Among white voters there is a clear generational divide among who they plan to support in the Presidential race this year, but there is not a similar age divide among non-white voters.

For reasons of basic fairness, equality, solidarity, and even raw political advantage DC statehood should be a top goal of the national Democratic Party. Yet congressional Democrats, despite recently having the opportunity to correct this injustice, have done nothing really to advance the issue.

This strategy session sounds like a thinly veiled campaign event designed to make 150 potential donors feel important and listened to. If is actually a sincere effort to try to solve this problem let me take five minutes to completely solve it with my three step plan.

While the favorability rating of local and state governments has only declined slightly in the past decade, Americans’ rating of the federal government has collapsed.

The job approval rating of Congress, while still atrocious, has managed to improve slightly in the last few months according to Gallup. Currently 17% approve of the job Congress is doing and 79% disapprove.

The official position of Robert Khuzami, the Chief of Enforcement of the SEC, is laid out in a brief asking Judge Rakoff to stay his stinging rejection of the weakling settlement with Citigroup last week pending appeal. The public will suffer because the SEC will have to devote its meager resources to trying a case, so they can’t do other great stuff, like investigate insider trading (57 cases this year, big deal) and ignore dozens of other cookie cutter cases just like the ones they settle for beans.

Across the board the American people overwhelming think too much power in this country is concentrated in the hands of a few very rich people and very large corporations. A full 77 percent of the country shares this opinion including even a majority, 53%, of Republicans.

A few odds and ends from the week just past.

In retrospect, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement shouldn’t be all that surprising.  Millions of hopeful people flocked to the ballot box in hopes of reversing decades of pro-corporate, pro-wealth, anti-ordinary people policies, only to realize that they had voted in what they thought they had voted out.  Progressives who had dedicated themselves [...]

The Wall Street Journal article about how the Obama administration decided to shelve an ozone regulation provides a great example for why we need to eliminate the absurd electoral college and switch to a national popular vote system for president.