March 19, 2010 archive

No money – no votes!

I heart Glenn Greenwald and urge you to read the whole article if you already haven’t.  

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Has Rahm’s assumption about progressives been vindicated?

For almost a full year, scores of progressive House members vowed — publicly and unequivocally — that they would never support a health care bill without a robust public option.  They collectively accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars based on this pledge.  Up until a few weeks ago, many progressive opinion leaders — such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann and many others — were insisting that the Senate bill was worse than the status quo and should be defeated.  But now?  All of those progressives House members are doing exactly what they swore they would never do — vote for a health care bill with no public option — and virtually every progressive opinion leader is not only now supportive of the bill, but vehemently so.  In other words, exactly what Rahm said would happen — ignore the progressives, we don’t need to give them anything because they’ll get into line — is exactly what happened.  How is that not vindication?

Pretty simple really.  No money, no votes.  If we all stay home in November, what will they do?

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

11/2/2010 The Great Sit In

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If the so-called progressive Democratic Party succeeds passing the Health Insurance Corporate Welfare bill without a public option, I’m staging a Sit In…On Election Day.

You’re all invited!

It’s easy to organize!

It requires almost no effort on the part of the participants!

Imagine a Sit In all across our nation.

If you want to demonstrate this in-action activism outside your own home you could stop by your polling place, walk in, sing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant, and walk out without voting.

It can start with just one person, if just one person does it they may think he’s a Crazy Third Party Naderite and they’ll ignore him.  And if two people, two people do it, in Harmony, they may think they’re both F-ing Rahmtarded Liberals and no big threat.  Where are they going to go anyway?

And if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization.  And can you, can you imagine fifty people in one day, I said fifty people in one day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out.  

They may think it’s a movement.

Why did Kucinich Cave? The answer really doesn’t matter.

FreeSociety has posed the question, Why Did Kucinich Cave In To Obama? Which is fine if you are reporting that Kucinich has capitulated to the Obama administration. But I think it’s more important that we should consider, “What does this mean and how should we go forward from here?”

I refuse to believe Dennis is a turncoat or an evil liar. Instead, what this news means to me is that they finally got to him. To me Dennis Kucinich symbolizes the last bastion of integrity left in congress.  The one stalwart figure who had balls to bring an impeachment resolution to congress and read the resolution into the record. And what was the response like? There was a resounding echo of crickets from the news media and from most of the members of the House. Kucinich is just and good man. You can bet that whatever “deal” Obama offered him, he chose “the lesser of two evils”. The problem he faces is that of a crushing and corrupted system.

We will probably never know the full details of this shit sandwich. However, I do think is important that we recognize what this means: Dennis Kucinich, our firewall, our levy, our one true remaining voice in the House of Representatives, has been compromised.

I don’t know what to think anymore

This isn’t going to be very long, nor even really a proper diary, but I need to get this off my chest.  I’m not inclined to put this up elsewhere, because I’m not in the mood for being flamed into oblivion.

The news of the health insurance reform bill being probably a done deal has me feeling very deeply torn.  To come out of the process with nothing wasn’t politically feasible.  To come out of this particular exercise with this piece of offal is enough to make me want to give up on the entire political system altogether.

Then, this afternoon, I got the following email.  Now, I get a lot of political junk email — from activist groups, from congresscritters, from organizations allied with the progressive movement.  Most of it I just delete, because most of it consisits of pleas for money I can’t spare.  I quote it in its entirety below the jump.  Some of what they say is true, some is pure bombast, and the overlap between the two is causing me real issues.  I pass it along not because I believe everything they say, or to hold it up for ridicule, but in the interest of a progressive community deconstruction of this text.

Overnight Caption Contest (new)

Lt Choi Arrested For Equal Rights Protest, Others Too @ Pelosi’s Office

Lt. Dan Choi, a nationally known LGBT activist and Iraq War veteran who the military is attempting to discharge because of its Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, led a group of protesters to the White House today, where he and Capt. Jim Pietrangelo let themselves be handcuffed to the wrought iron fence in an act of peaceful civil disobedience.  They were subsequently arrested and are now being held in jail pending court tomorrow.

The Advocate, 3/18/2010

http://www.advocate.com/News/D…


United States Park Police spokesman Sgt. David Schlosser told The Advocate that both men were taken to Park Police’s Anacostia station, where they were charged with failure to obey a lawful order. Choi and Pietrangelo will be held overnight and are scheduled to appear in D.C. Superior Court on Friday.

“You’ve been told that the White House has a plan,” Choi told rally attendees. “But we learned this week that the president is still not fully committed. … Following this rally, I will be leading [the protest] to the White House to say ‘enough talk.’ … I am still standing, I am still fighting, I am still speaking out, and I am still gay.”



 Lt Choi and Capt Pietrangelo, handcuffed to the fence at the White House on March 18, 2010, while the crowd chants “Equality…..  NOW ! ”                          

Despite the Democrats holding the majority in the House and Senate since 2006,  and the White House since January 2009, during campaigns which Democratic candidates called for the repeal of DADT,  nothing has changed much in that soldiers who are outed in terms of their sexuality can still be discharged against their will for nothing but being attracted to the same gender irregardless of performance and duty.  This in spite of the issue of inequality being used for fundraising purposes, people seeking justice have been told “not now, it’s too controversial while we’re doing something else first” repeatedly.   While the President finally mentioned the topic in this year’s state of the Union address, he intends to put language about it into a fiscal appropriations bill for next year.

This is ridiculous.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D…

In the fiscal years since the policy was first introduced in 1993, the military has discharged over 13,000 troops from the military under DADT.[23][51][52] The number of discharges per year under DADT dropped sharply after the September 11 attacks and has remained relatively low since. Discharges exceeded 600 every year until 2009. Statistics on the number of persons discharged per year follow:

2007 —  627  discharged

2008 —  619 discharged

2009  —  so far  428 discharged so far    



Rick Sanchez of CNN does a good job covering this in this video.  Lt. Choi and Capt. Pietrangelo chained themselves to the White House fence today, then were arrested, in an act of peaceful civil disobedience to protest the lack of action on the ENDA Non Discrimination Act, and for ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military. Choi is an Iraq veteran.

The protest at the White House was followed by sit ins at House Speaker Pelosi’s offices in San Francisco and in Washington, DC later that afternoon by LGBTQ activists with “Get Equal.”   http://www.getequal.org/getenda/  Per their website, 4 people have been arrested at Speaker Pelosi’s Washington DC office.   The ones arrested in San Francisco have been cited and released.   twitter for Get Equal  http://twitter.com/getequal

Newsweek The Human Condition blog 3/18/2010

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs…

The group appears to be convinced that the administration and Congress are not moving forward with gay-rights legislation, despite Obama’s call in the State of the Union for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and assurances that ENDA is being explored. This week, however, The Advocate published an article in which Barney Frank claimed that the administration wanted to push the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” into next year.

According to GetEqual’s statement: “ENDA legislation has been stuck in the House Committee on Education and Labor since last year. Contrary to what has been told to many LGBTQ allies in Congress, The Hill reported in December that Pelosi assured Democrats she would not bring any controversial bills to the floor for a vote this year.”

But activists say that politics should take a back seat to human rights and basic safety. “A recent study on discrimination found that 97 percent of transgender people who responded had experienced some level of harassment and 26 percent had been fired simply for being transgender,” said David McElhatton, who is described in the statement as a transgender activist who participated in the San Francisco action today. “We thought we had an ally in Nancy Pelosi, but she has taken our equality for granted. We are not going to let up on her until she takes action to ensure that we are all protected in the workplace.”

Human rights are civil rights.  We can’t be invading country after country on the rationalization of some sort of mission to “democracize” them with western values when we continue to discriminate here at home on the basis of religious and gender identity.  These people who are willing to defend and even die for us, only wish to continue to serve their country honorably.

End Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell this year.

Don’t let the fear be the enemy of the good.

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h/t to Lady Libertine for the links

How to End Kucinich’s Career

Dealing w/Kucinich: Blogging to the choir VS. Firing Him in an Organized Way VS. Firing Him in an Unorganized Way

There are many pieces of democratic infrastructure that exist, or should exist, to help deal with Kucinich’s dive on healthcare. I will take it as axiomatic that Kucinich should now be targetted for removal from office, and won’t even argue the point. Actually, I don’t have time and energy to develop much of any argument. My goal is more modest – to just sketch out 3 possible responses, and to get people to start thinking about them. The options I point to don’t essentially depend on the Kucinich dive, or even Kucinich, at all. However, such framing is timely and quite useful.

High-Risk Healthcare Reform

The The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as Passed is a transparent little document comprising a mere 2409 pages in pdf format, and Senate Democrats have made it conveniently available online.

One of the flagship provisions of this historic bill (“historic” meaning that this bill has already been discussed as much as the Magna Carta) will make it impossible for anyone to be denied health insurance on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

Health insurance for all of us, even if we’re actually sick! That’s the name of the game, but it isn’t exactly the name of the bill, and although coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions has remained at the top of Democratic talking-points for 14 long months, I was surprised to see that the word “pre-existing” only appears 5 times in 2409 pages of legislative language, mostly in Sec. 1101 of Subtitle B, and…

Here it is! That awfully famous “section” in all it’s glory, along with a few typographical peculiarities which arise from pasting pdf into html.

Subtitle B-Immediate Actions to

2 Preserve and Expand Coverage

3 SEC. 1101. IMMEDIATE ACCESS TO INSURANCE FOR UNIN4

SURED INDIVIDUALS WITH A PREEXISTING

5 CONDITION.

6 (a) IN GENERAL.-Not later than 90 days after the

7 date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall establish

8 a temporary high risk health insurance pool program to

9 provide health insurance coverage for eligible individuals

10 during the period beginning on the date on which such pro11

gram is established and ending on January 1, 2014.

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