At Hearing That Features Kissinger, CodePink Demands His Arrest

Amy Goodman delivered the following report this morning as host of Democracy Now!

Socialist Response to the State of the Union Address, 2015

Tuesday, as she did last year, Councilwoman Kshama Sawant PhD of Seattle, who was elected citywide in 2013 and is a member of the Socialist Alternative Party, rebutted the annual speech by President Obama to Congress.

Granny D's Rebellion to Save Democracy Continues

Soon after arriving at the New Hampshire headquarters of the Kerry/Edwards campaign in order to help do its work, I noticed, on the wall, a newspaper clipping about the US senatorial race in that state and was fascinated to learn the Democratic nominee was 94 years old.  She was named Doris Haddock but was better known as "Granny D" and had earned international attention in 1999 when walking from Los Angeles, CA, to the US Capitol to raise awareness of the need for campaign finance reform.

Haddock ("Democracy Now!")

Although the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. "McCain-Feingold," became law, Haddock was continuing her fight by challenging Republican incumbent Judd Gregg with a candidacy she kicked off by walking across the Granite State.

The great-grandmother authored Walking across America in My Ninetieth Year, You're Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell and Granny D's American Century in addition to being the subject of the documentaries Granny D Goes to Washington and Run, Granny, Run! as well as of the plays Go, Granny D! and Granny D: The Power of One.  She died at age 100 but had lived to blast the decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  That decision allows unlimited, corporate, independent expenditures intended to influence public elections.

Today, the third walk organized by New Hampshire Rebellion -- a division of Open Democracy, which Haddock founded -- for campaign finance reform concludes at the State Capitol in Concord.  Events along the way included a presentation by law professor Zephyr Teachout, author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United.  Last year, Teachout ran for the nominations of the Working Families Party and the Democratic Party for governor of New York against incumbent Andrew Cuomo, who remains under federal investigation for shutting down a commission that had begun to probe some of the biggest contributors to his campaign.

Yesterday on Bloomberg TV's With All Due Respect, the Fordham University faculty member reiterated her support for a populist challenge to former secretary of State Hillary Clinton (whose previous campaigns were brimming with donations from special interests) for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The NH Rebellion is determined to ask every presidential candidate in the upcoming cycle, "What specific reforms will you advance to end the corrupting influence of money in politics?"  The voters had better elect the one who has the best answer.

Barbara Boxer's Greatest Hits

Barbara Boxer, the junior senator from California, announced Thursday she will not seek re-election.  Her current term, which is her fourth in the upper chamber of Congress, will expire in January 2017.  Here are some reasons why I have considered Boxer to be the least disappointing Democrat in the Senate ever since Russell Feingold of Wisconsin left that body in 2011.

Boxer (US Senate
Historical Office)

Four years after no senator joined 13 representatives in their objections to the illegitimate Electoral votes from Florida, Boxer partnered with the late Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio to challenge the illegitimate Electoral votes from Ohio, forcing Congress to debate and vote on whether to certify them.  Boxer was the lone senator to join the mere 31 representatives who opposed certification.

At the hearings on the nomination of Condoleezza Rice PhD to be secretary of State -- a nomination Boxer was one of just 12 Democrats to vote to reject -- Boxer grilled Rice on lies she told as George W. Bush's wife national security advisor, especially about the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- an operation of which Boxer was among only 21 Democratic senators to vote against authorization.

Boxer was one of merely three cosponsors of Feingold's proposal to censure Bush for his misconduct with regard to surveillance by the National Security Agency. 

Chairing the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, Boxer deflated her colleague James Inhofe of Oklahoma for trying, at a hearing on climate change, to prevent any of his time from being used by former vice president Albert Gore Jr. to answer questions the denier of climate change was asking him.

Lastly, I fondly recall Boxer's fine job at comedy in the episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled, "The Anonymous Donor."