“Legal immigrants are active members of the community and shouldn’t be denied a voice because of these major barriers,” said Reva Eiferman, an organizer with Maine People’s Alliance. “There’s a disconnect between the citizenship process within the immigration system and an individual’s right to have their voice heard in their city.”

As cities and states across the country consider legislation aimed at limiting the flow of outsiders to their areas, a few municipalities are moving in the opposite direction, pushing to expand the rights of immigrants living within their borders. In Portland, Question 4 would allow legal immigrants to vote in municipal elections. A ballot proposition in San Francisco aims to take voting one step further, allowing even illegal immigrants to vote in school elections as long as they are the parents of a public school student. In New York, city council members plan to introduce legislation allowing legal residents to vote in city elections within the next few months.

These efforts show that while anti-immigrant sentiment is prevalent, it’s not universal, supporters argue.

“It responds to what’s happening nationwide — the new policies in Arizona included — in a positive way,” Eiferman said.

Non-citizens can already vote in six Maryland municipalities and in Chicago school elections, but the rest of the country gives voting privileges only to citizens. Early in the country’s history, non-citizens were allowed to vote in most states, but as immigration into the United States increased, residents began to restrict voting rights, state by state. (Federal elections have always limited voting to citizens.) By the 1920s, as Europeans moved to the country after World War I, states cut off legal immigrant voting rights entirely, and only a few cities have so far reinstated them.

“It was kind of like the atmosphere now: There was concern about the volume of newcomers and what it means for the nature of America and where it’s headed,” said Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at the City University in New York and a supporter of expanding New York voting rights to non-citizens.

If immigrants can vote, they will never bother to become citizens, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the anti-illegal immigration group Center for Immigration Studies. He said the citizenship process is sufficiently easy for legal immigrants that they should be required to fully commit to the country before getting the right to vote.

“It’s silly not to require that formal step of marrying America instead of just shacking up,” Krikorian said.

But supporters argue that voting would help legal immigrants become more invested in their cities and schools. The San Francisco ballot measure to give parents of public school students the right to vote, Proposition D, could dramatically increase the number of potential voters in school elections: About half of all children in the Bay area have at least one immigrant parent,according to a study by the California Immigration Policy Center.

“I really believe our schools will be better if more parents are involved in every level of school governance,” said Kathy Coll, the mother of two San Francisco Unified School District students and one of three co-chairmen of the campaign for Proposition D.

In New York, the effort to expand voting will go through the city council, not through voters directly. City council member Daniel Dromm, a Democrat, said the council plans to consider legislation to extend voting in city elections to legal immigrants with the next few months. The bill will be called the Resident Voting Rights Act — “They are residents, they’re just not citizens yet,” Dromm said — and would allow any legal resident to vote in municipal elections.

“I feel it’s a basic right: This country was founded on the premise of ‘no taxation without representation,’” Dromm said. “By denying residents the right to vote, we are forcing taxation without representation.”

Here’s an interesting angle on the fight over health care reform coming out of Arkansas. More than a dozen states may have decided to fight the new federal health care reform law based on a states’ rights argument. But Arkansas is staying out of the fray. That state tried the same argument in 1957 and lost, Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, told the Washington Post. That fight occurred when the state attempted to defy the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School only to watch the federal government send in troops to enforce the law. “I think you got to tell people the truth. And if I understand the law, the truth is the federal government can’t just be defied by the state governments,” Beebe told the Post.

For science geeks everywhere, today is a day of great rejoicing. The Large Hadron Collider began smashing subatomic particles together in Switzerland, causing physicists and other scientists to predict a coming era of new scientific discovery that could tell us more about how the universe functions, the New York Times reports.

Meanwhile, the federal Food and Drug Administration is feeling pressure to crack down on “food fraud,” the sale of items marketed as high-quality or pure that are anything but, reports the Washington Post.

Now onto a story about the wonders of crowd sourcing. Hundreds of folks in Portland, Oregon heard a boom Sunday night. But rather than waiting until the next day to let the police figure out the mystery, many individual did a little online snooping, the geeks at ReadWriteWeb tell us. In a matter of hours, a Google Map plotting hundreds of individuals’ description of how loud the explosion sounded to them had pinpointed a pattern: based on the map the explosion seemed loudest around a certain city park. Police investigated and found a detonated pipe bomb.

On the media front Michael Calderone, the media blogger at Politico.com, is departing, the latest in a series of departures from the online political journal, reports the Huffington Post.

“Turns out the Martin Act is something we have been studying to see if there are applications for N.M.,” Sisneros wrote via e-mail Wednesday. “We have not yet asked for such powers but it is a possibility in future sessions.”

The Martin Act, as you may recall from an earlier post this week, is a powerful anti-fraud weapon wielded by the New York Attorney General. New Mexico and many other states don’t have the same beefed up powers as given to New York’s top cop through the Martin Act. The law gives broad powers to the New York Attorney General that allowed former New York AG and governor Eliot Spitzer to go after abuses in the wake of the Enron collapse a few years ago.

And New York’s current attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has followed in Spitzer’s prosecutorial footsteps, using the same law to win guilty pleas in his investigation of pay-to-play allegations involving investments made by that state’s Comptroller Office.

That New York investigation has revealed connections to New Mexico’s own investments scandal.

The New Mexico Legislature considered a bill to tax online sales during the 30-day regular session, but the bill never got out of the first committee assigned to study it.

Rep. Eleanor Chavez, D-Albuquerque, who sponsored that legislation, said she’s planning on introducing a similar bill in 2011 if she’s re-elected.

“We have to look at every possible scenario,” Chavez told The Independent. As an example of states’ growing interest in taxing online sales, Chavez said Nevada officials contacted her during the 30-day regular session to ask her why the bill had died so quickly.

“I think people had a hard time because it died rapidly” in House Business and Industry Committee, Chavez said of her fellow state lawmakers. “They wanted to know how we were going to enforce it. They really couldn’t understand it and they thought maybe it wouldn’t be worth our while if we couldn’t enforce it.”

The prognosis for Colorado’s new law, signed by Gov. Bill Ritter on Feb. 24, is unclear, the Denver Post reports.

Amazon.com announced this week that it would no longer do business with thousands of blogs and niche websites in that state that send business its way. The Colorado measure requires online retailers to send notices to Colorado buyers that they owe state tax on their purchases, and it would fine the retailers $5 per unsent invoice if they don’t do it.

Amazon’s announcement has split Colorado lawmakers and others, with Democrats saying the state should not back down from trying to collect money it’s owed and Republicans arguing the new law should be repealed, according to the Denver Post.

Whatever happens, both sides agree the fight with Amazon could have national implications, the Post notes.

Colorado’s approach in attempting to collect sales tax from online retailers who don’t have a physical presence in the state is unique from any other state that has tried to collect the same tax.

That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that firms without a physical presence in a state, such a mail-order businesses, weren’t required to collect sales tax on purchases. That has meant that states can tax online purchases from businesses with a physical presence, say like Wal-Mart. But online retailers that do not have a so-called “nexus” have used that ruling in the past to fight off the imposition of sales tax on their business.

The battle over online sales, however, has heated up after New York State imposed collection of sales tax on online sales from companies like Amazon.com in 2008, using a different collection mechanism than Colorado. Now more and more states have begun looking at taxing online purchases as potential new revenue as their budgetary problems have grown.

Here’s more dire news from California. The Golden State may be known as the cradle of computer innovation, but several state agencies can’t get their computers to perform essential functions, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns for repair and upgrade work, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Although taxpayer money has been flowing to corporate consultants and software overhauls, some computer systems are on the verge of collapse, and some replacement projects are years behind schedule or have been scrapped because they didn’t work.

The antiquated systems have even been cited by top finance officials as a contributing factor in the difficulty the state has managing its money. A lack of shared databases results in a sluggish information flow that can hamper financial decision-making. Budget officials may have trouble obtaining accurate, up-to-date numbers, and the information lag can hinder purchasing and investment decisions.

The computer and software malfunctions just exacerbate a terrible budgetary situation for California, which is staring at a $21 billion shortfall over this year and next.

New York, meanwhile, may face a costly dilemma: it’s bond rating may be in peril depending on what decisions it makes to close this year’s budgetary shortfall, reports the Albany Times-Union. If bond rating agencies downgrade New York’s bond rating, that will make borrowing more expensive because the state is seen as a bigger risk.

Just over the New York border, Pennsylvania is considering something it’s never done before: contracting with another state or states to board as many as 2,000 convicted criminals, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true. And they are, reports the New York Times.

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

The rising interest rates over the next decade could push the country’s debt service payment to $700 billion a year, the paper reports.

Finally, the militia movement is on the rise again. The Associated Press has a story today about the growth of militias in Alaska as a microcosm of what’s going on across the country. “Norm Olson’s militia is minuscule at the moment, but there has been a resurgence of the militia movement nationwide, in part coinciding with the advent of the Obama administration,” the AP story says. “At least 50 new right-wing militia groups have been identified by the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization. All have formed within the last two years, many spreading their speeches and combat exercises on YouTube.”

This dire warning comes from a new report that shows “offices throughout the state routinely report the attorneys have twice their recommended maximum workloads.” The study, by the Spangenberg Group and the Center for Justice, Law and Society at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., noted that Missouri ranks 49th out of 50 states in per-capita spending on indigent defense. Public defenders represent those unable to afford their own attorneys. Earlier this year, the AP reports, the chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court warned that “vast numbers” of inmates may have to be released from jail because public defenders can’t try their cases soon enough.

Meanwhile in the nation’s capital, U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid said Monday that he will include a public health care option in legislation that will go to the Senate floor within a few weeks, the New York Times reports.

The paper reports, however, that states that want to can opt out of such a public option:

His (Reid’s) proposal came with an escape hatch: A state could refuse to participate in the public insurance plan by adopting a law to opt out. Even so, the announcement was a turning point in the debate over how much of a role government should play in an overhauled health care system, and it set the stage for a test of Democratic party unity.

A few hundred miles south of Washington, Florida parents are in sticker shock over the steep increases that have recently added to the cost pre-paid college plans, the St. Petersburg Times reports.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Mark Sanford, the disgraced, hangdog and for-all-practical-purposes batching-it-alone governor, can’t escape his troubles. The first impeachment bill will be introduced today in the House, the Christian Science Monitor reports. The legislation comes months after Sanford admitted to an affair with an Argentinian woman, which brought extra scrutiny to his tenure as governor. Several news reports since then have shown how Sanford used state resources for personal use. The impeachment bill will be referred to the House Judiciary Committee and await action after January. “Before considering impeachment, state legislators have said they want to wait for a report from the state’s ethics commission on the governor’s use of state funds. The commission is focused on his use of state aircraft, private travel expenditures, and campaign funds,” the paper reports.

About 1.5 million New Yorkers left the state from 2000 to 2008, reports the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Roughly a third of those leaving moved to Florida and another third moved to neighboring New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Despite the emigration wave, New York still grew by 2.7 percent from 2000 to 2008.

The paper went on to explain:

The report said the primary reason was an influx of 876,969 immigrants, who made up 22 percent of the state’s population in 2008, compared with 17 percent in 1995.

Still, New York’s population growth rate was slower than most of the nation, ranking it 41 out of 50 states from 2000 to 2008.

Fiscally, the Obama presidency has been a disaster, but that’s only partially Mr. Obama’s fault.  He could not have spent those ungodly sums of taxpayer money without Congress, after all. It took Harry and Nancy and Barney and all the other big spenders on Capitol Hill to pass the spending bills, but President Obama signed them all too gladly,  and so he bears part of the blame.

On the military front, Mr. Obama handled the Somali pirate affair with cool competence.  To his credit, he recognizes that the U.S. cannot simply pull our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as many of his supporters want, but that we must finish what we started, even though he wasn’t the one who started it.

In diplomacy, however, he has been less successful.  I’m not talking about trivialities like giving the British P.M. an unimpressive gift, but about the impression he gives of being more respectful — more deferential, even — to foreign leaders who have not been staunch allies of the U.S. than to those who have.  If he was cool and polite but no more to all foreign heads of state, then it would be no big deal that this was how he treated Gordon Brown. But he was positively jovial with Hugo Chavez, gracious in the face of anti-American rudeness from Daniel Ortega, and he actually bowed to the Saudi king.

President Obama’s Cabinet appointments have been shockingly disappointing. A staggering number of appointees had not paid their income taxes and had to withdraw from consideration on this account. Ironically, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose job includes heading up the IRS, did not have to withdraw, and became head tax-collector after not being able to figure out how to pay his own. Other members of the administration weren’t kept out by tax problems, but Obama may be wishing now they had been.

I speak, most notably, of Janet Napolitano, who thinks the 9/11 terrorists got into the U.S. through Canada, and believes crazy right-wingers and U.S. military veterans are a major threat to our homeland security.

And then there’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was so unprepared for her visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City that she asked who did the painting of the Virgin, and who recently replied to a question about U.S. policy toward Venezuela and other Latin American countries hostile to the U.S.:

Let’s put ideology aside; that is so yesterday.

Totally.  Like, so yesterday. We don’t, like, actually believe in anything.  We’re, you know, like, postmodern.  Not patriotic.  Patriotic is really, really so yesterday.

And speaking of yesterday — somebody in the administration (not the president himself, of course, because I really can’t believe a guy who’s as smart as Obama would have signed off on something  as asinine as this) gave thousands of terrified New Yorkers a little homeland security drill when Air Force One buzzed the Statue of Liberty for a photo op.  Not exactly how the president would have liked to wrap up his first 100 days, I’m sure.

But all levity aside,Mr. Obama has set an ominous and disturbing precedent in his treatment of the previous administration.  Intimations of criminal prosecutions of members of the Bush Administration abound, and while the president has not said definitively whether he will or won’t prosecute, even the threat of prosecutions is disturbing.

In this country, it has not been our practice to follow a partisan change in power with a witch hunt against the party out of power.  When John Adams and the Federalists stepped aside and made way for Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans in 1801, and the new administration carried on the business of governing without personal attacks on the faction it had replaced, it was a momentous occasion in American history, setting a felicitous precedent — one that appears, sadly, about to be overturned.

And two U.S. representatives from New Mexico, Ben Ray Luján and Harry Teague, have pitched in a few dollars to help fellow Democrat Scott Murphy in his race against Republican Jim Tedisco, according to Roll Call.

Roll Call reports that Teague gave Murphy’s campaign $1,000 in personal funds. Luján gave $1,000 from his campaign funds. The special election will be held on March 31. The seat was previously held by Democrat Karen Gillibrand, who was appointed to the U.S. Senate by New York Gov. David Paterson to replace Hillary Clinton, who became the nation’s secretary of state.

The money in the upstate New York seat is eye-popping, considering the short time the candidates have had to campaign.

Through March 11, Murphy, who is making his first run for political office, raised more than $1.1 million, including $250,000 from his own pocket. He had spent $705,000 and had $444,000 in the bank for the final push of the campaign.

Tedisco, who has served in the state Legislature since 1983, raised more than $1 million, a figure that includes $200,000 that he loaned to his own campaign. He had spent $569,000 through March 11 and had $468,000 on hand.

Roll Call also reports that the National Republican Campaign Committee had spent $553,000 in independent expenditures through Thursday. The Democratic Congressional Committee spent $336,000 by the same date. Not to mention the money spent by unions and conservative political action committees.