To the Majority leaders of the Senate, the House of Representatives, their Minority counterparts, the President of the United States, and various others (such as Senators McCain, Lieberman, and all the others who are making a mess out of our legislative system and the future of our economy and our government):
What the hell is wrong with you guys? Don't you know we are watching all of you as you behave like High School adolescents and make our lawmaking processes a joke? Don't you know you were elected by ordinary people like me and, while we don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure your campaign hotel accommodations are first rate, we believed that in voting for you... all of you...that you would not only represent us, but LISTEN to our concerns and work together to solve our collective problems?
The first rule of medicine is, "Do no harm." The post-Joe Lieberman version of the Senate healthcare bill fails that basic criterion. Unless Democratic leadership steps up to fix this misguided proposal, our only recourse will be to kill it.
The fundamental failing of the newest Senate proposal is that it requires individuals to purchase health insurance, but does nothing to rein in what insurance companies charge. There is nothing to stop spiraling health costs from eating up an ever-increasing percentage of our national productivity.
In an e-mail received Friday, Nov 13, Public Campaign says there are now 115 co-sponsors for HR 1826, the public financing for campaigns bill. Take a look at their website and re-double your efforts to build grassroots support for this needed change.
On the same date, an e-mail came in from Lawrence Lessig with news of the latest videos from Change-Congress. They are targeting Lieberman and Bayh for their links to big PhARMA and their threats to prevent significant reform with a public option. Here's hoping that Glenn Greenwald doesn't mind being "incorporated" into the Lieberman video; there have been times in the past when objections have been raised by persons whose words and likeness have been used by Change-Congress in a video ad.
In these the last weeks of debate, there is more value to the exposure of just how much the outside campaign contributions influence the positions of our Senators and Representatives.
One of the interesting facts is that not only do Democrats in the Senate defect a lot more than Republicans on crucial votes, but they are doing it more often. Thirty Democrats who were around for 2008 have Progressive Punch scores that are less liberal than their career marks while only 16 are more liberal. Overall, we are losing an average of 2.5 votes on crucual votes due to this trend.
Liberals/Progressives are essentially showing no trend. Most scores are pretty close and a similar number are going up as going down. Regionally, 8 of the 16 with a rising score come from the Northeast. With the exception of Tom Harkin, all of those with a higher score come from Democratic states in Democratic regions, although you might quibble about Ohio.
Some of those with the biggest increases were big targets of the left who may have decided to move closer to their constituencies: Joe Lieberman went from a pathetic 68.49 career score to an OK 83.33. DiFi moved from 79.06 to 87.50. Tom Carper, a particular sore spot for me, went from 70.45 to 81.25. John Kerry showed some leadership moving from 82.52 to a really good 95.83.
I read three or four serious articles about the rise of fascism yesterday, and they were helping to ground me with an understanding of the violent mobs shutting down public meetings on health care issues and threatening Congressmen with lynching and poisoning.
I thought, who I should send this to is Senators Reid, and Lieberman, and Nelson, and Feinstein, and tell them that it is their responsibility to stand up for our democracy, and take some effective action to stop this insanity.
And so I sent emails, and quotes from the pieces comparing our violent lobbyist-coached mobs and the situation in Nazi Germany, and I asked each of them to take responsibility, take action to stop this violence in our public meetings.
So I have been thinking about it for a day, and I want to suggest that we approach these so-called Democrats who do so much business with the health care industry, and we ask them to not only repudiate the violent and threatening behavior we've seen, but ask them also to acknowlege that the lobbyists they have been doing business with are financing the PR firms and lobby shops who are openly coaching and encouraging the mob actions.
Are Senators Lieberman, Feinstein, Nelson, and all the others, willing to sign onto this move into violence themselves? Or are they willing to quit supporting the corporations which are funding it?
Are they willing to condemn the corporate funding of violence and distortion and lies? Are they willing to meet with their lobbyist supporters and insist they they call off the violence and the mobs?
Are they willing to organize in the Senate and the House against violent behavior and threats?
If they are taking health care money, and the same organizations are financing mob rule, then the Senators and Representatives who take that money are responsible to stop the promotion of violence, or resign their alliance with those businesses.
Don't you think so?
What do you think?
Some info:
http://www.openleft.com/... http://qwstnevrythg.com/... http://www.alternet.org/...
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America are running a 10-day vote where progressives can decide which states to bring the WeWantThePublicOption.com "sign your name" ad to.
Ads will feature the names of local residents from across a given state and call out the local Senate Dem for taking millions from health and insurance interests while threatening to oppose the public option. (A slight variation of the ad to the right we've been running in DC the last few weeks.)
Thousands of people have voted. So far, Baucus is in first place, Kerry second, Feinstein third, Lieberman fourth, Bayh fifth, and so on.
Well me either and I'll tell you my main reason. The U.S. Senate could vote to gather up every loose saber littering that chamber's floor to lock safely in the attic and what this White House would hear are sabers being rattled while they were carted off. But I'll tell you something I don't like almost if not equally as much as Clinton's Kyle - Lieberman vote. By and large I am upset by how anti-war grassroots have seized on Clinton's vote to use as a primary season football at the expense of trying to lesson the risk of war with Iran.
Essentially the primary reaction of most anti-war grassroots activists to the passage of Kyle -Lieberman by the U. S. Senate has been to blast Clinton for her vote and use that vote to argue against her Presidential candidacy. I know I am over simplifying, but the most common line of attack seems to be that by voting for Kyle- Lieberman, Clinton gave political cover to Bush/Cheney that will make it easier for them to attack Iran while they still are in office. Let's step back and look at that for a second. Maybe several LONG seconds.
This is another in the regular series called Strategery, which is written by David Sirota and appears Wednesdays on OpenLeft (I know today is Thursday - sorry I'm off my a day...).
According to a new poll released today by the nonpartisan firm Research 2000, if Connecticut's 2006 Senate general election happened today, Ned Lamont would defeat Sen. Joe Lieberman handily. What is of particular significance in the numbers is that the shift is due precisely to the deception that Lamont supporters had been exposing during the campaign - but which reporters refused to cover both during the race and in the post-election analysis. This deception on the issue of Iraq goes straight to how the media and political Establishment will do anything to keep this war going. And the two lessons that come out of this poll after looking at its details are worth remembering.
As the poll shows, if the race were held today, Lamont would garner 48 percent of the vote, Lieberman just 40 percent and Republican Alan Schlesinger would get 10 percent. This represents roughly a 16-18 point swing from the actual results (Lieberman 49, Lamont 40, Schlesinger 10), and according to today's poll, the major shift to Lamont from Lieberman would be among Democratic and Independent voters.
You may recall that in a post-election analysis I wrote for In These Times, I noted that Lieberman's entire general election strategy was about pretending that, if reelected, he would lead the fight to end the Iraq War. The man literally portrayed himself as the leader of the antiwar movement after he lost the primary. His very first ad in the general election was him looking to camera saying "I want to help end the war in Iraq." During debates he said "No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do." It was, as this well-known YouTube video showed, a positively Nixonian enterprise by Lieberman - and it was a deliberate effort to confuse precisely the same Democratic and Independent voters who now say they would vote for Lamont. As I reported:
"Our internal polling showed that somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of the population said they simultaneously opposed the war and supported Lieberman's position on the war-a signal that Lieberman's confusion campaign was working."
During the campaign, we did all that we could to point out how Lieberman was lying about his position on the war through as many venues as possible - blogs, candidate speeches, and television advertising making the point that "a vote for Lieberman means a vote for more war" (an ad that Lieberman actually held a special press conference to attack for supposedly being not true). But in the general election's stretch run, the independent validators in the race - the local and national media - refused to report on Lieberman's actual positions and votes continuing to support Bush and the war, and this key slice of Democratic and Independent voters remained confused. They voted for Lieberman because they believed that he perhaps had been pro-war before, but had changed - when in fact the only thing that had changed temporarily was his language, but not his actions.
But now this key group of Democrats and Independents isn't confused anymore because, since the election (and, as predicted) Lieberman has become even more supportive of the Iraq War, and is actually publicly pushing a war with Iran. You can't turn on a television and see a story about the political debate over war without seeing/hearing/reading about Lieberman ratcheting up the saber rattling.
