Fix The Filibuster

Congress has left Washington and there will be no more chances to pass much-needed legislation before the election.

There will be no public option, no climate bill, no end to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," no new tier of unemployment benefits, no end of too big to fail, no response to the horrible Citizens United Supreme Court decision and no end to the crisis facing the federal judiciary caused by the dearth of judicial confirmations.

There is one reason why, despite Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, Congress was unable to pass many common sense reforms — the filibuster.

Tell the Senate: Fix the filibuster. Click here to automatically add your name.

The filibuster is an antiquated provision in Senate procedure that requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass legislation, confirm nominees or even perform some of the most mundane parliamentary tasks.

Filibuster abuse has gotten so bad that a staffer for Senator Jim DeMint (a Republican senator from South Carolina and the one most closely associated with the Tea Party) sent an e-mail to the offices of all the other senators explaining that Sen. DeMint would filibuster any bills he had not personally approved of moving to the floor.

This is what the filibuster has reduced the Senate to — an arena where moments of pique, inflated feelings of self-importance, the casual and callous disregard for the crises we face as a country, and political posturing can bring the business of the legislative branch of our government to a grinding halt.

Many progressives are frightened of filibuster reform.

Some defenders of the filibuster argue that we should keep it because the Senate should be a place for deliberation. If that's true, then the filibuster is exactly the wrong tool for the job.

There are over 400 bills that cleared the House and were not taken up by the Senate because of the filibuster or the threat of a filibuster, including many with broad bipartisan support. The filibuster hasn't led to deliberation in the Senate; the filibuster has led to debilitating constipation of the Senate.

Others want to keep the filibuster around so that a future progressive minority might be able to stop the excesses of a conservative majority. Even if you think that the Republicans will keep the filibuster in place when it's no longer to their benefit, it's hard to look back and survey the past history of the filibuster and deem it any near a net gain for progressives.

Look at what the filibuster has gotten us. The filibuster did not prevent the appointment of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that was able to hand the presidency to Bush. And afterward, it did not stop the appointments of reactionary and partisan Justices Roberts and Alito to the Court.

The damage averted during the eight years of the Bush administration because of the filibuster is dwarfed by the amount of progress the filibuster stifled in the two years since President Obama took office.

The simple fact is that we cannot allow the Senate to continue in such a dysfunctional manner. We need it to start functioning again if our nation is to meet the myriad challenges we face.

At the beginning of the next Congress, the Senate will be able to change the filibuster rules with a simple majority vote. There are multiple proposals on how to fix the filibuster, many of which have merit. But what is clear is that the Senate must seize this opportunity to fix the filibuster.

Tell the Senate: Fix the filibuster. Click here to automatically add your name.

Thank you for working for a better world.

Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager 
CREDO Action from Working Assets

P.S. Some progressives oppose efforts to reform the filibuster because they anticipate times when the filibuster will be used by a progressive minority to stop the overreach of a conservative majority.

If you look at the totality of how the filibuster has been used, it has on rare occasion achieved tactical success for progressives. But on the whole it has proved a strategic disaster for those who fight for social change.

The filibuster systematically works against those who want the government to function, who want to see our legislators address problems and fix things, and who want the government to move us past old prejudices and hateful laws written in the bad blood of our forbears.

And given the craven, callous disregard of Senate Republicans for the multiple crises we face as a nation, given their utter willingness to place political ambition and partisan gain over the need to legislate, is there any doubt that they will have the slightest scruples in eliminating the filibuster when it's to their advantage?

Rather than endure additional years of dysfunction in one of the most important institutions of our Republic, we should address the problem on our own terms.

Clicking here will add your name to this petition to all current senators and candidates for Senate: "I am writing today to demand that you support Senate rules reform and fix the filibuster at the beginning of the next Congress."  Click here to add your name

Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act

Senate to Vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act!	Take Action!
Before the Senate recessed last week to go home and campaign for the November elections, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) filed a cloture petition on the Paycheck Fairness Act. This is a big step forward for the bill and for pay equity. It means that the Senate will vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act after they reconvene on Nov. 15 following the election. This big step forward was made possible by your advocacy! But our work is not done! Now we all need to work to ensure that the cloture vote, a vote to end debate, passes. We need 60 votes to pass, so keep up that advocacy to ensure that the Paycheck Fairness Act passes the cloture vote in November. AAUW has been leading the coalition to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would close loopholes, strengthen incentives to prevent pay discrimination, and bring the Equal Pay Act in line with other civil rights laws. It would also prohibit retaliation against workers who inquire about employers' wage practices or disclose their own wages. Take Action! To urge your senators to support the Paycheck Fairness Act, just click on the “Take Action” link in the upper right corner or copy and paste the following URL into your Internet browser.  Then follow the instructions to send your message. http://capwiz.com/aauw/issues/alert/?alertid=15100991 AAUW’s Action Network makes it easy for advocates to influence  Congress to act on issues critical for equity for women and girls.  Help Action Network grow and be even more of a force in our  nation’s capital. Urge your friends and family to join AAUW’s  Action Network today.

Not That She Can Read, But...

Sarah Palin needs to learn about the true meaning of the First Amendment. And that's just what our friends at People For the American Way are setting out to teach her.

Palin's recent statements about the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center betray a contempt for the Freedom of Religion guaranteed by the First Amendment. And yet Palin has tried to use the First Amendment to stifle legitimate public debate that was critical of radio personality Laura Schlessinger.

Sign the petition to Palin and along with you signature People For the American Way will send Palin a copy of the First Amendment on your behalf.

Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager 
CREDO Action

Dear People For the American Way Supporter,

It is clear from her recent statements defending Dr. Laura Schlessinger's egregious on-air racial insensitivity and attacking the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque' that Sarah Palin does not know the first thing about the First Amendment.

Maybe she should read it again.

Our goal is to send tens of thousands... or hundreds of thousands... or with the help of Facebook and web users like you, maybe even a million copies of the First Amendment to Sarah Palin. If she reads it a million times, maybe the words will sink in and she might finally start to understand the concepts of Freedom of Religion and Free Speech.

Sign PFAW's petition now and we'll send Sarah Palin a copy of the First Amendment on your behalf!

Back when she was campaigning for vice president in 2008, Palin claimed her First Amendment rights were being violated because people criticized her rhetoric and some in the "lamestream media" questioned her scurrilous attacks on then-candidate Obama.

Now she has taken to Twitter to defend Dr. Laura Schlessinger's repeated use of the "n-word" on her radio show in a screed about how minorities are too sensitive about race and need to have thicker skins. Palin claims that Schlessinger's First Amendment rights are being denied because of the backlash against her remarks.

Unbelievable!

Someone needs to tell Sarah Palin that just as the First Amendment protects the right of Dr. Schlesinger to make racist, offensive comments, it protects our right to raise our voices in outrage. It's shocking that we'd need to explain this to any political leader, much less a vice presidential candidate from the most recent election who has since been since granted major spokesperson status in the media!

Send her a copy of the First Amendment now and hopefully a basic understanding of its clauses will sink in with repetition.

But it's not just the freedom of speech provision of the First Amendment that Sarah Palin doesn't comprehend — she's also unclear on the concept of freedom of religion. No one has been a more vocal critic of the planned Park51 Muslim community center in lower Manhattan. She has pointed fingers at Democrats, President Obama, "peace-loving Muslims" and others demanding that they take a position against a community center two blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood. One of the core principles expressed in the Constitution is the belief that people of all faiths, and of no faith at all, are equally welcome in public life. America betrays its deepest values when it says that minorities are welcome only if they know their place.

But Sarah Palin still doesn't get it! Let's help her.

Join our petition now to implore Sarah Palin to learn about this crucial piece of our Constitution which she invokes so recklessly and without understanding. We'll send her one copy of the First Amendment for every signature.

And, please, tell your friends. Our goal for this one is to get a huge response.

Thank you for standing up for freedom of speech, expression, the press, assembly and religion — thank you for standing up for the First Amendment.

Sincerely,

Ben Betz, Online Communications Manager

Truth vs. Truthy

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

September 30, 2010, 06:05 PM ET

Separating the Truth From the Truthy

By Travis Kaya

An Indiana University web project is separating the truth from the "truthy" in political Tweets online.

The project—named "Truthy," after Stephen Colbert's descriptor for misinformation dressed up as fact—mines Twitter to analyze patterns in political discussions and makes the information available online. The software allows visitors to take a closer look at Twitter trends to spot data manipulation by tech-savvy special-interest groups.

"We're trying to study how information propagates online through social networks, blogging, and social media," said Filippo Menczer, associate professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana, who is leading the research. Truthy, he said, attempts to answer the question, "Can we put together our understanding of complex social networks and crowdsourcing to automatically detect the spread of misinformation?"

Through the site's database of Twitter memes—ideas passed from user to user by retweets or mentions, often signified with hashtags like #TeaParty or usernames like@LadyGaga—visitors can track how often a meme is mentioned by how many unique users as well as the volume of tweets over time. Truthy also checks tweets against a list of words and word clusters compiled by psychologists to determine a tweet's mood. Truthy can tell, for example, whether users are hostile or supportive of #GOP at any given moment.

Visitors are also asked to identify memes that appear to have been tampered with by flagging them as "truthy." This crowdsourcing tool will allow users to see where misinformation is being spread and will eventually help researchers develop algorithms to automatically identify Twitter abuse by identifying "truthy" behavior. "We're interested to see if we can get reliable data from crowdsourcing," Mr. Menczer said.

The site has also introduced a new way to visualize memes as they emerge and grow. Maps of twitter memes—like #GOP, pictured above—show interactions between individual users (represented by black dots) as they connect via retweets (the blue lines) and @replies (the orange lines). As various user clusters spring up around a topic, their activities are mapped by the Truthy software. In the #GOP example, Mr. Menczer said two distinct clusters—conservative and liberal—have emerged with each clusters' users parroting members of their group with retweets and talking about members of the other cluster through mentions in @replies. That's why you see two dark blue clusters connected by a matrix of orange lines.

Truthy was inspired by a study on Twitter bombs—floods of messages by a small group of users to manipulate trending Twitter topics—done by a researcher team at Wellesley College earlier this year. Accoriding to researcher Pagiotis Takis Metaxas, a professor of computer science at Wellesley, the study looked at the tactics of a Conservative group that manipulated trending topics on Twitter on the day of a senatorial election in Massachusetts in January. The study found that the political group started nine Twitter accounts just days before the election and monitored Twitter users who were posting about the upcoming election. On election day, the group sent @replies with disparaging comments about the Democratic candidate and a link to the group's Web site to 60,000 users before they were shut down by Twitter administrators. The Twitter bomb not only spread misinformation about candidate Martha Coakley, but the tweet also appeared in Google search results since the search engine was displaying real-time messages online at the time. "As we were looking through the data, we suddenly realized that there was some pattern that was trying to influence Google," Mr. Metaxas said.

Although he does not believe the bomb had a major impact in the election outcome, Mr. Metaxas said the group's attempt to influence Twitter and Google search should make internet users more wary of what they read online. "People who are not very astute to the way these things work may get confused," he said. "We need to have very good critical thinking skills to survive."

While Mr. Menczer said the Truthy format is not yet set in stone, he hopes that the Web site will stop political groups from "abusing the system and spreading misinformation."

"Ideally," he said, "this will disincentivize the abuse."