Last night and this morning, that clip has been played on loop on every news and political talk show on the air, accompanied by choruses of “Oooh, he di’n't!” or some version thereof. It’s as if Franken had turned to Lieberman and said, “Your mother, buddy!” or “Stick your extra minute up your ass, Senator.”

What he did say, exactly and precisely, was, “As the Senator from Minnesota, I object.”

This is what passes for a sharp exchange on the floors of our hallowed legislative bodies. No frickin’ wonder the rest of the world finds us less-than-entertaining or amusing. This comes at the end of a week when Paul Gogarty, a member of the Irish Parliament uttered the infamous line, “With all due respect and in the most un-Parliamentary language, FUCK you, Deputy Stagg, Fuck you!”

“As the Senator from Minnesota, I object” pales in comparison. It also pales in comparison to the various episodes of fisticuffs that seem to routinely break out on the floors of other legislatures. Face it, folks – we’re boring. It’s no damn wonder that Florida’s Rep. Grayson is seen as such a political bad boy.

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The tele’d in guest was RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who was there to take potshots on the misinterpretation of Harry Reid’s remarks comparing the passage of revolutionary health care reform to other legislative revolutions in history, most notoriously, to the passage of emancipation legislation. Like the other Republicans, he is in high dudgeon, acting as if Reid had just called them all sadistic slave owners – though Steele did put a finer point on it. Reid’s analogy, he said, is an insult to the millions of African Americans who are descended from slaves because it compares their situation to the situation of people who don’t have health insurance. It almost makes sense viewed that way – almost – if it didn’t completely miss the point of the analogy: that medical care is a basic human right, and that legislation that recognizes that fact is as revolutionary and game-changing as legislation that outlawed the ownership of another human being.

So what did Deutsch do that made me want to kiss him? He brought the analogy back home after Steele deliberately distorted it, and said it that plainly. “When you bring it back to the basic intent of the analogy,” he said, And he laid out the analogy as it was intended, to portray the Republicans as akin to the naysayers who have tried to block every major revolution in American government by saying “It’s not time yet”.

And Steele’s response?

“I won’t even dignify that with an answer.”

Yeah. Good call when you don’t have any dignity with which to dignify a blatant mischaracterization. That’s the answer that every bluffer knows – it’s a cheesy way to avoid answering a question when you don’t have a good answer. Deutsch’s question called Steele out, and Steele’s best shot was to stand on dignity that he doesn’t have and refuse to answer. And Deutsch noted that as well.

So go Donnie. You’re the golden Ken doll today. Keep this up and I just may have to start looking beyond your hot exterior and start thinking you might have a brain.

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About a year and a half ago, I watched in rather unbelieving amusement as a bunch of Republican congressmen turned Congress into more of a sideshow than usual when they  “occupied the House floor” after Nancy Pelosi dismissed the chamber for the August recess. Frankly, it was hilarious watching a bunch of rich, preppy legislators pretend they were revolutionaries, right down to tweeting that the Capitol police were standing outside the chamber ooh noes! and might.. oh, the glory of it! … arrest them!
It was the start of the silly season – but this silly season didn’t last for a single month. Their stunt ushered in a silly season that appears to have no end. I suspect that they won’t be happy till their constituents get to watch them engaging in public fisticuffs on the House floor, swinging chairs at each others’ heads and throwing punches.

This silly season culminated in the entire Congress looking like a sixth grade classroom when Sen. Joe Wilson from S. Carolina missed his cue and yelled out “You lie!” a couple of seconds after his cronies had stopped providing protective cover by loud muttering and booing. Mind you, no one is talking about the booing this morning because Wilson distinguished himself by having the bad timing to shout out AFTER the other Republicans around him had shut up.

It’s a typical rookie mistake that any sixth grade teacher might have recognized. In fact, the Republican party’s entire performance last night – because make no mistake, it WAS a carefully orchestrated performance – resembled an attempted coup staged by a bunch of sixth graders. It was complete with hand-printed signs on notebook paper that they waved in unison at key points and the obligatory outburst of boos when the president mentioned illegal immigrants – and the one kid who goofs it up by overestimating how far his classmates will go to support him.

And immediately following his flub, there was the second of hushed silence, and then the “Ooooooh, oooohhhh!” of the kids in the class as they realize that a challenge has been made – and wait to see if the teacher takes the bait.

And the teacher did not, beyond a pointed stare in Wilson’s direction. Frankly, I’d love to have seen Wilson’s reaction during those few seconds. I’ll bet he was withering and looking around at all his fellows, wondering where the hell were the voices that were supposed to accompany his.

So Joe Wilson, with his bad timing, earned his fifteen minutes of national fame. The reaction on the internets is not surprising – the “serious kids” are shocked, shocked they tell you, and demanding that he be “punished”. The unruly kids that think the teacher is a dictator and must be undermined at every turn are hailing him as a hero. And the vast majority are rolling their eyes, and taking another careful step away from the class clowns.

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This summer, all over the country families are sitting down to decide what they want to do on vacation – maybe they want to go out to dinner once a week, or spend a weekend at the water park. And they have this same conversation – CAN WE AFFORD IT? And they don’t understand why the government isn’t asking the same question.

The answer is easy – health care is not a night out at the movies. It is not a family dinner. It is not a weekend at the water park. The analogy is false.

No – the mess that is health insurance and health care in this country is the ruptured sewer pipe spewing raw sewage into your basement. It’s the roof that’s sprung so many leaks you’re spending money to repair the water damage every time it rains – or dealing with the mold. It’s your son’s diagnosis of bone cancer.

When those things happen, families don’t sit around the table asking “Can we afford this?” If they ask anything beyond “Who do we call to fix this?” it’s HOW can we afford this? What do we go without to make sure this doesn’t destroy us? What sacrifices do we make to do the things that need to be done to keep a roof over our head, the shit out of the basement and our children alive and healthy?

And the sacrifice we are being asked to pay by most of these bills is a simple one – man up and buy health insurance. Take personal responsibility to make sure that you and your family are covered by health insurance and in turn, we will do this:

- we will make the insurance companies agree to cover every single person who applies for health insurance

- we will make it illegal for the health insurance companies to make you pay more for your health insurance because you have a pre-existing condition

- we will make it illegal for them to take away your insurance for any reason other than non-payment of premiums or outright, provable fraud

- we will set standards of care for your health insurance companies to follow

- we will set standards of administration that your health insurance companies must meet

- we will make sure that the care you get is the best practice in medicine so that when you pay for health care, you will be getting health care that actually works

- we will provide subsidies for those who cannot afford to pay for health insurance

- we will provide competition for the private health insurance companies so that they have to cut their costs and charge you less money

A health care reform bill that contains an individual and an employer mandate but does not include a public option – or an EQUALLY EFFECTIVE mechanism for containing costs is a giveaway – but it doesn’t change the basic fact that health care reform is something that needs doing… it’s not rocket surgery, folks. It’s just what it is.

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I recently moved back to Worcester with my new husband, excited to jump into the civic life of a city that I spent my first 22 years in, before moving to Lowell and Boston to help start small social entrepreneurships and support the development of city youth. Now 26 and armed with nearly 8 years small business management experience, a Masters degree and a doctorate on the way, I am excited to support growth of youth in THIS city, to give them the same opportunities that allowed me to complete two degrees, help build three successful youth programs and publish my first book.

I grew up in Main South in a time when many communities like ours were considered the problem, and not a source of solutions. During the early to mid 1990s I grew up around things that no one should ever have to see. In second grade, a classmate died in a housefire later ruled an arson. When I was 10 a 2-year-old neighbor was shot and killed. We played in a vacant lot filled with crack pipes, hidden weapons, and the remnants of buildings that once stood there. But when my mother organized kids in the neighborhood to help clean up the lot, and plant a garden, our City Councilor, Janice Nadeau, had the DPW out the next day to cart away discarded furniture and trash. The kids in the neighborhood planted gardens, and maintained that property, an abandoned lot, the community was involved and engaged. And out of that engagement grew a network of neighbors that held community meetings, helped each other in need, met with city officials, carpooled to parks, pools and beaches, and felt the sense of community that I believe made me who I am today.

I don’t know how young people growing up in this city today could feel the same. We were taught to be civically engaged because if we were, our elected officials would be able to partner with us to make our city great. This City Council seems to thrive on a lack of civic participation. Attending tonight’s City Council meeting I was shocked, appalled and ashamed that you are our elected officials. I’m not surprised when I overhear public servants excitedly predicting a low voter turnout, given how little the majority of you do to win votes that should be hard earned. I saw such disrespect, and even contempt for the public at tonight’s City Council meeting. It is no wonder that Worcester lacks the respect that the second largest city in New England should have in the region.

I watched a Mayor insist that we cannot sustain multiple neighborhood pools because the City has failed in the past to do so. She says this as though she is not the Mayor, as though she has not been a City Councilor for TWENTY years. If someone is responsible for failing the people of Worcester, is she not at least near the front of the line? Madam Mayor, you are quick to gavel silent a public that has waded through 7 community hearings, only to be displaced by a couple of well payed consultants. The respect you demand for “this body” of the City Council needs to be taken more seriously by its members. If you want the community to respect your representation, than perhaps you should learn to represent. I would like to thank Councilor Palmieri, Councilor Toomey, and especially Councilor Rushton, not for standing up for neighborhood pools, but for standing up for democratic values and due process that all of our policies deserve.

I know that you are all used to not having to do much to defend your place in the Council chambers, but I hope to appeal to your sense of duty, if you still have any, and ask you to step up to the call of your office. If you are going to sit and hear the will of the people, at least have the gumption to carry that will out to the City Manager who should, for all intents and purposes, report to you. I am ashamed at the pandering, corruption, and politicking that I witnessed this evening, and if you hope to keep your seats beyond November, perhaps you should be too. Because I pledge to do everything in my power to see that representatives that are incapable of representing will not have that awesome opportunity again.

Most sincerely,

Cara Lisa Berg Powers

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Good evening. Welcome back to Washington. I hope you’re ready to work harder than you’ve ever worked, because this is not the time to repackage old, failed solutions with shiny new ribbons and pass it off as new work. The issues that are facing this country are not issues that can be fixed with half-assed solutions designed to line the pockets of big industry players while leaving the working people out in the cold.

Going into the August recess, I made it clear, as I have been doing since the earliest days of my campaign for the presidency, that reforming the system of health care delivery and access is of vital importance to this country. That has not changed, and it will not change. I made it clear from the start that while I believe a single payer system works fine for other countries, it is not the right solution for the United States.

I have repeatedly stated my goals for health care reform in this country. They are not that hard to understand, unless you happen to be a journalist looking for a way to stir up controversy. I have said that any health care reform bill must do four things:

• It must provide access to quality health care, including preventive health care, for all people.
• It must contain the costs of health insurance and health care – bend the cost curve.
• It must provide health care security by eliminating discrimination for pre-existing conditions, removing cost-sharing for preventive care, limiting the use of annual and lifetime caps, reducing the amount of out-of-pocket expenses and abolishing the use of rescission to drop coverage on those that become sick.
• It must be budget neutral.

I have said over and over again that I believe a public option is the best way to accomplish those goals, particularly the ones that provide competition for private health insurance companies and reign in the outrageously steep climb of health insurance premiums – but that I’m willing to listen to other ideas to accomplish that aim.

Well, I’ve been listening for eight months, and all I’ve heard are ideas that will enrich the insurance companies without providing any guarantees that the American people will get any benefit at all. These ideas – tort reform, deregulation, non-profit coops – have been tried and do not work – except for the corporations they are meant to protect. After eight months of listening for new ideas that might work, I’m more convinced than ever that the best way to force insurance companies to be competitive and provide good service is to offer a public option.

Now, let me be clear about what a public option is and what it is not.

A public option is a non-profit health insurance plan that will be managed by the federal government. It will be open to anyone who does not have access to health insurance through an employer or other group mechanism. It will be started with an initial infusion of taxpayer money to get it off the ground. That initial infusion will be repaid as any other loan or investment would be paid. Aside from that initial infusion, it will be forced to exist on the premiums it collects from those who buy the plans it offers.

The public option will not be mandatory for anyone. It will not be free. It will not provide health insurance for illegal aliens. It will be one of many plans offered through a health insurance exchange where any citizen of the United States who does not have access to affordable health care is guaranteed the ability to buy a health insurance plan.

With all of that said, the public option is only one part of effective health care delivery reform. There are many things that we all agree upon. The lack of a public option will not destroy reform – it will only make it far less effective. Without an efficient mechanism to force insurance companies to stop gouging the American public, a health care bill will still stop rescission, cap out of pocket expenses, do away with annual and lifetime caps on coverage and guarantee that you can renew your insurance even if you actually use it. It will, however, cost far more to do those things without a public option.

And that may be good enough for you, but it’s not good enough for me. The hard working people who voted you into office deserve at least as much consideration as the corporations that put money into your campaign war chests. I will not sign a bill that forces people to buy health insurance unless it also contains the most effective and efficient option to make sure that those health insurance costs are bearable. Unless I see something radically different than I’ve seen to date, that option is a government run public option.

If you can not in good conscience vote for a bill that includes that reform, you can return to your constituents and let them know that you were willing to throw them under the bus so that health insurance companies could keep paying their CEOs and vice presidents more money every year than most of them will ever see in their lives. If you don’t, I will make sure that they get that message loud and clear.

A lot of the political pundits out there have been calling on me to give you a plan and tell you to pass it. Writing the laws is not my job – it’s yours. It’s your job to pass legislation that is in the best interests of your constituents, and that’s what I expect you to do.

So welcome back to Washington. I hope you enjoyed some fishing and some ice cream and some family time. It’s time to get back to work, so get out there and do your job.

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It’s OKAY When THEY Do It!

If you point out the fact that there are more people of color in prison than white people, you are not a racist, because you are simply stating a fact.

If you point out the fact that black kids may kill each other, but they don’t go nuts and shoot up schools, you are a racist despite the fact that you are simply stating a fact.

If you cheat on your wife while she’s sick, then dump her and marry someone richer, you can be the Republican candidate for president.

If you cheat on your wife while she’s sick, admit your fault, try to work things out through counseling and maintain that the issue is a family one not a political one, you can try to run for public office, but you will be excoriated and held up as an example of your entire party’s perfidy.

If you raise questions about the administration’s handling of 9/11 or Katrina after viewing footage of the events and reading an incomplete report, you’re a complete loon who should be wearing a tinfoil dunce cap – not to mention an un-American traitor espousing treason.

If you raise questions about the president’s citizenship despite wide debunking, call him a traitor and a fascist, stand on the world stage as a publicly elected official and agree that he should offer proof of his birth – AFTER said proof has been repeatedly shown, you are a true American patriot who doesn’t listen to the media lies (unless it’s Fox News lies because, you know, they’re the only station in the country who have a court ruling that SAYS they can lie in their “reporting”).

If you routinely cheat on your wife, divorce her and marry the person you cheated with, only to do it again a few years later, you can maintain your credibility and standing with your party and be suggested as the next Republican candidate for president.

If you routinely cheat on your wife, but your wife stands by you and says that it’s a personal issue between the two of you, you will be called into a special hearing convened by a specially appointed prosecutor who demands intimate details of your relationship with a woman who told her mother she was going to seduce you and write a book about it.

If you cheat on your wife, get your parents to pay off your mistress and her husband, hire her son for your campaign offices, and confess it all to your Republican friends in a secret fraternity, you will be supported and lauded by your party and retain your seat.

If you cheat on your wife, abandon your children on Fathers Day, get caught lying to your staff, your constituents and the general public, use state funds to pay for trysts with your mistress and claim that God has told you to stay in office, you can become a Republican hero who is being unfairly scrutinized by the left-wing media.

If you protest a war that was entered into on false pretenses to avenge a wrong that was committed by someone other than the country that we invaded, you are an unpatriotic traitor who hates soldiers and wants to see our country fail.

If you protest taxes that have not risen based on your belief that those taxes WILL be raised at some point in the future, as well as policies that will actually restore the dignity of the American worker, and you openly and stridently state that you want this president to fail, you are a true patriot and hero who dares to stand up to the government-run media – that is actually run by corporate moguls who are stealing you blind in order to enrich the top .05% of the country.

If you believe in an America where every citizen has the potential to improve his life and the lives of his family through hard work, but realize that we have drifted very far from that ideal, you are a communist welfare leech.

If you believe in an America where those who believe in God make lots of money and those who are poor, homeless, sick or jobless did something  wrong and are being punished for it, you are a true American who espouses the American ideal.

If you believe that compassion is weakness, admitting fault is treason and working for a better country and a better world is hating your country, you could be a Republican – but then you wouldn’t be reading this because it doesn’t fit your world view.

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Wrong. It does matter where he was born because of the law at the time of his birth. When I first started hearing about the whole birth certificate lunacy, I decided to test my own assumptions about citizenship by following every single item put out there as proof that “Barry” isn’t a legitimate citizen back to official documents and learning as much I could.

The result – if  Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, then he is a natural born citizen by the accepted legal definition of the term. If he was not – if he was born in, say, Kenya – then he is not a natural born citizen of the United States. THAT is why it is so important to the birthers to prove that the birth certificate that has been posted online and shown on television is not valid, and that Obama was actually born outside the country.

Here’s pertinent information for those who are confused about the birth certificate claims, the demands to see Obama’s transcripts and passport and all the other challenges and bullshit you’ll hear online now that the story is getting wider attention.

The U.S. Constitution provides that only a natural born citizen of the United States may serve as president. It does not, however, define natural born citizen. That is defined in the U.S. Code Title 8 Section 1401 – however, what you read there is the law as it NOW stands. If Barack Obama had been born at any time after 1986, the birthers would have to prove that either

• a)  Stanley Ann Dunham was not Barack Obama’s mother.
• b) Stanley Ann Dunham did not live inside the United States for at least one continuous year at any time before her son’s birth.

Obviously, their task would be far harder if that were the case. However, before 1986, the law stated that a child who was born OUTSIDE the United States to one citizen parent and one non-citizen parent was a natural born citizen IF the citizen parent had resided in the United States for at least 10 years, at least five of which were after the citizen parent’s 14th birthday.

And therein lies the nugget to which the birthers cling.  Stanly Ann Dunham turned 19 on November 29, 1961 – 117 days after Barack Obama’s birth – or, to put it another way – 117 days too late to have conferred natural born citizenship on her son IF and ONLY IF he was born outside the United States. If they can prove that Stanley Ann Durham traveled to Kenya and gave birth to Barack Obama there, then nothing else matters.

That’s why they’re twisting themselves in knots to try to prove that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii. Here are some of the tangles they’ve thrown out there and the answers to them.

1. The birth certificate is a forgery. It has Maya’s name on it, but it was erased.
   • Snopes.com debunked this one, but it didn’t stop Philip Berg from including it as part of his “proof” that Obama is not eligible to serve as president. Berg brought suit to have the election delayed or to have Barack Obama removed from the ballot. The “experts” that the suit claimed had determined the birth certificate was a forgery had never seen the actual document. They made their “determination” from scans of the birth certificate posted online. Most of them weren’t even identified by name – the best known of them  goes by the handle “Techdude” on various internet forums.
2. It’s not a real birth certificate. It’s a Certification of Live Birth, or a “short form birth certificate”.
   • Hawaii issues two forms of birth certificate, both called a Certification of Live Birth. The short form birth certificate is the one most commonly issued. It shows all the information necessary to establish not only U.S. citizenship, but natural born U.S. citizenship – place of birth. The long form is not issued any longer, but used to be required by the state of Hawaii to establish native Hawaiian heritage for participation in the state’s homesteading program. According to the State of Hawaii, Obama’s birth certificate is offical and not forged.
3. The “verbiage” is wrong for the times.
   • Stanley Ann Dunham’s race is listed as “Caucasion” and Barack Obama’s is listed as “African”, both of which, the meme goes, were not in common usage at the time of the President’s birth. However, the information on the birth certificate was supplied by either or both parents at the time of Obama’s birth. Why would a man born in Africa call himself anything other than “African”? Likewise, the term Caucasian was not unknown, and as a student of anthropology, Stanley Ann Dunham would have been quite familiar with it. All in all, pretty darn weak sauce as “proof”.
4. His sister said he was born at a different hosptial than was reported on Wikipedia.
   • It’s hard to believe this even could be stated as “proof” with a straight face, but it was one of the grounds that Berg cited in his motion to remove Obama from the ballot. Apparently, if your sibling can’t remember minute details of something that happened years before her birth, you’re a scurrilous liar. Considering that some half-siblings can’t even remember their sibs’ birthdays, I’m not sure how much credence this could possible be expected to hold.
5. His grandmother, Sarah Obama, said that she was present at his birth in Kenya.
   • This one is supposed to be a huge coup de grace. According to the narrative, the unsophisticated and uneducated Sarah Obama, step-mother of Barack Obama, Sr. made an OOPS! when talking to a reporter about her famous grandson. Since I personally don’t speak or understand Swahili, I have to count on what’s been reported by translators, and what’s been told about how it came about. You can find the full transcript of the almost fifteen minute phone call here and the tape of the conversation with Sarah Obama here.
6. The state of Hawaii allows parents to get a Hawaii birth certificate for children born outside the country.
   • Yes, yes it does. Children born outside Hawaii to parents who normally reside in Hawaii can be issued an official Hawaiian birth certificate. However, the birth certificate lists the actual place of birth on the line marked Place of Birth. In other words, If Barack Obama had been born in Nairobi, his Hawaiian birth certificate would not list Honolulu as his place of birth.

That’s just part of the whole conspiracy theory – you can catch up on some of the other garbage – including a docket of Obama lawsuits – at www.obamaconspiracy.org.

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photo

credit: Hamed Saber

For the past week, I, like many others, have found myself returning time after time to Nico Pitney’s live-blogging of the Iranian protests. Pitney’s aggregation of coverage from all the corners of the web – from Twitter to email to blogs to news – has an immediacy to it that can not be captured by television, by newspapers, by magazines. While the whole phenomenon of Twitter is new to many people, to me there’s a very familiar – almost eerily familiar – feel to this way of communicating past the barriers imposed by space, governments and the media.

The night of September 11, 2001, I sat in my living room, a safe distance from New York City and half-watched the coverage of the world’s reaction to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The rest of my attention was on my computer screen where my ICQ icon was flashing constantly and I had a dozen ICQ windows open.

In one, my friend Erika was telling me about her walk home from her office at Rockefeller Plaza earlier that day. Her descriptions were surreal – all the more so because they were flat and emotionless. The only emotion that came through clearly was confusion. She told me about walking past a a bloody foot and seeing a shoe nearby, and then wondered if she should go back and put the shoe on the foot, asked me if I thought that she should. I wanted to make her tea, sit across from her, hold her hands – but the best I could do was reassure her that someone would make sure the shoe and foot were reunited with the body – that it wasn’t her job to do it.

In another ICQ message box, my 18 year old friend Travis was typing from his dorm room in New York City. A freshman at college, just two weeks away from living in a comfortable upper middle class suburban home in Maryland, he wrote about the horror of smelling burnt meat and realizing it was people. He wrote about the noise outside his windows. He wrote about his worry for his Muslim roommate’s safety in the coming days.

In other windows, friends from all over the country reached out. Karen broadcast that Fred – working at the Pentagon – was safe. He’d been on the other side of the building. Thuy had managed to reach her daughter, stranded in Brazil when the planes were grounded, and she was safe.

On the television, they kept playing the infamous clip of people in some Middle East country dancing and celebrating the attack on the American devils. Amid the messages of condolence and support from various countries around the world, commentators kept coming back to that one clip, intoning that “not all of the world is sympathetic to us tonight”. The rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment eventually colored much of the coverage with the message that the entire Muslim world hated us and rejoiced in the deaths of Americans.

But I knew better. On my desktop, ICQ windows kept popping up – and would until well beyond the next afternoon – from Iran, from Iraq, from Saudi Arabia. Dozens of them from people I had never met or communicated with before – and the messages were not messages of hate and condemnation.

Tonight we are cry with you, one read. In Riyadh, we are not dance. We are mourn with your loss. Please tell your friends we cry.

There were many other messages, most of them in far better English, but that was the one that most touched me. I could imagine the writer taking the time and making the effort to search out the words in a dictionary or a translator so that he could reach out across the world and tell a stranger – we are not all one voice. What you see on your television is not the truth. We do not all hate you. We are crying with you. We mourn with you. Please share my message. Please tell others.

Watching Twitter turn green in support of the Iranian people, watching the flood of information that manages to leak around the censors and find the people around the edges of the media coverage, watching the media coverage itself change and respond as the PEOPLE demand to hear the truth, I can’t help but wonder how differently things may have turned out if the “new media” had been more robust in 2001. It’s a flawed analogy, of course, but I still wonder… what if those voices that reached out from Iran and Iraq and the Sudan and Turkey and Syria express their sympathy and solidarity, to give the lie to the media coverage of anti-American demonstrations – what if those voices had been louder in 2001 and 2003? Would we have been so quick to accept the enmity and hate as a given?

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Arlen Specter Defends Stimulus Vote

The news is just now breaking that Senator Arlen Specter has decided to switch to the Democratic party – and this bit of video from early February just might explain why, especially if you’re the least bit cynical. Which I’ve never denied – but I’ve also never denied that I try to look at the possible good (better) reasons. And here it comes – David Schuster just read on air from Specter’s prepared statement – and it’s an interesting combination of motives there.

I’m paraphrasing because the news has just been released and I can’t guarantee that my memory and my transcription skills are good enough to quote word for word but the major points are summed up in these:

1. The Republican party has moved far to the right since he was first elected.
2. The stimulus bill caused a major schism in the Republican party.
3. He has never represented the Republican party in Pennsylvania – he represents the people of Pennsylvania.
4. He is unwilling to be “judged” by the voters in a Republican primary election.

So… bottom line? He can’t win a Republican primary, and may be able to win as a Democrat. I think, though, that there is a lot more to his decision than convenience. His statement references the changes to the Republican party over his 2+ decades in Congress – that it has moved far to the right, and that moderate Republicans have been marginalized by the larger party.

Except that the “larger party” really isn’t larger at all. As recent surveys have shown, the Republican party is bleeding voters – apparently, most of those that disagree would rather switch than fight. And I can’t say that I blame them – those with more moderate views, those who refuse to have their politics defined by a few narrow issues are regularly shouted down and drowned out by the unified voices of a very loud minority.

I keep wondering why that is – why they allowed it to happen. And in this case, I’m not talking about the elected representatives, who are looking loonier and loonier all the time. I’m talking about the people who have always voted Republican because – well, frankly, because they believed in the broader platform. Why weren’t they storming the barricades and demanding that the party field candidates that actually, you know, represent their constituents?
Technorati Tags: arlen specter, party change, republican party left me

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