Depression, Mania, Politics, and Religion All from the Left Side

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by EZRA KLEIN, The Washington Post

The political-science evidence is clear on this: There’s no such thing as an election mandate. There’s only what a president is able to get done with the Congress the American people gave him.

But few politicians agree. And so the days and weeks after elections are heavy with arguments about who has a mandate, and for what. The latest debate is about whether President Obama, who ran a campaign explicitly promising to raise taxes on high earners and who beat a candidate explicitly promising to refuse any and all tax increases, has a mandate to raise taxes.

Speaker John Boehner says he doesn’t. “Listen, our majority is going to get reelected,” he said the day before the election. “We’ll have as much of a mandate as he [President Obama] will … to not raise taxes.”

Boehner’s logic is, on its face, sound. House Republicans have been as clear in their opposition to new taxes on the rich as Obama has been in his support for them. And House Republicans were reelected. They have as much right to claim a popular mandate as the president does.

Or they would if they’d actually won more votes. But they didn’t. House Republicans did the equivalent of winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote. [MORE]

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It’s not news that special-interest money is increasingly making it harder for our representatives to hear or care what We the People have to say. What IS news is that we’ve just helped create a BIG step in remedying this growing problem.

Coffee Party Austin has joined a new coalition of pro-democracy groups called Texans United to Amend in creating anonline petition that asks local government entities to pass resolutions in support of a constitutional amendment. We urge you to click here to sign the petition which states:

“I urge my local government to pass a resolution that seeks an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that only human beings, not corporations, unions, or similar entities, are entitled to constitutional rights.”

Please sign the petition, forward this email to at least two Texans and ask them to sign the petition themselves and pass it on to other Texans. You can also help by sharing the petition on Facebook using the link on the confirmation page.

Polls show that the vast majority of Americans are very concerned about the largely unregulated and unlimited amounts of money used to influence local, state and national elections, so you can expect a receptive audience.

Coffee Party Austin and the Texas United to Amend coalition invite you to join the growing movement that will change our electoral system by signing the petition now.

See on secure3.convio.net

See on Scoop.it – My Liberal Politics

The Obama administration says the project will improve the grid; environmentalists say it will harm public lands.

This is the kind of debate that should be going on in Congress or some public forum so voters can be informed. (By the way, I support the power line as necessary.)

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