(written by Helen Thomas - Front Row Seat)
President Obama should stop trying to win bipartisan support for national health care reform legislation.
Obama seems loath to put pressure on fellow Democrats to embrace a government-run health insurance program as part of his reform plan.
Instead, the president has waffled on this key point, most recently saying that it's "only a sliver" of his health care reform goals.
This mushy approach is designed to win Republican votes in Congress. But Obama should recognize that hard-line Republicans are never going to support his health reform program because, for them, the Obama health proposals are a sideshow. Their real goal is to limit his presidency to one term.
He should put his foot down and say that a government-sponsored health insurance agency is absolutely necessary to compete against private companies and keep their rates low. And he should accept the reality that any congressional victory will be won by Democrats -- not by some imaginary bipartisan coalition.
If Obama wants to win, he could tear a page out of Lyndon B. Johnson's book on sure-fire ways to overcome congressional resistance.
Tom Johnson, former deputy White House press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson (no relation), recalls that LBJ was relentless in pursuit of needed votes and that he knew what it would take to win every lawmaker's vote on Capitol Hill.
Johnson -- who went on to become publisher of the Los Angeles Times and president of CNN -- said LBJ would be on the telephone with members of Congress and their key staffers, telling them: "Your president really needs your vote on this bill."
He also would know about every special request from every member -- from White House tours to appointments to federal jobs and commissions.
"The Johnson treatment" also included personal or group visits with the president.
Johnson kept tabs on deep-pocket political donors and would urge them to pressure members of Congress to vote a certain way.
He also would call on religious leaders and even have his aide Jack Valenti call the pope "if it would help."
There were also evening meetings with senators and House members, with nightcaps and gifts to take home such as cuff links, watches, signed photos and a pledge to support them in the next election. He also sent them home with gifts for their children and grandchildren.
Bribes? You bet.
Nor were journalists immune from his charms and generosity. Newspaper and television network executives would get calls from Johnson, seeking their support.
He became a familiar figure at six different churches, often using references in the sermons he heard in his next speeches.
He would have been in heaven with a cell phone.
I remember when Johnson was very unhappy with his friend Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and veering away from support for the Vietnam War.
At a White House reception, Johnson beckoned Church over for a chat and said: "Now Frank, just where do you get your ideas about Vietnam?"
"From Walter Lippmann, the great political columnist," Church replied.
"Well," said Johnson, "the next time you need a dam in Idaho, you just ask Walter Lippmann."
Opponents of Obama's "public plan option" whine about government intervention in the private sector, though they were conspicuously silent when taxpayers had to bailout Wall Street.
Health insurance companies and other critics are pouring millions into defeating the proposed legislation. They are disseminating falsehoods and using fear tactics to scare constituents.
Lawmakers -- our elected public servants -- have a moral duty to help the 47 million Americans who have no insurance. Senators and House members should work to make sure that all Americans have the same comfortable health coverage that they have.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
HATE GROUPS ARE GROWING
I saw these hate groups way back in the primaries and caucus's. This is sickening! What is happening to this country? This is NOT patriotism. This is prejudice. This is hatred. This is violence. This is the KKK. This is the GOP. This is the Republican Party turning a blind eye and allowing this to happen. Obama wants peace between the two parties. What the hell is wrong with you crazy people!!! I admire Evan Kohlman in this interview below. Please watch...
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Susan B. Anthony
Her principal cause, women's suffrage, would not be realized until 1920, long after her death, when Congress enacted the 19th Amendment.
Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) was one of the 19th-century’s most successful reformers: (hello) A lecturer, advocate for temperance and abolitionism, and pioneer crusader for the woman suffrage movement in the United States. She fought for fair women’s wages, property and land rights for women, and legal rights of mother’s for their children. In 1869, Anthony, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founded the National Woman Suffrage Association which paved the way for nineteenth amendment (1920) to the Federal Constitution, giving women the right to vote. Bold and indefatigable, Anthony is the only women whose likeness has ever appeared on any U.S. currency -- currently the country’s largest denomination coin, the dollar.ProvenanceEdward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes; [Holman's Print Shop, Boston]; I.N. Phelps Stokes, New York, 1937
Signatures, Inscriptions, and MarkingsMarks: Hallmark, BL: B.F. 40 (see Spirit of Fact #5, p. 152)
Inscriptions: Inscribed in pencil, verso: "Susan B. Anthony // 1820-1906"
NotesBiography: Born into an activist Quaker family in Adams, Massachusetts, Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) devoted her life to the major causes of her day-temperance, abolition, feminism, and labor rights. In 1845, the Anthony family moved to Rochester, New York, where their farm served as a meeting place for abolitionists, including Fredrick Douglass and William Llyod Garrison. Her freindship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which began at an antislavery convention in 1851, along with the sexiest attitudes of temperance workers (as a woman, she was prohibited from speaking at public rallies), deepend her commitment to women's rights, and she quickly became one of the movement's ablest leaders. Her principal cause, women's suffrage, would not be realized until 1920, long after her death, when Congress enacted the 19th Amendment.
Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) was one of the 19th-century’s most successful reformers: (hello) A lecturer, advocate for temperance and abolitionism, and pioneer crusader for the woman suffrage movement in the United States. She fought for fair women’s wages, property and land rights for women, and legal rights of mother’s for their children. In 1869, Anthony, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founded the National Woman Suffrage Association which paved the way for nineteenth amendment (1920) to the Federal Constitution, giving women the right to vote. Bold and indefatigable, Anthony is the only women whose likeness has ever appeared on any U.S. currency -- currently the country’s largest denomination coin, the dollar.ProvenanceEdward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes; [Holman's Print Shop, Boston]; I.N. Phelps Stokes, New York, 1937
Signatures, Inscriptions, and MarkingsMarks: Hallmark, BL: B.F. 40 (see Spirit of Fact #5, p. 152)
Inscriptions: Inscribed in pencil, verso: "Susan B. Anthony // 1820-1906"
NotesBiography: Born into an activist Quaker family in Adams, Massachusetts, Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) devoted her life to the major causes of her day-temperance, abolition, feminism, and labor rights. In 1845, the Anthony family moved to Rochester, New York, where their farm served as a meeting place for abolitionists, including Fredrick Douglass and William Llyod Garrison. Her freindship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which began at an antislavery convention in 1851, along with the sexiest attitudes of temperance workers (as a woman, she was prohibited from speaking at public rallies), deepend her commitment to women's rights, and she quickly became one of the movement's ablest leaders. Her principal cause, women's suffrage, would not be realized until 1920, long after her death, when Congress enacted the 19th Amendment.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Its Obama They're After, not Healthcare
(this article taken from the NY Times)
The woman went to an airplane hangar in Belgrade, Mont., the other day, prepared to actually listen to President Obama talk about health care reform in America.
She has watched, the way the rest of us have watched, as the debate about health care has turned into a sideshow and in some cases even more of a freak show than Glenn Beck's. Now she wanted to see for herself, along with more than 1,000 others, if it would happen this way in Montana.
This is what she said about the event when it was over:
"Yes, there were a few protesters en route. But the Montanans who were excited to hear the President far outnumbered the fringe groups."
Then she said this about Obama: "He was smart, fair, funny."
So this wasn't an occasion when people with legitimate concerns and legitimate points to make were overwhelmed by the wing nuts and screamers who take their marching orders from right-wing radio and television and the Internet.
Those idiots come to these town hall meetings more to be seen than heard, and think creating chaos makes them great Americans.
Those people have been convinced by the current culture that we are dying to hear from them, and the louder the better. People who think that all they need to star in their own reality series is a couple of TV crews. But then this is Twitter America now, where no thought is supposed to go unspoken.
We hear that all of this is democracy in action. It's not. It's boom-box democracy, people thinking that if they somehow make enough noise on this subject, they can make Obama into a one-term President.
The most violent opposition isn't directed at his ideas about health care reform. It is directed at him. It is about him. They couldn't make enough of a majority to beat the Harvard-educated black guy out of the White House, so they will beat him on an issue where they see him as being most vulnerable.
In the process, they'll come after him on health care the way Kenneth Starr went after Bill Clinton on oral sex in the Oval Office.
With that kind of zealotry, screaming about government programs as if Medicare isn't one. It is why so many of them, all these wild-eyed red faces in the crowd, look completely certifiable, screaming about how Obama wants to kill Grandma, as if he's suddenly turned into Jack Kevorkian.
And by the way, if Sarah Palin is involved - Palin as uninformed as ever about these so-called "death panels" - the debate just got dumber, if that's possible. No kidding. If foreign policy was a brain-buster for Palin, something as truly complex as health care will make her feel as dizzy as if she just rolled down a hill.
So much of this comes from people who get all their information from right-wing media, or their cheerleading from political has-beens like Betsy McCaughey, people who don't see this as a fight for better and more inclusive health care, but who now see it as something grander and more noble, a fight to reclaim America from Obama.
They couldn't win the fight last November, when he laid out John McCain and Palin and a whole party with one election, so they try to do it now, with lies and rather amazing distortions. They want everybody to believe that if Obama gets his way, he'll eventually be in charge of insurance and doctors and whether you use CVS or Duane Reade. He's a Socialist selling socialized medicine. He'll kill Grandma. Come on. The notion that this is all honest dissent is just one more lie.
Even in Montana, the Swift Boaters who would line up against any health care plan endorsed by Barack Obama ran one television ad 115 times over a day and a half before the President arrived.
"Every time we are in sight of health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got," the President said outside Bozeman. "They use their influence and run their ads. They use their political allies to scare the American people."
He is right about that. But the special interests aren't fighting the reform, in a system that cries out for reform, as much as they are fighting him. They see their first real good opening and they go for it.
They don't just want to hijack this debate, they want to hijack his presidency. The rest of it, about your coverage and everything else, is just the cover story.
The woman went to an airplane hangar in Belgrade, Mont., the other day, prepared to actually listen to President Obama talk about health care reform in America.
She has watched, the way the rest of us have watched, as the debate about health care has turned into a sideshow and in some cases even more of a freak show than Glenn Beck's. Now she wanted to see for herself, along with more than 1,000 others, if it would happen this way in Montana.
This is what she said about the event when it was over:
"Yes, there were a few protesters en route. But the Montanans who were excited to hear the President far outnumbered the fringe groups."
Then she said this about Obama: "He was smart, fair, funny."
So this wasn't an occasion when people with legitimate concerns and legitimate points to make were overwhelmed by the wing nuts and screamers who take their marching orders from right-wing radio and television and the Internet.
Those idiots come to these town hall meetings more to be seen than heard, and think creating chaos makes them great Americans.
Those people have been convinced by the current culture that we are dying to hear from them, and the louder the better. People who think that all they need to star in their own reality series is a couple of TV crews. But then this is Twitter America now, where no thought is supposed to go unspoken.
We hear that all of this is democracy in action. It's not. It's boom-box democracy, people thinking that if they somehow make enough noise on this subject, they can make Obama into a one-term President.
The most violent opposition isn't directed at his ideas about health care reform. It is directed at him. It is about him. They couldn't make enough of a majority to beat the Harvard-educated black guy out of the White House, so they will beat him on an issue where they see him as being most vulnerable.
In the process, they'll come after him on health care the way Kenneth Starr went after Bill Clinton on oral sex in the Oval Office.
With that kind of zealotry, screaming about government programs as if Medicare isn't one. It is why so many of them, all these wild-eyed red faces in the crowd, look completely certifiable, screaming about how Obama wants to kill Grandma, as if he's suddenly turned into Jack Kevorkian.
And by the way, if Sarah Palin is involved - Palin as uninformed as ever about these so-called "death panels" - the debate just got dumber, if that's possible. No kidding. If foreign policy was a brain-buster for Palin, something as truly complex as health care will make her feel as dizzy as if she just rolled down a hill.
So much of this comes from people who get all their information from right-wing media, or their cheerleading from political has-beens like Betsy McCaughey, people who don't see this as a fight for better and more inclusive health care, but who now see it as something grander and more noble, a fight to reclaim America from Obama.
They couldn't win the fight last November, when he laid out John McCain and Palin and a whole party with one election, so they try to do it now, with lies and rather amazing distortions. They want everybody to believe that if Obama gets his way, he'll eventually be in charge of insurance and doctors and whether you use CVS or Duane Reade. He's a Socialist selling socialized medicine. He'll kill Grandma. Come on. The notion that this is all honest dissent is just one more lie.
Even in Montana, the Swift Boaters who would line up against any health care plan endorsed by Barack Obama ran one television ad 115 times over a day and a half before the President arrived.
"Every time we are in sight of health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got," the President said outside Bozeman. "They use their influence and run their ads. They use their political allies to scare the American people."
He is right about that. But the special interests aren't fighting the reform, in a system that cries out for reform, as much as they are fighting him. They see their first real good opening and they go for it.
They don't just want to hijack this debate, they want to hijack his presidency. The rest of it, about your coverage and everything else, is just the cover story.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
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