Making good on a promise he made earlier in the week, Senator Obama has made all of his budget requests, a total of $300 million dollars public. President Bush, threatening to use just the fourth veto of his entire administration is citing the amount of pork in the current budget as his reason, apparently he really misses that line item veto he had in Texas.

I personally don’t have the same tax payer penchant to see the death of earmarks and if people would realize those evil earmarks have built plenty of the things in their states they would calm down as well. That being said, I do think the process should require MoCs to disclose their earmarks. This adds transparency to the process and requires candidates to respond to questions from voters about money they are requesting. I see no reason why this, or any act of Congress with the exception of the most sensitive national security issues should not be revealed to the public.

The NYT today has a piece that seems to be a hit job on John Edwards, who after all has some how managed to avoid being pulled into the dirty politics between Obama and Hillary as of late. So the question is then raised, is this just another opp research memo? I think so, but it brings up topics that are worth discussing and addressing.

According to the article, Edwards used his 501(c)(4) organization, The Center for Progress and Opportunity, but tax filings show that the main beneficiary of the organization was not the poor but Edwards himself. The Times continues:

The organization became a big part of a shadow political apparatus for Mr. Edwards after his defeat as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004 and before the start of his presidential bid this time around. Its officers were members of his political staff, and it helped pay for his nearly constant travel, including to early primary states.

While Mr. Edwards said the organization’s purpose was making the eradication of poverty the cause of this generation, its federal filings say it financed retreats and seminars with foreign policy experts on Iraq and national security issues. Unlike the scholarship charity, donations to it were not tax deductible, and, significantly, it did not have to disclose its donors ” as political action committees and other political fund-raising vehicles do ” and there were no limits on the size of individual donations.

[...]

But it was his use of a tax-exempt organization to finance his travel and employ people connected to his past and current campaigns that went beyond what most other prospective candidates have done before pursuing national office. And according to experts on nonprofit foundations, Mr. Edwards pushed at the boundaries of how far such organizations can venture into the political realm.

The article does however mention that the organization has done its intended purpose, and quotes a representative from the Edwards campaign defending the organization and its activities, including the work in New Orleans. But right after that passage the article jumps back in to say that he had meetings with: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany; Henry Kravis, founder of KKR; and the chief executives of General Electric, Citigroup, Coca-Cola and DaimlerChrysler.

If this quote doesn’t set off the alarms that this is a hit job I don’t know what else will for you. While the merits of the Edwards’ apparatus and operation should be up to scrutiny and debate by voters, this article appears to be designed to drag Edwards into the same muck that Clinton and Obama are in with shady donations, dirty politics, and corporate ties, three things which Edwards has thus far been able to avoid.

The Boston Globe has an interesting story today about Mayor Tom Menino and his “edict” banning voicemail in Boston city government:

Though some think of it as a mundane and necessary cornerstone of modern communication, Mayor Thomas M. Menino banned it more than 10 years ago after suffering through a lengthy recording when he called a city department. He was so irritated that he issued an edict that he still personally enforces with a special vehemence. Menino has been known to sniff out clandestine voice mail and leave indignant messages.

While his methods may be a bit odd, maybe Menino has a point: it only reinforces the image of government as an expansive, bureaucratic monolith when citizens are continually routed through a maze of robotic voicemail boxes.

For all of the talk we hear about the ways new technology may increase citizen participation in politics – making it easier to give small amounts to candidates running for office, using a MeetUp to find people within your area who are interested in the same issues you are – technology also has the ability to make your interactions with government darn frustrating.

Political Wire has this story coming in from Stuart Rothenberg:

Former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, who narrowly lost a 2002 Senate race against Republican John Sununu, has reversed her earlier decision against running next year and, after a heavy recruiting effort by many Democrats, including Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, appears to be leaning toward a re-match with Sununu.

Insiders stress that Shaheen has not made a final decision, but they agree that the betting at the Harvard Institute of Politics, where she is the director, and in savvy political circles in New Hampshire, is that she is now likely to enter the Senate race.

In Nebraska, former Senator (and former Governor) Bob Kerrey also appears to be inching toward entering the state’s Senate contest, assuming that incumbent Senator Chuck Hagel (R) decides not to seek reelection. Kerrey would not challenge Hagel if the Republican decides to seek another term, which many think is not likely.

Kerrey of course is a former rockstar in the Democratic Party, and a rival of Bill Clinton in 1992 for the nomination. He is immensely popular in the state, and if Hagel steps down he would most likely win the election. However, all polling seems to indicate that if Hagel remains the seat will be safe for Republicans.

New Hampshire is an entirely different story with Sununu being one of the last federally elected Republicans in the region. 2006 was the start of a New England realignment and with Shaheen running, the vulnerable Senator could definitely fall. In the last time the two faced off Sununu won by only 18,817 votes in a solidly Republican aligning year.

Now, I know that most of our readers have probably read the Constitution, well read, so on and so forth. So it should come to no surprise to any of us that Vice President Cheney, has within his constitutional rights, declared himself to be outside the Executive Branch. As such he is exempt from the order Bush signed to safeguard confidential material within the government in 2003.

So, one wonders, where exactly then does Cheney believe the Vice President’s office fit into the scheme of checks and balances, perhaps as President of the Senate, he’s really a legislative officer, but then he’d still have to share his records. No, clearly Cheney is advocating something beyond just the unitary executive theory that Bush’s legal supporters love to tout, no this is the I’m Dick Fucking Cheney Theory of Vice Presidential Power, and I will do whatever I want.

Thankfully, Representative Waxman and House Oversight, is, as always, on the case. The Money Quote:

As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President’s position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President’s staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President’s executive order.

In his letter to the Vice President, Chairman Waxman writes: “I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions. … [I]t would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials.”

Addendum: A longer treatment of this story can be found in the morning’s NYT. -Z

The November 2006 elections meant one thing, and meant it very clearly, the American people are tired of the same policies of the Bush administration. They demanded a change in direction to the President’s failed Iraq policy. To date, the Democratic Congress has not provided any change in policy. Considering the way Congress rolled over and acquiesced to the President’s demands after his initial veto, raises an important question: “was all that just for show.”

The answer to that question though, now appears irrelevant. Today’s Gallup Poll, brought to us by Election Central shows that American’s confidence in the Congress is at an all time low.

The current confidence rating for Congress — 14% — is the lowest in Gallup’s history for that institution. Although ratings of Congress have never been high, they were at the 40% level at the time of Watergate in the 1970s, and again in 1986.

Clearly the Watergate example is illustrative that Congress has the opportunity to gain public favor, and do so by standing up to this President, gone renegade. Now news and military reports are coming in and telling us that “Choosing Victory — The Surge” isn’t working as we were told it would.

If Democrats in Congress are going to stand up to President Bush it needs to happen with the next round of appropriations. The issues surrounding Iraq are clearly complicated, but Congressional Democrats need to force Bush to take a different direction. Americans are not going to tolerate watching their sons and daughters come home maimed or worse, dead, defending people from a civil war. The Democrats are the party of the people, the people want to see a change in the Iraq policy, and if there is no good solution, no good plan, they want their sons and daughters to come home, and not be markers in W’s game of international checkers (What, you thought he could actually play chess?).

Protectionism is a threat to the U.S. economy. Saving globalization requires that its gains are spread more widely. The best way: redistribute income, or at least so says Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J. Slaughter in the current foreign affairs.

Globalization has brought huge overall benefits, but earnings for most U.S. workers ” even those with college degrees ” have been falling recently; inequality is greater now than at any other time in the last 70 years. Whatever the cause, the result has been a surge in protectionism. To save globalization, policymakers must spread its gains more widely. The best way to do that is by redistributing income.

They claim that there is greater support for engagement with the world economy in countries that spend more on programs for dislocated workers. I am little unsure about this claim, since France, for example, has very generous social programs and they have a very negative view of globalization.

More to the point, there is another side of the opinion poles, which is that politicians both react to them, but can also affect them. Many people blame globalization for their situation in great part because government officials often say that globalization is to blame for the unpopular policies that they implement. Similarly, corporations regularly say that they have no choice but to cut wages or offshore their operations to make it in today’s global economy. Further, some democratic politicians reenforce that idea in the minds of their constituents. Globalization is the perfect scapegoat. This political reality would have been a potentially illuminated area to engage.

Having said that it is a a great article. The basic idea is that the vast majority of American are not enjoying a rise in income through globalization although it is crucial to continued growth. The public has an increasingly negative view of globalization and move to protectionism, despite their apparent understanding of the benefits. Their solution, which is worth quoting in full, is something new to consider.

Recall that $500 billion is a common estimate of the annual income gain the United States enjoys today from earlier decades of trade and investment liberalization and also of the additional annual income it would enjoy as a result global free trade in goods and services. These aggregate gains, past and prospective, are immense and therefore immensely important to secure. But the imbalance in recent income growth suggests that the number of Americans not directly sharing in these aggregate gains may now be very large.

Truly expanding the political support for open borders requires a radical change in fiscal policy. This does not, however, mean making the personal income tax more progressive, as is often suggested. U.S. taxation of personal income is already quite progressive. Instead, policymakers should remember that workers do not pay only income taxes; they also pay the FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) payroll tax for social insurance. This tax offers the best way to redistribute income.

The payroll tax contains a Social Security portion and a Medicare portion, each of which is paid half by the worker and half by the employer. The overall payroll tax is a flat tax of 15.3 percent on the first $94,200 of gross income for every worker, with an ongoing 2.9 percent flat tax for the Medicare portion beyond that. Because it is a flat-rate tax on a (largely) capped base, it is a regressive tax — that is, it tends to reinforce rather than offset pretax inequality. At $760 billion in 2005, the regressive payroll tax was nearly as big as the progressive income tax ($1.1 trillion). Because it is large and regressive, the payroll tax is an obvious candidate for meaningful income redistribution linked to globalization.

A New Deal for globalization would combine further trade and investment liberalization with eliminating the full payroll tax for all workers earning below the national median. In 2005, the median total money earnings of all workers was $32,140, and there were about 67 million workers at or below this level. Assuming a mean labor income for this group of about $25,000, these 67 million workers would receive a tax cut of about $3,800 each. Because the economic burden of this tax falls largely on workers, this tax cut would be a direct gain in after-tax real income for them. With a total price tag of about $256 billion, the proposal could be paid for by raising the cap of $94,200, raising payroll tax rates (for progressivity, rates could escalate as they do with the income tax), or some combination of the two. This is, of course, only an outline of the needed policy reform, and there would be many implementation details to address. For example, rather than a single on-off point for this tax cut, a phase-in of it (like with the earned-income tax credit) would avoid incentive-distorting jumps in effective tax rates.

This may sound like a radical proposal. But keep in mind the figure of $500 billion: the annual U.S. income gain from trade and investment liberalization to date and the additional U.S. gain a successful Doha Round could deliver. Redistribution on this scale may be required to overcome the labor-market concerns driving the protectionist drift. Determining the right scale and structure of redistribution requires a thoughtful national discussion among all stakeholders. Policymakers must also consider how exactly to link such redistribution to further liberalization. But this should not obscure the essential idea: to be politically viable, efforts for further trade and investment liberalization will need to be explicitly linked to fundamental fiscal reform aimed at distributing globalization’s aggregate gains more broadly.

A more distributive fiscal policy and fairer rules will undoubtedly make globalization more politically viable and sustainable.

The article also makes me think about developing countries. I’m a sucker (perhaps knowing so much economics) for political liberty following from economic liberty. It’s breathtaking what’s happened in the last 20 years or less. It’s as though the whole world has changed its mind. Everywhere — in India, China, Asia, Latin America, Europe, North America, and above all in the communist world — governments have retreated from “the commanding heights of the economy.” The old debates were about what the role of the market was, what was the role of the state. I think it’s now generally appreciated that it’s the market that harnesses people’s initiative best. And the real focus of progressive thinking is not how to oppose and suppress market forces but how to use market forces to achieve progressive objectives. The article raised the same old argument against globalization: does it really work for lower class workers?

Last week, the State Department released its annual Trafficking in Persons Report. This report, among other things, classifies countries according to their efforts to halt the slave trade. There are now 32 countries in the State Department’s “Tier 2 watch list,” a list of those governments that are making efforts to comply with antislavery treaties but where compliance is still weak, which includes China, India and Russia. Another 16 countries are placed on the “Tier 3″ list, a list of those governments that are making little or no effort to halt the slave trade.

The State Department claims to have taken a global lead on combating the modern slave trade and much of the press coverage will implicitly praise our name and shame policy. What few people realize is that we rarely punish countries for failing to act. The law that authorizes the TIP report, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, also requires that the US government impose economic sanctions by blocking economic and military aid to tier three countries, unless national interests are at risk.

In September, President Bush will sign a memo outlining the sanctions that each country will face due to their status in the report. If history is any lesson, Bush will sign off on as many as half the tier three countries getting an exception from some or all the sanctions. Some are oil producers, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, or key allies in Washington’s war on terror, like Uzbekistan. The President has historically exempted other countries, like Iran, Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela, from part of the sanctions.

National security provisions are important, especially during the war on terror. But the State department and the President need to do more than pressure and threaten small governments across the developing world about their compliance, many of whom are on the tier 2 list. We must hold are allies to an even higher standard, no matter our reliance on their oil or geographic position. The Bush administration should remember that governments that allow this scourge to thrive are unlikely to be reliable allies when it comes to other problems that concern the United States. The TIP report describes unspeakable crimes and human rights abuses and come September, the President should do more than pat himself on the back for publishing a report, and should take direct action against all of the countries who are doing nothing to alleviate this problem.

This morning, the world learned that al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq, Zarqawi’s murderous tenure as “Prince of Iraq” ended at the hands of a precision United States Air Force strike. For a moment, we breathe a sigh of relief that one of the most reviled terrorists our troops have had to face has been stricken from this earth.

However, his death, two hours later, does little to stem the violence.

The painful, familiar beat resumed just two hours after the announcement of Mr. Zarqawi’s death when five young women waiting outside a university were gunned down in a drive-by shooting, a witness said. Four bombs killed as many as 30 people in largely Shiite areas of Baghdad, The Associated Press reported.

Yet now comes the painful reminder, that Zarqawi is only a man. Men live and die, but ideas go on forever. The ideas that Zarqawi and his followers preached, ideas that have brought Iraq to its knees in civil war, devastated by a fierce insurgency that considers all but its followers to be enemies. These ideas live on, despite the death of Zarqawi. He now becomes immortalized and remembered as a martyr, stricken by the devil of America.

I am not saying, that we should not have killed him. I would have loved a chance to capture him, and have him executed before our armed forces in Iraq. However, his death is only the continued rallying cry for increased violence. Now, more than ever, it is important for the United States to consider how we are approaching this war.

For this post, I am going to leave arguments for or against withdraw out, despite one’s feelings on them, we can assume that at least for the time being our troops will continue to be in harms way. It is thus incumbent upon us to decide how America will act to destroy this enemy. For the right, the only way is to insist upon the inherent rightness of America, our superiority as a nation, and our ability to do no wrong. It is this attitude though, which most hampers our efforts battling against jihadism.

There is no question that the principles of democracy and freedom far outshine jihadism. It’s not a question of moral relativity, but of right and wrong. But this is why it is so important for us to behave in the true tradition of freedom and democracy. Only the most foolish think that America can never do any wrong. It is this insistence of such a foolish thought that allows more of our enemies to bring more young people to their side. In Iraq and the Middle East young, angry, impressionable men watch stories of Abu Gharib or the slaughter at Haditha, and they become enraged. Then, our government, instead of stepping forward and truly punishing those responsible in the chain of command dismiss many of the cases.

It is only by demonstrating the true measure of justice that we will be able to prevail in an ongoing war against jihadism. Failure to demonstrate our justice, while maintaining military force where necessary, Iraq not being necessary; will only result in ongoing battles with jihadism.

The death of Zarqawi provides a time for questions as to where America needs to move now in fighting off the insurgency and gaining any semblance of stability in Iraq, if such a thing is possible. Regardless, it also remains a chance to witness first hand the power of an idea created by an ordinary man who now lies dead. And should afford us the rare opportunity to examine how to win this war, a war that can only be one with justice. Inflicting justice upon those who have attacked us, those who would seek to destroy us, and executing justice upon our own who seek to undermine justice abroad.

From the Dear Leader:

But Bush added: “It’s going to take awhile. Sometimes leaders show up who do a great disservice to the traditions and people of a country.”

Christ is he ever right!

California has made the first steps toward improving the shameless quality of electronic voting machines in our country. Currently, touch screen voting provides no written record of the vote cast, allowing for mistakes, lost votes, and other well documented failures.

California in yesterday’s election introduced a printer on the side of machines displaying the vote cast, allowing voters to report any anomalies so they may re-vote. However, the printer is a journal record and does not provide users with a receipt of their vote.

I don’t understand why there is such opposition to providing receipts to voters. Cost effectiveness can’t be it, receipt paper, all paper, is very, very cheap. So why not give people official records of their vote? If I walk into a room with a machine and push a button it should print me a receipt listing what button was pushed, and what was recorded into memory. If there is a problem, it can be reported not only to election officials, but the receipts could serve as evidence if ever voter fraud occurred. Why should people be opposed to this?

It seems to me the only reason to oppose protecting votes, are to protect one’s interest in changing them.

The House is supposed to conduct a floor vote today on Net Neutrality within the passage of telecommunication regulations. Net Neutrality is an important decision facing Congress, bringing even Sergey Birn of Google out to publicly lobby lawmakers for it.

In summation, Net Neutrality is the principle that the internet is to be free and open. But the internet isn’t free, you’d say. Well, that’s not really true, bandwidth isn’t free, and so you are not paying an ISP for the internet really, but instead are paying to as you probably realize for access and bandwidth to surf the free and open internet.

Major websites such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay support maintaining net neutrality and providing for its protection in upcoming telecom legislation. Telco’s like AT&T who insist that “the internet can’t be free”, want to be able to charge website owners to be included on their network. This would mean that Telco’s could force major, minor, any site to pay money in order to be accessible by users on their network. So if you were an AT&T customer for example, AT&T may try to force sites you visit every day, like Google, Yahoo, eBay, the New York Times to pay them a premium so that AT&T users can access these sites. Alternately, the could also charge you to gain access to a higher level of more open internet service.

When AT&T says the internet shouldn’t be free, he’s only half right. I quote the famous explanation of how free software works, it’s not always free like beer, but always free like speech. The internet is to always be free like speech, maintaining that allows us to fully utilize this unique communication system we now have. However, AT&T isn’t trying to collect money for beer being given away, instead they’re trying to make additional profits off of things they don’t even own.

Imagine that you own a small business, on main street, and people want to come in and shop at your store. Of course you pay taxes for your location, you pay rent to your landlord, and you sell your goods for a price. But now imagine that the city wants to add a special tax as well. They say that if you want to let more than so many people in per day, you’ll need to pay more for a special permit to do so. What’s even worse is customers might also have to pay to get access to your store.

The idea that the internet can’t be free is so devoid of reason, it’s insulting. It’s not free, people pay for bandwidth, user fees to the government, and so on and so forth. What these telco’s want is to be able to make money for nothing.