Author: hankkalet

Here is the full text of the press release issued by the Assembly Majority office on Joe Roberts’ Clean Elections bill. Notice how it ignores the bill’s very real flaws and limitations and paints a rosey picture.

But I’ll let the reader judge.

Here it is:

CLEAN ELECTIONS 2007 REAUTHORIZATION BILL
CLEARS COMMITTEE
Legislation Would Expand Project for 2007,
Institute Changes to Enhance Chances for Program’s Success

(TRENTON) – The Assembly State Government Committee today approved bipartisan legislation Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts Jr. sponsored to reauthorize the state’s Clean Elections program for 2007.

The campaign finance reform measure aims to enhance the ability of candidates to qualify for public campaign financing, extend the window for garnering qualifying contributions, and increase funding for voter outreach to educate the public on the program.

“This new Clean Elections approach will make New Jersey’s program more meaningful for candidates and voters alike,” said Roberts (D-Camden). “If enacted, these reforms will help prove that public financing can strengthen the democratic process by keeping special interest money out of election campaigns.”

The framework of recommendations is based on findings of a four-member bipartisan working group that the Assembly Speaker established in September and a report issued earlier this year by the New Jersey Citizens’ Clean Elections Commission. The Assembly working group members were: Assemblyman Louis Greenwald (D-Camden), Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein (D-Middlesex), Assemblyman Bill Baroni (R-Mercer), and Assemblywoman Amy Handlin (R-Monmouth) – all of whom have signed on as sponsors of the reauthorization measure.

“Clean Elections continues to hold the greatest promise for removing the influence of special interest money in the political governmental process,” said Greenstein, a champion of the initial public financing program. “These reforms will help ensure that the public’s interest and not the special interests are kept front-and-center in legislative campaigns.”

“This legislation creates a program that hopefully will start the process of weeding big money out of the political process,” said Baroni (R-Mercer/Middlesex). “One of the best ways to chip away at the culture of corruption is to do away with campaign contributions from those who seek to peddle influence.”

The legislation proposes the following changes be made for the Clean Elections program in 2007:

· Lower the number of necessary qualifying contributions from 1,500 to 800, and set a flat $10 donation level for qualifying donations – as recommended by the New Jersey Citizens’ Clean Elections Commission;

· Allow a candidate who reaches at least 50 percent of the qualification level to be certified as a “clean candidate”;

· Provide increased funding to the state’s Election Law Enforcement Commission for voter outreach, education, and communication – more than was previously recommended by the Clean Elections Commission;

· More than triple, to $10,000, the amount of seed money a candidate can collect to help finance their efforts to qualify as a “clean candidate”;

· Expand the number of districts participating in the program from two to three – including a competitive “split” legislative district; and

· Make it easier for residents to contribute to candidates seeking to qualify under the program (cash, online donations, etc.).

Under the measure, the participating legislative districts would be selected by the legislative leadership of each party. A current Democratic-controlled district would be selected jointly by the Senate President and Assembly Speaker; the Senate and Assembly minority leaders would select one Republican-controlled district. A third district with split representation would be agreed upon by all four legislative leaders.

“These changes will remove many of the stumbling blocks that hampered the ability of Clean Elections to really take hold in the last election cycle,” said Greenwald, who was one of only two candidates to qualify for public financing under the program in 2005. “While qualification standards should be challenging to attain, they must not be so stringent as to be unachievable. These revisions will enhance the ability of dedicated candidates to run under the Clean Elections banner.”

“Our task force worked hard to come up with a proposal that will improve on the clean elections pilot program from the last election,” said Handlin. “It is my hope that this program will make it easier for candidates to participate and more likely to achieve its goal of producing elections that are not dominated by the corrupting influence of large campaign donations.”

The working group examined existing Clean Elections legislative measures and the findings and recommendations of the New Jersey Citizens’ Clean Elections Commission, which issued a report and recommendations for the 2007 Fair and Clean Elections Pilot Project as the basis for formulating the legislative proposal.

New Jersey became the first state to legislatively enact a Clean Elections program in 2004.

The bill is scheduled for an Assembly floor vote on Monday, December 11.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

The latest on the pooch is that she’s eating — woo hoo!!

She moped around yesterday, refusing to eat in the morning and walking around hangdog (I now can understand how the expression came into being). ButAnnie and her sister Susan got Honey to play a bit outside and the vet gave her some steroids to jumpstart the appetite and things have been looking up.

She ate some pastina and chicken broth last night and then some dog food and some biscuits. Then, when I got home at about 10 p.m., she ate a little more — including the milk from my bowl of cereal (she loves the leftover milk).

We are still not sure what it was — and may never know. The vet was perplexed and we were prepared to take her to a specialist in Tinton Falls on Friday. That’s looking unnecessary and we’re finally starting to exhale.

The picture, by the way, is from the spring when she was in good health and before we renovated our kitchen. I think it proves that she’s always been a bit neureotic.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

BlueJersey has the second “Think Equal” ad up here.

And here is my Dispatches on the ad and on the campaign.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

At least the New York Post is consistent (remember the old saw about consistency?), though you have to wonder how long it can go on calling itself a newspaper when it makes such unvarnished editorial judgments on its front page/cover.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Ah, I fear that many of my mainstream liberal friends are drinking the Washington Kool-Aid, buying into the notion that the vaunted Iraq Study Group has actually recommended something creative or earth-shakingly important.

Sen. Bob Menendez leads the way with a rather limp response (though better than the one offered by New Jersey’s other U.S. Senator, Frank Lautenberg) to the report that proves the Rorshack nature of the report. Menendez follows the “see-the-report-proves-Bush-was-wrong” tack that so many are taking (as if we didn’t know that already) but does not really offer a cohesive approach to disentangling us from this mess.

And read this editorial in The New York Times, which admits the split-the-difference nature of the report and praises the “political cover” it offers to an administration out of touch with reality. The Boston Globe offers a similar assessment — saying it struck a “realistic and worldly tone” and might just offer the president a path back to reality.

I’m not buying it. The report, the product of a group of Washington insiders, does little more than state the obvious — that the Iraq mission is a failure, that diplomacy is needed and that a solution must be found to the Israel-Palestine issue. It tilts toward bringing American troops home but calls for a significant troop presence to remain and ignores one very basic fact: The mission is a failure because it is one that never should have been undertaken.

William Hartung, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, offers a pretty straightfoward critique of the report on Common Dreams, closing with this point:

By offering the prospect of some change – even if it leaves tens of thousands of combat troops and trainers in Iraq in 2008 and beyond — the Baker-Hamilton report could take pressure off Republicans and Democrats alike. Major figures in both parties could be relieved of the demand to push for a genuine withdrawal prior to the 2008 presidential elections.

Citizens who want a quicker timeline for U.S. withdrawal and a genuine military disengagement from Iraq will need to make their voices heard if U.S. policy is to go beyond the half-measures set out by the Baker-Hamilton panel.

It is a point echoed by Tom Hayden:

But the ISG equivocates on the alternative to prolonged war, speaking of “one last chance” to “succeed.” The panel’s proposed gradual pullback of 15 US combat brigades by early 2008 is a welcome alternative to presidential rhetoric about “staying the course.” But there is no deadline attached to the recommendation. There is no recommendation that they all be brought home. The ISG envisions keeping at least 70,000 or more US troops in Iraq for the long-term. Does the ISG imagine that the Iraqi nationalist insurgency will fade away? Does the ISG imagine that a “new” Iraqi army with US trainers will succeed against a nationalist insurgency and militias? Will US trainers be successful where US ground troops failed? Or is this the revival of the “decent interval” doctrine that ended in the collapse of South Vietnam after the US withdrew? No one knows what may be between the lines of this report.

But on their face the ISG recommendations fail to reflect the desire of the American people, and the Iraqi people, for military withdrawal, as measured in polls. Sixty-two percent of all Americans favor withdrawing all our troops, either immediately or within one year. Eighty percent of all Iraqis feel the same way, even more strongly; sixty percent favor armed resistance against US troops.

A diplomatic offensive will succeed only if the US counter-insurgency, bombing and occupation is abandoned. Merely proposing to talk with Iran and Syria only postpones the question of whether US troops will be withdrawn. The American government should end its Cold War towards Iran and Syria and begin open-ended talks about solutions to regional problems, including the humanitarian crisis of cross-border refugees and a political settlement of the Palestinian crisis. But state-to-state diplomacy is no substitute for addressing directly the grievances of the nationalist resistance movement who have been fighting the occupation since 2003. Above all, they are demanding a timetable for withdrawal and support for a national reconciliation process.

The political goal of the ISG report appears to be a reduction of US casualties and maintenance of a low-visibility US occupation as another American national election looms in 2008. The danger is that many Americans will be lulled with the familiar and deceptive promise that “peace is at hand.”

Another critical take come in the form of this op-ed from The Boston Globe by Peter W. Galbraith, who served as the first U.S. ambassador to Croatia. He criticizes the report as one part self-deception, another part delusion:

Iraq has broken up and is in the midst of a civil war, but this is never acknowledged in the report. The panel seems to assume that nation building is still possible in Iraq, and this underlies its recommendations. The result is a report that, on the most essential points, is pie in the sky.

The report, rather than pointing a way out, may tether us to the smoldering inferno well into the future. The subtext, unfortunately, is Galbraith’s contention that partition is in the offing (he doesn’t say it directly, but he uses the experience of the former Yugoslavia as a template for much of his argument). I’m not sure, given the location of oil in Iraq that this makes sense (partition would somehow have to equally distribute oil wealth, which may not be possible without forced (and morally suspect) relocations.

But his overall point is key: The Baker panel has not faced the “reality of a disintegrated Iraq” and “has missed an opportunity to forge a consensus around concrete steps that could contain Iraq’s civil war and extricate the United States from the quagmire.”

Sen. Russ Feingold (clip from “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” from Crooks and Liars, via Brilliant at Breakfast) also isn’t buying it, nor is U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (who should have been chairman of the House Intelligence Committee).

I’ll leave the final word, for now, to Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive. He calls the report “criticism on the margins,” and “based on a central fantasy: that magically, within a year, the Iraqi Army will be able to take over most of the fighting from U.S. combat forces.”

And, most importantly, he worries that the report, rather than leading to a more open debate, will actually put an end to the discussion:

But having made its criticisms on the margins, the Baker Report is trying to silence others about the fundamentals.

“Success depends on the unity of the American people in a time of political polarization,” James Baker and Lee Hamilton declare in their opening note. “Americans can and must enjoy right of robust debate within a democracy. Yet U.S foreign policy is doomed to failure—as is any course of action in Iraq—if it is not supported by a broad, sustained consensus.”

That’s a bunch of crap.

The U.S. is going to fail there regardless of dissent here. And the Baker Report should not be used as a gag in the mouths of the majority of Americans who want all troops out within a year.

Just because James Baker and Lee Hamilton have spoken doesn’t mean the rest of us have to shut up and get in line.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick