Search Results for: "Russ Feingold"

What do we want from our elected officials?

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Reading Jason Shephard’s excellent “Robarts Gets The Treatment” made me think about what we should expect from our elected officials.
Here are my initial thoughts:

  • Act Professionally
    Debate is essential to our form of government. Our elected leaders should engage in and value substantive debate. Nothing engages the public more than this type of dialogue.
  • Use Data to Make DecisionsThere’s a reason that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), and LAB (Legislative Audit Bureau) exist
  • Communicate: Tell the Whole Story
    Use the internet to converse with constituents.
  • Ask Tough Questions

Ruth Robarts and Kathleen Falk seem to be two local elected officials who are willing to challenge the status quo. Shephard is correct when he refers to Robarts as “Public Ally Number 1”
I consider Russ Feingold to be nearly a perfect politician. He’s idealist, yet has classic political abilities. He’s also very smart. Idealist in terms of compaign finance and local communications, political in terms of timely, political votes (NRA and Tax Giveaway) and smart (debates: where he shows that he knows the game very well). To his credit, he’s always willing to chat and ask questions.

Voter Information & Election Results

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Madison residents, find your polling places here. Dane County resident polling locations are here.
Madison & Dane County Results for County, State & Federal Races. This page will refresh periodically starting after 8:00p.m. tonight.
Following the elections via these blogs: UW Law Professor Ann Althouse Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Reynolds The Daily Kos Andrew Sullivan Dave Winer
One of the more interesting sites is technorati’s election watch. Google News
Candidate sites: Tammy Baldwin Dave Magnum Russ Feingold Tim Michels George Bush John Kerry
VOTE!

Nobelist Edward Prescott’s views on Tax Cuts

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An intresting yin to the professor’s yang on the Bush Tax Cuts:
Russ Wiles:

Prescott, speaking from Minnesota, where he advises the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, described Kerry’s plan to roll back tax cuts for top wage-earners as counterproductive.
“The idea that you can increase taxes and stimulate the economy is pretty damn stupid,” he said.
Bush’s campaign on Monday released a letter signed by Prescott and five other Nobel laureates critical of Kerry’s proposal to roll back tax reductions for families earning $200,000 or more.
In The Republic interview, he said such a policy would discourage people from working.
“It’s easy to get over $200,000 in income with two wage earners in a household,” Prescott said. “We want those highly educated, talented people to work.”
Prescott also gave Bush the nod on another controversial campaign issue, dismissing Kerry’s claims that outsourcing of jobs is damaging the economy. . . . Prescott also backed the idea, espoused by Bush, to reform Social Security by allowing some workers to place a portion of their payroll taxes into private savings accounts.

Personally, I’d rather see a more straightforward approach to taxes, than the ongoing deals with special interest groups that Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported recently. via instapundit

2 Shipbuilders Get Big Breaks in New Tax Bill

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As always, the rest of us get to pay. Evidently our senators, Russ Feingold (Yes) and Herb Kohl (“Present”) support these very narrow non populist measures. Edmund Andrews:

Under the bill, Navy shipbuilders would be allowed to once again defer paying most federal income taxes on a project until the contract was completed. Because it takes about five years to build an aircraft carrier and three years to build a destroyer, the shipyards would be able to delay their tax bills for years, allowing more opportunity to offset taxes against future losses.
….
“This provision takes dramatic steps to remedy the inequity of how naval shipbuilders pay their taxes,” Ms. Snowe said in a statement last week, just after House and Senate negotiators agreed to include the provision in a broader bill that would shower $140 billion in tax cuts across almost every segment of industry.
But critics said the provision would not create jobs, the stated intention of the tax bill, because employment at naval shipyards is determined almost entirely by federal spending on ships and submarines rather than by tax incentives.
“We’re not going to buy any more war boats if we give them a tax incentive,” said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research group here that has long scrutinized corporate tax practices. “We’re going to buy more boats if the government decides we need more boats.”

Business School Professors “Pen” a note on the Economy to President Bush

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An Open Letter to the President
These folks raise some useful points. The problem is not only with Bush. Interestingly, last week, Russ Feingold voted FOR one of the biggest tax giveaways…. (Kohl voted present).
The tax system is a complete mess and ripe for reform. Thinking of a solution, go read Mitch Kapor’s recent piece on our current political situation.

“Free Access to Every Work of Creativity.. is a Better World”

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David Weinberger:

[F]or one moment, I’d like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration even though they’re fair and important considerations and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!
…We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren’t passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist’s hands and enters our lives. And that’s not a betrayal of the work. That’s its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That’s artistic success, although it’s a branding failure.

Via Boing Boing
Related: Cory Doctorow’s recent anti-DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) speech to Microsoft is now available in a PDF file:

In this transcript of a speech he gave at Microsoft’s campus, Cory explains why DRM doesn’t work, why DRM is bad for society, bad for business, bad for artists, and a bad move for Microsoft.

Related 2: I recently emailed Dave Black, General Manager of the UW’s excellent WSUM radio station, complementing him on their “Student Section” sports talk show. I liked the fact that these student broadcasters, unlike many in the local sports media, are not ‘homers” with respect to UW Football. I also urged him to post their shows online in a iPod friendly mp3 format. Note his comments on the restrictions that the Hollywood paid for DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) places on their ability to share locally produced shows. The right solution? Cut deals with local artists/clubs and route around the outage.
Dave Replied:

Thanks, Jim,
What a pleasure to hear your kind words. Glad you enjoy the show, it is one of my favorites.
I have forwarded your email to our sports director, Joe Haas. He will take it up with our webmaster to see how feasible. As you may or may not know, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes archiving on a site difficult when it includes any musical content (e.g., the songs they play during the breaks). We will do the best we can under the circumstances.
All the best and please keep listening,
Dave Black
General Manager
WSUM-FM 91.7
University of Wisconsin-Madison
602 State St #205
Madison, WI 53703
608-262-9542 (no sales calls, please)
gm at wsum.wisc.edu
http://wsum.wisc.edu
visit our alumni organization at http://www.wsumfriends.org/

Yet another example of the “best law money can buy approach” is before the Senate: the Leahy/Hatch sponsored Induce Act. I recently emailed Senator Kohl to express my opposition to this bill. His reply was not great. Let him know what you think. Russ Feingold and Tim Michels should also know what you think.

Secret Laws

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Secret Hearings, trials without a defendant or defense attorneys? Right here, in the USA:

John Gilmore describes himself as “a civil libertarian millionaire eccentric.” He has recently garnered headlines because he refuses to show ID when boarding airplanes and is suing the Justice department and Southwest Airlines for not allowing him to travel in the U.S. without “showing papers.”
Some commentators, notably Hiawatha Bray at the Boston Globe don’t have much sympathy:
“The idea that we should be wasting our time arguing over whether it’s right to have to show ID before boarding a plane is too silly to deserve further discussion. I’m not trying to be rude; I just can’t take you [Todd Pinkerton] seriously, or Mr. Gilmore either.”
But Gilmore raised one deep concern in his foray against the Justice department: there appears to be a secret law that is being applied by the airlines, if not the TSA. What is the law? Who made it? How can I comply if I don’t know what it is? In a democracy that believes in the rule of law, this has got to be troubling.
t Gilmore raised one deep concern in his foray against the Justice department: there appears to be a secret law that is being applied by the airlines, if not the TSA. What is the law? Who made it? How can I comply if I don’t know what it is? In a democracy that believes in the rule of law, this has got to be troubling.
So, when the Ashcroft Justice Department demanded that the first hearing of the Gilmore case be held in secret, and that Gilmore and his attorneys be barred from it, things got even weirder, IMHO. This was beginning to sound like a proceeding from some totalitarian regime. The good news, in my opinion, is that the Court denied the DOJ motion.

– Chris Gulker
Memo to Republican Senate contender Tim Michels (running against incumbent Democrat Russ Feingold): The Patriot Act argument will not carry the day…..

A View of Wisconsin – ouch

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The Economist continues its series on swing states for this fall’s presidential elections. This week, they visit Wisconsin.

An interesting place that John Kerry is desperate to cling on to, but where independents tend to prefer George Bush
IT IS a quiet-looking state, a land of rolling hills, family farms and a few medium-sized cities in the middle of the northern stretch of the country. But, when it comes to politics, Wisconsin is more dramatic than it looks.

Then there’s this shot of reality (college grad retention and a generally ageing population):

Unfortunately for Mr Kerry, young liberals moving to Wisconsin are the exception rather than the rule in a fast ageing state. Without a smart urban centre of its own to attract young professionals, Wisconsin has seen an exodus of college graduates in the past two decades. It ranks 43rd among the 50 states in the share of college graduates in its workforce, says Terry Ludeman, a jobs expert. Meanwhile births are plummeting in its largely white population, down to about 65,000 a year from 93,000 at the height of the baby boom. As Wisconsin gets greyer, it is probably getting a little more conservative.

Fitting commentary, given my post yesterday on our state politicians poor priority choices…..

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