The Apathetic Middle: How Virginia Dems Will Lose the Governor's Mansion

The word on the street is that Democrats are being encouraged not to challenge other Dems in primaries.  While I'm not in favor of strong arming good candidates into "waiting their turn," I understand why the Dems are doing this. It seems that they've finally figured out that nasty Democratic primaries just help the Republicans in the general election. 

Take for example what's happened here in Virginia.  A Democrat, albeit a conservative Dem, has held the Governor's mansion for the last two election.  This year, there was no clear cut Democratic successor, even though the Republicans managed to narrow it down to Bob McDonnell and only Bob McDonnell.  We had three contenders in the Democratic primary: Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran. 

From the beginning, the consensus was that Creigh Deeds didn't have much of a chance.  Terry McAuliffe would get the out-of-state big money, Brian Moran would get the more liberal backing of Northern Virginia and the grass roots activists.  Creigh Deeds?  He's a nice guy, but conventional wisdom said he was too conservative and couldn't be aggressive enough to win the primary. 

Go Watch It: Rep. Anthony Weiner on Government-Run Health Care

New York Congressman Anthony Weiner gave Republicans in the House the chance to put their votes where their mouths are on government-run health insurance plans Thursday by introducing an amendment to eliminate our best-known government-run health care program, Medicare, and inviting them to vote yes.

"I double dare you. Vote yes on it," he said. "And then go home and explain to your constituents how you're so philosophically opposed to publicly-funded health care that you voted to eliminate Medicare on its 44th anniversary."



Unsurprisingly, the House Republicans did not take Representative Weiner up on his challenge. The amendment to repeal Medicare did not pass.

MOMocrats Meet Valerie Jarrett at BlogHer

At the BlogHer '09 conference, five MOMocrats writers were among a group of women bloggers who met with White House Adviser and Public Liason Valerie Jarrett to talk about health insurance reform. Representing MOMocrats.com were BlogHer Political Director and MOMocrats contributor Erin Kotecki Vest, MOMocrats Founding Editor Stefania Pomponi Butler, PunditMom creator, Huffington Post contributor, and MOMocrats writer Joanne Bamberger, MOMocrats writer Sheila Bernus Dowd, and MOMocrats writer Jaelithe Judy.

Also in attendance were:

• BlogHer Community Manager Denise Tanton and BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone
• Jenny Prokopi, the founder of an online community for women living with chronic health conditions, ChronicBabe.com
• Kerri Morrone Sparling, author of Six Until Me, a blog about living with diabetes.
• Loolwa Khazoom, journalist and founder of the Dancing with Pain chronic pain management website.
• Kim McAllister, who writes about her life as a nurse at Emergiblog.
• Liz Henry, tech blogger, momblogger, disability rights advocate and BlogHer contributor.
• Kelly Wickham, a public school administrator, writer of the blog Mocha Momma, and BlogHer Content Editor.
• Daphra Holder, Manager of Mobilization Marketing for the charitable organization Donors Choose. 
• Katie, who has written about her experiences as a brain surgery patient at Overflowing Brain.
• Casey Mullins from Moosh in Indy, who has written about her struggles with depression, endometriosis and infertility.
• Loralee from Loralee's Looney Tunes, who has written about her experience being denied insurance coverage for a high risk pregnancy.

Here is the official BlogHer liveblog of the Valerie Jarrett meeting, written by Denise Tanton as the meeting happened.

Senator John Cornyn: Rhetoric may sound friendly, but actions are foe to health care reform

In early July, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) began his health care outreach tour across Texas. While he met with high-placed politicians and executives, his staff met with average citizens. On Thursday, July 23, 2009, MoveOn.org sponsored a health care reform rally at Senator John Cornyn's Houston offices. Small business owner Rusty Cates, who has been active in leading a non-partisan regional health care reform group, spoke at the rally and had the opportunity to sit down with a Cornyn staff member after the rally.

Cates was particularly moved by the story fellow rally participant, Joseph Benson, told. Benson had been in a auto accident with an uninsured motorist. Cates related Benson's story, "In two and a half years of recovery in the Texas Medical Center he maxed out his insurance, spent his life savings, spent his children's college savings, lost his job, his house, his family, and his legs. When he was discharged it was as a homeless man living on the streets in a wheelchair. In the years since he has rebuilt his life, sort of; his children did not get an education and he is confined to a manual wheelchair. He will never have his family back and he can not afford the prosthetic legs that a proper health care system would have provided him. He now works in a homeless shelter."

Cates said this is the sort of story that has inspired him to advocate for health care reform. He was at Senator Cornyn's office because Cornyn's current tour around Texas has given hope to people that he might be amenable to supporting the President's appeal for health care reform.

But is Senator Cornyn's "listening tour" truly indicative of a change of heart? Can citizens count on him to support reform?

New Poll Finds Majority of Public Remain Supportive of Health Reform, Though There is Some Softening

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) admitted that the Senate would not vote on health care reform before the August recess. This comes as a result of Republican opposition and Democrat divisiveness on the issue.

It also comes right when a new poll displays that although most Americans still back health care reform, criticism about proposed plans and a rush to implement have succeeded in creating doubts in the public.

The Kaiser Family Foundation released this press release about the poll and the public option:

While Congress works through specific health reform proposals, the July Kaiser Health Tracking Poll finds a majority of the public remains supportive of taking action on health reform now, though there is some softening of support as criticisms and doubts seem to be registering.

As has been the case over the past ten months, a majority of the American people (56%) continue to believe that health reform is more important than ever despite the country's economic problems, and the public believes by a two to one margin (51% versus 23%) that the country will be better rather than worse off if Congress and the president enact health reform. More Americans think they and their family will be better off (39%) than worse off (21%) if legislation passes, with roughly a third (32%) believing it will make no difference for them or their family.

Breaking News and A Chance For You to Help Planned Parenthood

Today the House will vote on the FY2010 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill. This is the largest of the 13 annual measures that fund the government.

Labor-H funds a whole host of programs and agencies -- everything from the Maternal Child Health Block Grant to the State Children's Health Insurance Program to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Tossed in there is funding for Population Research and Voluntary Family Planning programs -- usually referred to as Title X, its place in the Public Health Service Act. Title X provides -- with preference for low-income individuals -- family planning and related preventive health services. Every year it receives about $280 million; though the proposed funding in 2010 is about $317 million. (And if that seems like a lot of money, it isn't. If Title X had kept pace with inflation since 1980, it'd be receiving about $725 million.)

Today on the House floor Reps. Pence (R-IN), Cao (R-LA), Lamborn (R-CO), Terry (R-NE), Pitts (R-PA), Smith (R-NJ), and Latta (R-OH) will be offering an amendment that would prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving any Title X funds.  About 15% of ALL the family planning clinics in the US are run by Planned Parenthood; some 4 million women a year access services at these clinics. And here I feel compelled to point out that Title X does not cover abortion services (see Section 1008 for the prohibition).

If you think women, especially poor women, should have access to Title X services, including at Planned Parenthood, please call your representative and tell them to vote against the Pence amendment to H.R. 3293.

Photo credit: Sarah Consolacion on Flickr. Creative Commons License.

When Theft Met Profit

Last week Goldman Sachs reported a spectacular quarterly profit -- close to $3.5 billion -- and according to the company, it is on track to award an average of about $700,000 in bonus for each employee by year end.  Right before Goldman released its quarterly earnings, Rolling Stone published a scathing article by Matt Taibbi about the financial giant called "The Great American Bubble Machine," pointing out that Goldman has miraculously been on the win side of every major speculative bubble in America since the Great Depression.  Following the earnings release and the Rolling Stones article, not a few economic pundits have weighed in on the profit-machine that is Goldman Sachs of America.

Of course, by this weekend, it was the Washington Post to the rescue, calling the various sources clamouring about the inherent injustice of the Goldman profit and compensation scheme as "braying," full of "conspiracy mongering" and "priming the pump of outrage".  And in the great tradition of calling everyone who doesn't see the world your way a "socialist", WaPo then passively aggressively insists that the Goldman detractors simply have a problem with profit-making ventures.

Excuse me, but it's not profit when it is theft.

Conservative Shadowboxing on Sonia Sotomayor

This week's Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor closed Thursday, not so much with a bang, but a whimper, with the confirmation committee's ranking Republican member Senator Jeff Sessions going so far as to say to the judge, "I will not support and I don't think any member of this side will support a filibuster or any attempt to block a vote on your nomination. I look forward to you getting that vote before we recess in August."

Sessions' remarks were a fitting coda to match Republican Senator Lindsay Graham's statement during opening remarks on the first day of the hearings, "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you are going to get confirmed." But Republican politicians and conservative pundits managed to fit quite a show of political theater in between.

For a nominee who is apparently almost guaranteed to be confirmed, and may even garner a few Republican votes, Judge Sonia Sotomayor has faced quite a gauntlet of unfounded accusations by conservatives this week. Here are a few of the talking points most frequently aimed against her:

Pat Buchanan: You Are a Hateful Disgrace

In an interview with Rachel Maddow tonight, Pat Buchanan makes an ass of himself stating that Sonia Sotomayor, a sitting judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit is not qualified to sit on the United States Supreme Court.

Judge Sotomayor isn't qualified? Seriously? She's never written anything? Except detailed and well researched legal opinions. You forgot about those, didn't you, Pat?

Buchanan then goes on to say that this country was built by "white folks" and states that Sotomayor was appointed to the Appeals Court and the Supreme Court because she is a hispanic woman. And for only that reason. Buchanan wraps it up by stating that the reason we've only had white MEN (excluding Thomas) on the Supreme Court, is that the men have been more qualified.

Rachel has a good point, Pat. Let's compare your grades at Georgetown to Sotomayor's at Yale. Stop trying to paint white men as victims. Your problem is the one that Melissa's husband, DADocrat Daniel Levine, so aptly pointed out earlier this week: Pat, you are completely and utterly blind to your own prejudices and the privileges granted to you as a white male. You don't have a clue. Pat, until you walk a mile in a woman's heels or walk a mile in Sotomayor's heels, a latina woman raised in the Bronix who really knows what working class Americans are like, shut the hell up. You don't speak for us.

It's people like Pat Buchanan who really make me fear for this country, who make me worry and fret about the world I've brought my children into.  People like Pat Buchanan are completely unable to see the world outside their small sphere of experience.  People like Pat Buchanan prefer to blame their own white, male shortcomings on the reverse discrimination bogey man than to get off of their own asses and work harder.  People like Pat Buchanan find it easier to belittle an accomplished and intelligent JUDGE like Sonia Sotomayor, who has done far more for society than Pat Buchanan ever has, than to think for even a tiny moment that maybe, just maybe she actually is smarter.

And then Pat goes back to his office and asks his female secretary to fetch him some coffee.  Because that's the way it should be.  Because this country was "built by white folks."  And by men.  Women had absolutely nothing to do with it.  Neither, apparently did anyone of color.  Not even those who literally built the South.

Pat, you can stick this woman's size 6 1/2 high heeled shoe up your white, pompous ass.

After you dig Rachel's out.

Thanks to Tracy Viselli for the video. She has an excellent post of her own up about Buchanan. Cross posted at Lawyer Mama in slightly different form.

A Women of Color Trifecta This Week? Sotomayor, Chu, and Benjamin

    
In judge's robes: 2d Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor, nominee for Supreme Court Justice; center: Congresswoman Judy Chu; in a doctor's coat: Dr. Regina Benjamin, nominee for U.S. Surgeon General

During the recent hearings to confirm Obama's appointment of Sonia Sotomayor as the newest member of SCOTUS, Senator Lindsay Graham sourly admitted to Sotomayor, "Unless you have a meltdown, you're going to get confirmed."

The surly, condescending impotence of Graham's statement aside, what he was acknowledging was the 60-seat majority of Democratic senators in the Senate, making Republicans' filibuster shenanigans to block Sotomayor's confirmation highly unlikely.

If all goes well, then, this week we'll have seen a women of color trifecta: Sonia Sotomayor's appointment to the Supreme Court, Judy Chu's landslide election to the Congressional seat vacated by Hilda Solis upon becoming Labor Secretary in Obama's cabinet, and Dr. Regina Benjamin's appointment as the Surgeon General of the United States.

Can't appoint or elect eminently qualified women of color to serve America at the highest levels of public office because "they don't exist"? President Obama's appointments and the voters of CD32 beg to differ.

Accomplished women of all colors and walks of life are ready to repay the benefits from uniquely American opportunities available to them. This is cause for celebration, and the wider the net we throw to find talent, the more every one of us reaps the reward.

Cynematic blogs at P i l l o w b o o k. She'd like to see various LGBT military men and women (like Lt Dan Choi, for example) be reinstated to service, and DADT repealed, for the same reason that race, age, or gender discrimination is no longer a barrier to employment anywhere or to public service: DISCRIMINATION BASED ON SEXUAL ORIENTATION UNJUSTLY NARROWS THE POOL OF TALENT AND HAS NO BEARING ON MERITORIOUS ACHIEVEMENT.