Blue American’s Alan Grayson has been a maverick -- I mean the real kind -- since he was elected to Congress when nobody said he had a chance to win except of course Blue America. And he is becoming a real leader and not a follower. First, he’s trying to get a bill passed that really does help working-class America:

Howie Klein:

Alan is introducing a bill, the first in (American) history, that guarantees paid vacations. (France guarantees a month of paid vacation per year.)

The bill's provisions, which are expected to meet stiff opposition from Republicans and Blue Dogs poll exceedingly well among average Americans. Nearly 70% of Americans support the idea. This is what Grayson's legislation would accomplish: • Requires one week of paid vacation for employees of companies with at least 100 employees. Three years after passage, the bill extends this requirement to companies with at least 50 employees, and requires two weeks for companies with 100 employees.

• Covers workers after one year on the job. Part-timers must work 25 or more hours a week and 1250 hours per year to be covered.

Read on.

You can be sure that the Blue Dogs and Evan Bayh’s garrison of phonies will do everything they can to block it, but at least Americans are seeing what a good and better Democrat can do.

Now he’s trying to audit the Federal Reserve to see exactly where the 2 trillion dollars that they dished out went.

Jane Hamsher writes:

Last month Charles Grassley tried to push a bill through the Senate which called for the Fed to be audited, but Richard Shelby watered it down before it passed. Now there are 165 cosponsors of Ron Paul's Federal Reserve Transparency Act in the House, but 135 of them are Republicans. (Bernie Sanders stands alone sponsoring the bill in the Senate.)

Alan Grayson is trying to bring Democrats on board: The Federal Reserve has refused multiple inquiries from both the House and the Senate to disclose who is receiving trillions of dollars from the central banking system. The Federal Reserve has redacted the central terms of the no-bid contracts it has issued to Wall Street firms like Blackrock and PIMCO, without disclosure required of the Treasury, and is participating in new and exotic programs like the trillion-dollar TALF to leverage the Treasury’s balance sheet.

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Jon Stewart traces John McCain's evolution from a straight-talking maverick to a shameless panderer who now embraces all the things he used to condemn.

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"He started out as a maverick reformer. But now this reformed maverick is something even better: a winner. And he's loving it."

Best McCain Analogy Evah...

From the comments on the Just Because McCain Says He’s a “Maverick” Doesn’t Make It So post:

fiver Says :

A high school friend of mine had an old Maverick. It had lots of miles and was pretty run down. It didn't always start in the winter, and it overheated pretty easily if you drove it to far. On the highway it generally pulled to the right, but it could change direction in an instant - almost so fast you couldn't remember the original direction.

Of course it used a ton of gas, burnt oil and created clouds of smoke. But every time my buddy got pulled over, he'd tell the cops the car had been towed and spent a long time in the pound. For some reason, that excuse seemed to work all the time…

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

On Fox News Sunday when asked to "assess the Bush presidency" by Chris Wallace, John McCain asserted that "history will judge the president" and ran through a litany of talking points attempting to differentiate himself from the current administration. One area he was most insistent about was that he is a "maverick" who continues to oppose the Bush administration's use of torture.

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McCain: I obviously don’t want to torture any prisoners. There’s a long list of areas that we were in disagreement on, but I also think ...

Wallace: You’re not suggesting he did want to torture prisoners?

McCain: Well, waterboarding to me is torture, OK? And waterboarding was advocated by the administration and according to published reports was used, but the point is, we’ve had our disagreements, and I've been called a quote "maverick," and I'm not the most popular person in my party.

Though McCain himself was a victim of torture and has been outspoken about his opposition to it, his voting record has not matched his rhetoric.

ThinkProgress:

McCain seems to forget that he voted against a bill that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding. In fact, when the bill passed, McCain urged Bush to veto it, which he did. Thus, McCain’s claim that he “obviously doesn’t want to torture prisoners” rings hollow. Indeed, because of Bush’s veto, the CIA retains the option of waterboarding prisoners. ..(more)

And it wasn't just torture that John McCain was being disingenuous about. His oft-repeated claim that he is a "maverick" is a myth. His own home state paper, The Arizona Republic, concluded otherwise, finding through an analysis of his Senate votes over the past decade "that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives." Just like he did on torture, he oft pretends to be against something but only until his vote is actually needed to count, and whenever that happens he falls reliably in line.

Likewise, his attempts to differentiate himself from Bush would be laughable if so much weren't at stake. John McCain has voted with George W. Bush 95 percent of the time in 2007, and has voted with him 100 percent so far this year.

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Just one day after the McCain campaign proclaimed its man the "Original Maverick," Barack Obama blasted that assertion both on the stump and in a new ad of his own. "You can't be a maverick when politically it's working for you," Obama said, "and not a maverick when it doesn't work for you." Which may explain why the McCain campaign has apparently tried to purge any traces of its "True Conservative" ad, a February 2008 spot designed to win over hard right GOP primary voters.

As it turns out, McCain's latest ads ("Broken" and "Praising McCain") tout the Arizona Senator as the populist "Original Maverick." But that resurrection of McCain's tattered maverick image is contradicted by the "True Conservative" TV spot he used during the Republican primaries. In February, McCain to be sure wasn't the maverick battling special interests in his own party:

Announcer: As a prisoner of war, John McCain was inspired by Ronald Reagan.

Mr. McCain: I enlisted as a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution.

Announcer: Guided by strong conservative principles, he'll cut wasteful spending and keep taxes low. A proud social conservative who will never waver. The leadership and experience to call for the surge strategy in Iraq that is working.

John McCain: The true conservative. Ready to be commander-in-chief on Day One.

As it turns out, McCain's claim to be a "true conservative" didn't just disappear once he sewed up the Republican nomination. For the most part, so did the ad itself.

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