United Republic introduces The American Anti-Corruption Act.

United Republic has just announced its 9-point plan to get much of the big money and undue influence out of politics. They are looking for one million people to sign their petition right now, and eventually 100 million, because Congress is paralyzed and won't act. Change absolutely must come from the grass roots. United Republic believes that almost all of America's clashing groups can and will come together on this project. United Republic will actively require all members of Congress to declare whether they are with the program--the pro-money representatives need to get the boot. Interesting collection of folks on the board, including Josh Silver, Lawrence Lessig and reformed lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Take a close look at this effort, because this actually has a chance of getting traction. The name of the proposed act: "The American Anti-Corruption Act."

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What it takes to end a general’s career

Glenn Greenwald comments on what the media establishment cares about:

[General David Petraeus] has left a string of failures and even scandals behind him: a disastrous Iraqi training program, a worsening of the war in Afghanistan since he ran it, the attempt to convert the CIA into principally a para-military force, the series of misleading statements about the Benghazi attack and the revealed large CIA presence in Libya. To that one could add the constant killing of innocent people in the Muslim world without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight. Yet none of those issues provokes the slightest concern from our intrepid press corps. His career and reputation could never be damaged, let alone ended, by any of that. Instead, it takes a sex scandal - a revelation that he had carried on a perfectly legal extramarital affair - to force him from power. That is the warped world of Washington.

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Looking Forward?

As usual, Florida is still undecided, a mess. According to NPR, though, it is leaning heavily toward Obama, despite the shenanigans of the state GOP in suppressing the vote. I didn’t watch last night. Couldn’t. We went to bed early. But then Donna got up around midnight and woke me by a whoop of joy that I briefly mistook for anguish. To my small surprise and relief, Obama won. I will not miss the constant electioneering, the radio ads, the tv spots, the slick mailers. I will not miss keeping still in mixed groups about my politics (something I am not good at, but this election cycle it feels more like holy war than an election). I will not miss wincing every time some politician opens his or her mouth and nonsense spills out. (This is, of course, normal, but during presidential years it feels much, much worse.) I will not miss… Anyway, the election came out partially the way I expected, in those moments when I felt calm enough to think rationally. Rationality seemed in short supply this year and mine was sorely tasked. So now, I sit here sorting through my reactions, trying to come up with something cogent to say. I am disappointed the House is still Republican, but it seems a number of the Tea Party robots from 2010 lost their seats, so maybe the temperature in chambers will drop a degree or two and some business may get done. Gary Johnson, running as a Libertarian, pulled 350,000 votes as of nine last night. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got around 100,000. (Randall Terry received 8700 votes, a fact that both reassures me and gives me shivers—there are people who will actually vote for him?) Combined, the independent candidates made virtually no difference nationally. Which is a shame, really. I’ve read both Stein’s and Johnson’s platforms and both of them are willing to address the problems in the system. Johnson is the least realistic of the two and I like a lot of the Green Party platform. More . . .

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Two billion dollars per week for 11 years, but our leaders won’t level with us about Afghanistan

The War in Afghanistan. We've spent enormous blood and treasure on this adventure, yet it almost never shows up in most daily papers. The candidates for president almost never discuss it. In eleven years, no one has articulated why it is that we have invested so heavily in being there for eleven years. The official platitudes are based on horrific lies. No politician wants to discuss that our "ally" Pakistan is encouraging the Afghanistan insurgency. What should we say to the families of the soldiers who died there? Your loved ones died for what? "Freedom!" scream the politicians. No politician has discussed all of the things we could have done with that money had we truly invested in something permanent and valuable rather than something wasteful, tribal and destructive. No candidate has stated the obvious: We have been propping up a corrupt regime in Afghanistan. And the media cooperates with all of the above ignorance, making Afghanistan a bloodless, vague, distant thing that we don't know anything about, and we, as a nation, don't care that we know nothing about it. No one in power wants to admit that fighting wars is good insurance for re-election, or that it simply makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful and patriotic to fight a war, even an insane war.

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New cute bank trick

About two years ago, I took most of my money out of banks, putting it into a local credit union. I'm extremely happy with my credit union, which explains its procedures simply and doesn't hit you with dozens of tricks and traps. Well, maybe I should move my last account from Commerce Bank, a regional bank in the Midwest. Here's the latest trick/trap offered by Commerce. It offers online banking, but Commerce has decided that it will only let you SEE the past 6 months of your transactions online, unless you pay Commerce an extra fee of $6 or $10. Here's the notice that popped up on the Commerce website. You might be thinking what I'm thinking: They already HAVE all of the customer account data . It's not like it costs them anything more to display it ALL. But they would rather that you pay them something for nothing. After viewing the above page on my browser I took the above screen shot. I then tried to move forward by indicating that I would pay $0 for six months of displayed data. That's when I got the error prompt indicating that I still needed to make a "choice." Apparently, "Free" is not a valid choice. I had to log out and back in to circumvent this deceptive screen.

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