The USA's greatest economic strength for decades has been the extent to which Americans strike off on their own with new ideas and turn them into new companies and products, or work for themselves doing things they love. This country makes it easier, in many ways, to start new companies or go into business for oneself than most.

However, we still have some antiquated financial and legal structures the discourage this kind of innovation:

• People fear that leaving their job means they won't get health care.
• Self-employed people pay higher FICA taxes and file paperwork more frequently.
• Traditionally-employed people are protected against recession by unemployment insurance, entrepeneurs are not.

These and other things push potential innovators into staying in traditional jobs for economic security. What if we changed the incentives to encourage people to take risks with their new ideas?  Sure, some would fail, but some would succeed, to all of our benefit.

With this in mind, I submitted an idea on Change.Gov. Please vote for it!

Problem: A lot of banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions are in trouble, and if a bunch of them fail the economy will suffer severely.  They're in trouble through a chain of stuff that starts with a lot more mortgages failing than were expected, and a bad housing market.  When someone can't make their mortgage payments they may be forced to sell the house, but in a bad housing market, their house may not be worth enough anymore to pay off the mortgage by selling it, so they can't do that.  Glossing over a lot of the stuff in between, and ignoring for a moment the legal changes that let this happen, that's basically where the problem begins at the moment, yes?

Now, assuming that we decide that we can't afford to let all these financial institutions fail, and assuming we decide it's worth spending several hundred billion dollars on it right now - rather than argue the merit of those two points, let's take them as a given - assuming all of that...  why would Congress even consider using that money to bail out the financial institutions directly?????

We could...  (read more below)

Here at Netroots Nation, the DNC's Parag Mehta gave an excellent presentation about the field plan for 2008, which focuses on neighbor-to-neighbor relationships.  Afterwards, he took questions, and the first question was no surprise: "What if my neighbor asks me about Obama's vote on FISA with telecom immunity?"

I didn't like Parag's advice answer on this, and I think I have a better suggestion.

What he suggested was to say, "all I can do is point you to Obama's words on this," followed with a summary of Obama's explanation of why he compromised.  I think there are two big problems with this kind of response:

Returns are coming in on election night; the race has been close and polls show either candidate could win.  Now, with 83% of precincts reporting, candidate A is leading 53% to 47% over B.  It's an insurmountable lead, and the race is called for candidate A.  That's where the Democratic primaries are: Of the 3253 pledged delegates available, about 83% have already been voted on, and Obama is leading Clinton by about 53% to 47%.  We can call the race now.

Look at it another way: There are 566 pledged delegates left from states that haven't voted yet.  To catch up with Obama, Clinton needs to win about 65% of those, which means she needs to average about 65% of the vote in the remaining states.  She doesn't win by such margins: So far, Clinton has received more than 60% of the vote in exactly one state: Arkansas.  Her second-best result was 58% in Rhode Island.  Her other home state, New York, gave her 57%.

If every state from now on goes as well for Clinton as her home state of New York did, she'll still lose.

[ Note: I didn't write this for a kos audience; most of you already know this stuff.  It's an overview you can point people to. ]

Russ Feingold's Progressive Patriots Fund is holding a poll to pick the next Progressive Patriots.  One of these candidates will get a $5,000 contribution.  Voting closes at 5pm today (central).

Mark Udall, running for Senate in Colorado, is the obvious choice:

• As a member of the House, he voted against the Iraq war and against the Patriot Act, making him a great fit for the Russ Feingold "Progressive Patriot" name.
• He and his brother are key to bringing conservation and stewardship of the environment to the Senate, and come from a long family background of conservation (read that article, it's worth it).
• He's ahead in the polls but within margin of error.  With Colorado's Democratic resurgence, his chances are good, but he can use the help!

Vote!

This AFP article  has been all over the blogs in the past few days:

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

The story has also been picked up by foreign press, and the likes of UPI, Capitol Hill Blue, and Fox news.  But AFP's presentation is glaringly wrong.  "The Lakota Sioux" have done no such thing.

In the run-up to the 2006 election, Senator Hillary Clinton said that George W Bush would be seen by history as one of America's worst presidents in history.  A year ago, in January of 2006, USA Today's publisher Al Neuharth criticized here in a piece titled Hillary has it wrong, Bush not the 'worst':

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. [...] charged that the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country."  She's wrong.

Neuharth provided his own list of the worst presidents in our history, adding that Bush would not make the list:

• Andrew Jackson, (D) 1829-37
• James Buchanan, (D) 1857-61
• Ulysses S. Grant, (R) 1869-77
• Herbert Hoover, (R) 1929-33
• Richard Nixon, (R) 1969-74

It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list in his remaining three years in office.

... but now, he is retracting that statement.

[ I wrote this post for the Massachusetts political blog Blue Mass Group. ]

Boston and Massachusetts officials, and some people here at Blue Mass Group, have tried to justify Boston's overreaction to some hanging lights last week by saying, "what if they hadn't done what they did, and a real bomb went off?"  This makes as much sense to me as trying to justify the Iraq war by asking, "what if we had not invaded Iraq, and there were another terrorist attack in the US?"

Or, they say, "people were just doing their job!"  Why, they ask, are we second-guessing the actions of the bomb squad, who were responding to a call?  Keeping with the Iraq analogy, this is the "support the troops" tack: It equates criticizing bad policy with attacking the police officers (soldiers) who carry it out.

Boston is not under a serious threat of bombs, but it does have a process of random panic that is supposed to protect us from that threat and is actually the problem, itself.  Follow my reasoning, below the fold.

We think of Massachusetts as an all paper ballot state.  For the past decade, it has been.  Small towns handcount the paper ballots, everywhere else counts them with optical scan machines.  But no longer.  This Tuesday, Massachusetts will be using Diebold TSx touchscreen voting machines in 12 cities and towns, thanks to our Democratic Secretary of State, Bill Galvin.

During the primary, I worked for Galvin's Democratic challenger, John Bonifaz and we tried to warn people that Galvin was considering Diebold touchscreen voting machines.  Unfortunately, we got very little press, and most voters didn't know about it.  Most voters still don't know about it.

Massachusetts voters: please don't vote for Galvin.  You can vote for Jill Stein (Green), who's on the ballot for Secretary.  You can write in John Bonifaz (Democrat).  You can write in someone else.  Just vote for someone for Secretary who is not Galvin!  Do you know anyone in Massachusetts?  Please pass this on!

Republicans like to talk about being "tough" on crime.  It's a trick.  We're really talking about how to reduce crime and make us safer, but when we talk Republican, we create an assumption that "toughness" is the one and only way to reduce crime.  Many Republicans don't think it's a trick; they honestly believe it.

What got me thinking about this framing trick is a recent BBC article about a surge of criminal gang violence in France over the past few years:

In 2002 Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy decided to abandon community policing based on prevention in favour of a strict law-and-order approach. [...] Many local officials and youth workers in the suburbs feel this was a dreadful mistake.

Last week, the conference report of H.R.4954, the port security bill, passed in the House by a vote of 409-2.  I noticed that Ed Markey, from the district next to mine, was one of the two Representatives voting No (the other was Jeff Flake, R-AZ), so I called Markey's office to find out why...

The Senate had expanded the bill to provide overall transportation security with a series of bi-partisan amendments, including Senator McCain's rail security amendment and Democratic amendments on trucking and public transit security.  The House passed a motion, by a 2-1 margin, asking the conference committee to incorporate these Senate amendments.  A no-brainer for the committee, right?

With Democrats shut out of the process, Republican leaders stripped the rail security, trucking security, and public transit security amendments from the bill.  Instead, they inserted an amendment banning online gambling that had never been approved by either the House or Senate, and had nothing to do with port or transport security, or any sort of security.

A furor seems to have erupted recently among verified voting activists about HR 550, a bill that seeks to improve our voting laws by requiring a paper trail and audits.  Bev Harris of Black Box Voting came out in opposition to the bill on the same day that True Majority emailed their members urging support for it.  Debate has raged on lists and web sites all week.

I support H.R.550, while agreeing with some of the criticisms.  Below, I outline what people have been writing (including Bev Harris, Rush Holt, and Nancy Tobi), and why I support the bill.  Read on... and then call your Representative!

[Note: crossposted from MyDD]

We have a system for allowing users to write their own posts, recommend other people's posts, and theoretically bubble the best ones up to a wider audience.  How exactly the system works is not documented, users don't seem to know how it works, and in my opinion, it works poorly.  I believe we're missing many of the best posts on dailykos, and that a better system would bring more of them to our attention.  Separately, whatever system we have should be documented, so we know how it works.

Below, I propose a recommendation system that I think would best achieve the goal of promoting the best posts for more of us to see, while remaining as simple to use as the current system.  And, I call for the recommend system to be documented.

On Tuesday, this quotation appeared on Indianz.com and spread quickly:

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women. "To me, it is now a question of sovereignty," she said to me last week. "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

After initial elation, I wanted to look for the source.  "She said to me" isn't much context; was it public statement or private conversation?  They linked to a Native Times piece accessible only to paid subscribers.  So I investigated further, and contacted the writer of the column...

[Note: I know other people diaried this; I have new information. Also: how to send support.]
Edit: ~16:00 (eastern): Planned Parenthood just issued a press release. Details below.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left the right wing Likud Party, which he founded in 1973, to form a new centrist political party and call new elections this March.  A lot of bloggers and the American press have been talking about Israel's political earthquake and the tectonic plates moving in Israeli politics.  I think the analogy is apt, but they're mostly missing the real tectonic shift.  There is something bigger and deeper happening here.

The real earthquake began on November 9th, when Amir Peretz beat Shimon Peres in an election for leader of the Labor Party.  Peretz promptly pulled Labor out of the governing coalition with the Likud, forcing Sharon's hand and spurring his quick departure from the Likud.  Beneath these flashy, headline-grabbing events, however, Peretz's election to head Labor may both signal and catalyze a shift in one of Israel's most fundamental political and social rifts - a rift that is almost invisible in the western press.  A shift that could mean the end of Likud's status as a major party, for good.

[Edit: frontpaged at MyDD - there are comment threads there too]

[ Edit: The vote didn't seem to happen Thursday. That means it will most likely happen Friday. ]

Congress passed a PATRIOT Act reauthorization that included some compromises.  It wasn't very good, but it was not as horrible as it could have been.  This week, the compromises all went out the window.  In a familiar pattern, the White House and Republicans substituted a new bill into the conference committee at the last moment, with no consultation with Democrats.  The conference bill coming back to the House and Senate is not what they sent to the committee when they voted this fall.

It is expected to be voted on this week.  Conference bills usually pass automatically, but there's a new factor at play...  Congresscritters trying to distance themselves from Bush to avoid electoral fallout.  We have a chance to stop it - please call your Senators and Representative TODAY

 -- Grover Norquist, NPR Morning Edition interview, May 25, 2001

 -- Tom DeLay, at Ruth's Chris Steak House, DC, May 2004

Think Norquist would be up for it if we asked him? :)

The Senate approved a spending bill which had the REAL ID Act tacked onto it in conference committee, meaning the act has now passed both houses.

This insane law effectively creates a national ID card, but forces states to pay for it.  It will create centralized databases that have personally identifying information along with biometric identifiers - all accessible to many thousands of government employees legally, inherently hard to protect from criminals and identity thieves.  And among other things, you'll need to present your birth certficate to renew your existing drivers license.  I wasn't born in this country and have no idea where my birth certificate is.  I have a friend who homebirthed her children, and had trouble getting the local city hall to issue birth certificates for them.  Imagine what this will mean for poor immigrants, with spotty English - they'll have trouble travelling, getting jobs, or registering for government programs.

The ACLU directed me to their web form for sending email to Congress about READ ID.  They provide a form letter, but I mostly rewrote it.  Here is mine...