Prominent Jewish Republicans flew to Israel last weekend to join presidential candidate Mitt Romney on his overseas trip. Among them were casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam.
The Adelsons were in the audience Sunday when Romney gave a policy speech in Jerusaleum. And at a fundraising breakfast Monday, Sheldon Adelson sat by Romney's side.
Representative John Dingell (D-MI), the longest-sitting member of Congress, introduced a bill Thursday designed to force the Supreme Court to reconsider its Citizens United decision. Along with at least ten co-sponsors, Dingell's Restoring Confidence in Our Democracy Act, would ban corporations and unions from making independent political expenditures. It would also subject Super PACs to the same contribution limits that exist with other PACs.
For all the talk about the need for voter-identification laws, you’d think millions of Americans were impersonating dead people to get their candidates elected, or casting multiple ballots after breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The newest GDP release shows an increase of 1.5 percent in the second quarter of 2012, down from a 1.9 percent growth in the first quarter and three percent growth in 2011. But, as Demos continually asks in our Beyond GDP work: What exactly is GDP measuring?
One of the main reason alternative indicators are important is that they take things that we value on a visceral level, like the environment, and put them into the universal language of capital.
One of the big questions environmentalists struggle with is whether there should be a price on nature. For some things, like the cost savings that are realized through cleaner air or water, there is a rote calculation that can be done to price out environmental and health benefits. But, if you think of nature as an independent entity having a worth beyond what it can provide to humans, how do you put a price on it? How much is the Amazon River or the Himalayan mountain range worth?
It seems there is little real relief on the horizon.
“If you’re coming out of college with an average number of $20,000 to $25,000 in debt and there’s no job out there, you’ve got a real problem,” said John Quinterno, a researcher who has studied the consequences of student debt.
Summertime in an election year in Colorado always has a certain excitement. Candidates marching in parades, petitioners gathering signatures at festivals ... some years we even get regular visits from the presidential candidates. Coloradans experience democracy in action well before Election Day.
Many Florida families have been paying up to 25 percent of median income for public in-state college costs — out of reach for some middle-class parents who have taken recent pay cuts or lost jobs, according to a new study.
Recall your last voting experience: chances are you were packed into a school cafeteria, shuttled along to a table where someone checked your name off a long list of registered voters, and you cast your ballot before rushing to work.
It’s no secret that some very rich people support the super PACs and other groups that have inundated the 2012 campaign with unlimited sums of cash. But a study to be released Thursday details the extent to which this kind of donating is the sport of the One Percent.
The November presidential election, widely expected to rest on a final blitz of advertising and furious campaigning, may also hinge nearly as much on last-minute legal battles over when and how ballots should be cast and counted, particularly if the race remains tight in battleground states.
The good folks at Demos, led by the indefatigable Liz Kennedy, released a report today about the legal underpinnings under what Demos predicts will be an epidemic of direct voter challenges at the polls themselves come November. This, alas, is neither new — challenging Hispanic voters at the polls in Arizona is how William Rehnquist got start in politics — nor is it particularly surprising. The new voter-suppression laws in several states are only half the plan.
The right to vote is a fundamental freedom that protects the other essential freedoms that Americans hold dear. It is at the heart of what it means to be an American citizen. Elections in American should be free, fair, and accessible, and voters should not have to overcome burdensome barriers to cast their ballot.
POLITICO led this morning with a piece arguing that Mitt Romney's clay feet on the subject of national security threaten to turn him into John Kerry. I don't quite buy the comparison, however Kerry-like Mr Romney may be in his stiffness and aloofness; Mr Romney never claimed national security as a core competency, as Mr Kerry did.
The Nation's Brentin Mock reports on a new study, "Bullies at the Ballot Box" by Common Cause and Demos, which merits the attention of everyone concerned about the abuse of voting rights. As Mock reports,
The scrutinization of True the Vote, and their voter-stalking Tea Party co-signers across the nation, is growing. Today, Common Cause and Demos released a report called “Bullies at the Ballot Box” that raises awareness about groups determined to challenge voters at the polls, even at risk of intimidating voters. Says the report:
ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – Missouri makes a list of ten states at risk for “voter bullying,” in a report released by the voting rights groups Common Cause and Demos.
A very different kind of organizing campaign than AFSCME’s is going on in states across the country with a single undemocratic purpose: to keep voters away from the ballot box.
A swarm of right-wing loyalists with intimidation on their minds can be expected to descend on polling places in minority neighborhoods this November, two public interest groups warned government officials Monday.
In a new report titled, “Bullies at the Ballot Box,” Demos and Common Cause describe campaigns by conservative groups—particularly the tea party-affiliated True the Vote—to train and deploy as many as 1 million persons to police the polls.