A senior legal adviser to the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign is working behind the scenes to help enact a Missouri state constitutional amendment that critics say would suppress the vote in the key battleground state this November by requiring voters to show proof of citizenship.

Mark “Thor” Hearne, Bush-Cheney’s national counsel in 2004 and now a partner in the St. Louis, Missouri, firm of Lathrop & Gage, has been collaborating with Missouri’s Republican state Rep. Stanley Cox, the sponsor of the constitutional amendment, Cox’s office confirmed this week.

For years, Hearne has been a leading Republican figure demanding stricter voter-identification laws and popularizing claims about widespread voter fraud, although many election experts dismiss such alarms as hyperbole.

During the 2004 campaign, Hearne reportedly worked with White House political adviser Karl Rove on “voter fraud” issues and spearheaded GOP efforts to challenge voter-registration drives by pro-Democratic groups.

According to a posting at his law firm’s Web site, “Hearne traveled to every battleground state and oversaw more than 65 different lawsuits that concerned the conduct of the election.”

Hearne also has shown up as a background figure in the Bush administration’s scandal that erupted over the firing of nine federal prosecutors, some of whom came under White House criticism for not seeking pre-election voter fraud indictments in 2006.

More recently, Hearne has been instrumental in pushing state lawmakers to pass strict voter identification laws in Missouri, New Mexico, Indiana and other states. The Indiana voter-ID law recently was upheld by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hearne conducted much of this work through his now defunct organization, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), which called itself a non-partisan group defending voter rights and seeking to enhance public confidence in the fairness and outcome of elections.

However, an investigation into ACVR by blogger Brad Friedman reported that it concentrated on stricter voter-ID laws. “Thor Hearne helped to write that Indiana law, then Thor Hearne submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of Republican U.S. Congress members in support of it.”

GOP Strategy

Rather than an epidemic of illegal voters casting ballots, some election experts point to a nationwide Republican strategy of exploiting those concerns to depress the voting of low-income and minority citizens and thus boost the chances of GOP candidates.

Joseph Rich, formerly chief of the voting section in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said that under the Bush administration the department “shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights.”

“Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections,” Rich wrote in a March 29, 2007, op-ed in The Los Angeles Times.

“From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.”

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Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.

These are statistics that most Americans dont know, because the Bush administration has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has tried to present it as a war without casualties.

In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones.

The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake, went to trial last month at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing briefs until May 19 and waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already having an impact.

“Shh!”

That’s because over the course of the two week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis effecting wounded soldiers.

“Shh!” begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VAs Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.

“Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” the e-mail concludes.

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John McCain is planning to run as a different kind of Republican. But being any kind of Republican seems like some sort of death sentence these days.

In case you’ve been too consumed by the Democratic race to notice, Republicans are getting crushed in historic ways both at the polls and in the polls.

At the polls, it has been a massacre. In recent weeks, Republicans have lost a Louisiana House seat they had held for more than two decades and an Illinois House seat they had held for more than three. Internal polls show that next week they could lose a Mississippi House seat that they have held for 13 years.

In the polls, they are setting records (and not the good kind). The most recent Gallup Poll has 67 percent of voters disapproving of President Bush; those numbers are worse than Richard Nixon’s on the eve of his resignation. A CBS News poll taken at the end of April found only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP - the lowest since CBS started asking the question more than two decades ago. By comparison, 52 percent of the public has a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

Things are so bad that many people don’t even want to call themselves Republicans. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has found the lowest percentage of self-described Republicans in 16 years of polling.

“The anti-Republican mood is fairly big, and it has been overwhelming,” said Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis.

With an environment so toxic, does McCain have even a chance of winning in November?

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Last week’s Indiana primary put an exclamation point on one of the big civic-political trends of the year: Democratic turnout is surging.

Of all adult Hoosiers who could vote, 27.6 percent went to the polls to choose between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the fourth-strongest turnout this year — and more than 20 percentage points higher than in either of the state’s previous two presidential primaries. And something similar has happened across the country:

State by State: Click Here to View Chart

In Washington, D.C., and the 26 states that have had contested Democratic primaries all three times, turnout of the voting-age, citizen population in those contests has averaged 19 percent in 2008 — 9 points higher than in 2004 (when John Kerry wrapped up the nomination by early March) and 10 points higher than in 2000 (when Al Gore did likewise, and the GOP nominating contest was harder-fought.) More than one-quarter of adults showed up to vote Democratic in D.C., Vermont, New Hampshire, Indiana, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Ohio.

And 17 places recorded percentage-point turnout gains in double digits since 2000. The Republicans have not seen the same phenomenon; the turnout of adults for GOP primaries topped 20 percent only in New Hampshire this year, and in 15 states turnout was a smaller percentage this year than in 2000.

Exhausted and stultified by the endless Democratic primary? Gagging a little bit every time you hear that John McCain is a “maverick?” With all the attention paid to the presidential slugfest, it’s easy to forget that this November, over a third of the United States Senate will also be up for grabs. While supporters of reproductive rights fervently hope to see the White House back in pro-choice hands, the Senate would act as the crucial check on presidential power should that effort be thwarted. That’s because with veto power over federal judicial appointments, only Senators have the ability to stymie a conservative president’s attempts to place another anti-Roe justice on the Supreme Court.

Today’s Senate Democrats enjoy only a razor-thin 51-49 majority, meaning they can’t prevent conservative filibusters or override a presidential veto. And according to NARAL Pro-Choice America classifications, there are currently just 35 strongly “pro-choice” senators and 17 “mixed choice” senators (including majority leader Harry Reid), but a full 48 “anti-choice” senators. That means when it comes to protecting reproductive health and rights, every open seat can make a difference, whether Republican or Democratic. Here are some of the key races to look out for:

Maine

One might think that two-term Republican Senator Susan Collins would be facing a tougher than usual reelection battle this year because of her constituents’ frustrations with the conservative excesses of the Bush years. Still, polls show Collins leading her Democratic competitor, Rep. Tom Allen, by over 20 points. “Independent Democrat” Sen. Joe Lieberman has said he will campaign for her.

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American women, like those in other industrialized countries, take our family planning for granted. But we shouldn’t. It’s only been 40 years since family planning was recognized as an international human right.

It was May 13, 1968, that the International Conference on Human Rights, held in Tehran, declared that “Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children.”

It is an understatement to say that for women worldwide, this was a revolutionary declaration. For millennia, women were valued almost exclusively as mothers — while family planning was illegal. But women have sought means of limiting their mothering at least since Cleopatra tried using gold pellets. Women have always known that family planning gives them options — time to mature, to get an education or hold a job, or to recover from previous pregnancies.

Women also know that motherhood, though beautiful, is dangerous. More than 40 percent of all pregnancies suffer complications, and in 15 percent of pregnancies the complications are life-threatening. Infection, hemorrhage, high blood pressure (eclampsia), and obstructed labor, were routine killers of women worldwide, rich and poor alike, until the western medical advances of the 20th century. The Taj Mahal is a bereaved emperor’s monument to the wife who died at the age of 39 giving birth to his 14th child. In 1900, death in childbirth was still common, but women around the world bore an average of six children each.

The arrival of the intra-uterine device and the birth control pill in 1960 began the era of safe, affordable and effective contraceptives, and pressure from the post World War II generation of educated women gradually led to its legalization around the world.

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When The New York Times published its explosive “Pentagon Pundits” story on April 20, the result was a wave of criticism directed at the Defense Department for manipulating TV news coverage of the Iraq war. Critics also faulted the networks for failing to scrutinize the conflicts of interest of the “military analysts” who went on the air. Many of those retired military officers were being coached by the Pentagon to mislead the public, and many had personal financial stakes in corporations with major Pentagon contracts.

Routinely lost in the current uproar is the extent to which media managers have gone out of their way to suck up to the Pentagon. Top network executive Eason Jordan - who ran CNN’s news operation during the invasion of Iraq - is a case in point. He repeatedly asked the Pentagon for approval of the “military analysts” who were under consideration for on-air roles.

The documentary film “War Made Easy,” based on my book of the same name, shows the pervasive and long-running partnership between key news outlets and high-ranking warmakers in Washington. This video excerpt from the movie puts the “Pentagon Pundits” story in a broad and chilling context.

Years later, some news outlets like to critique the previous media spin for war. It’s part of what amounts to a repetition compulsion disorder - which includes participating in the corrupted process and then critiquing it long after the damage has been done.

Unfortunately, when the next agenda-setting for war gets underway, as is now the case for Iran, the mainline news reporting slides into a very similar mode of parroting official sources. It’s not hard to point the finger backwards and acknowledge misdeeds in the past. As Mark Twain said long ago: “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.”

From the “War Made Easy” transcript:

SEAN PENN [narrator]: CNN’s use of retired generals as supposedly independent experts reinforced a decidedly military mindset, even as serious questions remained about the wisdom and necessity of going to war.

NORMAN SOLOMON: Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting. But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it. You had a top CNN official named Eason Jordan going on the air of his network and boasting that he had visited the Pentagon with a list of possible military commentators, and he asked officials at the Defense Department whether that was a good list of people to hire.

EASON JORDAN [speaking on CNN]: Oh, I think it’s important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict. I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs up on all of them. That was important.

NORMAN SOLOMON: It wasn’t even something to hide, ultimately. It was something to say to the American people on its own network, “See, we’re team players. We may be the news media, but we’re on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.” And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press, and that suggests that we have some deep patterns of media avoidance when the US is involved in a war based on lies.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Sunday that Republicans are using “hate and divisiveness” to win elections.

Dean argued that the use of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) former pastor Jeremiah Wright in GOP ads in local races is “race baiting.”

“When you start bringing up things that have nothing to do with the candidate and nothing to do with the issues, that’s race baiting,” Dean said on Fox News Sunday in response to a question whether the Wright issue and his ties to Obama hurt Democrats down ticket.

“There’s a lot of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on issues, but the biggest issue of all is we don’t use this kind of stuff. We never have used this kind of stuff, and we’re not going to start now,” said the DNC chairman. “America is more important than the Republican Party, and that’s the lesson that the voters are about to teach the Republicans.”

In response, Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said in a statement that “voters are looking for strong leadership that has a positive vision to move us forward, but also recognizes the very real challenges we face by putting forward common sense solutions that grow our economy and protect our nation.”

Duncan criticized both Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as lacking an understanding of the economy and said the Democratic ticket in the fall will be headed by a candidate who “failed to follow through on their commitment to support the troops,” while standing with “the most radical elements of their party.”

On Sunday, Democrats appeared united in their desire to put the Wright controversy aside.

Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said Obama would not be a drag on the Democratic ticket.

On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the former first lady also weighed in on the issue.

“We should definitely move on,” Clinton said. “And we should move on because there [are] so many important issues facing our country that we have to attend to.”

Meantime, Obama said the Wright controversy has “distracted” his campaign.

“What he said did not bring the country together, it divided the country,” Obama said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

The Illinois senator said that he would “ultimately trust the American people to put this in context.”

Armed with potent drugs and new technology, a dangerous breed of soldiers are being trained to fight America’s future wars.

Amphetamines and the military first met somewhere in the fog of WWII, when axis and allied forces alike were issued speed tablets to head off fatigue on the battlefield.

More than 60 years later, the U.S. Air Force still doles out dextro-amphetamine to pilots whose duties do not afford them the luxury of sleep.

Through it all, it seems, the human body and its fleshy weaknesses keep getting in the way of warfare. Just as in the health clinics of the nation, the first waypoint in the military effort to redress these foibles is a pharmaceutical one. The catch is, we’re really not that great at it. In the case of speed, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency itself notes a few unwanted snags like addiction, anxiety, aggression, paranoia and hallucinations. For side-effects like insomnia, the Air Force issues “no-go” pills like temazepam alongside its “go” pills. Psychosis, though, is a wee bit trickier.

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KENANSVILLE, NC - An innocent man who spent 14 years on North Carolina’s death row after being wrongfully convicted for a 1987 murder will be released from prison today. Jones has been represented by American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project lawyers Cassandra Stubbs and Brian Stull, along with North Carolina attorney Ernest “Buddy” Connor.

Levon “Bo” Jones, an African American man who has always maintained his innocence, was sentenced to death in 1993 for the murder of Leamon Grady, a white man. Jones is the fifth innocent death row inmate to be exonerated in the United States in the past 11 months, and the third innocent North Carolina death row inmate to be granted release in the past six months. He is the 129th death row exoneree since 1973.

“We never had any doubt about Bo Jones’ innocence,” said Connor. “We knew when we started the case that there were serious holes in the evidence. After we began seriously investigating the case, it completely unraveled.”

A federal judge ordered Jones off death row in 2006 and overturned his conviction, declaring that the defense provided by Jones’ initial defense attorneys was so poor that they missed critical evidence pointing to his innocence. After keeping him imprisoned in anticipation of a retrial, the Duplin County, N.C. District Attorney announced Thursday that the state was dropping all charges and Jones would be released.

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John McCain [spent] the week promoting his health care scheme. The crux of the plan is to abolish employer-based health insurance and throw middle class working Americans to the wolves. It is market fundamentalism at its worst.

But I’m not here to talk about the policy details. I want to discuss message framing. During an election campaign, when our ultimate audience is persuadable voters, how do we talk about health care?

Let’s first understand McCain’s frame. His campaign understands one crucial fact (if nothing else): About 95 percent of the voters in the 2008 general election will be insured - the uninsured don’t tend to vote. Extensive polling and focus group research has shown, without a doubt, that people who are insured are more interested in preserving and improving their own coverage than in covering the uninsured. Americans want “quality, affordable health care.” But of the two concepts, they are more focused on affordability than on quality.

McCain is trying to convince voters that Democrats are all about covering the uninsured while he, on the other hand, is all about lowering health care costs. Understand that this is a good strategy because it fits voters’ stereotypes of Democrats (and is fairly true). To our credit, we focus on “universal” or “single-payer” coverage, “Medicare for all,” “Canadian-style” health, and the like. But this is not good message framing for the 2008 election.

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The voter engagement initiative is gaining traction in Fairfield County. We hope to use it as a model that can be replicated in other counties. It’s a project with great potential, and we’re excited to be doing hands-on work in rural communities. Stay tuned.

This is an exciting time for progressives. An inspiring new approach to politics has mobilized millions of politically ambivalent citizens. There is, for the first time in our lives, a genuine optimism that we can reclaim our country from a corrupt and morally bankrupt extremist group that has hijacked the discourse - and thus the dominant institutions - of the body politic.

And yet, there are dangers far greater than the smears we have seen so far.

As members of the Rockridge Institute, we have been unable to comment on the promise of the Obama campaign, and the perils progressives face in its midst, due to the restriction against partisan activities by 501(c)(3) nonprofits such as ours. The Rockridge Institute closed this week and, so, we are able to comment directly on our analyses of political campaigns. Now that we are free from legal constraints, we feel the need to help our fellow progressives prepare to face the challenges that lie ahead.

First, a note about the Rockridge Institute. This nonpartisan progressive think tank was founded by George Lakoff to shift the political debate through insights and analyses from the cognitive sciences. You can read the announcement declaring the end of the Rockridge Era here. In this article, we call for a new era for progressive politics informed by the opportunities and pitfalls we discovered through our work at this small shop based out of Berkeley, California.

A Wake Up Call for Progressives

Obama has ignited the civic passions of millions with an inspiring call to transcend the politics of the past and deliver on the promise of a more perfect union. His campaign is grounded in the fundamental American values and principles that have brought about progressive changes throughout our history. The success of this approach, though often criticized in the media, exemplifies a basic tenet that Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute have advocated for a long time, namely that voters are motivated by shared values and authenticity.

The Clintons and others criticized Obama when he rightly pointed out “Republicans were the party of ideas,” in recent decades, because they “were challenging conventional wisdom.” At a time when his opponents were trying to represent Obama as too far to the right, they linked these comments to his insightful observation that Ronald Reagan had successfully “changed the trajectory of America,” which they spun as Reagan worship. A key insight missed by the media during that trifle is that conservatives have indeed shifted the common sense of our nation - for the worse. For decades, conservative think tanks have churned out and propagated strategic initiatives that have undermined the founding principles of the United States. Meanwhile, progressives have been stuck in reaction mode, struggling to defend the policies of the past, issue by issue.

It has been an uphill battle to get progressives to recognize the need to (a) challenge the conservative principles behind all of their policies and (b) advance progressive principles to replace them. So, for example, when conservatives call for privatization of the central functions of government, progressives recoil in disgust. But when asked how to respond to privatization and the defunding of successful social programs, progressives remain stuck in the reaction trap and position themselves against the conservative thrust.

When prodded about their stance, they generally lack a proactive progressive response - such as the recognition that government has a positive moral mission to protect and empower its people, which led to a large middle class and our historic prosperity. An expansive middle class doesn’t happen naturally as the conservatives have worked to convince us. (Nor will global climate change just go away.) It takes community understanding of shared prosperity achieved through an infrastructure of government support and protection. But progressives aren’t getting this understanding out there. While the rich get richer and the middle class struggles, while we wait for polluters to voluntarily clean up their act, too many people continue to believe that middle class prosperity and clear skies just happen.

This lack of a coherent progressive vision leads to the creation of many single-issue organizations that simply react to conservative efforts to privatize, defund and dismantle X, Y or Z. Such organizations compete with each other for resources and fail to establish a public understanding of the vital role of government. It may be obvious to the people who work in these organizations, but it’s not the current common sense. Why not? Why aren’t good works enough? Because, everyday for the last 40 years, conservatives have been investing in long-term strategic efforts to undermine public appreciation for the positive and necessary role of government in a thriving society. Even failures, such as the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, enable conservatives to strengthen the perception that we can’t count on government to protect us. Too many people cannot separate Republican governing failures from government itself. And, so, we acquiesce to Republican privatization - instead of strengthening the Federal Emergency Management Administration, we get a transfer of governance to private companies like Halliburton and Blackwater.

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