, restrictions on speech. I think we need to find a way to get people to stop voting on partisan lines and start objectively evaluating candidates based on voter guides. The marketing dollars are only going to replaced with substantive dialog to the degree that people stop responding to marketing and start looking for substantive dialog. Basically, I think we are as much the problem as they are. The culture of politics needs to change. But how do you do that?

RE: What should be on the Dems agenda?

The Roveian fire-up-the-base-and-screw-the-middle strategy only works mathematically if losses in the political center can be minimized. Now they can't and the GOP is likely to pay the price--and very probably not just in this election.

The post I'm linking here is very good. There is nothing America needs more right now than an end to partisan extremeism. I hope this result gets the country to mellow out.

SHOWDOWN 06: The Washington Monthly

Members of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys believe the bankruptcy law overhaul has made the process more costly and complex, without making it more effective. "In practice, the new bankruptcy law changes have proven to be a nearly total bust in terms of what the proponents of the change had forecast," said Ike Shulman, a California bankruptcy lawyer and an officer with the association.

I'd like to see a wish list from the Dems. At the top for me would be to undue the bankruptcy "reform" bill from last year which has both hurt people and cost the insurance industry money. If someone is benefiting from this bill, I can't figure out who. We tried this. It doesn't work. You should have known better. Can we please stop being stupid now?

What should be on the Dems agenda?

Today is an election day in the United States. Go Vote. When you're done, click on this link.

Go Vote

"HBO's controversial special 'Hacking Democracy' on issues with Diebold voting machines is now available in full on Google Video."

This was discussed here. I haven't seen it yet. Have you?

Slashdot | HBO's Hacking Democracy Available Online

I believe that Republicans vote Republican and Democrats vote Democrat....the campaign managers know this and they have a pretty good idea of how many of each demographic they have to work with. So, their job isn't to try and convince you who to vote for, you've already decided that. Their job is to get you into the polls so you can actually cast that vote.

Somewhere along the line, they decided that the best motivator was to get you pissed off enough at the other guy that you would make the time to get into the polls.

I think this is basically true. Most people who care about politics are too brainwashed by punditry to take an objective position on various candidates for office. Most people who don't care about politics are too overwhelmed by the sheer number of different little offices and races they are asked to vote for, and the dearth of good information about the candidates running for them, that voting a party line is just easier. Then there is social peer pressure. "You're not a pussy liberal are you boy?" or "God! You're not a Republican, are you?! Yuck!" No one likes an independent. It means you're everyone's enemy.

Republican Robocall Pretexting Campaign

Transparent, High Integrity, Open Source Elections

I like this much better than Chaum's previous proposals. Relatively speaking its actually quite simple. You could really deploy this.

This is very similar to a proposal that I made on this website back in 2003.

The cool aspect is that you go home with a receipt. You can log into a website and verify that your vote was logged correctly, and you can download the complete election results and count them yourself with your own software, so you don't have to trust someone else to count them correctly.

Furthermore, you cannot prove to anyone else that you voted for a particular candidate, which makes it impossible for anyone to influence your vote. The candidates need to perform some random auditing to verify that the votes have been applied to the correct candidates, so you have to trust that the candidates:

1. Aren't colluding to throw the election.
2. Haven't screwed up their audits.
3. Haven't been fooled by some sleight of hand on the part of the system operators.

However, I think these are acceptable risks, at least in the west. The existance of all of these things creates, I think, and effective deterrent against fraud in the counting process, particularly with electronic machines. Its also a hell of a lot cheaper and more accurate than the paper audit trail "high school gym full of old ladies" counting process that many voting advocates seem enamored with.

The other issue, which I cover in my proposal, is that the count of registered voters needs to sync with the count of votes cast, and the people voting need to be alive, etc... To be honest, I think thats likely a much larger source of fraud than then actual counting process...

On slashdot people are calling this snake oil. That community is really getting worthless as a litmus of what real technical people think. Unfortunately, I worry that if they don't get it, the general population won't get it either... I think this could actually get a better recpetion in practice than it has had on Slashdot, but you'd really need communities like that to get behind doing the auditing... Its a shame they couldn't be bothered to read the things they are commenting on.

Punchscan.org

The many disappointments and crimes and blunders do not relieve us of a responsibility that is either insufficiently stressed or else passed over entirely: What is to become, in the event of a withdrawal, of the many Arab and Kurdish Iraqis who do want to live in a secular and democratic and federal country? We have acquired this responsibility not since 2003, or in the sideshow debate over prewar propaganda, but over decades of intervention in Iraq's affairs,

Unlike Hitchens I question the wisdom of starting this conflaguration in the first place. Furthermore, I'm probably more unhappy than he is about the Administration's pattern of firing people who told them the truth and retaining people who told them what they wanted to hear. But regardless, its worth pointing out that the war did, in fact, happen, and withdrawing from Iraq will not undo that. In fact, one of my most serious criticisms of this whole adventure is the reality that in removing Hussein we may have unleashed forces that will make the region a thousand times more dangerous and oppressive. What that means is now we have a responsibility and a clear need to be there. I do worry that in burning the Republicans for incompetence we'll replace then with Democrats who want us to withdraw. Leaving Iraq to it's own devices after casting it into chaos is the worst thing we can possibly do. If that point has been insufficiently stressed then let it be heard.

The indecent haste to exit Iraq. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

HA! Thanks Flynn...

Hockey Fights at hockeyfights.com

John Yoo is a law professor who served in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice from 2001 to 2003. In that capacity, he participated -- often quite centrally -- in the key post-9/11 legal decisions that framed the Bush administration's war on terror, including the Patriot Act, the National Security Agency surveillance program and administration positions on torture, military tribunals and the treatment of alleged terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

In War by Other Means, Yoo delivers on his subtitle. This is indeed "an insider's account of the war on terror." He sets an ambitious goal for himself: "to explain the choices that the Bush administration made after 9/11," choices made "under one of the most dire challenges our nation has ever faced."

A scathing review of John Yoo, but somewhat complementary of his new book. I'd like to read his book. I would hope he would understand that Clarence Thomas's view of executive privledge is radical, and opposition to it isn't rooted in ignorance, but if the man who is responsible for about half of what pisses me off about the war on terror indeed just published a rant accussing everyone who disagrees with him of being idiots, its another brick in the wall. Of course, at some point on this blog I've probably called him the same, but a blog is not like a book.

The Amazon page is entertaining. Nearly no one has reviewed the book. Opinions are breaking on partisan lines about the policy. Clearly, Republicans see this as a work of brilliance, and Democrats see it as chilling. I have to wonder what the partisan break would look like if Yoo had been working for Clinton.

Taking Liberties - washingtonpost.com