By Jim Heim Sunday, July 11, 2010
After every election, it seems, we decry the low voter turnout and then move on to other topics. But having just experienced a set of runoff elections with a voter participation under 5 percent, maybe we should spend some time considering ways to make the system work better.
First, let’s shorten the time between elections and runoffs. The six-week period prescribed by North Carolina law delays the candidate selection process and dampens voter enthusiasm needlessly. Arkansas recently decided its senatorial nomination in three weeks, a more reasonable span. Surely we can do as well.
To take this one step further, we might introduce instant runoff voting (IRV). Invented in the United States and used by several countries as well as many U.S. cities (including nearby Cary), IRV allows a voter to select candidates for a given position in order of preference.
If no one gets the required majority, the ballots for the bottom candidate are checked to see the next preference, and those votes are added. The process is repeated until a winner is declared. In this way the “runoff” is part of the original process and a second trip to the polls is avoided.
A truly innovative approach enacted by voters in Oregon in 2000 replaced polling booths with a vote-by-mail system. As implemented, a ballot is mailed to every registered voter a few weeks before Election Day. This allows the voter to carefully consider each choice, with time to study candidate positions in detail. Then the ballot is mailed or dropped off at selected sites.
On arrival, the outer envelope is scanned by computer and the voter’s signature is compared with the one on file for authenticity, after which the ballot is removed and stored until being counted on Election Day.
In the years since the adoption of vote-by-mail, Oregon has enjoyed much higher voter turnout, significantly lower election costs and no election-related controversies.
During the most recent primary election season, Oregon enjoyed a voter participation of 41.6 percent, compared with 14.4 percent here. And there is automatically a paper trail to allow corrections should a dispute arise. Despite warnings from skeptics, there has been no evidence of voter coercion or tampering.
Many states have eased the requirements for absentee balloting during the past few years, a kind of “back-door” mail-in voting system. Sadly, North Carolina has not. A voter must still request the ballot with a handwritten note, and the voting process must be witnessed by two adults willing to sign the ballot return envelope.
Such an arcane requirement seems a vestige of a time when voting was being discouraged. It does little to enhance ballot security and should be scrapped.
The savings that vote-by-mail systems deliver are considerable. Each election cycle finds our local boards of election struggling to find and train enough polling place judges and assistants to operate the polling booths.
The costs for training and the pay for personnel add up and are largely eliminated when ballots are delivered by mail. Moreover, the voting machines have become more expensive to acquire and maintain as the complexities of the systems increase. Having a central counting facility would save scarce tax dollars.
Having discussed these issues with my Republican friends, I am struck by our differences. No matter what aspect of the balloting is being considered, their first response is that we need photo identification for each voter at the polling place.
What’s missing is any evidence of even small-scale voter fraud. Accusations of fraud are rare and prosecutions are rarer yet. There is simply no case for such an expensive and intrusive requirement. But it remains the most important issue for conservatives.
I spend most of my Election Day outside my polling place to provide information to voters who request it. I also observe the process.
There are the elderly who may not know about the drive-up space reserved for them who make their painful way into the building to exercise their right. There is the young mother with an infant and a toddler or two wrestling the carriers and strollers. And there are those who don’t come in, perhaps because they work and can’t get away to cast a ballot.
America has long been the country of progress and innovation. We have a history of looking at how things work and making them better. There is no good reason why we can’t do the same for elections. There are new ideas and technologies to make voting easier and more secure.
In time, we will most certainly be able to vote over the Internet, knowing that sufficient safeguards will ensure that our vote will be accurately counted. Until then there is room for much improvement, and we should explore better ways of making our voices heard.
Moore Progressive
Sunday, July 11, 2010
It's Not Whether to Address the National Debt, but How
By Kevin Smith - Sunday, July 11, 2010
On the Thursday before last, I watched the Senate vote on an extension of unemployment benefits for people who are struggling to find jobs in the great recession.
I watched because I have a rooting interest in this issue, because I think that extending the benefits is the right thing to do, and because I’m close to people who are much more invested in the outcome. The measure failed, as it had several times before. This time it missed by just two votes, 58-38.
What that means is that 200,000 Americans a week will be losing their benefits. Two hundred thousand sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers like me — hard-working people who lost their livelihoods in the wake of a financial crisis that was not of their making — will soon be running out of the resources to take care of their families.
Minutes after the votes were counted, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed Democrats for its failure, saying that his party wants to extend the benefits but is unwilling to spend the $39 billion that it would take to extend them until November. Instead, Republicans proposed to extend unemployment benefits for another month using stimulus money — money for saving and creating jobs.
McConnell, who was more like a butterfly while the previous president doubled the national debt, has morphed into a deficit hawk, as have all his Republican colleagues in Congress.
That’s not a bad thing. We should be concerned with our spiraling debt. We stand to be the first generation of Americans to leave our children and grandchildren a country in worse shape than the one we inherited. It would be irresponsible not to consider the deficit with every measure that comes before Congress. The question is not whether to address the deficit but how to address it.
Republicans are servicing our debt on the backs of people most at risk, working-class families and people out of work. They’ve used the deficit as cover to block unemployment benefits, a jobs bill and a second stimulus.
That’s especially troubling because we need jobs, and a lot of that stimulus money has gone to states to prevent layoffs. In the absence of a second stimulus, cash-strapped states are cutting funds for education. In the reality of a global economy, Republicans are trying to balance our budgets by making our children and our workers less competitive.
Their solution, their one trick, is to cut taxes. By their reckoning, you can never raise taxes because raising taxes kills jobs and the only way to create jobs is to cut taxes. My Republican friends are confusing cheap with patriotic. The fact is that our federal income tax rates right now are pretty low.
Through most of the 1990s, when we saw unprecedented economic expansion, the top marginal income tax rates were about four points higher than they are now. From 1947 to 1973, the top marginal tax rate ranged from 70 percent to 91 percent. Over those 25 years, the income of middle-class Americans nearly doubled while the incomes of upper-class Americans rose by 85 percent.
If cutting taxes is all there is to creating jobs and wealth, then at today’s 35 percent we shouldn’t be able to print money fast enough.
Instead, we’re mired in a recession. Recent estimates have real unemployment, those seeking jobs and those who have given up, at somewhere between 16.5 percent and 21.5 percent. As invested as the GOP is in making you believe otherwise, we can’t cut our way out of our problems. We have to grow. We have to invest in jobs, in education and continuing education that will keep us competitive in an evolving economy.
We must be ever vigilant on costs and waste, but we must be fair and forthright. We cannot spare our successors the rotten fruit of our excesses by writing off the poor and the unemployed.
On the Thursday before last, I watched the Senate vote on an extension of unemployment benefits for people who are struggling to find jobs in the great recession.
I watched because I have a rooting interest in this issue, because I think that extending the benefits is the right thing to do, and because I’m close to people who are much more invested in the outcome. The measure failed, as it had several times before. This time it missed by just two votes, 58-38.
What that means is that 200,000 Americans a week will be losing their benefits. Two hundred thousand sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers like me — hard-working people who lost their livelihoods in the wake of a financial crisis that was not of their making — will soon be running out of the resources to take care of their families.
Minutes after the votes were counted, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed Democrats for its failure, saying that his party wants to extend the benefits but is unwilling to spend the $39 billion that it would take to extend them until November. Instead, Republicans proposed to extend unemployment benefits for another month using stimulus money — money for saving and creating jobs.
McConnell, who was more like a butterfly while the previous president doubled the national debt, has morphed into a deficit hawk, as have all his Republican colleagues in Congress.
That’s not a bad thing. We should be concerned with our spiraling debt. We stand to be the first generation of Americans to leave our children and grandchildren a country in worse shape than the one we inherited. It would be irresponsible not to consider the deficit with every measure that comes before Congress. The question is not whether to address the deficit but how to address it.
Republicans are servicing our debt on the backs of people most at risk, working-class families and people out of work. They’ve used the deficit as cover to block unemployment benefits, a jobs bill and a second stimulus.
That’s especially troubling because we need jobs, and a lot of that stimulus money has gone to states to prevent layoffs. In the absence of a second stimulus, cash-strapped states are cutting funds for education. In the reality of a global economy, Republicans are trying to balance our budgets by making our children and our workers less competitive.
Their solution, their one trick, is to cut taxes. By their reckoning, you can never raise taxes because raising taxes kills jobs and the only way to create jobs is to cut taxes. My Republican friends are confusing cheap with patriotic. The fact is that our federal income tax rates right now are pretty low.
Through most of the 1990s, when we saw unprecedented economic expansion, the top marginal income tax rates were about four points higher than they are now. From 1947 to 1973, the top marginal tax rate ranged from 70 percent to 91 percent. Over those 25 years, the income of middle-class Americans nearly doubled while the incomes of upper-class Americans rose by 85 percent.
If cutting taxes is all there is to creating jobs and wealth, then at today’s 35 percent we shouldn’t be able to print money fast enough.
Instead, we’re mired in a recession. Recent estimates have real unemployment, those seeking jobs and those who have given up, at somewhere between 16.5 percent and 21.5 percent. As invested as the GOP is in making you believe otherwise, we can’t cut our way out of our problems. We have to grow. We have to invest in jobs, in education and continuing education that will keep us competitive in an evolving economy.
We must be ever vigilant on costs and waste, but we must be fair and forthright. We cannot spare our successors the rotten fruit of our excesses by writing off the poor and the unemployed.
It's OK Now to Call the President Hitler
By Dusty Rhoades - Sunday, July 11, 2010
I’m old enough to remember a time long, long ago when it was absolutely the worst thing you could do to compare the president of the United States to Adolf Hitler. And by “long, long ago,” I mean 2004.
That’s the year that the liberal website Moveon.org sponsored a contest for homemade political campaign ads. One of the contest entries featured quotes from George Dubbya Bush to the effect that God had told him to strike the country’s enemies and that he was “taking steps to protect the homeland.”
These were superimposed over stock footage of Hitler speaking to cheering, swastika-waving crowds. It was crude, it was heavy-handed, it was over the top and unfair. It also was taken down off the website, and it didn’t make the cut for the first round of the competition.
Another ad said, “What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003.” The final two frames of that proposed ad included Hitler with his hand raised and then a shot of Bush with his hand up taking the oath of office. That one got pulled, too.
But that didn’t stop Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie from calling the ads “the worst and most vile form of political hate speech” and demanding that the Democratic candidates, none of whom had anything to do with the ads, “repudiate this pollution of our political process” by denouncing them.
It looks like the Republicans are still ultra-super-sensitive, in a “Princess and the Pea” kinda way, about being in any way even vaguely associated with Hitler or the Nazis.
When Vice President Joe Biden recently sent out a fundraising message saying there was going to be a “GOP blitzkrieg” of dirty campaign tactics, Republican lawmakers went verruckt (crazy). Despite the fact that “blitzkrieg” and its shortened form “blitz” have long since passed into common usage as an expression for any fast, overwhelming attack, the GOP claimed they were being compared to the invaders of Poland.
“Invoking the Nazis’ crimes against humanity in a political debate is simply inappropriate,” a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner said. But apparently it’s only “inappropriate” or “vile” if you’re a Democrat. As you know, the only principle the GOP has left is IOKIYAR (It’s OK If You’re a Republican), and comparing their political rivals to Nazis is, it seems, A-OK with them:
— Posters and placards of President Obama dressed as Hitler abound at tea party rallies.
— National Review Editor Jonah Goldberg wrote a notorious book entitled “Liberal Fascism.”
— Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, writing about the $20 billion dollar relief fund paid by BP for the Gulf oil spill, directly compared the fund to laws passed by Germany’s Reichstag that gave Hitler “dictatorial powers.”
— On May 16 of this year, Republican elder statesman Newt Gingrich went on Fox News and asserted that “the secular socialist machine” (his buzzword for the currently elected government) “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did.”
Backed into a corner by host Chris Wallace, Gingrich said that he wasn’t really calling the administration Nazis, he was just saying they were as big a threat as the Nazis. You know, sort of like saying, “I’m not saying your sister’s a prostitute, I’m just saying she sleeps with a lot of guys for money.”
The biggest proponent of associating President Obama and ill-defined “liberals” as Nazis, however, is Glenn Beck. Pretty much any spokesman for the administration or its policies can expect at some point to be compared by Beck to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels.
He’s responded to critics of Fox News by invoking a famous poem about the Holocaust and directly comparing Fox to the Jews. (“When they’re done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, ‘first they came for the Jews, and I wasn’t Jewish.”)
And the list goes on, with not a peep from the Republican leadership.
In the responses to this column, both in e-mail and in the online comments section, I tend to get some negative feedback for using terms like “wingnut.” Maybe I should become a Republican again. Then I can call people anything, up to and including Nazis, and no one will say a mumblin’ word.
I’m old enough to remember a time long, long ago when it was absolutely the worst thing you could do to compare the president of the United States to Adolf Hitler. And by “long, long ago,” I mean 2004.
That’s the year that the liberal website Moveon.org sponsored a contest for homemade political campaign ads. One of the contest entries featured quotes from George Dubbya Bush to the effect that God had told him to strike the country’s enemies and that he was “taking steps to protect the homeland.”
These were superimposed over stock footage of Hitler speaking to cheering, swastika-waving crowds. It was crude, it was heavy-handed, it was over the top and unfair. It also was taken down off the website, and it didn’t make the cut for the first round of the competition.
Another ad said, “What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003.” The final two frames of that proposed ad included Hitler with his hand raised and then a shot of Bush with his hand up taking the oath of office. That one got pulled, too.
But that didn’t stop Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie from calling the ads “the worst and most vile form of political hate speech” and demanding that the Democratic candidates, none of whom had anything to do with the ads, “repudiate this pollution of our political process” by denouncing them.
It looks like the Republicans are still ultra-super-sensitive, in a “Princess and the Pea” kinda way, about being in any way even vaguely associated with Hitler or the Nazis.
When Vice President Joe Biden recently sent out a fundraising message saying there was going to be a “GOP blitzkrieg” of dirty campaign tactics, Republican lawmakers went verruckt (crazy). Despite the fact that “blitzkrieg” and its shortened form “blitz” have long since passed into common usage as an expression for any fast, overwhelming attack, the GOP claimed they were being compared to the invaders of Poland.
“Invoking the Nazis’ crimes against humanity in a political debate is simply inappropriate,” a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner said. But apparently it’s only “inappropriate” or “vile” if you’re a Democrat. As you know, the only principle the GOP has left is IOKIYAR (It’s OK If You’re a Republican), and comparing their political rivals to Nazis is, it seems, A-OK with them:
— Posters and placards of President Obama dressed as Hitler abound at tea party rallies.
— National Review Editor Jonah Goldberg wrote a notorious book entitled “Liberal Fascism.”
— Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, writing about the $20 billion dollar relief fund paid by BP for the Gulf oil spill, directly compared the fund to laws passed by Germany’s Reichstag that gave Hitler “dictatorial powers.”
— On May 16 of this year, Republican elder statesman Newt Gingrich went on Fox News and asserted that “the secular socialist machine” (his buzzword for the currently elected government) “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did.”
Backed into a corner by host Chris Wallace, Gingrich said that he wasn’t really calling the administration Nazis, he was just saying they were as big a threat as the Nazis. You know, sort of like saying, “I’m not saying your sister’s a prostitute, I’m just saying she sleeps with a lot of guys for money.”
The biggest proponent of associating President Obama and ill-defined “liberals” as Nazis, however, is Glenn Beck. Pretty much any spokesman for the administration or its policies can expect at some point to be compared by Beck to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels.
He’s responded to critics of Fox News by invoking a famous poem about the Holocaust and directly comparing Fox to the Jews. (“When they’re done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, ‘first they came for the Jews, and I wasn’t Jewish.”)
And the list goes on, with not a peep from the Republican leadership.
In the responses to this column, both in e-mail and in the online comments section, I tend to get some negative feedback for using terms like “wingnut.” Maybe I should become a Republican again. Then I can call people anything, up to and including Nazis, and no one will say a mumblin’ word.
Thoughts on All That ‘Christian Nation’ Talk
I would not classify Steve Bouser as a progressive. I would not classify Steve Bouser at all, which is what makes him a good editor. But as a progressive and as a person of faith, I do appreciate the sentiments expressed in this editorial. - Kevin Smith
By Steve Bouser - Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Are we a Christian nation?
I hate it whenever this question rears its head, as it increasingly has been doing lately amid the comments on thepilot.com and in other forums, because I know things are always going to get ugly and polarized and unreasonable. I hope you read the thoughtful June 27 essay on a related topic by my erudite minister friend Bill Smith.
Our republic, as far as I know, has managed to sail along pretty well for two centuries and more with a secular government that still puts “In God We Trust” on its coins and has chaplains in its Army and usually looks the other way in toleration when somebody says a prayer at a public meeting or puts up a Christmas tree on a courthouse square.
That’s the way it should be. An attitude of civil coexistence, with inconsistency and perhaps even a small measure of hypocrisy around the edges, is much to be preferred to a pitched battle that must have a winner and a loser, with no subtle grays in between all those blacks and whites.
So are we a Christian nation? Hard to say. Obviously there are more of us who sprang from some kind of traditional Christian background than anything else, unless you count nonbelievers. But as one of our Web commentators so succinctly pointed out a while back, “Even if we are a Christian nation, that doesn’t mean we have a Christian government.”
To which I can only say — you should pardon the expression — thank God.
I’m writing here as one who has gone to church all of his adult life, sings bass in an Episcopal choir, loves the Bible and once read the whole thing in a year. But I grow alarmed when I see the dangerous and mine-filled road down which some believers would lead my beloved country.
You can drag out or distort all the quotes about God from the Founding Fathers that you want to, but there are more compelling ones on the other side of the argument. The inescapable truth is that our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written by 18th century men whose attitudes sprang from the Age of Reason and who felt contempt toward all forms of superstition and myth — and especially toward the kind of established state church that they or their fathers had fled from in Europe.
They rightly envisioned a republic whose government would be neutral on matters of religion, serving a country that welcomed believers in other creeds — and nonbelievers as well.
I find it ironic in the extreme that this outcry that we are supposed to turn ourselves into a Christian nation with a Christian government has intensified when it has — in many cases as a reaction against 9/11 and all things Islamic. Having witnessed the evil that can result from things like the Taliban’s imposition of religious government on Afghanistan, how can we then react by deciding that the proper response would be to impose a religious government on America?
But Christianity is different, we may say. It’s more benign and peaceful and respectful of individual rights. I would like to think so. But tell that to those who had their tongues ripped out and otherwise suffered and died in the torture dungeons of the Inquisition or were roasted at the stake for believing, contrary to the Bible story, that the Earth revolved around the sun. Good movements have a way of going bad when they find themselves in power.
Our recent military ventures into Iraq and Afghanistan have been primarily reactive or defensive in nature. But I cringe when I imagine how even thoughtful Muslims abroad (never mind the fanatical fringe) must react when they see Americans invading Islamic lands on the one hand while portraying themselves as a Christian nation on the other. To people raised from childhood on fears of another Crusade from the West, that must bear a frosty sound.
Again, the Web commenter was right. We may be a Christian-majority nation, but we don’t have — nor should we want — a Christian government. Or a Muslim one or a Jewish one or even a nonbelieving one.
At the same time, that shouldn’t keep us all from hoping (dare I say praying?) that the attitudes and actions of the secular leaders we choose reflect courage, charity, tolerance, compassion — and all the other attributes we have come to think of as Christian virtues.
By Steve Bouser - Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Are we a Christian nation?
I hate it whenever this question rears its head, as it increasingly has been doing lately amid the comments on thepilot.com and in other forums, because I know things are always going to get ugly and polarized and unreasonable. I hope you read the thoughtful June 27 essay on a related topic by my erudite minister friend Bill Smith.
Our republic, as far as I know, has managed to sail along pretty well for two centuries and more with a secular government that still puts “In God We Trust” on its coins and has chaplains in its Army and usually looks the other way in toleration when somebody says a prayer at a public meeting or puts up a Christmas tree on a courthouse square.
That’s the way it should be. An attitude of civil coexistence, with inconsistency and perhaps even a small measure of hypocrisy around the edges, is much to be preferred to a pitched battle that must have a winner and a loser, with no subtle grays in between all those blacks and whites.
So are we a Christian nation? Hard to say. Obviously there are more of us who sprang from some kind of traditional Christian background than anything else, unless you count nonbelievers. But as one of our Web commentators so succinctly pointed out a while back, “Even if we are a Christian nation, that doesn’t mean we have a Christian government.”
To which I can only say — you should pardon the expression — thank God.
I’m writing here as one who has gone to church all of his adult life, sings bass in an Episcopal choir, loves the Bible and once read the whole thing in a year. But I grow alarmed when I see the dangerous and mine-filled road down which some believers would lead my beloved country.
You can drag out or distort all the quotes about God from the Founding Fathers that you want to, but there are more compelling ones on the other side of the argument. The inescapable truth is that our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written by 18th century men whose attitudes sprang from the Age of Reason and who felt contempt toward all forms of superstition and myth — and especially toward the kind of established state church that they or their fathers had fled from in Europe.
They rightly envisioned a republic whose government would be neutral on matters of religion, serving a country that welcomed believers in other creeds — and nonbelievers as well.
I find it ironic in the extreme that this outcry that we are supposed to turn ourselves into a Christian nation with a Christian government has intensified when it has — in many cases as a reaction against 9/11 and all things Islamic. Having witnessed the evil that can result from things like the Taliban’s imposition of religious government on Afghanistan, how can we then react by deciding that the proper response would be to impose a religious government on America?
But Christianity is different, we may say. It’s more benign and peaceful and respectful of individual rights. I would like to think so. But tell that to those who had their tongues ripped out and otherwise suffered and died in the torture dungeons of the Inquisition or were roasted at the stake for believing, contrary to the Bible story, that the Earth revolved around the sun. Good movements have a way of going bad when they find themselves in power.
Our recent military ventures into Iraq and Afghanistan have been primarily reactive or defensive in nature. But I cringe when I imagine how even thoughtful Muslims abroad (never mind the fanatical fringe) must react when they see Americans invading Islamic lands on the one hand while portraying themselves as a Christian nation on the other. To people raised from childhood on fears of another Crusade from the West, that must bear a frosty sound.
Again, the Web commenter was right. We may be a Christian-majority nation, but we don’t have — nor should we want — a Christian government. Or a Muslim one or a Jewish one or even a nonbelieving one.
At the same time, that shouldn’t keep us all from hoping (dare I say praying?) that the attitudes and actions of the secular leaders we choose reflect courage, charity, tolerance, compassion — and all the other attributes we have come to think of as Christian virtues.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Been a while
I started this blog a while back in the hope that it might serve as an oasis of liberalism in the desert of conservatism that is Moore County, North Carolina. Unfortunately as I took on a number responsibilities, I let myself loose track of it. As we get nearer to the midterm elections in November, it is more important than ever to shine a light on the price we are continuing to pay for the failure of the right. There's a better way. Progressives have to lead.
Yes we can,
Kevin
Yes we can,
Kevin
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