Mike Gravel is being interviewed live right now on a radio webcast thing from Muncie, Indiana.  If it’s not on now, they’re starting very soon.  Check it out.

Live Broadcasting by Ustream

I’m not going to pull any punches here.  I detest the two party system.  I believe that it undermines representative government.  It makes our government more responsive to corporations than to citizens.  It decreases the chances of progress and it results in many good ideas being shut out of the national political debate.

This piece was written as part of GreenChange Blog Action Day.  Learn more here.

Yesterday, the New Mexico House of Representatives unanimously decided to move the states’ money into small banks and credit unions, becoming yet another example of the fact that progressive change will not come from the top down.

In the context of the larger movement against the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street, this is a dramatic repudiation of that behavior from a somewhat unexpected source.

The bill enables a possible switch of $2-5 billion of state funds into CUs and small banks.

If enacted, the municipal funds bill, in the works since last year and still subject to a Senate vote, would represent a setback to large national banks, like Bank of America and Wells Fargo, which have had a lock on such funds.

The altered view of New Mexico lawmakers in favoring local control of state funds, officials said, follows national mention of the New Mexico effort in the “Move Your Money” campaign of New York pundit Arianna Huffington in her online Huffington Post columns.

This is for real.

When it finally came time for the Committee to meet and vote the result was almost anti-climactic. Jack Hanna, the Chair of the Rules Committee said that there that there was “great concensus in support of this resolution” and urged that the entire membership be permitted to consider it.” Democratic Chair T.J. Rooney shepherded the resolution to the floor, and in seconds it was over. The resolution was passed by acclamation.

Grace Ross, who ran in 2006 as the Green Party’s candidate for governor of Massachusetts, is now running in the Democratic primary for the same office, against incumbent governor Deval Patrick.  “I wasn’t planning to run again,” stated Ross, “but things got worse.  Things got worse for regular people.”

There are many people who lament the end of the ’60s and complain about today’s self-absorbed, materialistic youth.  Now, I’m a teenager, and I can tell you that there’s a grain of truth (maybe a boulder…) to those complaints, but there’s also a vibrant political culture among those of us whippersnappers who do care.

Well, we all know Dylan, Lennon, and Young.  But what about Francis, Folds, and Morello?  If you take a look at the music scene today, it’s apparent that there are a lot of young people who care.  There’s currently a lot of music in the same spirit, if not the same style, as the classics of protest music.

Today, the BRAD BLOG is reporting that there’s a fair chance Prop 8 was not decided by bigoted voters, but by “fraud or gross errors” in the election.  From WasProp8Straight.org:

A new analysis of independent exit polls conducted in L.A. County at the November 2008 election indicates significant likelihood that the official vote counts are incorrect. It is indeed possible that the California state constitution was amended to strip marriage rights of some of the state’s people as a result of vote counts that were incorrect and possibly even fraudulent.

A “no” vote for Prop 8 meant that you wanted marriage equality.  In some places in Los Angeles, the difference between the official vote totals and this study were a not so alarming 2%, but in other places they approached a shocking 18%.  Just to clarify, this study is saying that in some places the actual votes that people cast differed from what was recorded by the state by nearly 18%.  And Prop 8 passed by a margin of less than 5% of the vote.

Watch here: http://www.c-span.org/Watch/C-…

Check out below the fold for more info.