Activist Susan Cunningham told us last Sunday about her outrage that a tea party group wanted to use the local high school auditorium in Union to disseminate its lies--and that it wanted the fee waived. Not one to sit home alone and fume, Susan joined 25 or so "take the fight to them" activists and appeared at the Wednesday evening Union school board meeting. One tea party member showed up.
The sign Susan brought that evening built on a recent school bond issue campaign with the theme "Save our schools. She added "from Patriots" because these particular tea partiers call themselves the Franklin County Patriots. (Get a load of their professional looking--not cheap, sponsored by the big bucks?--website.)
The school board was mighty impressed with the arguments Susan's group presented--including the fact that as anti-tax, anti-government, anti-public-anything citizens, the teabaggers support vouchers over public schools.
The board voted unanimously not to waive the fee for the teabaggers. But it turns out that the district has no policy about who may rent the auditorium, so the tea party event will be there on Oct. 10. The local Dems had just assumed that political groups would not be allowed to rent the place. Now that they know differently, they'll make use of it, so in a way the baggers did the Dems a favor. And the Democrats may decide to attend on the tenth and participate--but civilly, of course.
There were no other speakers at Obama's town hall in Arnold, MO, to celebrate his first 100 days in office--just a barbershop quartet singing the National Anthem;
a pastor who delivered a (rather long winded) prayer; a Vietnam vet who led the pledge of allegiance; and a woman who has raised her children in nearby Imperial and who switched last election from voting for Republicans. She introduced ... wait for it ... President Obama. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, the gym exploded. Twelve hundred ticket holders were on their feet cheering and clapping.
Choosing Linda Pleimann for the intro was a subtle way of reaching out to the half a percent of Missouri voters who kept Obama from carrying the state last November, the Republicans who need a few gentle nudges in our direction. Predictably, the move was part of today's Post-Dispatch coverage of the event:
Linda Pleimann of Imperial also heard Monday that she would introduce Obama. She had campaigned for Obama and said he was the first Democrat she had voted for since Jimmy Carter.
"At first I wasn't sure I could get out of work," to attend Wednesday's event, said Pleimann, a hairstylist. "When I told my clients, they said, 'Cancel me!' No one complained."
Pleimann, whose stepson, Sgt. Carl Pleimann, is stationed in Germany after having recently finished a tour of duty in Iraq, said the president helped calm her nerves.
"We walked in together and he said, 'This is going to be fun,'" she recalled. "And just before I walked on stage he said, 'Go get 'em.'"
Another gentle nudge was Obama's choice for his last questioner: an angelic looking (check out the pic), articulate fourth grader named Laurel, who wanted to know about his plans to fight climate change.
Laurel was the culmination of the town hall part of the meeting, one of only six people who got to ask questions. After his brief opening remarks about what he hopes to accomplish, Obama announced that he would take questions from the audience, and that he would go "boy, girl, boy, girl" in choosing the questioners. I'll admit it's a hasty generalization to say that Democratic office holders conduct their town halls more open handedly than Republicans, but I couldn't help but remember how scripted was the "town hall" Akin and Leutkemeyer conducted a couple of weeks ago, with questions submitted in advance and carefully screened. Obama and McCaskill are free wheeling, ready to handle whatever pops out of the mouths of their questioners. Claire picked questions out of a fishbowl at her recent kitchen table talk in St. Charles, and the President picked people at random in the crowd. Akin makes me think of the way Bush used to keep protesters in a screened off area a mile away from wherever he was.
Until the last few days, the only celebrity status Charles "Chet" Hurth from Union, MO had enjoyed was for being sued ten years ago when he was a law student at St. Louis U. for biting a female law student on the butt--so hard she had to seek medical treatment. Now Hurth, the city attorney for tiny New Haven is embroiled in something that's grabbing headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle.
You're probably aware by now of the latest dirty trick the Republicans are up to, a petition initiative drive in California. They want Californians to vote in June on whether to split California's electoral votes in the 2008 presidential election by awarding electoral votes by each congressional district rather than by the winner-take-all rules that have applied.
Under its proposed district-by-district system, Kerry - who won California's popular vote in 2004 - would have received just 33 electoral votes, and Republican President Bush would have earned 22 votes - more than the number awarded in Illinois (21), Pennsylvania (21) or Ohio (20).
