Californians, prepare yourselves. At this rate, you may get to vote on the entire budget. Gov. Schwarzenegger said today that his plan to lease out the lottery to raise funds to balance the budget could be referred to the voters for their approval. "I think that we have to include those kinds of decisions, we have to include the people," he said, noting that a change to Prop 98, the state's constitutional guarantee on education spending, would require voter approval anyway. Schwarzenegger also has been talkiing up constitutional budget reform that would require voter approval. Civic-minded Californians should keep one eye on budget talks during their summer vacations, since it looks like they may have to bless the results.

Because of Philippe Sands, a London-based international criminal lawyer and professor, American wheels of justice have begun to grind in the direction of the nation's most senior lawyers; the men who designed and then covered up the legal authorization for the use of torture by the U.S. Military. After testifying on Capitol Hill to Rep. John Conyers' House Judiciary Committee, Philippe Sands joined Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.) and me to explain, examine and discuss what exactly happened, and the burgeoning case against the lawyers for Secretary of State Don Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, and President George W. Bush.

Drawing from his recently-released book, Torture Team, and his article in this month's issue of Vanity Fair, Philippe revealed a powerful indictment of the actions of the White House from 2001-2006. For the full event video, click here.

Ultimately, however, the question of accountability for these actions, which Supreme Court Justice Kennedy wrote may amount to "war crimes," in his 2006 concurring Hamdan opinion, must be complemented with a robust new committment to stregthen the American system against future perversions of America's considerable power.

Col. Wilkerson, in his remarks, discussed one such option that would restore balance within America's national security architecture . In short, he would promote the Assistant Secretaries of State for each region of the world to Under Secretary of State, send them out of Foggy Bottom and into the field and then make the regional combattant commander, (CENTCOM, SOUTHCOM, PACOM, etc.) report to the Under Secretary of State for that region. Col. Wilkerson, of course, makes the point more eloquently:

 This Sunday we honor the 83 million moms in America on Mother’s Day.  We owe our Moms our lives and our thanks.  Mother’s Day also turns our attention to our children and the need for more focus on them.  Unfortunately, families with children receive a dwindling share for federal expenditures. Scholars Eugene Steuerle and Adam Carasso have found that between 1960 and 2005, federal spending on children declined from 20.1 percent of the domestic budget to just 15.4 percent, while non-child Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending soared from 22.1 percent to 45.9 percent.  This is not good for the development of our future generation.

It is within families that many Americans find the support and love to live their lives with joy.  Many Americans work increasingly hard and it is within families that they experience unconditional love and support in times of trouble.  For couples that do not have children, nuclear and extended families provide critical emotional support.  In a variety of emotional and psychological ways, families enhance the lives of millions of Americans.  And through children, mothers help ensure our future.

Let’s thank our mothers for all they do to make our families what they are.

Let’s let Mother’s Day be a wake-up call for us to invest more in our children.  

Rev. Gray directs the New America Foundation’s Workforce and Family Program. 

Raising taxes is almost always difficult politically. When it comes to tax-hiking ballot measures, the trick is to find a politically popular cause to fund. Sam Page, a candidate for lieutenant governor in Missouri, may have come up with the best possible tax ballot measure so far. He proposes a ballot mesaure to raise sales taxes by one-eighth of a cent to fund "veterans' homes, services and programs." Just try to be the poor soul organizing a no campaign against that. It's too late to qualify measures for November, so the legislature would have to put it on the ballot. Look for politicians in other states to copy this.

You may have heard about Rep. Steve Kagen, a Wisconsin allergist turned Democratic lawmaker who has spurned Congress's generous health coverage until all his constitutents can get health insurance too. Ivan Oransky, a writer who gets both science and health policy, has a good profile of Kagen at the Scientific American website:

Kagen, 58, is now one of millions of Americans, including at least nine million children, without health insurance. "I have absolutely no health coverage at all," he told ScientificAmerican.com during a recent interview. "I have no health conditions and am pretty darn healthy." And if he gets sick? "I'd be just like the 47 [million] to 50 million American citizens who don't have coverage," he says, "and I'd have to negotiate with hospitals and doctors for the best-priced coverage."

Breaking news -- Asset limits to be reformed in the Food Stamp Program!

The conference committee formed to work out differences in the House and Senate versions of the 2007 Farm Bill has included provisions to reform asset limits in the food stamp program-- an issue championed by Chairman Harkin (D-IA) and Ranking Member Chambliss (R-GA).

The Farm Bill, if passed unchanged by the full House and Senate, will officially exclude savings in IRAs and 529 college savings accounts from consideration in determining eligibility for food stamp assistance.  

What's more, the existing asset limit, which is set at 2,000 for most families and has only been increased once since the late 1970's, will be indexed to inflation to prevent further erosion.

This is a tremendous victory for the entire assets community.  I'd especially like to recognize the Corporation for Enterprise Development, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Retirement Security Project, who we've worked closely with to educate policymakers and push for change.

Earlier this week we posted our interview about the future of health IT with Carol Diamond of the Markle Foundation. (Part one, and part two). Today we'd like to point you to The Hill 's interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt on the same topic.

Two points struck us. First, neither the article nor the full Leavitt transcript mentions the word "privacy"—a big issue both for policymakers and for the public who keep reading about nosy hospital staff, researchers who do sloppy things like leave laptops with patient records in the car, and thieves who steal credit card numbers and other financial identity information from medical records. Not insurmountable but essential if we're going to get the country on board with health IT. Second, Leavitt really depicted the health IT challenge primarily as a technology question involving interoperability (letting different computer systems talk to each other) while Markle's Connecting for Health program and conversations with some other experts have made us think about a far broader range of policy challenges that won't be solved only by the computer geeks.

Complaints about the initiative process often have little to do with the process and a lot to do with the content of the initiative in question. Democratic legislators who rail against the process end up sponsoring initiatives to fund pet causes. And Republicans -- particularly those in California -- often talk about the initiative as a sacred expression of the people's will (especially Prop 13, the ultimate holy sacrament). Except when it produces policies they don't like.

The latest example of this comes from Dave Cogdill, the new Republican leader in the California State Senate. This week Cogdill proposed to balance the budget by raiding three accounts set up by ballot initiative: the county commissions for children established by Prop 10; the mental health services funds set aside by Prop 63, and the transportation fund established by Prop 42.

On the natural, each of these proposals is worth considering. Ballot box budgeting has its problems, and in a budget crisis, everything ought to be on the table. But the hypocrisy is nauseating. If someone suggested suspending Prop. 13 property tax limits, Cogdill and Republicans would be denouncing the notion. Next, Democratic legislators, who have been no friends of the initiative, predictably will rise to the defense of the people's will. The wailing you hear is California crying for leadership.

When the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced its penalties for poor athlete academic performance this week, it let many high-profile Division I college basketball and football teams off the hook.

After four years of collecting data, the organization was set to enact full scholarship penalties for teams that fail to keep their athletes on track to graduate. But because of the NCAA's generous use of waivers for wealthy, high-profile athletic programs, as well as a flawed penalty structure, many teams with poor academic records found themselves in the clear.

Under the NCAA's Academic Progress Rates (APR) system, teams get points each semester for retaining athletes and for keeping them academically eligible. The NCAA has a system of penalties for teams that post low APRs. For the past three years, most teams have not been subject to the penalties, however, because of squad-size adjustments, or exemptions due to insufficient data.

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair has struck again-with yet another creative response to the ongoing mortgage crisis. Chairman Bair has a history of being ahead of just about everyone else in Washington with proposals to respond to the crisis in a manner that is doable and fair. This time it's the Home Ownership Preservation or HOP loan, and the FDIC estimates about one million loans-make that one million homeowners in trouble-might be eligible.