The progressive movement is often difficult to pin down because allied groups use multiple names and organizations to spread confusion and give the appearance of both overwhelming numbers and independent expenditure.  We should not be fooled by this host of political malcontents attempting to co-opt state and local politics in the name of a national agenda. Examining the tactics of these groups gives us the key to understanding the purpose of organizations like the Secretary of State Project, ACORN, and Project Vote.  Our states are under concerted judicial assault from progressive lawyers, and they are many.

Let us first address the networks of influence.  Project Vote is the legal arm of ACORN, and in the cases we’ll study, conducted all of the informational build-up to bring suits against potential swing states.  It works like this: Project Vote files state versions of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, gathers relevant data, conducts studies, and contacts various state officials to coordinate these activities.  Once Project Vote gathers the minimal amount of information needed,  ACORN then files a complaint in federal district court.  A rotating pinwheel of other progressive groups join the suit and, often, The Brennan Center for Justice provides additional help through legal counsel.

The lawsuits at issue all involve violations of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA).  The NVRA requires states to conduct voter registration through (1) motor vehicle registration agencies, (2) mail, and (3) public assistance agencies.  HAVA (1) provides funds to states to improve election administration, (2) establishes minimum election administration standards for states, and (3) creates the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).  NVRA and HAVA require states to designate a “chief state elections official” to coordinate and implement state responsibilities under the acts.  Most states have designated their secretary of state as the chief state elections official.  Project Vote directs information-gathering to the secretary of state for each targeted state.  If the secretary of state becomes a stumbling-block to the efforts of Project Vote, SoSP targets that secretary of state for removal.  If the secretary of state aids and abets Project Vote, SoSP supports that secretary of state for re-election.

We start with a look at the past suits brought against the states.

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Today, in 1962, the United States banned all trade with Cuba. The Castro regime capitulated soon after…oh, wait…

HERE WE GO–

Andrew Breitbart just introduced tonight’s speaker SARAH PALIN.

Mindy and Madison were excited to hear Sarah Palin. They blogged this weekend, too.

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It was almost a dream come true.

The media reported that a group of a National Tea Party Convention counter-protesters were going to flock to the Opryland Hotel for a showdown.

But only 4 people showed up.

The mainstream media, of course, swarmed them.

The protesters belonged to the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition. They told the media they represent 35 of 44 tea party groups in Tennessee and they were upset with the event this weekend.

Right Wing News posted the group’s press release.

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On Friday, I appeared on Bill Moyers Journal with Harvard law prof and cyberspace theorist Lawrence Lessig to discuss the whys and wherefores of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. From the show’s writeup:

The Supreme Court’s January 2010 decision of the Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission on campaign finance regulations has caused a stir around the political spectrum. A poll from Angus Reid Public Opinion found that 65 percent of people surveyed disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision — 67 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Republicans, and 72 percent of independents.

Libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie says all that worry is misplaced in a much-watched video “Three Reasons Not to Sweat Citizens United.” “If you want to get bent out of shape about something, direct your ire at a massive and constantly growing government that has its hands in virtually every aspect of economic and social life in America,” Says Gillespie.

Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig disagrees, viewing the ruling as a another step in the takeover of democracy by big money. In an article for THE NATION entitled “How to Get Our Democracy Back: If You Want Change, You Have to Change Congress,” Lessig calls for a constitutional convention to make public financing of campaigns the law of the land, “What both sides must come to see is that the reform of neither is possible until we solve our first problem first — the dependency of the Fundraising Congress.”

As you might guess, we didn’t agree on much, but it was a spirited and civil conversation well worth having. A full transcript is available, along with video of the segment and links to related materials, by clicking on the image below.

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Here are a couple of shots from the Tea Party convention news conference which should answer the question, “Can you hear me now?”

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Andrew Breitbart raised the roof at the National Tea Part Convention this morning in Nashville, Tennessee. Speaking to the dozens of reporters assembled in the back of the room, Andrew said this:
“It’s not your business model that sucks, it’s you that sucks.”

Andrew finished his speech with this warning to the media:

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Popular conservative Erick Erickson has a change of heart at National Tea Party Convention.

Early in January RedState blogger Erick Erickson slammed the National Tea Party Convention. Erickson compared the convention organizers to Nigerian scam artists.

Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a “National Tea Party Convention” run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number.

I am led to believe a number of the sponsors who lent their names early on have grown wary of the event. That lines up with what I am hearing.

The tea party movement was always about the unorganized masses of concerned, passionate Americans uniting together with a common voice to protest the direction of the country. From that passion, others have sought to make money off the tea party movement. Some have done it for good. Many have not. And more and more we are seeing some people rise up to claim the mantle of “leader” of the tea party movement. Many of us who have been around for a while just want to know who the heck these so called leaders are.

But Erick Erickson had a change of heart. Today he is not as suspicious of the event. The RedState blogger actually was impressed with the convention and thinks it may bode well for the future of the tea party. We caught up with Erick earlier tonight:

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No president of the 20th century had a more positive and enduring influence than Ronald Reagan, who was born 99 years ago today. Other presidents, from Wilson to FDR, exceeded Reagan in their impact, but much of it was negative. Sure, they won wars, but they almost destroyed the American economy as well.

Reagan, by contrast, won the Cold War and also revived the American economy from decades of abuse. He was successful both at home and abroad.

Since President Reagan left the White House in 1989, the U. S. has stumbled, so it is wise to ponder why Reagan did so well. Was it natural intelligence or careful political training? Not really—and that fact both galls and baffles his critics. Reagan was a C student at lowly Eureka College and from there he went into small-town broadcasting, and then to Hollywood. He didn’t try to be governor of California until he was 55 years old.

Reagan had three parts to his genius. First, he was a visionary; he believed that people wanted freedom and would do well when more of it was given to them. Whether he was undermining the Soviets, challenging an unlawful union, or deregulating oil production he tried to move in a consistent direction of greater freedom and less government. According to Dinesh D’Souza, “Reagan’s greatness derives in large part from the fact that he was a visionary—a conceptualizer who was able to see the world differently from the way it was.” Reagan knew where he wanted to go: Jimmy Carter, by contrast, had multiple plans to create energy, to generate revenue, and to cut inflation. Often they were contradictory; all of them failed. Reagan was more consistent because he had vision: He knew where he wanted to go and how he wanted to get there.

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Today, in 1911, Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in rural Illinois. He’s the kind of leader who ordinarily comes along only once in a life-time. We’re hoping we can beat those odds.

Chuck Johnson is at it again. He must be out on a weekend pass. I was compelled to answer the Little Green Monster after I saw him go after James O’Keefe with that same tired wet noodle of a charge he has leveled at so many, calling him a white nationalist. Johnson claimed in an LGF post that “according to a group called ‘One People’s Project,’ ACORN sting filmmaker James O’Keefe was photographed attending a 2006 white nationalist conference titled ‘Race and Conservatism.’”

Sounds terrible, right? Sure, until you get the facts that Johnson doesn’t tell you. When it became clear that it wasn’t a “white nationalist conference,” Johnson tried to slither out of responsibility for his words by saying in a new post: “It’s very clear that I attributed the ‘white nationalist conference’ claim to One People’s Project; that’s what the words ‘according to’ mean.”

Busted! As if it weren’t obvious that in his original post, he was approving of and endorsing what One People’s Project said. But this is typical of Johnson’s weaselly hit-and-run smear tactics.

Meanwhile, Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism uncovered the truth about O’Keefe’s supposed participation in this conference:

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This week we broke the story of possible criminal wrongdoing in the government takeover of insurance giant AIG. In the last several months, the US government has tried, unsuccessfully, to throw out plaintiff Kevin Murray’s case, alleging that the government’s takeover of AIG puts it in the position of supporting and promoting Islam and Shariah finance.

This past Tuesday, Federal district court judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff rejected the Treasury Department’s and the Fed’s effort to prevent any further discovery while the government attempts to convince the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Judge Zatkoff’s earlier ruling rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss the federal lawsuit challenging the government’s takeover of AIG on First Amendment-Establishment Clause grounds.

Tim Geithner: The “extraordinary move to depose a sitting Treasury Secretary”

The lawsuit, captioned Murray v. Geithner et al., was brought by attorneys David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise, representing the plaintiff, Kevin Murray, a tax payer and former combat Marine who served in Iraq. The federal lawsuit alleges that the U.S. government’s takeover and financial bailout of AIG was in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

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You just knew before this weekend was over that the mainstream media would insert itself into the story.

The presss conference was packed today at the National Tea Party Convention but not everyone acted like they were glad to be there.

The media elites could only sit on their hands for so long. After biting his lip for twenty minutes New York-based ABC reporter John Berman ripped into the National Tea Party Convention leaders at their press conference today.

John was visibly upset after attending former Rep. Tom Tancredo’s speech last night at the conference. Instead of confronting Tancredo, Berman attacked the organizers of the event and demanded they speak for the former representative. Berman also attacked organizer Mark Skoda for not listing the names of the board members of a newly formed organization after Skoda said he would have the names listed by the end of the week… Funny, Berman’s never been this hard on Team Obama?

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Lots of politicians make promises they can’t keep.  Statesmen, by contrast, promise less and deliver more.  Knowing their own limitations and those of the people they serve, they act according to principles, not just promises.

As a presidential candidate Barack Obama promised the American people nothing less than a new nation.   “. . . We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he said just before he was elected president in November 2008.

Since his victory the president has made very clear his reverence for the idea of transformational leadership.  He has identified “transformative moments” that must be seized,  lauded “leaders who are able to bring about transformative change,” and heralded his administration’s steps towards “a transformation of how government works.”

The president’s efforts to make his idea of “transformational leadership” real are everywhere.  Whether in massive bailouts, sweeping health care reform legislation, an attempt to overhaul the student loan system, or a proposed revamping of financial regulations, the president has sought a transformation of huge swaths of American life with little regard to the constitutionality of these efforts.

Mr. Obama has done all of this while at the same time linking his idea of transformation to the sixteenth American president.  Asked in July 2009 who his heroes are, President Obama singled out Abraham Lincoln for the highest praise.

The president’s admiration both of Lincoln and the idea of transformational leadership is perplexing, because for Lincoln the idea of “transformational leadership” was not just foreign, but something he had to fight.

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… at least that’s what the latest Gallup numbers would suggest: “Socialism Viewed Positively by 36% of Americans”

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The 13th Annual Energy & Environment Conference, held in Phoenix Feb. 1-3, isn’t the sort of place where global warming “deniers” are exactly welcome. In fact, by my observations, the skeptical caucus at the event consisted entirely of: James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute; Keith Lockitch, a fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights; and me. All the other attendees spent their time discussing how the U.S. government — or, even better, a “global government” — needs to compel us all to live “greener” lives through schemes like cap-and-trade. Environmentalists are a bossy and power-hungry lot.

Lockitch gave a presentation arguing free-market economies are better positioned than socialist societies to deal with any severe weather events caused by climate change — and was called a “denier” and compared to a shill for “Big Tobacco” for his trouble. Taylor got off a little easier, receiving only scoffs and curious-to-annoyed glances for asking inconvenient questions.

But that’s not to say we were the only people to question the assumptions of the attendees who believe the “science is settled” on global warming. Perhaps the greatest challenge came from one of their own — renowned climate scientist William Sprigg — who urged his colleagues to stop treating the ClimateGate scandal as irrelevant noise promoted by “deniers.” In an amazingly telling moment, green energy consultant Andy Van Horn, who introduced Sprigg, admitted he’d never heard of ClimateGate until Sprigg suggested it a few weeks ago as a topic worthy of discussion. (Who are the real “deniers” again?)

Sprigg, adjunct research professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, believes the planet is on a potentially dangerous warming path and atmospheric carbon dioxide is to blame. He also led the technical review of the first global warming report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990. Clealry, Sprigg is no “outlier” or “rebel,” but one of the most respected and “mainstream” scientists in the field of climatology. So it came to a bit of shock to the audience when Sprigg expressed concerns about how contrarian scientists are treated with contempt by many of his colleagues.

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Smart Girl Politics led a breakout session this morning on “Conducting a Voter Registration Drive.” One of Smart Girl Politics goals is to focus on educating conservative women. As part of that goal, SGP members members Michelle Moore (r) and Bridget Blanton led the meeting.

Michelle Moore, SGP Director of Technology, and Bridget Blanton, SGP National Voter Registration Coordinator, led the training session at the event focusing on Women in Politics and Voter Registration. Michelle Moore will be tweeting the conference this weekend. The Smart Girls give a voice to smart, strong, well-informed conservative women. The Smart Girls are the women who will take back this country.

Smart Girl Politics is committed to providing a conservative community for women to express their opinions and ideas in an open and welcoming environment. SGP is dedicated to reaching out into the community to engage, educate, and empower conservative women to take a more active role in politics. And finally, we will debate and develop clear positions that encourage conservative activism in order to counter the negative activity of popular culture that is often found in the main stream media.

Michelle opened up the session and was terrific. She made St. Louis proud. Michelle said she found a home in Smart Girl Politics. She says she is inspired and empowered by the strong women of this movement.

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In what quickly became the headline story from the results of the Illinois Primary on February 2nd, Scott Lee Cohen was nominated as the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor. This charming gentlemen spent around $2-$3 million of his own money to win the election.  Here is where things get weird.

Dem Lt Gov Candidate Scott Lee Cohen

The Chicago Tribune, in writing on his victory, immediately highlighted he was charged with domestic battery. Then news came fast and furious. He was a chronic user of anabolic steroids. He was abusive to his wife and children and even went so far as to try to “force himself” on her. He held a knife to his prostitute girlfriend’s throat. As he was spending millions running for office, he was a dead beat dad falling behind on child support payments he obviously could afford. His divorce file was found and put online. Those documents were not even sealed.

This, of course, presents a huge problem for Illinois Democrats. The Lt. Governor runs independent in the Primary but in the General the Governor and Lt. Governor are paired.  Governor Pat Quinn is, understandably, less than pleased. However, by law, there is no way to get rid of the Lt. Governor candidate unless that person drops out. To say the Democrats are in a state of panic is to put it mildly.

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Editors Note: This post is re-printed with permission from The Nation magazine, where it appears as the February 4, 2010 cover story. You can see a video interview with Professor Lessig about the piece here, or take action on issues raised in the piece by visiting FixCongressFirst.org.

We should remember what it felt like one year ago, as the ability to recall it emotionally will pass and it is an emotional memory as much as anything else. It was a moment rare in a democracy’s history. The feeling was palpable–to supporters and opponents alike–that something important had happened. America had elected, the young candidate promised, a transformational president. And wrapped in a campaign that had produced the biggest influx of new voters and small-dollar contributions in a generation, the claim seemed credible, almost intoxicating, and just in time.

Yet a year into the presidency of Barack Obama, it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed. Not because it is too conservative. Not because it is too liberal. But because it is too conventional. Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign–a campaign that promised to “challenge the broken system in Washington” and to “fundamentally change the way Washington works.” Indeed, “fundamental change” is no longer even a hint.

Instead, we are now seeing the consequences of a decision made at the most vulnerable point of Obama’s campaign–just when it seemed that he might really have beaten the party’s presumed nominee. For at that moment, Obama handed the architecture of his new administration over to a team that thought what America needed most was another Bill Clinton. A team chosen by the brother of one of DC’s most powerful lobbyists, and a White House headed by the quintessential DC politician. A team that could envision nothing more than the ordinary politics of Washington–the kind of politics Obama had called “small.” A team whose imagination–politically–is tiny.

These tiny minds–brilliant though they may be in the conventional game of DC–have given up what distinguished Obama’s extraordinary campaign. Not the promise of healthcare reform or global warming legislation–Hillary Clinton had embraced both of those ideas, and every other substantive proposal that Obama advanced. Instead, the passion that Obama inspired grew from the recognition that something fundamental had gone wrong in the way our government functions, and his commitment to reform it.

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