The New York Times has an excellent piece about the Daschle debacle. It points to the fundamental point missed by the obsession with whether the former Senator(‘s accountant) made an error in calculating his tax: The real problem is not people who can’t understand and follow tax rules (i.e., all of us, at least on the understanding part). It is a system in which former Members can trade their status as former Members for millions of dollars.
This system is an economy. It only works if those being paid millions deliver millions (plus something) in value in return. And as the business model of being a public servant more and more becomes the business of becoming a well-paid ex-public servant, public servants within the system will do whatever they can to make this economy work. Think of it as a political life insurance policy — paid out when your public political life ends.
Daschle, of course, is the most innocent in this guilty system. His plan was to serve the public as long as he possibly could. The voters in South Dakota terminated that plan. His desire is to return to public service, working on a set of issues that he feels passionate about. Indeed, issues he actually knows something about. So no doubt, he is a good soul in a bad system.
But his goodness doesn’t inoculate the system. And the system is why no one should count on real CHANGE till it, the system, gets changed. Continue reading →

So argues William Hurley (to President Obama) at InfoWorld. Continue reading →

Here’s 4:51 from the Open Rights Group on the proposal to extend the copyright term for sound recordings in Europe. (Recall, we extended our term to match the Europeans, but then, surprise surprise, we actually overshot the Europeans in important categories, leading the Europeans now to argue they need to extend the term to match the Americans.)
There’s an event on 27 Jan in Brussels to discuss the issue. Continue reading →

Robert Sand wrote this thesis as an undergraduate at Brown (he is now a law student). Roughly put, it models the effect that the view that “money buys results” has on political participation. The idea he wanted to test is this: that the more you think “money buys results,” the less effective you think your own participation in the political process is, and thus, you participate less. And, by contrast, the less you think “money buys results,” (for example, because of citizen funding of elections), the more effective you think your own participation is, and thus you participate more.
He’s got an enormous range of data for this, and he finds statistically significant results supporting the thesis.
Sand wants to work on this more and eventually publish it. He has included his email address if you’d like to see the data. Obviously, there’s tons more work to be done here to verify and understand the model better. But I wanted to share this here (with his permission) because it is precisely the dynamic at the core of the concern that I am talking about: The expectation of illicit influence drives people to disengage — even if there isn’t any such influence.
If this model stands up, it will be an important contribution to this debate. Whether it does or not, quite a contribution from an undergraduate.
Meanwhile, less than 12 hours to vote on the Citizens’ Funded Elections proposal at change.org. At this moment, we need 6 votes to get into the second round. Continue reading →

Type “Apple Store Chestnut Hill” on your iPhone in Boston, and you get the map on the left. Follow the directions and you end up on a back alley — about a mile from the Apple Store in Chestnut Hill. Frustrated. And cold. And no longer in the holiday spirit. Continue reading →

Jamie Boyle’s fantastic new book is out. And he has beat me in getting it out with a CC license (soon, not soon enough, but soon). Download it for free here. Buy copies for all your friends (and 5 of your enemies) here.
And congratulations to Jamie. It was Boyle’s first book more than any work of scholarship that got me into this movement. It it wonderful to see the godfather return to print. Continue reading →

A powerful and good read. Continue reading →

REMIX has been released. There’s a site with stuff about it. There’s a link to buy it on Amazon. And there’s a page with reviews, including the one by L. Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading →

As reported in Politico, Grover Norquist has joined the Open Debate Coalition.

“I’m happy to join the Open Debate Coalition in calling for dismantling the Commission or fundamentally reforming it so it is accountable to one constituency only: the public.”

This now is the unavoidable goal: “dismantling the Commission.” The most astonishing thing about this process has been the totally non-responsive “Commission on Presidential Debates.” I could get top people from both campaigns to respond almost immediately to the requests we made. But the Executive Director of the Commission, Janet Brown, didn’t have time for even the courtesy of a response to an email.
Enough of that, and enough of them. Join us now in a call that the Commission formally release the debates to the public. Either ping the Executive Director or sign-up at OpenDebateCoalition.org. Join us later to help remake this Commission. Continue reading →

Barack Obama has reaffirmed the position he took in the primaries and asked the Debate Commission to support “open debates.” Here’s the letter.
Three key open questions:

1) Will the media pool choose to put their video of the debates in the public domain, so folks can freely blog key moments and share them without fear of being deemed a lawbreaker?
2) Will Tom Brokaw use some bottom-up debate questions collected and voted on on Google’s site, in addition or in place of the top-down ones the Commission collected?
3) Will the Commission adopt these principles for future debates, now that the candidates from both major parties embrace them?

And one final point: Now that both Senators have affirmed the “open debate” principles, its time for citizens to do the same. Please sign up below to support the call for “open debates.” Once again, the original letter to McCain and Obama is here.

Continue reading →