Monthly Archives: May 2010

Mickey Mouse, Purcellville and Disclosure

Bob Lazaro is the inexplicably popular, always colorful mayor of Purcellville. He’s famous for suing the County over a high school. As a result, residents of Purcellville saw their taxes going to funding both sides of a local lawsuit. Now that is fiscally conservative!

Well, it appears that Mickey Mouse took a stand against the Mayor’s antics, and is being called out for it.

Purcellville Mayor Bob Lazaro this week made good on a statement he made to the Town Council May 11 by filing a formal complaint to the Virginia State Board of Elections “with respect to apparent violations of the State Code related to Campaign Finance Disclosure.”

The mayor was referring to signs placed outside the polling station advocating write-in votes for Mickey Mouse in the uncontested mayoral race May 4. Lazaro was unopposed on the ballot, however, an unidentified group or individual paid for automated phone calls to residents and distributed fliers advocating the defeat of incumbents on the Town Council. – Leesburg Today

It is odd to find myself grudgingly agreeing with Mayor Lazaro’s call for disclosure, even as I wonder what the consequences of that agreement may be.

Please click through and join me in my deliberation.I strongly support disclosure in election spending, especially in an era when corporations no longer have spending limits. The DISCLOSE Act, which would shed a lot more sunlight on corporate political spending, and help mitigate some of the evils of the Citizens United decision, is an important part of that.

In the independent campaign against Purcellville incumbents this year, the robocalls did not provide disclosure of who paid for them.

The automated phone calls received by area residents right before the election advocating the mayor’s defeat and proposing a fictitious character, also failed to contain the legally required disclosure, Lazaro said, adding the same comment for the signs. – Leesburg Today

That lack of disclosure in the robocalls, which are quite different from fliers that an individual voter can print up at home, is simply not okay. Like TV airtime, robocalls are a form of speech that is only available to some, not all, thanks to their cost. If you’re paying for robocalls, you need to say so on the calls (in my opinion).

In the case of TV airtime, disclosure is equally important. It’s all well and good to say we all have free speech, but when some peoples’ speech is “freer” than others by virtue of access to public airwaves by spending private money to get that access, the relative prevalence or value of a particular opinion can be misconstrued or artificially enhanced by spending. After all, airtime is a zero-sum speech game (unlike, say, the Internet). Company X buying ad time during the LOST finale closes off the possibility of Advocacy Group Y having access to that time. It is critical that there is disclosure of funding when it is funding that makes some kinds of speech even possible.

That being said, I worry about the impact disclosure requirements may have on small, local elections where anonymity of authorship may be invaluable as neighbors clash over local issues. Disclosure requirements, with their attendant compliance costs, shouldn’t be used as a bludgeon to minimize a minority’s ability to dissent. Disclosure requirements could be used to quell dissent in two ways.

First, the cost of complying with disclosure requirements could, themselves, provide a barrier to otherwise free political speech. The costs of printing up a flier and distributing it are negligible, but the costs of filling out required forms with the state for having printed up the fliers and the even greater costs (fines, lawsuits) of not filing because you didn’t know you were supposed to are far from negligible.

Second, the act of public disclosure of flier authorship could lead to blowback on an individual and their family. There’s a reason a lot of Revolutionary leaders published their opinions anonymously. Even today, I wonder what distributing a pro-migrant flier in Sterling might lead to if it were signed by someone in the neighborhood. Ostracization in some places for sure, vandalism possibly. Do we have the freedom from negative reactions to our political speech? Probably not. That seems to advocate for the importance of anonymous political speech, in flier form, even immediately before an election.

The flier Mayor Lazaro takes issue with did provide authorship disclosure, of a sort.

In his letter, Lazaro cited the “apparent violations” of the disclosure act. The flier, accusing the town of “debt, debt, & more debt,” said it was “time to fight back” and advocated the defeat of incumbent Town Council members. The flier, Lazaro wrote, violates the campaign finance disclosure provisions of the state code as it did not have the legally required disclaimer identifying the person and/or group paying for it. The flier contained a statement at the bottom saying it was “paid for privately, not sponsored by any candidate, campaign or PAC.” – Leesburg Today

So the question is whether that level of disclosure on the flier is sufficient. Is it enough to assert that a flier wasn’t paid for by a PAC without making a positive statement of who did pay for it? After all, our country was founded using anonymous fliers, as The Anonymous Liberal has observed.

The whole point of pseudonymous writing is that people don’t know who the writer is. They have to judge the writing on its merits, not on the credentials of the writer. That was precisely why Madison, Hamilton, and Jay chose to use a pseudonym. They wanted their ideas to be judged separately from any opinions people had about them personally. If they wanted to cash in on their reputations as “heroically successful revolutionaries,” they would have signed their own names to what they were writing.

Indeed, we who write Loudoun Progress have debated among ourselves and with others about the relative merits of blogging publicly or anonymously.

And so I am of two minds, and have to compliment Mayor Lazaro for making me think. I am sincerely interested in hearing what the readers of Progress think about anonymous political speech, as our experiment in Loudoun group blogging continues.

(Bonus points for those of you who noticed I linked to a concurring Supreme Court opinion by Justice Thomas above.)

Announcement

As seen at Blue Virginia

As an FYI to all, the 10th District Democratic Committee is filling a vacancy to the State Central Committee due to Eileen Manning’s resignation and move to Florida.

Those that might be interested in serving on the Committee should seek an appointment. I believe the Committee will be seeking female applicants from Fairfax to maintain gender and geographic balance.

If anyone is interested, email some members of the 10th to seek a nomination. Committee members are listed here:

http://10thcdvadems.org/page7/…

Links We’re Reading – 24-26 May 2010

These links are sponsored by the letters VA and the number 10.

A temporarily radioactive Gulf of Mexico can only encourage Virginia tourism. – Dan Sullivan, Blue Virginia

 

In Cooch’s Grasp

Rather than regurgitate something covered very much in depth by Lowell over at Blue Virginia, I just recommend everyone go over there and read what he had to say about the transgressions at the Republican 10th District convention on Saturday.

In short, Frank Wolf’s preferred nominee to head the committee lost, and they get a “Kookanelli Kollaborator” instead.

So, to recap, we have a Cooch disciple heading the LCRC, and now a Cooch disciple running the 10th CD Republican committee. This in itself portends that the congressional campaign this Fall is almost surely going to take a severely negative turn.

But luckily, we have a man running for Congress in Jeff Barnett who isn’t afraid of what the lunatic fringe is going to lob at him. He served valiantly for 26 years in the Air Force, including a stint as “a campaign planner for the first Gulf War”, and then later as “Chief of Staff for a 6,000 person, multi-national peacekeeping force” in Croatia, “the most successful peacekeeping mission in UN History” (all quotes from Jeff’s campaign website). A true patriot, indeed.

So bring on the dirty politics, Republicans; we’re ready for it, and the good people of the 10th District are going to see through it for what it is – desperation.

Links We’re Reading – 21-23 May 2010

What has Congress done for you lately? Quite a bit, actually.

And that list, if anything, understates the 111th Congress’s productivity, as some of the larger bills included secondary provisions that would’ve been massive achievements if they’d passed on their own: Think calorie labeling at chain restaurants in the health-care bill, or the consumer financial protection agency in the financial-regulation bill, or any of a half-dozen infrastructure and technological-investment projects passed in the stimulus. – Ezra Klein

Go linky, go now.

Musical Interlude

I’m a long-time fan of Christine Lavin, and this song’s been bouncing around in my head the past couple of days. I should tell you that YouTube has flagged the video as being inappropriate for younger viewers, probably due to a quote by Ann Coulter and an old video from a western where a gun is shot toward the camera.

Sign This, Send That 2

As people who have become active in the past decade or so, we get tons of email from various organizations asking us to sign this petition or fax that senator, not to mention the constant “send $10” requests. In some cases, we even sign this, or send that if the request strikes us so.

Follow below the fold for some of the progressive solicitations we’ve actually responded to recently including supporting the Clean Air Act and accuracy in history textbooks.  

  • Oppose a Border-Only Immigration Bill – Reform Immigration for America is running a campaign against a proposed “border only” Republican immigration bill. Reinforcing the border without addressing the millions of Americans here without documentation is not reform, it’s reaction. We need to make sure Sen. Webb is on the right side of this legislation and votes against it.
  • Say No to ahistorical, anti-science textbooks rewritten by the Texas State Board of Education – Texas reviews and adapts textbook standards for the major subjects every six years, and because of the size of the state’s market, textbook publishers often print books consistent with the Texas standards. However, the Texas State Board of Education is an elected body currently dominated by the Religious Right and intent on rewriting textbooks according to a right-wing world view and revisionist history. Send a message to those publishers.
  • Ask Senator Webb to support Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal in the defense bill mark up – Mark up starts Wednesday. We need one vote to make this happen – his. The time for study is over. This has been studied to death already, and it’s past time that all Americans who want to serve this country be able to do so honestly and openly. Better yet: Call him at 202.224.3121.
  • Support the Clean Air Act – Sen. Murkowski is proposing a resolution that would eliminate the EPAs authority to regulate certain greenhouse gases. Our Senators are especially vulnerable on this issue, as they represent a coal-producing state. They need to know that there are Virginia voters who like clean air more than coal.

So, did everybody read Vivian’s post?

Unintended Consequences: Yeardly Love and Marshall-Newman.

I hate to say I told you so, but I ABSOLUTELY told you so. If you don’t want to click through, here’s what I said on Friday, November 3rd, 2006:

It’s that time again

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have less than a week until election day. This year, it’s more important than ever that you get out there and vote.

(A paragraph on Judy Feder).

(A paragraph on Jim Webb, ending in a comment about Gay Rights = Civil Rights)

Speaking of which, I’m voting “NO!!!!” on ballot question 1 which reads:

Question: Shall Article I (the Bill of Rights) of the Constitution of

Virginia be amended to state:

“That only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.

This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage. Nor shall this Commonwealth or its political subdivisions create or recognize another union, partnership, or other legal status to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of

marriage.”?

Now, the first paragraph is foul on its own. Homophobia enshrined in a state constitution. It makes me sick.

The second paragraph is also quite worrisome. In Ohio, some courts have decided that similar language in their constitution bars unmarried women from getting protective orders against their abusive live-in boyfriends. It could invalidate living wills, roommate agreements, custody agreements between people who were never married.

Our lovely State’s Attorney (an elected Republican) {OH! He’s our GOVERNOR now!} sneers at our concerns and says that the legislature and he have written opinions and intent statements that they don’t mean this to apply to straight people. Or elderly aunts. Or abused girlfriends. But these are the same people who fought to get strict constructionist judges on benches all over our state. And if I remember correctly, strict constructionists are not known for giving a hoot about the legislative intent. They go by the words in the document.

Heck, even the extremely conservative Richmond Times Dispatch is against it.

Seriously, people. I’ve been angry about this for four years now. When civil rights don’t apply to EVERYBODY, we end up finding that they don’t apply to ANYBODY.

Speaking of the census..

I’m curious: What race would you expect a person to be if that person recorded their race as “American” on their census form?

I ask because there is a Loudoun County blogger who recently invited readers to share their stories of “close encounters with the census.” I’m not going to link to this person, because 1) the political portion of her blog is nothing but an outlet for anti-Obama and anti-government paranoia, devoid of any reputable source material, and 2) it upsets her. Instead, I will link to this parody.

Here is the comment she used to illustrate, without a trace of irony, the sort of story she was looking for:

I filled in our census form and mailed it in. I made sure to put “American” for the race of all in my family. We got a call over the weekend to “verify that the information is correct”. My husband ruined my good fun because he was asked if anyone was black or latino and he says “No” and then the person asked “so you’re white” and my husband responds “yes”. ugg… I wish I had answered the phone.

A bunch of other people then chimed in, saying they had put down “American” as their race, too.Now, to be fair, there are legitimate and compelling reasons for objecting to the way race as a category was handled in the current census. None of them were to be found in this post, but they do exist. One is the use of offensive, anachronistic language, which the Census Bureau answers essentially by saying that part of the generation that used that language is still living, and it’s the job of the Bureau to get accurate information, not police language. It’s also true that there is no such thing as “race” in a literal sense. Individuals can’t be reliably categorized by race using some objective biological measure, so it’s fair to ask: Why do it at all? However, it matters who is doing the asking.

The idea of writing “American” in the race box seems to have its origin in a post on NRO’s The Corner by Mark Krikorian (he’s the anti-immigrant crank who claimed that Haiti is “screwed up” because it “wasn’t colonized long enough,” and that there isn’t enough pressure in American society for “Anglo-conformity”). It’s part of the general conspiracy-theory nonsense about the census, with one prominent claim being that the Constitution only requires enumeration, and that any questions beyond the number of people living in a residence are an illegal intrusion by the government.

Here is what the Census Bureau says about the collection of other demographic information:

Census information affects the numbers of seats your state occupies in the U.S. House of Representatives. And people from many walks of life use census data to advocate for causes, rescue disaster victims, prevent diseases, research markets, locate pools of skilled workers and more.

And they provide specific examples of how the data can be used in community organizing:

“Low-income families have clearly been targeted in this study.” The Organic Consumers Association used census data to lobby the Environmental Protection Agency to halt testing dangerous chemicals on low-income children in Florida. The testing was eventually stopped due to the petition.

This seems to be the issue. You might ask, for whom would “advocating for causes” and “more” on the basis of demographic characteristics like gender, ethnicity, family composition or income be a problem? For those who have an interest in denying the facts of ongoing discrimination, the first line of defense is to make discrimination difficult to prove. If you can prevent collection of the data that would make it possible to detect and demonstrate systematic discrimination against a community, voila! It doesn’t exist. It’s no surprise that this disinformation is being peddled by those resentful of losing “their” country, an Archie Bunker world in which white = normative, and everyone else is “other.”

Here is just a small sample of reasons, items that happened to land in my inbox just over the last three days, to think that we might still need to be monitoring systematic discrimination on the basis of that fiction we call “race.”

  • “Black or White: Kids on race,” a series currently running on Anderson Cooper 360, reports the conclusions of a new study of children’s attitudes about race. Both white and (to a lesser degree) black children express overwhelming bias toward whiteness.
  • The Texas Board of Education, among other revisionist changes to history textbooks, would like the slave trade to be renamed “the Atlantic triangular trade.” Because that’s so much more appealing, don’t you think?
  • The new Republican Senate nominee for Kentucky, Rand Paul, believes that the market should have been allowed to determine whether or not Woolworth’s lunch counters must serve non-white citizens.
  • In one of Loudoun County’s high income gated communities, two African-American women were reported as “suspicious” for taking a walk in their neighborhood, and were then stopped and investigated by Sheriff’s deputies a few blocks from their own house. One of the women reports that she was asked if they were “coming off service.”

There are people – some of them in our own community – who very much would like everyone to forget the standard argument against passage of the Civil Rights Act: That private business owners should be free to determine which members of the public they serve, and that losing this freedom was a violation of their First Amendment rights (history is now repeating itself, with this exact argument being deployed against passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act). They would like everyone to think that racism is somehow created by people identifying, analyzing, talking about and working to combat racism and its pervasive effects. Such is the sanctimonious, smug ignorance of people who actually think they are being “color-blind” when they write “American” as a synonym for “white.”

Sen. Warner and Corporate Personhood

(I am posting this on behalf of TonyF, who would’ve written this post himself, but is out of town today. -P13)

A friend and long-time Democrat here in Loudoun wrote a letter to Sen. Mark Warner regarding the Citizens United decision. TonyF is a veteran and thoughtful citizen who has been community leader in Leesburg and Loudoun for a long time. He fought hard for Mark Warner throughout the Governor’s career.

Click below to read the Senator’s response to TonyF’s question about Sen. Warner’s position on corporate money in politics.  Here is what the Senator had to say.

Dear Lt. Col.,

Thank you for contacting me regarding the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) and legislation that has been proposed to address this issue.

On January 21, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 5-4 ruling in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission where it found long-standing government restrictions on corporate independent expenditures on elections to be unconstitutional in violation of the First Amendment. However, the majority of the Court did find disclaimer and disclosure requirements constitutional.

I share your concerns regarding the negative impact the Court’s decision may have on future elections. Those with immense resources now have the potential to drown out the voices of individual Americans who wish to actively participate in our democracy. On April 30, 2010, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act (S. 3295) to address this issue. As a member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration I have the opportunity to review S. 3295 and will certainly keep your thoughts in mind.

Again, thank you for writing. As we move forward in the 111th Congress, please continue to be in touch with your opinions and concerns.

Sincerely,

MARK R. WARNER

United States Senator

If you want to ask Sen. Warner to support the DISCLOSE Act, you can contact his office:

459A Russell Senate Office Building

Washington, DC 20510

Phone: 202-224-2023

Fax: 202-224-6295