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Rumor: Koch Brothers to buy 8 major newspapers, including LA Times

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:38:37 +0000

The Koch Brothers -- billionaire ultra-conservative puppet-masters and Tea Party funders -- are rumored to be in talks to buy eight newspapers, including the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant from the Tribune company, which is emerging from bankruptcy protection. Half of the LA Times's newsroom has threatened to quit if the Kochs take over.

One thing sure to happen if the Koch brothers take over the paper is a conservative agenda on the editorial page. As other newspapers have cut back on editorials and endorsements, the Times is now often the only LA news outlet that issues endorsements on political candidates and on ballot measures and initiatives. This is particularly crucial in California, where even the most educated voter is left clueless and confused -- or worse, tricked -- after reading the state propositions put on the ballot by Californians who simply gathered enough signatures to push a private agenda.
If the Times' editorial page is filled with the Koch brothers' libertarian opinions, other journalists in LA will need to step up and voice opposing views.

If Koch Brothers Buy LA Times, Half of Staff May Quit (VIDEO) [Kathleen Miles/HuffPo]

(via Reddit)

(Image: LA Times, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 24293932@N00's photostream)

Voter fraud is a fraud

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 02:05:44 +0000

The New Yorker's "Voter-Fraud Myth" by Jane Mayer is a good, fair, investigative piece tracking the rise of the Republican orthodoxy that says that voter fraud is rampant, and that it favors Democrats. Mayer makes a reasoned, factual case to show that there is no substantial voter fraud problem (much-vaunted incidents like the scores of dead voters in Georgia were later revealed to not have a single verifiable instance of a dead person voting). Mayer also shows how anti-fraud measures disproportionately target young people, poor people, and visible minorities. This is a great piece to refer to when discussing the subject with friends who've been convinced that voter ID laws amount to anything other than partisan voter suppression.

Von Spakovsky offered me the names of two experts who, he said, would confirm that voter-impersonation fraud posed a significant peril: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Pastor, von Spakovsky noted, had spoken to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about being a victim of election fraud: voting in Georgia, he discovered that someone else had already voted under his name.
When I reached Pastor, he clarified what had happened to him. “I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted—it was just a mistake.” He added, “I don’t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem.” Pastor believes that, compared with other democracies, America is “somewhere near the bottom in election administration,” and thinks that voter I.D.s make sense—but only if they are free and easily available to all, which, he points out, is not what Republican legislatures have proposed. Sabato, who supports the use of voter I.D.s under the same basic conditions, says of the voter-impersonation question, “One fraudulent vote is one too many, but my sense is that it’s relatively rare today.”
Hasen says that, while researching “The Voting Wars,” he “tried to find a single case” since 1980 when “an election outcome could plausibly have turned on voter-impersonation fraud.” He couldn’t find one. News21, an investigative-journalism group, has reported that voter impersonation at the polls is a “virtually non-existent” problem. After conducting an exhaustive analysis of election-crime prosecutions since 2000, it identified only seven convictions for impersonation fraud. None of those cases involved conspiracy.

The Voter-Fraud Myth

Anti-choice Tea Party Congressman pressured pregnant mistress to get an abortion

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:48:50 +0000

Tennessee Tea Party Rep Dr. Scott DesJarlais -- a serial philanderer who told a court he'd cheated on his wife four times -- calls himself anti-abortion. His website says, "All life should be cherished and protected. We are pro-life." He has consistently voted for legislation that restricted abortion. But when he got his mistress pregnant, he insisted that she get an abortion. Here's a transcript of some of that conversation:

"If we need to go to Atlanta, or whatever, to get this solved and get it over with so we can get on with our lives, then let's do it," Desjarlais says.
“Well, we’ve got to do something soon. And you’ve even got to admit that because the clock is ticking right?” he says at another point.

I guess that this is consistent with an anti-choice position (he doesn't want women to choose, he wants their married boyfriends to choose), but "pro-life"? Not so much.

Anti-choice GOP Congressman pushed mistress to get abortion (Thanks, Winkel!)

Irish president lambastes right wing US radio DJ over the politics of fear

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:40:45 +0000

Irish politicians are justly famed for their scathing wit, and if you've ever wondered why, listen to this clip of Irish president Michael D Higgins flaying alive Michael Graham, a US radio host, graduate of Oral Roberts University and supporter of the Tea Party movement. The recording dates to before Higgins won the presidency, but one imagines that political debate in Eire is a lot of fun these days.

From May 2010, an exchange between Michael D Higgins (who was elected President of Ireland last year) and Tea Party-loving radio guy Michael Graham on Irish radio. Full exchange here.

Michael D Higgins v Michael Graham (via Reddit)

Award-winning book-burning hoax saves Troy, MI libraries

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 19:55:52 +0000

The Leo Burnett/Arc Worldwide agency has won a gold prize in the Effie awards for their hoax "Book Burning Party" campaign, which is credited with saving the public library in Troy, MI. Michigan's extreme austerity measures and collapsing economy had put the library under threat, and the town proposed a 0.7% tax raise to keep it open. The local Tea Party spent a large sum of money opposing the measure on the grounds that all taxes are bad, so the Burnett campaign reframed the issue by creating a hoax campaign to celebrate the library's closure with a Book Burning Party a few days after the vote.

The outrage generated by this campaign was sufficient to win the day for the library, as Troy's residents made the connection between closing libraries and burning books, focusing their minds on literacy and shared community, rather than taxation.

Troy Public Library would close for good unless voters approved a tax increase. With little money, six weeks until the election, facing a well organized anti-tax group who'd managed to get two previous library-saving tax increases to fail, we had to be bold. We posed as a clandestine group who urged people to vote to close the library so they could have a book burning party. Public outcry over the idea drowned out the anti-tax opposition and created a ground-swell of support for the library, which won by a landslide.

BOOK BURNING PARTY (via MeFi)

Lessig's One Way Forward

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:41:08 +0000

Lawrence Lessig's new ebook One Way Forward is one of the most exciting documents I've read since I first found The Federalist Papers. One Way Forward is more of a long pamphlet than a book. It's tempting to call it a "manifesto," except that it's so darned reasonable, and that's not a word that comes readily to mind when one hears "manifesto."

At the core of Lessig's reasonable manifesto is the corrupting influence of money in politics, a corruption that predates the notorious Citizens United Supreme Court case. Lessig ascribes to this corruption the outrage that mobilizes both Occupy and the Tea Party, and he believes that the corruption can't be ended until both the left and right realize that though they don't have a common goal, they do share a common enemy, and unite to defeat it.

To this end, Lessig has a series of extremely practical suggestions, legislative proposals that, individually, strike at the root of the corruption, and, collectively, could kill it. Most of these don't require any kind of constitutional amendment. All are designed to be passed through the nonpartisan action of activists of all political stripes, working together on ideals that neither should find fundamentally objectionable.

Indeed, the steps laid out in One Way Forward remind of nothing so much as Creative Commons, in that they constitute a set of principles and actions that we can undertake individually, but which grows into a movement the more of us join in, and that are designed to reside in a sweet spot that does not violate any dogma or ideology. This is Lessig's special gift, the ability to design movements around legal and social principles that use a series of attainable, independent goals to build towards larger, more powerful solutions.

A mere 62 pages, plus a few more pages of model legislative language and end-notes, One Way Forward is an hour's read and a lifetime's work. If you want to get a sense of what this is all about, visit TheAntiCorruptionPledge.org (a pledge for civilians and politicians alike to take against corruption), AmericansElect.org (a project to put a third, reform-oriented candidate on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, with the goal of making reform into a national issue in the 2014 election); and CallAConvention.org, a dress-rehearsal for a series of citizens' constitutional amendment conventions that may some day change Citizens United forever. For a broader outline, see Lessig's own oneway.lessig.org, and the organization he founded, RootStrikers.

We must first build a system to fund campaigns in which all of us, or at least the vast majority of us, become the effective funders. Not through a system that forces one side to subsidize the speech of the other, or that empowers Washington bureaucrats to decide how much money each side has to run its campaigns. That’s the awful connotation that typically comes with the term “publicly funded elections,” and it’s not what I mean here.
Instead, through a system that incentivizes candidates to raise campaign funds from all of us, in small dollar chunks, and that effectively spreads its influence to all of us. Here’s just one example: Imagine a system that rebated the first $50 of tax revenue paid by each of us, in the form of a voucher—call it a “democracy voucher.”39 Voters could allocate that voucher (or any part of it) to any candidate for Congress who agrees to fund his or her campaign only with “democracy vouchers” and contributions from citizens of up to $100 per election. Vouchers not used would get returned to the political party of the voter—or, if the voter is an independent or chooses differently, to some other democracy-supporting fund. At $50 per voter, this system would put at least $7 billion into elections each year, more than three times the total raised in congressional elections in 2010.
Call this the Grant and Franklin Project. As a system, it would easily and adequately fund congressional elections. But it would be us, not the you-pick-your-fraction-of-the- top-1-percent of Americans, who would be funding these elections. And, sure, the money to fund this system would be “the public’s”—in the sense that the Treasury would write the checks to back the democracy vouchers. But as with everything in the Treasury, the Treasury got this bit of the “public” from us first. This system just rebates what the people have given the government, in a form that allows the People to make Congress responsive to them.

One Way Forward