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Utah Legislators Call LDS Bluff on LGBT Rights

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November 11, 2008 in American Society, Civil/Human Rights, Government, Religion and State and Local. 0 Comments

Courtesy The Campaign Silo:

A group of at least five Utah legislators have asked the Mormon leadership to join their call for state legislation protecting LGBT rights to hospital visitation, medical care, fair housing, inheritance, and non-discrimination in employment, based on a statement from the Church itself last week that the Church “does not object to rights for same-sex couples” in any of these areas.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have said they do not object to rights for same-sex couples, as long as those rights do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family.

Now, gay-rights activists and at least five Utah legislators are asking the Church to demonstrate its conviction.

The group Equality Utah says the Church made the invitation, and they’re accepting it. “The LDS Church says it does not oppose same-sex couples receiving such rights as hospitalization and medical care, fair housing rights or probate rights,” said Mike Thompson, executive director of Equality Utah.

In their attempt to appear non-bigoted the day after Prop 8 took away marriage equality rights throughout California, the Mormon leadership detailed a long list of rights of same-sex couples to which they do not object. Now, these legislators will introduce bills to protect all of these rights, and they ask the Church leadership to support them.

“Setting aside the marriage issue for now, there is so much in that space that is short of marriage that we need to talk about; and we’re saying, ‘Let’s talk about it,’” said Utah Sen. Scott McCoy.

Those issues include rights in medical care and hospital visitation, housing and employment protections, insurance rights for a partner, a statewide domestic partner registry. Repealing the second part of Utah’s Amendment 3 would officially recognize gay couples.

-Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Alaska’s Fishy Vote Total?

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November 10, 2008 in Dirty Tricks, Election '08, Election Fraud, Politics, State and Local, Voting and video. 0 Comments

Courtesy Rawstory:

The 2008 presidential race is over, but several Senate races still remain undecided. Georgia is headed for a runoff, Minnesota for a recount — and in Alaska things just keep getting stranger.

“It looks like senator and convicted felon Ted Stevens and Congressman-currently-under-investigation Don Young will both hold onto their seats,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted on Thursday. “That said, there’s a case to be made that there’s something fishy going on up there.”

Even though the polls this year have generally been pretty accurate, they were way off in Alaska. Stevens was running between 7% and 22% behind his Democratic challenger in the polls, but now he is narrowly ahead in the vote count

Polling analysis website 538.com comments, “The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest — voters told pollsters that they weren’t about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem. The problem with this theory is that the polling failures in Alaska weren’t unique to Stevens.”

The polls also consistently showed Rep. Young as losing by at least 6%, but he is currently ahead in the vote count by 8%. Even in the presidential race, where polls showed McCain leading by 14% or less, the vote count has him winning by 61% to 35% — precisely the same margin as George Bush in 2004. That represents a polling error of at least 11% to 14% in all three races.

At the same time, total voter turnout appears to be about 11% lower in Alaska this year than in 2004 — despite over 20,000 new registrations, heavy turnout in the primaries, record early voting, long lines at the polls on Election Day, and the state’s own governor being on the ballot, all of which had led to an expectation of record participation.

Maddow turned for explanations to Nate Silver of 538.com, who pointed out that tens of thousands of absentee ballots, early votes, and provisional votes are yet to be counted. However, these appear to be spread fairly evenly across the state, not concentrated in Democratic areas, so even a final tally is unlikely to jibe with the polls. “Clearly it didn’t go how the pollsters expected,” Silver commented.

-Article Continues With Video @ Soured Site.

U.S., Canada Increasingly at Odds over Water

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November 8, 2008 in Big Business, Government, Policy, Regulation, State and Local, Water and World. 0 Comments

Courtesy Celsias:

The United States and Canada have often been uneasy neighbors, perhaps never more so than when Canada included the U.S. on a list ofcountries that torture inmates  .

That flashpoint aside, Canada’s recent habit of distancing itself may have less to do with politics and more to do with a perceivedextraterritorial expansion   of U.S. environmental laws - a state of affairs that wakens Canadian fears of being gobbled up by its larger, stronger and louder neighbor.

For example, in July of this year, the National Academies   expressed the opinion   that the United States should pass Great Lakes protection laws more closely mirroring the standards sets by the International Maritime Organization   (IMO) - standards which Canada had already adopted.

On October 3, President Bush took up the challenge by signing theGreat Lakes Compact  , a complex, 13-part bill that will protect the Lakes’ water from unwarranted diversion and protect the water itself via standards for everything from industrial chemicals to sewage, including ballast water regulations aimed at preventing the introduction and spread of invasive species   (PDF).

This Compact, almost a decade in the making   and several times stalled by state governors unwilling to accept a broader but more limiting portfolio of protections, is now law. Diversions outside the Lakes area will require the unanimous agreement of all eight   governors (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York) and the heads of adjacent Canadian provinces (Quebec and Ontario).

That the Compact is still not as comprehensive as standards set by the IMO is unfortunate. Even so, the Compact is by far the most thorough bill yet passed in the U.S. regarding Great Lakes water, and not a moment too soon as drought   spreads throughout the U.S. southeast, southwest, the Pacific Coast, Idaho, and even into the upper Great Plains.

The bill, a political hot potato among U.S. governors, finally won grudging Canadian acceptance when the U.S. Senate incorporated an amendment, at the Council of Canadian’s request, prohibiting sales to water bottlers  . Most likely, Canadians felt they had no choice. NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, clearly defines water as both a service and an investment  , opening wide the door to sales south of the U.S. border by any U.S. government agency looking for an edge in Mexico.

These water-sale schemes weren’t isolated to the U.S, however. The Compact, which serves an area in the U.S. and contiguous Canadian provinces with a population of approximately 40 million, is the offshoot of a 1999 proposal from Ontario   to ship Lakes water to Asia, and Ontario was not the only schemer. At various times, British Columbia, Quebec and Newfoundland had also considered licensing bulk water exports.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Just 3 ‘superbanks’ now dominate industry

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November 8, 2008 in Banks and Finance, Economy, Monopoly, Regulation, State and Local and The Consumer. 0 Comments

Courtesy MSNBC:

The financial crisis that has been sweeping the globe has reshaped nearly every corner of the economy, but no industry has been altered more radically than banking.

Several of the nation’s biggest banks have failed or been absorbed by healthier institutions, leaving three giant “superbanks” with an unprecedented concentration of market power: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

While that may be good news for emerging giants and the failing companies they helped rescue, the new oligopoly raises troubling questions about regulation and competition, analysts and consumer advocates say.

“Bank fees are going up, up, up, and that’s the danger to consumers as more of these banks consolidate,” says Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumer League. “It’s difficult for the average person to get a bank account that doesn’t involve fees, and if you get into financial distress you’re cooked, and you’ll be ‘fee-ed’ to death.”

According to a recently released banking fee study from Bankrate.com, ATM surcharges rose 11 percent this year to an average of $1.97, and the fee for a bounced checks rose 2.5 percent to an average $28.95.

“Consumers are going to be victims of higher and more punitive fees,” Greenberg predicts.

Moreover, many analysts worry about how federal and state authorities, who were unable to prevent the current financial industry meltdown, will be able to monitor the new giant banks that combine a wide range of operations from investment banking to consumer lending.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

The Man Behind Proposition 8

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November 4, 2008 in Politics, Religion, State and Local, Voting and video. 0 Comments

Courtesy Alternet:

Among the local ballot measures to be decided on Election Day, California’s Proposition 8 is perhaps the most fiercely contested. Backers of the proposition to ban same-sex marriage in the state cast their campaign in apocalyptic terms. “This vote on whether we stop the gay-marriage juggernaut in California is Armageddon,” born-again Watergate felon and Prison Fellowship Ministries founder Chuck Colson told the New York Times. Tony Perkins, the president of the Christian right’s most powerful Beltway lobbying outfit, Family Research Council, echoed Colson’s language. “It’s more important than the presidential election,” Perkins said of Prop 8. “We will not survive [as a nation] if we lose the institution of marriage.”

The campaign for Prop 8 has reaped massive funding from conservative backers across the country. Much of it comes from prominent donors like the Utah-based Church of Latter Day Saints and the Catholic conservative group, Knights of Columbus. Prop 8 has also received a boost from Elsa Broekhuizen, the widow of Michigan-based Christian backer Edgard Prince and the mother of Erik Prince, founder of the controversial mercenary firm, Blackwater.

While the Church of Latter Day Saints’ public role in Prop 8 has engendered a growing backlash from its more liberal members, and Broekhuizen’s involvement attracted some media attention, the extreme politics of Prop 8’s third largest private donor, Howard F. Ahmanson, reclusive heir to a banking fortune, have passed almost completely below the media’s radar. Ahmanson has donated $900,000 to the passage of Prop 8 so far.

I first met Ahmanson in 2004, when he and his wife, Roberta, agreed to an interview request for an article I was writing for Salon. Their exchanges with me marked the first time since 1984 that Howard had agreed to make contact with a journalist, and the first time since 1992 for Roberta. Howard agreed to answer questions only by email because, according to Roberta, his Tourette’s Syndrome made chatting on the phone with a stranger nearly impossible. He functions “like a slow modem,” she said. Her dual role as her husband’s spokesperson and nurse quickly became apparent.

Few Americans have heard of Ahmanson—and that’s the way he likes it. He donates cash either out of his own pocket or through his unincorporated Fieldstead & Co. to avoid having to report the names of his grantees to the IRS. His Tourette’s syndrome only adds to his mysterious persona, as his fear of speaking leads him to shun the media. While Ahmanson once resided in a mental institution in Kansas, he now occupies a position among the Christian right’s power pantheon as one of the movement’s most influential donors. During a 1985 interview with the Orange County Register, Ahmanson summarized his political agenda: “My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives.”

The campaign to teach “intelligent design” in public school classrooms, the Republican takeover of the California Assembly, and the rollback of affirmative action in California—Ahmanson has been behind them all. He has also taken a special interest in anti-gay crusades. Ahmanson’s most controversial episode related to his funding of the religious empire of Rousas John Rushdoony, a radical evangelical theologian who advocated placing the United States under the control of a Christian theocracy that would mandate the stoning to death of homosexuals. With Prop 8 organizers claiming in a virtual mantra that their measure will not harm gays or take rights away from heterosexual Californians, Ahmanson has good reason to conceal his involvement in the campaign.

When Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. was born in 1950, his father, then 44 years old, was feting visiting kings and queens and basking in the opulence of his mansion on Harbor Island, an exclusive address in Southern California’s Newport Harbor. Howard Junior was tended by an army of servants and ferried to and from school in a limousine. Watching the world glide by through darkened windows, he was gripped with a longing to cast off his wealth and disappear into anonymity. He burned with resentment toward his father, a remote, towering presence, referred to by friends and foes alike as “Emperor Ahmanson.” While Ahmanson Sr. showered local institutions in the Los Angeles area with charitable gifts from the fortune he amassed as the founder of Washington Mutual, his son was starved for attention.

Article continues with Video @ Sourced Site.

Cali GOP Files Complaint with FEC Over Obama Trip to seeing Dying Grandmother.

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November 4, 2008 in State and Local and The GOP. 0 Comments

Courtesy Rawstory

Oops.

In what the Washington Post called “perhaps the most ill-timed press release of the 2008 campaign,” the California Republican Party announced that they’d filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Sen. Barack Obama had illegally funneled funds from his campaign account for his personal use.

The use? Visiting his dying grandmother, whose passing was announced this afternoon.

The GOP sent the release at 1:30 pm ET, a few hours before Obama’s grandmother’s death was announced.

“Obama for America violated federal law by converting its campaign funds to Senator Obama’s personal use,” the release stated. “Senator Obama recently traveled to Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother. This was the right thing for any grandson to do — at his own expense — but it was not travel that his campaign may fund.”

Federal law prohibits campaigns from using campaign funds for personal travel. Obama’s campaign said beforehand that they had reviewed the trips with their lawyers and believed it was allowable. Republicans, meanwhile, contend that because Obama did not campaign in Hawaii, it should not have been budgeted as a campaign expense.

Obama announced Monday that the grandmother who brought him up had died, aged 86. He flew to Hawaii to visit Madelyn Dunham’s side in Hawaii two weeks ago, fearing she would not live to see what polls suggest may be his triumph.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Paper Ballot Has Md.’s, Va.’s Vote

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October 30, 2008 in State and Local, Voting and Voting Machines. 0 Comments

Courtesy The Washington Post:

Goodbye, electronic voting. Farewell, fancy touch screen. Maryland and Virginia are going old school after Tuesday’s election.

Maryland will scrap its $65 million electronic system and go back to paper ballots in time for the 2010 midterm elections — and will still be paying for the abandoned system until 2014. In Virginia, localities are moving to paper after the General Assembly voted last year to phase out electronic voting machines as they wear out.

It was just a few years ago that electronic voting machines were heralded as a computerized panacea to the hanging chad, a state-of-the-art system immune to the kinds of hijinks and confusion that some say make paper ballots vulnerable. But now, after concern that the electronic voting machines could crash or be hacked, the two states are swinging away from the systems, saying paper ballots filled out by hand are more reliable, especially in a recount.

The trend reflects a national movement away from electronic voting machines. About a third of all voters will use them Tuesday, down from a peak of almost 40 percent in 2006, according to Election Data Services, a Manassas-based consulting firm specializing in election administration. Every jurisdiction that has changed election systems since 2006 has gone to paper ballots read by optical scan machines, said Kimball Brace, the firm’s president. And for the first time in the country’s history, fewer jurisdictions will be using electronic machines than in the previous election, he said.

“The battle for the hearts and minds of voters on whether electronic systems are good or bad has been lost,” Brace said. The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable “have won that battle.”

The District has one electronic machine in every precinct. But most people vote on paper ballots, said Dan Murphy, a spokesman for the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics.

In Virginia, the law passed last year prohibits localities from purchasing more electronic machines, also known as direct-recording election machines. It could take years to completely switch to paper.

“I think there’s a concern that . . . the votes may not be counted correctly,” said state Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax). “And with the [machine] there is no backup, and I think that’s the greatest concern.”

But the move has perplexed some experts who say that after using the electronic touch screens for several elections now, voters have gotten used to them. People use touch-screen machines for many things, such as ordering at McDonald’s and taking money out of the bank, and should, advocates say, be able to vote on them.

“We’re going to discard tens of millions of dollars to go to a system that is less accurate and secure,” said John Willis, an elections expert who was secretary of state under former Maryland governor Parris N. Glendening (D). “The proper question is security and safeguards. It’s not to go backwards into the 19th century with paper.”

Others, such as Fairfax County General Registrar Rokey W. Suleman II, say there are pluses and minuses with both systems. The touch screens, he said, are easy to use and clearly mark voters’ intent. By contrast, voters don’t always make their mark definitive on a paper ballot.

But in Virginia and Maryland, the electronic machines don’t print a piece of paper that voters can check to make sure their vote was recorded correctly. And that, critics say, means there can’t be a reliable recount. Another problem with the electronic machines is that only one person at a time can vote on them. That can make voting take longer, a concern when officials are predicting record turnout Nov. 4.

Paper ballots, which are fed into an optical scan machine that reads them, can help lines move much more quickly because many voters can fill them out at once, officials say. Fairfax has already purchased optical scan machines to back up its touch screens. And on Election Day, elections officers will urge people to vote with paper ballots, Suleman said.

“If voters want to go off in a corner with a clipboard, they can,” he said. Otherwise, they’d have to wait for an electronic machine to open up.

Article Continued @ Sourced Site.

Sequoia Admits to not Printing 11,000 ballots for Denver Co Voters

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October 27, 2008 in Politics, State and Local and Voting. 0 Comments

From After Downing Street:

In a stunning admission Sequoia Voting Systems has admitted to not
printing and mailing over 11,000 absentee ballots to Denver, Colorado
voters. Their spokeswoman claimed they “made an unfortunate mistake”.
In fact, the company had failed to notify the city of this “mistake”
and when originally asked they lied and told the city they had
delivered all 21,450 ballots they were supposed to print and deliver
to the post office on Oct. 16. Sequoia claims they will have ballots
printed and delivered to the post office by tomorrow, Monday. Voters
have until election day to get those ballots marked and either back
in the mail or delivered to any early polling site. Not mentioned by
anyone is if any overseas voters or military are affected by this
failure.

In Jefferson Co Arkansas voters will vote on ballots that don’t have
some alderman races on them. The county discovered their error too
late and they have now fixed it but all early voting has been done
without those races being voted on by the voters. The county will
just forget all of those voters and hope that none of the races are
close which would open them up for potential lawsuits.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Colo Amendment 48 Goes Too Far

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October 24, 2008 in Civil/Human Rights, Law and Justice, Policy, Politics and State and Local. 0 Comments

Courtesy Common Dream:

My very first job after graduating from Harvard Law School was as a part-time lawyer for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains in Denver. I was working on cases related to expanding access to birth control to all couples regardless of their marital status. At the time the birth control pill was recently approved as safe, but it was not yet legal in all states for all women. The Supreme Court in 1965 established basic privacy rights to birth control, but only for women who could produce a marriage license.

Fast forward to 2008, 40 years later. In my worst nightmare, it never crossed my mind that voters in Colorado would be considering a constitutional amendment that could outlaw birth control pills. Emergency contraceptives could also be illegal under Proposition 48, a form of birth control that if taken up to 72 hours after intercourse can prevent an unwanted pregnancy, especially used by rape and incest victims.

If you need more reasons to Vote No on 48, chances are you or your own family will be affected if this crazy proposal passes. Like thousands of living women in Colorado in the 1970’s, I struggled with difficult pregnancies. I lost twins during my second pregnancy and almost died during childbirth. It was a painful time for my family, as it is for all families. I can only imagine how devastating it would have been if government officials had shown up on my doorstep, asking questions about what had happened, was it really a miscarriage? Yet, couples could face that kind of unthinkable government investigation if Colorado voters allow Amendment 48 to pass.

If you don’t believe it could happen, just take a look at the plain language of the Amendment. It would amend the Colorado constitution to grant, for the first time, inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law to fertilized eggs. Even the proponents of the Amendment admit they don’t know all the possible ramifications.

Would couples struggling to get pregnant be allowed to use in vitro fertilization, which depends on fertilizing more eggs than a woman can carry to term? Would common birth control methods, such as the Pill, IUDs, the Patch, and the Ring, be outlawed because they operate by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus?

Could child welfare agencies be called to investigate abuse of a fertilized egg? Would a fertilized egg have standing to sue a woman for getting chemotherapy for cancer because it might be harmed? Amendment 48 would open more than 20,000 statutes and regulations to re-interpretation by the courts and lawyers. Almost every area of the law would be affected, including criminal law, family law, trusts and estates, elder law, tort law, juvenile law, health law, and business law.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Md. Police Put Activists’ Names On Terror Lists

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October 9, 2008 in Civil/Human Rights, Police, Politics, Protest and State and Local. 0 Comments

Courtesy The Washington Post

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.

olice Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July.

The department started sending letters of notification Saturday to the activists, inviting them to review their files before they are purged from the databases, Sheridan said.

“The names don’t belong in there,” he told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. “It’s as simple as that.”

The surveillance took place over 14 months in 2005 and 2006, under the administration of former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R). The former state police superintendent who authorized the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the program in testimony yesterday. Hutchins said the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists “fringe people.”

Sheridan said protest groups were also entered as terrorist organizations in the databases, but his staff has not identified which ones.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

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