Foes vow to fight new ballot hurdles

Libertarian Barry Hess said he's determined to run for governor next year, even though he'll face a 4,380 percent increase in the number of signatures he'll need to qualify for the ballot.

For Democrats, it's a 9.8 percent increase. Meanwhile, any Republican seeking the seat will have a 5.8 percent decrease in the signature requirement.

The shifting numbers are due to a late addition to a wide-ranging election bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week. The measure was favored by Republicans, who flexed some local and national muscle to revive House Bill 2305 in the waning hours of the recently completed legislative session.

The law raises the bar to qualify for the ballot so high that minor-party candidates, such as Greens and Libertarians, say it would be nearly impossible for them to compete in statewide, congressional and legislative races. The law also raises the requirement for Democrats seeking to run statewide, be it for governor or U.S. senator.

In legislative and congressional contests, the effect on Democrats and Republicans varies with the voter registration in a given district. In some cases, they will need to collect fewer voter signatures; in others, more.

That provision, on top of other parts of HB 2305, has energized critics who say they are working on plans to stop the law from taking effect Sept. 13.

Warren Severin, chairman of the Arizona Libertarian Party, predicts a referendum to put the matter before the voters in 2014.

"There will be legal action," said Severin, adding that opponents are meeting Tuesday to discuss strategy.

D.J. Quinlan, executive director of the state Democratic Party, says the bill smacks of voter suppression with its tighter limits on the citizen-initiative process, ballot collection and the early-voting list.

"All options are on the table," he said.

The new law ties the signature requirement to the total number of voters registered in a given district, as opposed to the the current system, which is linked to the number of registered voters of a given party. Parties with smaller numbers have had a smaller base from which to calculate the signature requirement; the new law widens that base by linking it to all registered voters, not just those of a given party.

Representatives of the Green and Libertarian parties said they find that particularly offensive in the case of primaries, in which parties nominate their own candidates. In some cases, they will have to get the signatures of independents, Democrats or Republicans to qualify for their own party primaries.

Angel Torres, chairman of the Arizona Green Party, said the law effectively shuts his party out of primary contests because of the higher signature count. He predicted the Greens will opt to run as write-in candidates.

Critics of the law said it's a valentine for Republican candidates, who often view third-party candidates, particularly Libertarians, as spoilers in their races. The bill would cement the two major parties' hold on Arizona elections, said Hess, communications chairman for the state Libertarian Party.

Republicans who pushed the measure say it's a matter of fairness: All candidates for a given race should meet the same signature threshold.

The bill failed on a Senate vote but was revived when Sens. Steve Pierce and Rich Crandall reversed their stances and voted in favor of it.

Pierce, R-Prescott, said he got a call from Daniel Scarpinato, spokesman for the Republican National Congressional Committee. Pierce said Scarpinato was not calling in his official capacity, although his concern was how the signature requirement would affect campaigns.

Scarpinato was the spokesman for Republican Jonathan Paton's congressional campaign last year. Paton lost to Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick in a close race for Congressional District 1 that also included Libertarian Kim Allen, who received 6percent of the vote. If Allen were not on the ballot, Paton's camp believes, Paton would have won.

To underscore the political ramifications of HB 2305 and its effect on minor-party candidates, Pierce said an angry state Rep. Adam Kwasman, R-Oro Valley, confronted him after the bill failed. Kwasman said he needed it to pass because he plans to run in CD1 next year, Pierce said.

Kwasman did not return a call seeking comment.

Pierce said he switched his vote after calling two people, whom he did not identify, asking to be released from his promise to vote against the bill.

Scarpinato did not return a call for comment. Crandall, R-Mesa, also did not reply to several requests for him to comment on his changed vote.

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Democrats Gain the Upper Hand in Tax Fight

It’s only been a year since Congressional Republicans, bent on cutting spending, manufactured a financial crisis by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling. Now, apparently thinking the public has forgotten that debacle, they’re furious that Democrats have figured out a way to turn the tables.

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a member of the Democratic leadership, said Monday that her party was prepared to let all the Bush-era tax cuts expire on Jan. 1 if Republicans refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy. The same holds true, she said, for the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts that begin at the same time, which Republicans demanded in the debt crisis but now oppose after realizing that the cuts affect more than social welfare programs.

Republican leaders quickly voiced horror at these tactics. “Has it come to this?” said Speaker John Boehner, accusing Democrats of holding the economy hostage for the sake of high-end tax increases. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, called it “an entirely avoidable high-stakes game of chicken with the single-minded goal of taking more money from those who earn it.”

Taking hostages has unfortunately become the default method of exercising power in Washington, after Republicans decided that conventional compromise with Democrats was unpalatable. But the Democrats’ proposal would have nowhere near the same outcome as the Republicans’ debt ceiling threat last year.

Had Republicans forced the government into an unprecedented default last August, the worldwide impact on credit markets and economic growth would have been “catastrophic,” in the words of Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman. By contrast, the combined impact of the tax-cut expiration and the spending cuts — the so-called fiscal cliff — would only push the economy into a shallow recession next year, he told a Senate panel Tuesday morning.

That would be a painful outcome for millions of people, but it is not comparable to a default, and would not happen instantly, instead building slowly over time.

It could also be prevented from happening altogether, as early as January, and Senator Murray has the right plan to do so. By letting all the tax cuts expire on schedule, Republicans can then join Democrats in restoring the cuts only for income up to $250,000. No vote need be taken on raising taxes for the rich, and thus Republicans won’t have to remove their no-tax-increase straitjacket.

She is right in refusing Republican demands to end the half of the sequester that cuts $500 billion from defense over a decade, the only leverage Democrats have in preventing much bigger and more painful domestic cuts. If Republicans want to limit the recessionary impact of the sequester they initiated and supported, they will have to reduce it in a balanced way, now that Democrats have learned a painful lesson from Republican power games.

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Chefs lead fight against Calif. ban on foie gras delicacy

Erika Ramos, 26, feeds the ducks at Hudson Valley Foie Gras farm in Ferndale, N.Y. In a feeding process called gavage, corn is force-fed to the ducks which helps expand their livers for foie gras.

By Jennifer S. Altman, for USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – Diners are lining up to get their last bit of foie gras at Santa Monica's Mélisse restaurant, where chef Josiah Citrin is offering a "Foie for All" five-course tasting menu.

By Jennifer S. Altman, for USA TODAY

Ducks drink water at Hudson Valley Foie Gras farm in Ferndale, N.Y., one of the nation's few foie gras producers.

By Jennifer S. Altman, for USA TODAY

Ducks drink water at Hudson Valley Foie Gras farm in Ferndale, N.Y., one of the nation's few foie gras producers.

"We're super busy," maitre d' Matthew Greenberg says. "About 30% of our guests are ordering foie gras."

Other California restaurants are also seeing a rise in orders of the gourmet duck liver, a delicacy that will become illegal to sell in the state on July 1.

Critics object to how the ducks and geese are raised: Three-month-old birds are force-fed by inserting a tube in their throat and pouring in grain. Over the two- or three-week feeding period before slaughter, the birds' livers enlarge from 3 ounces to about a pound and a quarter. More than a dozen countries ban the practice.

California chefs haven't given up hope that they can keep dishes such as Mélisse's "foie gras flan with blood orange gelée" on the menu. More than 100 have submitted a petition urging the Legislature to lift the ban.

The group, which calls itself the Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards (CHEFS), is proposing new rules that would require farmers to raise geese and ducks in a cage-free environment, minimize stress and use feeding methods that do not harm the birds' esophagus or beak.

The chefs need a two-thirds vote in both the state Assembly and Senate to overturn the ban.

Animal rights activists say there's no humane way to force-feed ducks and geese.

"Shoving a pipe down a duck's throat three times a day to force him to eat far more than he would eat on his own is just inhumane," says Paul Shapiro, who leads the farm animal protection division at the Humane Society of the United States. The ducks "have difficulty even walking by the end of the process," he says.

It's just part of life and death on the farm, chefs say — and worth it. Foie gras is rich and luscious, tender when served hot, and when cold, "it's like eating really delicious salted, duck-flavored butter," says Daniel Scherotter, executive chef at Palio d'Asti here.

By Jennifer S. Altman, for USA TODAY

About 8,000 ducks a week are grown for foie gras in the United States and Canada.

Hunters have always known that geese and ducks gorging themselves on grain before flying south for the winter developed fat livers — in French, foie gras.

Farmers as far back as Greek and Roman times began to deliberately overfeed geese, which eventually developed into a method of force-feeding geese and ducks called gavage. Ducks, the farmers note, have a strong, insensitive esophagus that allows them to swallow fish whole.

Hudson Valley Foie Gras in Ferndale, N.Y., is one of the USA's few foie gras producers. "We let hundreds of people on our farm to see the process," operations manager Marcus Henley says. The company has posted YouTube videos in the belief that if the public sees the actual process, people will understand that it's not damaging to the birds.

Foie foes are naive, Scherotter says. "It attracts the kind of loony-left animal rights activists who are urban and suburban white people who are unaware of how food is produced, so when they actually see it they're grossed out by it. Rural people don't have these issues."

John Burton, who introduced the original legislation in 2004 when he was Senate president pro tempore, told the San Francisco Chronicle, "I'd like to sit all 100 (chefs) down and have duck and goose fat — better yet, dry oatmeal — shoved down their throats over and over and over again."

Chef Mark Pastore, owner of Incanto restaurant in San Francisco, condemned what he called Burton's "use of violent rhetoric" in an opinion piece in the Chronicle on May 10 and asked for a public apology.

Burton, now chairman of the state Democratic Party, says the chefs had seven years to work out a plan. "There was a deal cut" to give California's only producer, Sonoma Foie Gras, time to "either figure out how to do this right or figure out how to make money doing other stuff," he says. "Nobody heard a peep out of anybody" until now.

"The effect of the ban is the closing of a successful family business," Guillermo Gonzalez, owner of Sonoma Foie Gras, said via e-mail. "Our farm is being forced to close its doors at the end of June, and the most unfortunate fact is that science has not been given a chance to play a role in this debate."

By Jennifer S. Altman, for USA TODAY

Marcus Henley, Hudson Valley Foie Gras farm's operations manager, holds one of the baby ducks.

Foie gras is "an integral part of gourmet cooking," and the ban could lead to a black market, says Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for the chefs' group. "If you have smugglers and bootleggers who are willing to risk criminal prosecution to sell foie gras in California," he says, no one will be able to watch over how the ducks are raised because it will be happening in secret.

He says that when Chicago passed a foie gras ban in 2006, "chefs started selling $25 croutons and giving away the foie gras for free." The Chicago ban was overturned in 2008.

Banning foie gras "knocks California down a peg as a culinary destination," Ballard says. That, he suggests, could lead to fine diners bypassing the Golden State for the restaurants of Las Vegas.

Burton isn't convinced. "Right," he says sarcastically. "California has wineries, Disneyland, but … 'They don't have foie gras — let's go to South Dakota instead.' "

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Congress delays budget fight until Monday (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Congress set the stage for another last-minute budget showdown as lawmakers delayed action on a broad spending bill until Monday, shortly before disaster relief funds will run out completely.

This time, the brinkmanship threatens to disrupt assistance to victims of floods, wildfires and other natural disasters in one of the most extreme years for weather in U.S. history.

That money could run out as soon as Tuesday, but Republicans and Democrats appeared no closer to a solution after a week of legislative maneuvering.

A billion-dollar dispute over an electric-vehicle program favored by Democrats is preventing Congress from passing a trillion-dollar bill that would replenish disaster funds and ensure the government keeps running past October 1, the start of the new fiscal year.

"Everyone, once in a while, needs a little cooling off," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said. "We'll come here Monday and more reasonable heads will prevail."

Reid spoke after the Democratic-controlled Senate, by a vote of 59 to 36, rejected a version that had passed the Republican-led House of Representatives.

Lawmakers have tried to lower the temperature on Capitol Hill after a series of acrimonious budget battles rattled markets, spooked consumers and disgusted voters.

Still, the stark partisan divide over spending that has dominated Washington this year once again threatened Congress' ability to pass even the most basic legislation.

The bill in question would give the Federal Emergency Management Agency more disaster relief money and ensure that the government can continue operating while Congress debates a full 2012 budget.

Failure to act by then would force the government to suspend everything from space exploration to river dredging. It also would disrupt a flood-insurance program, delivering a further hammer blow to the troubled housing market.

ADDING TO UNCERTAINTY

Analysts and lawmakers said a government shutdown remains unlikely at this point as Congress now routinely resolves budget disputes at the last possible minute. But the wrangling adds further uncertainty to markets that are already on edge.

"Something like this is just a reminder of a lack of policy response by government, not only here in the U.S. but across the globe, in coming up with solutions to the financial and economic problems that we face," said Gary Pollack, managing director at Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management.

Democrats and Republicans remained at odds over a $1.5 billion cut to an electric vehicle program championed by President Barack Obama.

Republicans proposed the cut to partially offset the added disaster costs to avoid adding to the nation's fiscal woes.

Democrats point out that Congress usually exempts disaster money from normal budget rules. They say the cut would threaten thousands of manufacturing jobs at a time when the country is struggling with 9.1 percent unemployment.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on Monday on a version of the bill that would restore the car loan program. The chamber's top Republican, Mitch McConnell, predicted it would fail.

The dispute throws into question lawmakers' ability to find common ground on the more painful choices they will have to confront in the coming months as a special bipartisan committee searches for trillions of dollars in budget savings.

"Any delay that occurs because of inaction in the Senate will only imperil needed disaster relief for these thousands of families all across our country," House Speaker John Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, said at a news conference.

Boehner has so far declined to give ground to Democrats as he seeks to control a rebellion from his party's conservative Tea Party faction, which is pressing for deeper spending cuts.

Democrats have shown an increased reluctance to compromise after a year of bruising budget battles has left their liberal supporters feeling like they have already given away too much.

Budget fights in Congress earlier this year pushed the government to the brink of a shutdown in April and the edge of default in August, leading to a cut in the country's top-notch AAA credit rating.

(Additional reporting by Donna Smith, Susan Cornwell and Thomas Ferraro in Washington and Karen Brettell, Rodrigo Campos and Richard Leong in New York; editing by Ross Colvin and Eric Walsh)

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Democrats continue fight against voter ID laws (Daily Caller)

Democrats are battling a growing number of states that are preparing to implement tougher voter identification laws.

Stopping voter ID laws is crucial to Democrats who argue college students, the elderly and minorities will be prevented from voting under the new laws.

“It’s no surprise that these voter suppression efforts are being pushed by Republicans in key swing states,” said Democratic Governor Association spokeswoman Lis Smith.

Republicans pushing to pass such legislation counter that tougher laws will prevent voter fraud and keep ineligible voters from the polling booths.

Now, opponents of the laws don’t just have Republicans to worry about.

Rhode Island’s independent Gov. Lincoln Chafee is the latest to join the voter identification law spree—he signed a tougher bill into law Tuesday after it was passed by the state’s Democratic-controlled house and senate. The governor told The Providence Journal the new law would increase “accuracy and integrity” shortly after signing the bill.

Nearly 20 other states are considering more stringent voter photo identification laws, which has many Democrats crying out in retaliation.

More than 15 Democratic senators have signed a letter calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the legality of states’ “highly restrictive photo identification requirements,” which they allege violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act and, ultimately, civil rights.

Holder’s office would not confirm or deny if it is complying with the request from the senators.

“The Justice Department is monitoring, as it routinely does, this type of legislative activity in the states,” Holder’s office told The Daily Caller.

The letter comes weeks after the Democratic Governors Association embarked on a $50,000 fundraising effort to combat voter ID laws.

The Supreme Court has previously upheld voter photo ID laws. The high court ruled in favor of allowing Indiana to enforce photo identification legislation at voting booths in April 2008. High profile Republicans such as current House Speaker John Boehner praised the decision while civil rights groups like the League of Women Voters and many Democrats denounced it.

The fundraising, which ended June 30, surpassed the $50,000 mark, Smith said.

So far, the DGA has specifically targeted Florida and Wisconsin, where Republican governors recently signed voter ID bills into law.

But the DGA isn’t stopping there.

“It’s definitely a big priority of ours,” Smith said. “I think you’ll see we’re going to be involved in additional states in coming weeks and months, Pennsylvania’s one, Ohio’s another.”

Smith said the issue, which the DGA believes is “aimed directly at Democratic voters,” is a priority because it will stop thousands of eligible voters from coming to the polls in 2012.

Before 2011, nine states already required photo IDs at polls. Seven states have inked new voter ID laws this year.

“If this legislation is successful, it will prevent seniors, students, low income folks, women who’ve gotten their names change because they were married, from being able to cast their vote in the 2012 elections,” Smith said.

Not to be outdone, the Democratic National Committee has started its own push back to stop voter ID legislation from becoming law.

The DNC has focused its energy on the exposing the cost of implementing “unnecessary” new voter ID laws. The DNC estimates the cost of the laws could range between $276 million and $828 million for states, attributing the millions to educating voters.

“The concern is the really isn’t a problem,” said DNC spokesperson Alec Gerlach. “It’s more of a solution in search of a problem. Voter impersonation is not a problem”

Gerlach said the stringent voter ID laws make it difficult for minorities and the elderly to vote.

“I think that minority voters and elderly voters are harder to reach as far education is concerned, if you change the law you have to make the effort to educate,” Gerlach said.

No matter how many attack ads Democrats run against the voter ID laws, Republican-controlled legislatures are undeterred. Ohio’s GOP legislature is expected to vote on a series of voter identification reforms during special session in coming weeks.

“The Ohio Republican Party favors an identification provision that is strict and consistent to ensure integrity in our election process,” Ohio GOP Chairman Mike DeWine said to The Daily Caller in a statement. “Identification requirements should comply with the requirements for registration and remain consistent across all 21 days of voting.”

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