Thanks, Willy, for pointing us to the report about which states will benefit the most from health care reform. I would love to send the report to my ersatz Congressman, but facts, data, rational arguments can't pierce his smug little cocoon.
Blaine Leutkemeyer's email "newsletter" (propaganda rag) arrived, appropriately enough, in my JUNK folder. Even my computer recognizes toxic crap, and I had to really think about the injunction to "mark as safe."
It's hard to choose which lie to hate the most in his nasty, unpatriotic diatribe because of the cloud of hypocrisy hiding his true motives.
I am anxious to begin work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to find bi-partisan solutions that will enable America's employers, workers, small business owners and entrepreneurs to create jobs for our families.
Gimme a break !
But the most dangerous thing these anarchist Repugs are doing is undermining the basic function of a representative democracy by blocking, sabotaging, poisoning the business of Congress. Pernicious. That's a word I haven't used in a long time, but it jumps out at me when I read the blatant misrepresentations of fact in Leutkemeyer's messages.
Last week, Senator McCaskill held one of her Kitchen Table Talks at St. Charles Community College. This week, Representatives Todd Akin and Blaine Leutkemeyer held a town hall on the same campus. The different formats told a tale. Although the senator's crowd was, understandably, larger (it filled a gym), Claire let it all hang out. She drew questions from a fish bowl and answered them rapid fire. The two Republican representatives are wound a lot tighter, so the event was choreographed. I was discouraged from, though not forbidden to tape. The moderator chose the questions, and they--can you imagine the coincidence of it?--exactly fitted the topics the two men had announced in advance that they wanted to talk about.
The invitation had been to small businessmen, so the audience of nearly 200 consisted mostly of businessmen and juco students. We were treated, before the Q & A, to an impassioned rant from a Union, MO, electrical contractor--a Fox News junkie, who believes that Citigroup and GM should be allowed to fail. I was flashing back to the Tea Party at Kiener Plaza the night before. The man has no sense of history. If the banking system and one of our largest employers (plus all of its suppliers) were to simultaneously nosedive, it would be 1931 again. And his electrical contracting business might well go under in the depression that would result.
Once the Q & A session started, the two representatives mostly peddled their disinformation unchallenged, and I don't throw the term "disinformation" around lightly.
Two audience members staged a brief but fiery uprising when liberty loving Akin bemoaned the loss of the secret ballot in union elections.
But after the gentleman was escorted from the room, the Republicans said whatever they pleased without contradiction.
We won the Iraq war (?!) in spite of the fact that no one knew how hard it would be to control all those "Arab factions". I knew before we went in there. Did you? We must be among the damned liberal ivory tower academics that W didn't trust.
Akin gave a lengthy treatise on the reason that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae caused this country's financial meltdown. As if.
The Q & A focused on convincing small businessmen that Obama's policies will ruin them. Cap and trade, according to Akin, is "cap and tax." It will raise energy costs 40-65 percent in Missouri, he said, and cost each family $3100 extra dollars a year. And all of this wasted money to "solve a problem that sound science says may not even be a problem." He averred that it is not clear that rising CO2 levels are causing warming. That's why scientists have been forced to abandon the term "global warming" in favor of "climate change."
