Have you ever heard of ranked-choice voting? There’s good and bad points but Oakland was recently the first large U.S. city to use it for a mayoral election. Jean Quan who came in second in the election ended up becoming mayor and offers some of the good points in last night’s PBS NewsHour video. (click here for video and transcript)

SPENCER MICHELS: Quan thinks, without ranked-choice voting, which takes the place of a runoff in situations where nobody gets a majority, she would have been in trouble raising money for another election.

JEAN QUAN: In a traditional system, I would have had to raise $400,000 in June, and I would have to try to raise $400,000 in the fall. My husband and I actually put a second mortgage on our house to make sure we’d have enough money on Election Day.

Well obviously she was not exactly an impoverished candidate but there are many questions and answers addressed in the link above about this means of avoiding runoff elections. Another PBS video and transcript that takes a closer look at Oakland’s new mayor helps also helps to explain rank-choice voting.

But the new system used for the election garnered as much attention as the candidates and the issues. This was the first year the county used “ranked-choice voting,” which asks voters to name the second- and third-choice candidates in addition to their top one. In the first round of voting, State Sen. Don Perata won the most votes but he didn’t have enough to secure the required majority. After an eight-day vote count, city council member Jean Quan got more than enough second- and third-place votes to overtake Perata and win.

Last week in a New York Times report, While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales, there was a conflict of interest story that would give any Tea Party member a coronary. It’s bad for Democrats too.

You know how the United States Department of Agriculture is running a federal anti-obesity drive? Well, how about the fact that they also advised Domino’s on how to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, then helped them devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign. Sales soared by double digits.

That’s just the beginning. You should read the whole story about Dairy Management Inc. that was created by the government in 1995 and not only invented the “Got Milk” campaign but runs an aggressive campaign to promoting the excessive consumption of cheese and convince Americans that saturated fats are good for you.

It’s almost comical that a subsidiary of America’s nutrition police ran a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy and lobbied the Agriculture Department not to cut the amount of cheese in federal food assistance programs by citing these false weight-loss claims from research they mostly financed and already knew to be false.

Tonight on the PBS show that replaced Bill Moyers Journal “Need to Know,” there was a follow up report Mixed signals: Why is the USDA promoting nutrition and pushing cheese? I think it’s must see TV and goes a little further than “Got Milk?”

In the ongoing Propublica investigation Buried Secrets, Gas Drilling’s Environmental Threat today’s headline is Pittsburgh Bans Natural Gas Drilling. Citing health and environmental concerns, the city council received a standing ovation after voting 9-0 to approve the ban within city limits on Tuesday.

City Council President Darlene Harris said her biggest concern was people’s health. She said she had heard stories about people being sickened by water contaminated by Marcellus drilling. She said claims by the industry of the thousands of jobs being created wasn’t worth the risk.

“They’re bringing jobs all right,” Harris said. “There’s going to be a lot of jobs for funeral homes and hospitals. That’s where the jobs are. Is it worth it?”

Pennsylvania is the center of the Marcellus Shale activity, with more than 2,000 wells drilled in the past three years and many thousands more planned, as multinational exploration companies invest billions in the pursuit.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group, takes credit for drafting the ordinance and claims this is a “first-in-the-nation ordinance” that “elevates the right of the community to decide, not corporations.”

Very good news for Americans and that’s on top of the recent bad news for Halliburton. Dick Cheney must be having a bad day!

Cross-posted several places including Progressive Blue and  DailyKos.

It was looking grim for H.R. 847: James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010 that had already passed in the House. Now there is some hope for a bill named after James Zadroga, an NYPD detective who died at age 34, the first police officer to die of a respiratory disease attributed to participation in rescue and recovery operations at the World Trade Center.

The legislation that provides $3.2 billion for long-term health care for rescue and construction workers at Ground Zero, plus another $4.2 billion in compensation for others who were exposed to the toxic dust that resulted from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in 2001 will probably have no chance in the new Congress.

So there is a big push with Ground Zero Workers lobbying in D.C. Sen, Harry Reid working to get the bill out of a committee and bring it directly to the floor. New York Senators are drumming up support. Mayor Bloomberg met with three Republican Senators today. Even Republican House members from the area are working to pass this bill.

Cross-posted at Progressive Blue, Docudharma and even the Big O.

What a tough week this has been, the Yankees were out of it and the Jets had a buy week. To make matters even worse the right wing corporate home team got the great shellacking by the visitors from beyond the right field wall. But I was walking around with the old camera and taking photos. Plenty of photos, plenty of back lighting.

I spent the week with a familiar song locked in my head, the lyric “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” After the past two years I could never again come up with a reason to support a Dem but without the tradition of photography I would be a shaky as a fiddler on a roof. So during that fabulous Jets win, I slapped together a few photos from the week.  

And I agree with almost everything he said.

Especially the part where he said “Both parties will sell out the middle class faster than Jim Cramer can yell ‘booyah.'”

Cross-posted at Progressive Blue and several other places.

Actually the list of ways to kill off competition from Parties that represent the people is endless. When it comes to getting things done, taking out Third Parties has been one place where the two power parties has always preformed to the utmost of their ability and this is just one New York story.

Some states have evolved Fusion Parties in an attempt to get out from under the scrutiny of these power happy keepers of the plutocracy. One of these upstanding parties is The Working Families Party that has some presence in New York State. They stand for progressive values and labor union rights but this party has endorsed Andrew Cuomo. Reading Cuomo Vows Offensive Against Labor Unions it seems mysterious that the Working Families Party would place Cuomo on the ticket.

Andrew M. Cuomo  will mount a presidential-style permanent political campaign to counter the well-financed labor unions he believes have bullied previous governors and lawmakers into making bad decisions. He will seek to transform the state’s weak business lobby into a more formidable ally, believing that corporate leaders in New York have virtually surrendered the field to big labor.

By following the explanation of Celeste Katz who writes The Daily Politic at the New York Daily News the mystery is solved. Did you know that the Working Families Party has to receive 50,000 votes in the governors race this year to be on the ticket in 2010? Not getting those 50,000 (and it was because of Andrew Cuomo) was how the Liberal Party lost a column in New York State and later withered and died.  

The short version is that Andrew Cuomo used that 50,000 hurdle to blackmail the Working Families Party but below the fold I’ll follow the full explanation by Celeste Katz to understand how a union hating gubernatorial candidate got the endorsement of a party that is suppose to represent labor.

Note: from Progressive Blue and cross-posted at DailyKos.

In the quest to maintain a Democrat majority it seems easy to overlook the race for New York State Attorney General. Considering a powerful social and economic justice policy position where the jurisdiction includes Wall Street and the traditional influence this office has had over media and talk shows it’s not about majority but justice vs. injustice.

Now Eric Schneiderman who is committed to “protecting homeowners and consumers from bad actors on Wall Street” faces a Republican who has suggested that he would “de-emphasize the high-profile securities fraud cases that defined the tenures of Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer.” In a nation where the banking lobbyist induced false claim that “sound economics means hands off Wall St.” is too often heard, think back the early 1990’s when nobody seemed interested in the big money crimes and Eliot Spitzer did much to change the national focus.

But Senator Schneiderman represents so much more that that. Not just a politician but a public servant with the energy and willpower to fight for the people. Looking at what this man has to offer in this high profile office with the power to steer the national debate, it seems obvious that a NY loss would be a setback for all Americans.