Former California Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham sentenced to 8 years and 4 months in prison for accepting bribes.

Check out the story from AP

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is one of our nation's most successful pieces of civil rights legislation, but several provisions of the act will expire in 2007 unless the Congress votes to renew them.  In California, the Voting Rights Act has played a key role in the empowerment of the state's diverse ethnic populations through increasing opportunities for political representation and accessibility to the fundamental right to vote

California Common Cause will be co-sponsoring a one day conference in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 4, 2006 to train community members on how to advocate and mobilize for reauthorization.  

Save the date!

For more information, visit: www.calvec.org

Here is a message from Lauren Skowronski of Common Cause New Jersey...

One year of hard fought lobbying by the Common Cause NJ, the Citizens' Campaign and other reform organizations -- supported throughout the state by hundreds of letters and emails from you -- were rewarded Thursday with the unanimous vote by the NJ State Senate to pass S-1987.  This "Enabling Legislation" protects over 60 existing local Pay-to-Play reform laws from being "pre-empted" by the weak statewide bill that goes into effect on January 1, 2006.  Just as important, this win preserves the right of citizens in other municipalities to protect their own hometowns with their own strong legislation.

Contact Lauren@JoinTheCampaign.com to find out how you can bring this law to your town.  Special mention must be made of Senator Joseph Vitale's bold move to call for an "Order of the Day" motion to crack the legislative logjam which has existed since June.  Joined by the bill's other Senate co-sponsor, Senator Peter Inverso, and with the active support of Acting Governor Richard Codey, this motion carried the day. We offer them -- and the other courageous legislators who have been supporting this bill all along, and the groups and citizens who made their voices heard -- our deepest thanks.

Read more on the bill and its vote on Thursday by clicking here.

This post is from Celia Viggo Wexler, Vice President of Advocacy, currently on location in Africa.

Tunis, Tunisia -- This is the second day of the World Summit on the Information Society, and it's clear that all the problems that preoccupy media reformers in the U.S. -- access to new technology, reducing the digital divide, who controls media content, the rights of communications workers, and how to protect children -- are shared by reformers all over the world. 

While we in this country worry about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting being subject to government intrusion, in many countries, the government takes a more direct and threatening role. The owners of cybercafes are held responsible for whatever their customers do.  There has been improvement in the numbers of individuals conntected to the Internet throughout the Middle East.  For example, the growth of Internet users in Iran has grown exponentially, noted panelists Elijah Zirwan. "Farsi is the fourth most common language in the blogosphere."  And Internet use in Tunisia, fostered by the government, has grown from about 5,000 in 1999 to about 800,000 today.  In Syria, the first private Internet Service Provider has been launched, and private ISPs tend to be less restrictive than government run ones.  But much remains to be done, Zirwan said.  He noted that in Egypt and Syria, there are laws on the books abridging the rights of free expression, including online expression, and that people have been detained for their online communications.  Governments routinely block the web sites of groups such as Human Rights Watch or Reporters Without Borders.  And today, we got a vivid demonstration of that intervention when a panel on Human Rights inthe Information Society was not permitted to go forward.

This post was submitted by Celia Wexler who is on vacation this week...

There are lots of reasons I should not be writing this blog.  One, I'm on vacation.  Two, it concerns an issue that is not precisely a Common Cause issue.  But Common Cause always has been about sticking up for the little guy and fairness, and this story, buried on the Federal Page of The Washington Post on Monday, August 29, speaks to both.  It also speaks to the issues and people the media find compelling.  This story, which has not yet been picked up by any major news outlets, landed on page A13 under a headline, "Noted with Interest."

The Post reports that a mother of an Iraqi soldier was denied two days off to see her son return to the U.S. after serving seven months in Iraq.

Was it some hard-hearted capitalist not wanting to spare one of his best lawyers, or accountants or stock brokers?  Was it the head of a hospital department who could not spare his trauma nurse?

No, it was Uncle Sam, begrudging the time from a federal custodian who has worked for the government for 15 years, sweeping congressional offices.