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The Swamp (2020): Official Trailer | HBO

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University of California Television (UCTV)

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The Rise of Political Polarization -- Goldman Stories: Henry Brady

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In 2005, in the midst of a career of traveling around the world to help set up elections in some of the most challenging places on earth - Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan and Yemen, among others - my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.

In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.

When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina's overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table - a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

That North Carolina can no longer call its elections democratic is shocking enough, but our democratic decline goes beyond what happens at election time. The most respected measures of democracy - Freedom House, POLITY and the Varieties of Democracy project - all assess the degree to which the exercise of power depends on the will of the people: That is, governance is not arbitrary, it follows established rules and is based on popular legitimacy.

The extent to which North Carolina now breaches these principles means our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy.

First, legislative power does not depend on the votes of the people. One party wins just half the votes but 100 percent of the power. The GOP has a huge legislative majority giving it absolute veto-proof control with that tiny advantage in the popular vote. The other party wins just a handful of votes less and 0 percent of the legislative power. This is above and beyond the way in which state legislators are detached from democratic accountability as a result of the rigged district boundaries. They are beholden to their party bosses, not the voters. Seventy-six of the 170 (45 percent) incumbent state legislators were not even opposed by the other party in the general election.

Second, democracies do not limit their citizens' rights on the basis of their born identities. However, this is exactly what the North Carolina legislature did through House Bill 2 (there are an estimated 38,000 transgender Tar Heels), targeted attempts to reduce African-American and Latino access to the vote and pernicious laws to constrain the ability of women to act as autonomous citizens.

Third, government in North Carolina has become arbitrary and detached from popular will. When, in response to losing the governorship, one party uses its legislative dominance to take away significant executive power, it is a direct attack upon the separation of powers that defines American democracy. When a wounded legislative leadership, and a lame-duck executive, force through draconian changes with no time for robust review and debate it leaves Carolina no better than the authoritarian regimes we look down upon.

What is to be done? How do we reverse the slide and become a democracy once again? Many of the issues that face us are national questions, but there are flaws in our government that can be corrected at the state level.

The first step to recovery is self-awareness. We need to put aside the complacent hyperbole and accept that in North Carolina we no longer live in a functioning democracy worth its name. We have become one of those struggling developing world states that needs to claw its way slowly toward democratic integrity.

Practically we need to address the institutional failures which have cost us our democratic ranking - districting, equal access to the vote and the abuse of legislative power. An independent commission is the sine-qua-non of democratic districting (no democracy in the world outside of the U.S. allows the elected politicians to draw the lines). Voter registration and poll access should make voting as easy as possible and never be skewed in favor of any one section of society. Last, elected officials need to respect the core principles of democracy - respect the will of the voters, all the voters and play the game with integrity.

Respect for democracy is not a partisan issue. In America true Republicans are as loyal to democratic principles as are Democrats.

Andrew Reynolds has consulted in over 25 nations on issues of democratic design since 1991. His most recent book is The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (Oxford). He is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Point of View: North Carolina no longer a democracy

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In the just released EIP report, North Carolina's overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.

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Twenty-two-year-old Dylan Playfair sets out on a road trip across North America to find out why his generation isn't turning up at the polls.

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(I haven't watched this)

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война с россией

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война с украиной

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For many people the Fake News phenomenon has come from nowhere to dominate the airwaves, column inches and internet. But it hasn't. New documentary by British journalist Tim White traces the roots of fake news, from the second world war, via Estonia, the war in Ukraine, and MH17 through to President Donald Trump.

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'State of Surveillance' with Edward Snowden and Shane Smith (VICE on HBO: Season 4, Episode 13)

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THE I's had been dotted; the T's were crossed. The 55 delegates to America's first and so-far-only constitutional convention had hammered out compromises on the separation of powers, apportionment of seats in the legislature and the future of the slave trade. But on September 15th 1787 George Mason, a plantation owner from Virginia, rose to his feet to object.

Article V of the draft text laid out two paths by which future amendments could be proposed. Congress could either propose them itself, or it could summon a convention of representatives from the states to propose them. Mason warned that if the federal government were to become oppressive, Congress would be unlikely to call a convention to correct matters. To protect the people's freedom, he argued, convening power should instead be vested in the states. Should two-thirds of their legislatures call for a convention, Congress would have to accede to their demand: a convention they should have.

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The constitution was signed two days later, with Article V changed as Mason had suggested. Since then 33 amendments have been proposed, with 27 subsequently ratified, a process which requires approval in three-quarters of the states (see chart 1). Whether the issue was great (abolishing slavery) or small (changing the date of presidential inaugurations), all 33 of the proposals came from Congress. Mason's mechanism for change driven by state legislatures has never been used. Even politically informed Americans often have no idea it exists.

That could soon change. In recent years the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force (BBATF)-a shoestring group that received just $43,000 in donations in 2015-has been campaigning with great success for such an "Article V" convention. There are now 27 states in which the legislatures have passed resolutions calling for a convention that would propose a balanced-budget amendment. The two-thirds-of-the-states threshold for calling a convention is 34. And, as it happens, there are seven states which have not yet called for a convention to propose a balanced-budget amendment, but in which Republicans control both houses of the legislature.

The earliest all seven could plausibly make the call is 2019, because Montana's legislature is not in session again until then. Bill Fruth, a co-founder of the BBATF, says that by that point he hopes to have the other six in the bag. If he does, then a convention would be on the cards. If his efforts falter, a bigger push is waiting in the wings. Called the Convention of States (CoS), it promises amendments on three topics: a balanced budget, limiting the federal government's power and establishing term limits for members of Congress. Led by Mark Meckler, a former Tea Party activist, the CoS got its first resolution passed in 2014. But it has grown fast. It is far better-funded than the BBATF and claims 2.2m volunteers across the country; its advisers include Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, two influential former Republican senators. Its resolution has now passed in 12 states.

Mr Meckler, like Mr Fruth, says he aims to have 34 states signed up by the end of 2019. Outside observers take that prediction seriously. Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers' Union (NTU), which has long advocated a balanced-budget amendment, puts the probability of an Article V convention being called by 2020 at 50-50. So does Jay Riestenberg of Common Cause, an organisation devoted to government reform which fiercely opposes an Article V convention.

Take a bow for the new revolution

The idea has support that extends well beyond those fixated on fiscal probity. Although the most successful Article V campaigners have been conservatives, some on the left like the idea, too. They think the status quo is defective, that constitutional fixes need to be applied and that a convention ostensibly called for the purposes of a balanced-budget amendment might, once in session, be convinced to widen its ambit and consider other amendments too. This prospect-a "runaway" convention-persuades others that Article V is a Pandora's Box which needs to be kept firmly shut. It may not be much longer before it becomes clear which side is right.

The want of any previous Article V convention in the past 228 years is not for lack of trying. No one has a firm count of the number of resolutions that state legislatures have passed calling for one, but it is over 500. In 1963 Arkansas even passed a resolution calling for an Article V convention to put forth an amendment removing Mason's convention procedure from Article V. Today, 42 states have at least one Article V application pending.

Given that Article V says Congress must call a convention once two-thirds of the states have asked for one, why has it not? One answer is that no one with standing has gone to court and asked it to. Another may well be that, without conscious deliberation on the subject, Congress has decided that it needs 34 applications not just for any old convention, but for a specific convention: applications that share a topic, wording and the like. This is what the BBATF and CoS are trying to provide.

They are not the first to make such a push. In the 1970s the NTU began a campaign to pass state resolutions for a convention on a balanced-budget amendment. By 1983 the project was on the brink of success; 32 state legislatures, some of them Democratic, had signed up, and California and Montana were set to hold ballot initiatives that would have forced their legislatures to add to those applications. But state courts ruled the two ballot initiatives unconstitutional, and the effort stalled (see chart 2).

With the amenders' momentum sapped, their opponents gained the upper hand. Somewhat surprisingly, the most effective response came from the right. The John Birch Society, a far-right fringe group, launched a counter-campaign; the Eagle Forum, a conservative group best known for its fight against an amendment guaranteeing women equal rights to men, led a similar charge. By the late years of Bill Clinton's presidency the budget was in surplus, taking further wind out of the movement's sails. Many states which had passed resolutions rescinded them.

But under George W. Bush the deficit returned, and in 2009 the financial crisis drove it up to levels not seen since the second world war. "When I saw [the Federal Reserve] printing currency, that's when I got motivated to work on this," says Mr Fruth. "I became frightened as a citizen." One year later, Republicans swept the midterm elections. Democrats lost hundreds of seats in state legislatures. Because 2010 was a census year the newly empowered Republicans were in a position to oversee redistricting, and thus in some places able to cement their new advantage. In 2009 there were 14 states where Republicans controlled the whole legislature. By 2017 there were 33. The landslide of 2010 opened a purely partisan path to a convention.

Since 2010 the BBATF has helped get resolutions passed in 15 states which previously lacked them. But its opponents have swung back into action, too. They fall into two camps: those who fear that an Article V convention will do what its advocates want it to, and those who fear that it will not. The first cohort consists primarily of liberals, who see a balanced-budget amendment as a vehicle for right-wing dreams of rolling back America's welfare state. "The right is very frustrated with Congress's inability to cut these social-safety-net programmes, and this is their backdoor way to do it," says Chris Taylor, a Democratic assemblywoman in Wisconsin. At a conference held in 2013 by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that writes model conservative bills for state lawmakers to introduce, Ms Taylor remembers hearing delegates talk about "the purpose being to kneecap the federal government and prohibit it from regulating and spending in every area except national defence."

A larger group of critics, whose strange bedfellows include the Birchers, the American Civil Liberties Union and Common Cause, has focused on the risk of a runaway convention veering off into non-budgetary topics. The opportunity to propose amendments without the normal hurdle of getting them past two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate might prove hard for ideologues to resist. Would conservative delegates really vote against, say, a separate amendment asserting that the protections of citizenship start at conception?

Arguments like this have worked in some more liberal states. Delaware, which passed an application for a balanced-budget amendment in 1976, rescinded it last year; New Mexico, Maryland and Nevada followed suit in 2017. But that tactic seems to have run out of room; none of the remaining 27 states looks likely to rescind. Instead the focus is now on the seven states with Republican-controlled legislatures that have yet to request a convention: Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin. In some of these states, opponents are putting up a strong enough fight that a convention is not a foregone conclusion. In March the Idaho Senate, where Republicans hold a 29-6 majority, shot down an Article V application.

Virginia's House of Delegates approved an Article V application in 2016, but Richard Black, a Republican state senator, has helped stymie the resolution's progress with warnings of devious Democrats hijacking a convention. "They could change freedom of religion to say certain teachings from the Bible are hate speech," he told supporters by e-mail in 2015. "They could take away our right to own a gun."

And there are indeed people on the left who like the idea of turning such a convention to their own ends. Two Republican majorities in Congress alongside a Republican president have made the idea of restraining the federal government more appealing to liberals. An Article V convention has a prominent advocate in Lawrence Lessig, an idealistic law professor at Harvard, who argues that it is the only way to achieve campaign-finance reform. Mr Lessig envisions a grand bargain of "electoral integrity for fiscal integrity", in which the left would reduce the amount of money in elections and the right would reduce the amount spent by government.

To allay the fears that Mr Black and Mr Lessig might stir in Republican hearts, the BBATF and CoS insist that a convention could put forward amendments only on the subjects listed in the states' applications. Sponsors in some states, such as Wisconsin, have proposed state laws that would ban delegates from casting votes on unrelated topics. But Article V itself says nothing about limiting the scope of a convention. Indeed, it says nothing about many issues which, were a convention to be called under its auspices, would become contested: who would attend; whether it would be open to states that had not called for it; what limits might be placed on its delegates; by what majority an amendment would need to pass to be proposed; and so on.

In the absence of such guidance the BBATF convened a meeting in Phoenix this September to hammer out its own rules for a convention. In spite of a raucous group of protesters-one dressed as George Washington, complete with wig and stockings, and another wielding a sign scolding the delegates "You're No Hamilton"-they agreed to give each state one vote regardless of population, and to limit the subject matter to the issue named in the states' resolutions, even if a supermajority wished to add new topics.

But fun as they were to debate, the recommendations from the pow-wow in Phoenix have no formal standing. Nor do the rules that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1984 for the convention on the balanced-budget amendment then being proposed, which would have seen the senior senator of the majority party and the Speaker of the House preside over the convention, and required a three-fifths vote of delegates to establish rules of procedure. If Congress does call an Article V convention, it can also pass a new law governing the delegates' behaviour.

But if the convention ignores such strictures, there might be no way to enforce them. Once a convention was under way, its procedures would almost certainly be immune to judicial review. In 1939, when the Supreme Court refused to set a ratification deadline for a proposed constitutional amendment, it established a precedent that the mechanics of amendments are a "political question", reserved for elected branches of government. "There is absolutely no force that can override what the convention does," says David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law. "Congress can send them rules, state legislatures can send them rules, but they can do what they want. I'm not sure there'd even be one vote for blocking it on the Supreme Court. The precedent is that strong."

Liberated from the fold

The convention's freedom applies only to proposing amendments. Those changes still need to be ratified by 38 states-which proponents of a convention say offers a crucial check on anyone doing anything they do not approve of. Mr Lessig dismisses CoS's wish list of amendments as "a certain loser" at the ratification stage. Mr Meckler says Mr Lessig is "fantasising" about a campaign-finance amendment: "Political reality makes [it] unviable."

But the logic of a convention might argue against such purity. The delegates, expecting the support of the solidly Republican state legislatures that had called the convention, would know they needed some split legislatures for ratification. Would they really be above crafting their amendment so as to contain something enticing to the other side?

There is also the possibility that Congress could choose ratification by means of state conventions. This is a constitutionally approved alternative to ratification by state legislatures, which has so far been used only once-for the amendment that repealed the prohibition of alcohol. In that case many states determined the make-up of their convention by a popular vote which in effect became a referendum on the amendment. As a balanced-budget amendment might, in some states, be more popular with the public than with legislators, it might be more easily ratified by this unusual route. Polls have consistently suggested that 65-70% of the public support such an amendment in principle.

There is also a long game to be played. The states do not have to ratify the amendment all at once, or in a rush. The 27th amendment, which prevents members of Congress from raising their salaries, was proposed in 1789; it did not get its 38th ratification until 1992. Unless the proposers put a time limit on their amendment's ratification-as has been the case for most 20th-century amendments-it can sit around accumulating ratifications in perpetuity. As Mason intended, the federal government would have no way to block the process. Though some states might in time try to rescind their initial ratifications, this would be another area where the constitution is mum and the courts will not venture.

And then there is, as there always seems to be, a nuclear option. Delegates could simply declare a new, lower threshold for ratification. Uniquely in matters concerning Article V conventions, there is actually some precedent for this. The Articles of Confederation, signed in 1777 and ratified by all 13 original states in 1781, required the unanimous consent of all states for any changes. The constitutional convention of 1787 ignored this, deciding that ratification by nine of them would be sufficient for their document to replace the articles. Unless Article V is amended first, a convention would have no constitutional power to change the ratification rules itself. But delegates still might try. "The sovereign people have the right to alter or abolish their form of government and change it to whatever they want," says Larry Greenley of the John Birch Society. "This is a convention that creates constitutions. It's a level above state legislatures, and can't be limited. We really believe that any Article V convention would have the ability to change the ratification process."

A legal requirement to balance the budget could, if it included no safety valves, greatly damage the government's ability to manage economic shocks. If it were carefully drafted, it might conceivably do a modicum of good. Whether that would be worth the risks of triggering an untested and remarkably poorly constrained constitutional mechanism with huge potential power, though, is another matter.
Correction (September 29th): An earlier version of this story said that the full Senate passed a bill in 1982 laying out rules for an Article V convention. In fact the bill only passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, in 1984.

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America might see a new constitutional convention in a few years

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THE I's had been dotted; the T's were crossed. The 55 delegates to America's first and so-far-only constitutional convention had hammered out compromises on the separation of powers, apportionment of seats in the legislature and the future of the slave trade.

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how to outsmart fake news in your facebook feed - cnn

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Here's how to outsmart fake news in your Facebook feed

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Fake news is actually really easy to spot -- if you know how. Consider this your New Media Literacy Guide.

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Adam Ruins Everything - Why Partisan Politics Have Been on the Rise since the 1960’s

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Liberal Republicans and Conservative Democrats actually used to exist. Subscribe: http://full.sc/1s9KQGe Watch Full Episodes for FREE: http://bit.ly/1Rw2yzp Check Adam's Sources: http://bit.ly/1Q7MHpK In Adam Ruins Everything, host Adam Conover employs a combination of comedy, history and science to dispel widespread misconceptions about everything we take for granted.

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Polarized Media: Consuming News from Inside Your Bubble: The Daily Show

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As the 2016 election nears, Trevor examines the differences in how liberal and conservative websites report on the increasingly contentious presidential campaigns. Watch full episodes of The Daily Show now -- no login required: http://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah/full-episodes The Daily Show with Trevor Noah airs weeknights at 11/10c on Comedy Central.

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Adam Ruins Everything - Why Rigging Elections Is Completely Legal

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I'm Just a Bill Parody | Follow The Money | TakePart

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How & Why Other Countries have Ended the 2-Party System

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So the conventions are in the books, and we're two months away from the election. We're two months away from Americans having an ultimate choice - vote for the Democrat or vote for the Republican. Actually...that's not really much of a choice at all.

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john oliver slams voter id laws - cnn video

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John Oliver slams voter ID laws - CNN Video

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John Oliver railed against U.S. voter ID laws on HBO's "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver," saying they're ineffective in preventing voter fraud.