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What a week. We've already seen Blue Dogs take women to the back of the bus (or was it the alley?) with Stupak's impressively Stupid Amendment. Now we're hearing that those who supposedly worry about "too much spending" when it comes to health care--you know, the meatloaf-brains who rejected the public option, which would create competition and actually bring down costs--are now blathering on about embracing "tort reform."

Because you'd really want to take away the rights of victims in a democracy to lower the health care costs by...wait for it...wait for it... ".5%" (according to the CBO).

All you really need to know is that Blue Dogs/GOPers (is there any difference?) are those in favor of this counterproductive course of action, yet if you do indeed need more, watch the heart wrenching videos recounting the tragic results of medical malpractice. To learn more about the 98,000 lives lost due to medical error each year--or 268 every day--go to 98,000 reasons, a website set up by the American Association for Justice. Once there send a message to your Senator: Remind them you won't have your rights further stripped away so they can scarf down more caviar with their contributors at Big Insurance.

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So last week the Thune Amendment was thankfully defeated. A group I work with, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, took on the task of defeating this insane legislation, which only had a chance of passing due to the extremism of the NRA/Birther crowd and the ever-present cowardice of the usual Blue Dog Democrats.

I guess they weren't busy enough trying to destroy health care reform or climate-change legislation, so overriding state laws trying to prevent criminals from enjoying the right to concealed carry seemed like a good idea.

Thankfully, the NRA lost a gun battle for the first time in five years, but no thanks to squeamish Blue-Dog Democrats. Take Colorado Democratic Senators Udall and Bennet, for example. They waited to the end to vote, as if calculating which way to go right up until the last possible moment, and then voted with the gun nuts. Interestingly, two Republicans from generally pro-gun states, Senators George Voinovich of Ohio and Dick Lugar of Indiana, didn't feel a need to cave to the Bonkers Wing of the GOP. Nor did some other Democrats from pro-gun states, like Senators Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Bill Nelson of Florida and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

In response, a Columbine dad, who suffered what is the nightmare scenario for all of us with children in school, decided to remind these two men about what is and is not leadership in today's Denver Post. It says everything that needs to be said on this issue, as well as a host of others the Blue Dogs continue to practice duck & cover.

Sadly, the biggest threat to rational legislating right now is not from Republicans, who are and should be irrelevant, but from Blue Dogs. These people need to be taught not to fear their big contributors, but We The People.

(**As I stated in the piece, I am working with Mayors Against Illegal Guns.)

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On FOX News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Convervakrat Evah Bayh joined hard-right fanatic Tom "Dr. No" Coburn and echoed his conservative principles and renewed his opposition to universal health care for America.

It's really sad that a man rumored to be a VP pick is using the tired right wing talking points that the government can't do anything effectively and he had the frakkin' nerve to bring in the Hannity-Beck line calling everything in sight "socialism" to describe Obama's fiscal beliefs. Is he seriously a member of the Democratic Party? He's against any form of nationalism of the banking industry and wins the coveted "C&L Propaganda Spoon" befitting a FOX Talker when he called universal health care socialized medicine.

Bayh: Some action in the crisis was called for, that's in the short run. In the long run though we've got to start unwinding some of these things. We don't want the government in the business of owning our banks. We don't want the government intruding any more than it has to in the private sector so we've got to start reversing some of this once the momentum is in the economy to grow the economy once again to stabilize situations and I do agree with Tom, when it comes to health care we don't want "socialized medicine," but there is an appropriate role for government to expand coverage, to make it more affordable for people who don't have the means and that actually enables to meet the challenges....

Evan Good Bye should be a regular on Hannity's Great America panel. He'd fit in like a glove. Good Bye was very outspoken against President Obama's budget and is setting up a Blue Dog caucus of his own in the Senate. That's just what we need, failed conservative economic principles at a critical time in our history.

Bayh, a leading contender to be Obama’s running mate last year, was one of only two Democrats to vote against the president’s budget. He also has formed a 15-member group of centrist Senate Democrats called the Moderate Dems Working Group.

“I’ve been a fiscal conservative throughout my career. It’s nothing personal to the president, “ Bayh said. "In the short run, I agree with the president. We do need to stimulate the economy. The government needs to step in… In the long run, I think the deficits and the debt are too high. We need to get those under control. So that was the reason for my vote there."

OK, this might be a bogus report, but the Politico mentioned Blue Dog Jim Cooper as a possible replacement for Daschle.

But some potential replacements for Daschle could include former Vermont Gov. and DNC Chair Howard Dean, Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber and Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.)

Digby writes about the media's suck up to Cooper's foray into the health care debate under Clinton:

Jim Cooper is an enemy of universal health care. He will, however, work to ensure that the insurance industry and the Big Pharma gets more of your tax dollars.

Read this report and weep.

The country cannot afford another giveaway to Big Insurance and Pharma and desperately needs a complete overhaul of the system in order to get costs into line and get people covered. This recession is going to end up making more than 50 million people without health insurance, very possibly more than that. Many more are terribly underinsured. Obama cannot put some slimy Blue Dog opportunist in charge of it.

Make sure to read Digby's entire post. I Like Howard Dean very much and hope he gets the job, but what Obama cannot do is appoint fraking Blue Dogs to help pass Universal Health Care. It's going to be a tough fight even if Americans voted in Obama to do exactly that. You can be sure that the media will adopt right wing talking points and feature members from the conservatives in Congress and Gingrich types to set the tone to help defeat universal health care. The economic stimulus debate so far has been a primer for what's to come.

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So Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of the bluer of the old Bush Dogs, is helping enable Republican obstructionism in the Senate:

According to Fox News, Nelson convened a meeting in his Senate office today with Senate Republicans and some Democrats who are seeking “common ground on how they can improve the $819 billion economic stimulus bill.” Nelson’s meeting included Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA).

Here's what he told Fox:

NELSON: I don’t know, I don’t even know how many Democrats will vote for it as it stands today because a lot of my colleagues are not decided. They’re undecided on the bill as it is right now. Fortunately, we don’t have to take the vote on it right now. We have an opportunity to make some improvements.

He later came on Andrea Mitchell's program at MSNBC, in the clip above, and tried to explain further:

Nelson: So what we have to do is what the president just said in the last clip, is we have to create jobs. And if you take a look at the stimulus package, there are those programs that are there for infrastructure, that are there to develop construction, that will create jobs, and those have a robust nature to them in creating jobs. Unfortunately, there are other parts to the program that are borderline, marginal, when it comes to job creation. There's no question that there's a lot of spending in the bill, but what we really need to do is focus on what it does for jobs.

According to the Washington Post, two programs in particular are the object of Nelson's displeasure:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who remains undecided about the bill, said he opposes money going to research projects at the National Institutes of Health and about $13 billion for Pell grants that help students pay for college. Nelson says the measures are worthy but do not belong in legislation designed to stimulate the economy.

But as Red Rogue at DailyKos notes:

Earlier today, President Obama released state by state job improvement numbers should the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Program be implemented. According to the figures, Nebraska would see an employment boom of 19,220 jobs or a -1.3% drop in the unemployment rate.

Those numbers alone make the program worthy of support.

I'd love to put something in this diary telling you to "Call Senator Nelson and demand he vote for the bill!" but it wouldn't have any effect. Honestly I think Nelson is toeing that line yet again in order to shore up support amongst conservatives in Nebraska. It's no different than earlier this week when Nelson voted "yea" on a killer amendment on the SCHIP bill -- it's all for show because last night Nelson voted for SCHIP.

Indeed, Digby has already observed that this really is just so much posturing:

This may be kabuki. McCaskill is a super Obama friend and may be playing a role on his behalf to help him gain a handful of Republican votes so they can call it bipartisan. (Let's hope they don't give away the store to do it...) But, the end result is the same, whether Obama is part of it or not. Conservative values and economic shibboleths will have been validated and going forward we will have to re-fight the battle from square one.

Even Nelson seems to acknowledge as much to Mitchell:

Nelson: There are people who think we have a choice here. I'm not sure we have a choice. But I do think there are choices within this package that we can make.

Unfortunately, Nelson's way of making that point is all about enabling Conservative talking points -- which they will then use to explain their ideological obstructionism. Nice job, Senator.

It didn't take Blue Dog Jim Cooper too long to betray President Obama. What, eight days or so. Barack Obama started using Cooper last February for health care during the primary and Mike Lux issued a huge warning.

My concerns shifted into overdrive, though, when I noticed that the Obama campaign is now using Rep. Jim Cooper as a spokesperson/surrogate on health care.

I was part of the Clinton White House team on the health care reform issue in 1993/94, and no Democrat did more to destroy our chances in that fight than Jim Cooper. We had laid down a marker very early that we thought universal coverage was the most essential element to getting a good package, saying we were to happy to negotiate over the details but that universality was our bottom line.

Cooper, a leader of conservative Dems on the health care issue, instead of working with us, came out early and said universality was unimportant, and came out with a bill that did almost nothing in terms of covering the uninsured. He quickly became the leading spokesman on the Dem side for the insurance industry position, and undercut us at every possible opportunity, basically ending any hopes we had for a unified Democratic Party position. I was never so delighted to see a Democrat lose as when he went down in the 1994 GOP tide. Unfortunately, he came back, like a bad penny.
It is such a huge mistake for Obama to use a guy like this to defend their position on health care...read on

How did he betray President Obama you ask?

From Kagro:

Special "F. You" Note: To Blue Dog Jim Cooper (D-TN-05), who back in December extracted from the Obama team the promise of the convening of a "fiscal responsibility summit," which he wanted to be included in the stimulus. Instead, Obama agreed two weeks in advance of the stimulus vote to convene such a summit in February, and I said Obama should have waited to see that Cooper and the Blue Dogs pony up on the stimulus before agreeing.

Well, Obama didn't wait, and Cooper (and five other Blue Dogs) didn't show. What a surprise.

There's still time to disinvite them, of course. Think that'll happen?

Jim Cooper voted against the stimulus plan.

(h/t Hullabaloo)

From Kucinich.us:

Last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich delivered a petition bearing more than 100,000 names to the Speaker of the House urging that impeachment proceedings begin into the conduct of President Bush. ...With new disclosures that the Administration tried to "cook the books at the CIA" by creating a phony, forged link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, "We cannot step back and let this President escape accountability."

Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel (Dave Lindorff):

The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation’s democracy by two aspiring tyrants in the White House.

[Most mainstream media outlets] have blacked out news of impeachment. Incredibly, the New York Times, for example, has not even reported on Friday’s hearing, even as a news “brief.” Those news organizations, like the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer, that did report on the hearings did so only in short, inside articles. Though the hearing was aired in full on C-Span (and is still available for download), many Americans don’t even know it happened. 

The Blue America PAC has been striking hard against Blue Dogs, Hoyer and Congress in general for abandoning the rule of law and allowing retroactive immunity for the Telecoms. You've donated and we have responded. As part of our efforts we've also decided to donate money to twelve different Democratic leaders, a thousand dollars each to show that good behavior also is worthy of support too. Here's the list:

Chris Dodd (CT)

Russ Feingold (WI)

Tom Allen (ME)

Tom Udall (NM)

Carol Shea-Porter (NH)

Doug Tudor (FL)

Dennis Shulman (NJ)

Andrew Rice (OK)

Rick Noriega (TX)

Darcy Burner (WA)

Jim Himes (CT)

Jon Tester (MT)

You can read a list of all their very good quotes here. Thank you all!

We've also started running ads against Georgia's John Barrow.

Today the first of Blue America's ads rolls out in Georgia's 12th congressional district where the Democrat who votes most frequently with George Bush on substantive matters, slippery Athens Blue Dog John Barrow, faces state Senator Regina Thomas. The two couldn't be more different. Barrow gobbles up special interests money and votes for... special interests...

And here's more from SavannhaNow: Barrow's re-election no shoo-in...

She has a tough fight ahead of her, but Go Regina...(see ad below the fold)

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Are all Democrats better than all Republicans? Well... it wasn't always that way, but it sure is these days, at least in Congress. Not counting some pretty decent mainstream Republican governors, like Charlie Crist in Florida and Sarah Palin in Alaska, something frighteningly partisan has taken hold of the GOP. It's like America's interests takes a back seat to the narrow ideological purity of their increasingly right wing, neo-Con/neo-Confederate caucuses. But that doesn't take the onus off Democrats who are almost as reactionary. The Inside the Beltway Republicans want to give the Executive branch the authority to order warrantless wiretaps plus hand them retroactive immunity for Bush Regime cronies and possible criminals among telecom industry executives. Quite a few individual grassroots Republicans are alarmed at both prospects.

And then there are the right-of-center Democrats, mostly Blue Dogs, (Chris Carney is one) who, out of fear, are enabling Republicans. Today Glenn Greenwald over at Salon pieces together how Steny Hoyer is working with the Blue Dogs to give Bush just what he's looking for. C&L is working with Glenn and the rest of Blue America to raise some money to hold a Blue Dog accountable. Over 1,000 of our readers have pitched in so far. All those $5 and $10 and $20 contributions have raised over $57,000 so far, almost $10,000 today. If you can... let's make sure the Blue Dogs know that there are Democrats who don't favor retroactive immunity and who don't favor warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. We will be heard on this! You can Donate here...

John Amato: We've been very effective so far when we run a campaign like this and I wanted to say thanks once again for all your help.

Blue America's FISA fundraiser is doing incredible. Thanks so much and keep contributing if possible so we can take swift action against the Bush Dogs. Donate here.

Jane at FDL sez:

What can I say. In a little over 24 hours, much to our surprise, we raised almost $42,000 to go after Bush Dog Democrats who are joining with the Republicans to try and pass retroactive telecom immunity. Woof.

So the question is still -- who do we go after? You can still vote.

As Glenzilla says, "The goal is to raise as much money as possible to run local ads against one or two of them, alerting as many possible voters in their districts of their endless complicity with the most radical, corrupt aspects of the Bush administration's chronic lawbreaking and illegal domestic spying."

Thanks to you, we have a lot of options. Let us know who you think deserves to be the target of our efforts for joining with the Republicans to try and pass retroactive immunity for Dick Cheney and the telecom criminals.

Cast your vote here.

Ha ha, just kidding, Mister Murdoch! Strange Tales (syndicated):

The BBC is spending more than $1 million to teach its staff the importance of telling viewers the truth. Vin Ray, director of the BBC's college of journalism, said the cost of taking 17,000 workers off the job for the two-hour training seminar would add at least another $1 million to the cost. Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, ordered the training after the broadcaster admitted a series of bogus broadcasts, including made-up winners for phone-in contests and a misleading promotional video for a documentary about Queen Elizabeth.

It's very troubling.

Brian Williams: You know what I thought was unsaid ---they took their position Chris, we're seeing the replay --- they end up in this spot and the sun is coming is just from the side and there in the shadow is John McCain's buckled, concave shoulder. It's a part of his body the suit doesn't fill out because of his war injuries. Again you wouldn't spot it unless you knew to look for it. He doesn't give the same full chested profile as the president standing next to him. Talk about a warrior...

A great many bloggers are participating in "Blog for Choice" today. From a roundup of feminist response to the anniversary in Salon (advertisement req.)

I wish young women knew how deeply their way of life offends the right-to-life establishment and how set this establishment is on changing our lifestyle, either by criminalizing the things that make it possible (the most common forms of family planning) or filling our heads with fears and lies (abstinence-only curriculum). Today, 95 percent of us have sex before marriage, 85 percent of couples have sex once a week (decidedly not for baby making), 90 percent use some form of artificial birth control. The "right to life" movement is dedicated to stopping this.

Nevertheless, many bloggers have neither forgiven nor forgotten that NARAL endorsed Joe Lieberman in Connecticut over Ned Lamont, and Bush-dog Al Wynn in Maryland over Donna Edwards.

Digby said it way better than I could... NARAL is

Yet another thing that has to be cleaned up --- the foolish, moribund, liberal interest groups of the Village that refuse to enter the 21st century. It's exhausting.

Back on topic, this video, which asks anti-abortion protesters exactly what should happen to women who have abortions, is extraordinarily telling.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

PBS' NOW highlighted our efforts (Mo Better Democrats!) to send a very important message to the Bush Dogs and establishment Democrats who support the Al Wynn's of the party when we raised over 100,000 dollars for Blue America's Donna Edwards a few months ago. Here's our ActBlue page for Donna.

With Democrats like Al Wynn, who needs Republicans? Donna Edwards...

Right on, Donna! Big Media Matt Stoller was interviewed for the show and did a tremendous job of explaining our position.

Stoller: I mean if you're willing to compromise on core values with people who operate in bad faith then you will always be ruled, you'll just never get anything done.

PBS:

In Maryland, six-term incumbent Al Wynn is facing a tough challenge from newcomer Donna Edwards. According to Edwards, Wynn has sold out to big business and the Bush agenda, including a vote for the war in Iraq and the 2005 energy bill. Wynn says his challenger is naïve and doesn't understand that there are choices in politics between compromise and doing nothing.

Fueling candidates like Edwards are the foot soldiers of the progressive battle—bloggers and other political outsiders like Matt Stoller of OpenLeft.com who are drumming up national support on the Internet.

Martin Schram in The Sacramento Bee (h/t BSM):

Along with the handful of presidential candidates who dropped out so far, voters might be better served if a hundred or so of my political-reporter and pundit colleagues dropped out as well – and were replaced by journalists whose beats are about national security, economics, environment and health care.

Read more...