Called my congressman’s* local office. The staffer I spoke to there(a former colleague) said they are getting ‘don’t pass the bill’ calls, because the people for it assume that because the Representative is for it, they don’t need to call. The staffer said people who are for it need to call.
Even if you think that your Congressperson is a safe vote, call anyway. You will make make it that much easier for him or her to cast that key vote.
KCinDC
Lovely: “Kucinich to Vote with Republicans on Health Care” — and he’s seeking an endorsement from Firedoglake.
KCinDC
Oh, and the article says Massa’s sticking with his “no” vote as well. So both have moved from symbolic noes to maybe actually helping to kill HCR.
Michael
OT – Today’s economic brilliance from Citi:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/2/9/835434/-Let-the-Bonuses-Shower-Bankstas-Like-RainCiti-Plans-Crisis-Derivatives
Seems that Citi’s great new game for avoiding suffering from the trauma of accepting only modest returns for responsible lending to small businesses and consumers is to offer a great new financial product – crisis derivatives.
What can possibly go wrong?
Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich
I just called my reps office, Lynn Woolsey. The staffer seemed to imply that she would not vote for the senate bill as is. I stated that she better or I’ll rain down hell fire. Actually, I said please vote for it, we have to pass the senate bill because the results will be horrible without it.
Michael
When they don’t get their way, they fold up and collapse like a cheap chair under a 300 pound woman at the church potluck.
Fucking assholes. They’re all mouth.
Napoleon
@KCinDC:
Kucinich is a complete preening asshole. His district is just a few miles from mine and I swear if he draws a serious challenger in the primary like last time (when he actually drew several which was a problem) I am going to give to them and go out and pound campaign signs at 4am and hand out liturature – whatever it takes.
Martin
Mine thinks that Obama needs to show his birth certificate and hands out copies of Atlas Shrugged to constituents. Think I should bother calling?
Phyllis
Okay, have to get the head-swelling down from seeing my comment on the front page. I will say my congressman is right high up in the food chain re: house leadership, with the ability to ‘whip’, as it were, and a solid dem vote. But even he needs prodding.
I’m tempted to call Lindsay Graham’s office, because he can be rational and reasonable once in a while. Ain’t calling DeMint. Am not infecting my phone line with whatever brand of crazy he’s got.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
You know, if Democrats where good at learning lessons, this whole thing would be a good case for realizing that everyone should stay on top of things all the way through.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Seriously, though, it shouldn’t take one person – Obama – to have to keep everyone together. This still would not have been easy, but I think people should be more aware that these things take a lot of effort.
beltane
@Michael: All mouth and all ego. There are some people who get into the game to feed their vanity, not to make the country a better place. But even Denis Kucinich pales in the esteem of the FDL’ers in comparison to the never-elected Darcy Burnor.
Midnight Marauder
No, really. Fuck you, Dennis Kucinich.
jibeaux
@KCinDC:
In his defense, I’m pretty sure you get extra votes if you’re #1 Most Favoritest Congresscritter in an FDL poll.
KCinDC
@beltane, I’m pretty sure Darcy Burner wouldn’t be deranged enough to refuse to vote for any bill short of single payer. She’s no Kucinich.
fasteddie9318
If they’re going to govern according to which calls them the most, can’t we just switch to direct democracy?
Napoleon
@jibeaux:
And I think he is enamored by the fact that Shirley Mclain and Sean Penn pay attention to him.
What kills me is that once he was kicked out of the mayors job in Cleveland he was basically living hand to mouth and sleeping on a buddies couch for a while, and he comes from a larger working class family with plenty of examples, I am sure, of what the consequences are to killing HCR, yet it doesn’t phase him, apparently, to play with the future of people like them.
I hope Elizabeth (his wife) cuts him off!
Leelee for Obama
@Martin:Is your Rep. Bill Posey?! I thought I was the only one who had a critter as bad as that!
fasteddie9318
Oh, and let me add another hearty GFY to Rep. Kucinich.
FormerSwingVoter
@Martin: YES. The Birthers and Deathers and Teabaggers we’re competing against don’t say “I better not call because I’m in a blue state”.
If you think you shouldn’t bother, you’re wrong. Although you may need to be a bit more confrontational. Less “pretty please pass the bill” and more “pass this bill or Real Americans will make sure you never see congress again this November, you treasonous asshole”
Michael
He hasn’t led shit, because he hasn’t done shit.
Somebody needs to ask Howdy Doody if he’s ever accomplished anything.
beltane
@KCinDC: Burnor would have made a fine representative. It just happens to be a little odd that to some people the most perfect progressives are the ones who are never actually elected to anything. In 2002 Howard Dean was at-risk of losing his reelection bid to a wingnut due to a progressive spoiler candidate, all on account of him not being pure enough.
Napoleon
@Michael:
He sent a major American city into default, does that count?
demo woman
OT Robert Gibbs has his store list written on the palm of his hand. lol
john b
just called hagan, burr and price’s NC offices. burr’s person was actually far kinder than i expected. Price and Hagan are already on board with HCR, but the NC offices couldn’t really get into specifics of tactics or anything.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Michael: Wouldn’t that be like “I’ll oppose any jobs bill that doesn’t ensure that every American is earning at least $40K per year?”
Notorious P.A.T.
Hey John, did Rahm save you from drowning once or something? Why defend the guy? This administration followed his plan for a whole year and has next to nothing to show for it. Plus he’s a dick.
lol
@beltane:
Are you sure? I’ve heard stories about Jane feeling threatened by Darcy. She doesn’t like other women taking the spotlight away from her.
beltane
@lol: That is funny. I bet if Burnor were in Congress right now, Hamsher would condemn her as a sellout and shill. Jane is one of those people who desperately wants to be a puppet master but can’t because it is impossible for her to remain behind the curtain.
CaseyL
Allrighty, here’s what I’ve gotten from my calls to the offices of Congressperson McDermott and Senators Murray and Cantwell. Note that I called their local offices, rather than their DC offices, and spoke to people I had not previously spoken to:
1. McDermott’s office says he’s well aware of the stakes, and is willing to pass the Senate bill as is. They also said that the House was poised to pass a bill eliminating the anti-trust exemption this week, but thanks to the snow everything is now postponed until when the House reconvenes on Feb 22. I said it would be really nice for the House to have something to show people that HCR is not dead: something that can actually go into effect right away. The person I spoke to agreed.
2. Murray’s office knows nothing about where the Senator stands.
3. Cantwell’s office said the current HCR bill does address the Senator’s top 3 priorities (cost-cutting, covering people not currently covered, and protecting the rights of people who are covered) and that she is willing to work within the reconciliation process to improve/fix whatever comes out of the House.
Cantwell’s person also said something odd re reconciliation: he said she wasn’t sure if she’d be “chosen” to be part of the process. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I suspect it means be among the Senators who draft the amendments to be voted on in reconciliation. My guess is that amendments will be worked on in the same committees that came up with the original bill – which might bode very badly for reconciliation, if the same jackasses in the committees that gave us the awful bits in the Senate bill refuse to allow any amendments that remove them from even getting out of committee, never mind to a floor vote under reconciliation.
Does anyone know enough about the procedural end of things to talk about this possibility?
fasteddie9318
@Notorious P.A.T.
That’s just it; they don’t have “next to nothing to show for it.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122436116
The problem is that they’ve fucked up the biggest thing, HCR, and that’s overshadowed their successes.
fasteddie9318
Sorry, blockquote fail.
JMY
And people thought Kucinich would make a great president? LMAO.
It’s gotten to the point where I think there are people both on the left (PUMA’s, far-left) and the right (Teabaggers) who want this president to fail. I don’t know specifically why they would want that, but the past 3-5 months have driven me to that conclusion.
Blue Raven
It was fucktards like Kucinich who stopped meaningful reform under Nixon, too. He can go eat a bucket of gangrene.
jibeaux
Rep. Miller’s office (D-NC) couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me whether or not he would support the Senate bill as is, but I called, again. Got my opinion registered. Even called, pointlessly, Sen. Burr’s (R) office. Guy there sounded very bored. I didn’t waste a lot of time trying to convince him to go track down the Senator and convince him to allow HCR to go to an up or down vote, but just stated that I wanted my opinion logged. Actually, it’s just occurring to me now that I got the DC office for Burr and maybe the flunky was just longing to go play in the snow.
jibeaux
I love that trying to do an R in parenthesis gets you a trademarked Senator. Pretty appropriate. Make it Sen. Burr (R-NC).
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@fasteddie9318:
The problem, if you want to call it that, is that he tried to tackle HCR at all, and people are willing to call him a failure for batting .500.
John
@KCinDC:
God, I’m so glad liberal bloggers led the charge to make sure he beat his primary challenger. Wouldn’t it have sucked if that safe Democratic district was represented by a generic party hack who voted how the leadership told him to, instead of a Great Progressive Leader like Dennis Kucinich?
John
@CaseyL:
Cantwell’s on the Finance Committee.
fasteddie9318
@Belafon
I should be clear that when I say “they’ve fucked up” I mean the entire Dem Party hierarchy, not just Obama. Just getting two bills passed was an accomplishment, but if they don’t see it over the last 5 yards into the end zone then it’s a failure.
Notorious P.A.T.
That’s the problem with going by percentages. Well, one problem anyway.
fasteddie9318
@Notorious P.A.T.
OK, forget percentages:
http://themoderatevoice.com/57560/obamas-first-year/
Signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law
Signed the stimulus package into law
Banned enhanced interrogation techniques
Restored funding to overseas family planning organizations
Restored funding for stem-cell research
Oversaw the banking rescue
Oversaw material interventions in the U.S. car industry
Successfully nominated Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court
Greenlit California car-emission standards
Advanced the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq
Reinforced the U.S. commitment to fighting terrorists in Afghanistan/Pakistan
Took steps toward resetting the tone of U.S. relations with the Arab world
Ordered the release of “the torture memos”
Helped advance health insurance reform – farther than any prior U.S. presidentStriking the last one, even though it’s accurate, because compromising on legislation must = failure. A couple of these I disagreed with (doubling-down in Afghanistan), and there are other things I wish he would have done (frog-marching Dick Cheney out of his bunker), but the fact is that he campaigned on doing the former and on not doing the latter, so that’s not a fair criticism in assessing what they’ve managed to accomplish.
Notorious P.A.T.
Where can we get a list of what the government has accomplished this past year?
EDIT: Whoops, my usual impeccable timing.
aimai
I’m thrilled with all Obama has accomplished in his first year. Every time I listen to absolutely sane people discuss foreign policy, for example, I practically start to cry. But that’s actually the source of my distress. We simply have to maintain and strengthen the Democratic majority just to stay in power, minimally. Just to keep our heads above water as a people and as a country.
I am anxious because I see this whole political thing as a see-saw. We simply can’t allow the balance to swing back towards the Republicans and let the kind of Republican that party will put up get back into power. If the Democrats blow health care *in such a way* as to bring our party into disrepute (they can’t govern!) or in such a way as to piss off the electorate (underselling what they do manage to pass) that constitutes a problem for the next election cycle. We simply can’t afford a Republican house, or a Republican Senate, or g-d forbid a Republican president. I really mean that. We.can’t.afford.these.nuts.
aimai
Notorious P.A.T.
It’ll be no surprise that I don’t find that list very impressive. The stimulus was far too small, and the main reason was Obama’s administration negotiating against itself. His treatment of detainees is far from acceptable. The banking rescue has been a fiasco, since he failed to get anything in return for all that money and his soft treatment of banks has fueled public anger against his government. And now Wall Street is angry at his tiny symbolic gestures toward reigning them in, and is threatening to side with Repbulicans once more–no one could have predicted that! ! ! So now, in return for his babying of the big money, he has lost the public AND the banks, with nothing to show for it.
His escalation of Afghanistan is reprehensible, not least because he refused to push through some mechanism to pay for it. It’s hard to believe our relations with the Middle East will improve just because we are holding uncharged Arabs forever in Illinois rather than Guantanamo.
And then there’s the health reform debacle.
lol
@Notorious P.A.T.:
I thought the main reason the stimulus shrank was because Obama needed to get at least two Senate Republicans on board to pass it plus whatever ransom demands the conservative Dems had.
I mean, you should be able to point to concessions that were given solely to Republicans who didn’t vote for the bill. The vast vast majority of them were made to people with necessary votes.
chrome agnomen
if the democrats in the senate could only find cheney’s secret man-safe, they might discover that stash of gonads that cheney surgically removed from them prior to 2009.
or perhaps they never really existed.
CaseyL
@John: Ah. I wonder if he meant that Finance would be shut out because they did such a lousy job last time? I have no problem with that.
MC in NE
My senator is Ben Nelson. Pity me.
I called his office this morning and registered two concerns: first, his announcement that he would join the Republican filibuster of Craig Becker; and second, his general suckage in the health care fiasco. The Stepford wife working in Nelson’s office read me a script about how awesome Nelson is and how progressives should love him because he voted for Sotomayor (he held out for a damn long time before “making up his mind”) and “voted for health care” – – WTF!
I suggested that in the next election, I won’t vote for a Republican, and that means I won’t vote for either the official GOP candidate or Nelson, who might as well caucus with the Republicans. She didn’t care. Then again, I’m not an insurance company.