What Digby says:
Imagine what we could do if we had more real, progressive civil libertarians in the US Senate. Here's one for you to support. It's Shenna Bellows and she's running in Maine against the bucket of lukewarm water known as Susan Collins. She wrote this for Blue America:
What Bellows says:
The Senate Intelligence Committee, on which my opponent, Susan Collins, sits, is reportedly holding closed-door hearings on NSA reform legislation. The secrecy of the proceedings is part of the problem. It is unacceptable for Congress to scold the White House in public but codify NSA spying in secret. The Senate should open its work to the public and enact meaningful NSA reforms.
My work in Maine provides a model for moving forward. I made my decision to run for United States Senate when I was working on two groundbreaking privacy laws this spring to require law enforcement to get a warrant before accessing cellphone communications including location data, text messages and voice mails. I organized a broad coalition of Democrats, Republicans, Independents and Greens. We did not agree on very much at all except the fundamental importance of our constitutional freedoms and the dangers posed by government intrusion into our personal lives. The opposition was intense, bipartisan and included some of my close friends, but we persevered. Maine was one of only two states in the country to protect against cell phone tracking. The law also survived a veto by Governor Paul LePage on a rare veto override vote.
There is a whole raft of other progressive reasons to support Bellows, from marijuana legalization to prison reform, from privacy, to equality, to economic justice.
Take a look, I think you will like what you see.
bellowsforsenate.com
For a taste, drop below the fold:
As Maine Goes, So Should the Nation with Drug Law Reform
By Shenna Bellows
A few years ago, as executive director of the ACLU of Maine, I was discussing marijuana policy with a prosecutor. As we debated, he started reminiscing about his days as a pot smoker. At that point, I had to tell him that I’d never smoked pot due to my severe asthma. He thought this was funny, but I was troubled by the hypocrisy. When the prosecutor who is locking people up for marijuana laughs about his own use, something is terribly wrong. And when our last three U.S. Presidents have acknowledged marijuana use at the same time that poor kids-- particularly young males of color-- are getting thrown in jail for the same activity, we need change.
As a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, I support marijuana legalization. We need to end the war on drugs and reform our criminal justice system, and we cannot afford to wait. The United States incarcerates more people in total and more people per capita than any other country in the world, and the racial disparities are alarming. Even in my home state of Maine, which is the whitest state in the union, blacks are 2.1 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. Government spends billions of dollars each year enforcing counterproductive drug laws, which are truly the New Jim Crow. The economic and human rights costs are enormous.
- See more here: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/...