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Now in its 5th year, the program has trained 250 candidates of which 111 have been placed in jobs. The program has helped build better relations between labor and the community.

A former aide to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Tim Russell,

A new national poll has found that more Americans than ever agree that it’s time to take a second look at our election laws. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said that they’d support national standards establishing who can vote, polling hours, ballot design, and more; 50% said they’d be very supportive of these measures.

Your vote is your voice, but you have to sign up before you can speak up. Make sure you’re REGISTERED to VOTE before the deadline in your state.

It’s the first Monday in October, so the big news outlets and legal blogs were full over the weekend of stories and posts on the opening of the Supreme Court’s 2012-13 term.
The new term begins with the court still refusing to formally adopt for itself the ethical code it enforces at every other level of the federal judiciary. The Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges instructs judges to maintain their independence by acting “without fear or favor.” It tells judges to disqualify themselves from cases in which they or members of their family have a personal interest, to take care to obey laws requiring them to disclose their personal finances and to avoid any involvement in partisan politics, among other things.

At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, scientists have modeled what the U.S. would look like in 2050, and they say it’s possible for renewable energy to make up 80 percent of the electricity generated, even with existing technologies.
Whether that comes to pass will depend on the price of technology, transmission capacity and policies and regulations that encourage renewable energy development.

Common Cause NY released a report today that exposes just how much money casino, racino, and other gambling interests have spent on politics over the past decade. The report, entitled “Stacking The Deck: The Gambling Industry’s Political Spending In New York State,” details the big bets that casino owners have made on elected officials, and how those bets have paid off.
In New York State alone, the gambling industry has spent over $50 million on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past seven years. This is much more than what larger and more critical sectors of the economy, such as the energy or telecommunications industry, spend on politics.

Getting lost among the many quotable Montgomery Burns-esque grumblings in Mitt Romney’s now infamous fundraiser speech is his lament that unions will prevent him from making the deep cuts to federal employee rolls that he desires. Along with calling nearly half of Americans “moochers,” promising to not be their President, and wishing he was born Mexican so that people would vote for him, the election loser-to-be revealed his plans to “clean house.” From the tape:
“I wish we weren’t unionized so we could go a lot deeper than you’re actually allowed to go.”

California, it’s here! After years of advocacy and months of working on design, details, and testing, the nation’s most populous state will have Online Voter Registration available to its 23.7 million eligible voters.