Month: September 2009

Big Tent Democrat catches this little gem:

MoBlue points out this quote reported by ABC:

As one top Democrat told me, the fundamental problem [with Baucuscare] is that Democrats “are being asked to support a bipartisan bill that doesn’t have bipartisan support.” The compromise without the cover.

Indeed. And Obama wants this? Really? Nuts.

It is nuts, but it provides one of the few rays of optimism I can dredge up at this point. Without the cover of bipartisan support, this bill is totally owned by the Democrats — and that should worry them.

I wrote this a while back when it became clear that the Republicans weren’t going to cooperate:

The sell-outs are almost begging the Republicans to help them pass the terrible, insurance company giveaway bill they want so badly — and the Republicans just won’t cooperate. They are making the Democrats go this alone, which is the last thing they want to do because they have to face their own voters after passing something that won’t work — and now they know the Republicans will kill them no matter what they do. They have nowhere to hide.

If these Democrats had a brain in their heads they’d realize that the best way to maintain their power (and keep getting those big bucks) is to pass a good bill. Successful reform will be their only defense because the true political downside to passing a bad bill now is being out there alone selling out the American people all by themselves.

It’s quite clear these corporatists really don’t want to pass a good bill — they are, after all, more loyal to big business than the Republicans at this point, who see that there is great political hay to be made in taking the populist side (at least until they get back into power.) But in the end the Republicans may just force them to pass something decent anyway by failing to give them the cover for capitulation they so desperately need. It’s an interesting squeeze play that may backfire on the GOP in the long run if good health care reform is passed. (Let’s hope so anyway.)

It’s ironic that if real health care reform is ultimately achieved, it will be at the hands of obstructionist Republicans who refused to help the sell-out Dems. What a screwed up system.

Obama admitted that he would “own” this bill, which he will. But these Democrats in the congress had better worry about the same thing if they pass some crappy bill without being able to claim they needed to compromise with theRepublicans. The American people are going to have no one to blame but them.

And Republican obstructionism presents another problem for the conservadems as well:

According to Martin Paone, a legislative expert who’s helping Democrats map out legislative strategy, a more robust public option–one that sets low prices, and provides cheap, subsidized insurance to low- and middle-class consumers–would have an easier time surviving the procedural demands of the so-called reconciliation process. However, he cautions that the cost of subsidies “will have to be offset and if [the health care plan] loses money beyond 2014…it will have to be sunsetted.” And there the irony continues: Some experts, including on Capitol Hill, believe that a more robust public option will generate crucial savings needed to keep health care reform in the black, thus prevent it from expiring.

If there is zero GOP support and reconciliation really is the only way to get a bill (assuming the Democrats still want one) the conservadems may have to face the fact that only the government can ensure the savings that everyone has been insisting upon. It’s quite a conundrum for them.

Like I said, it’s a long shot. But nothing’s settled yet and anything could happen.

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Only A Comic Can Inquire Into Such Madness

by dday

The Colbert Report last night featured one of the most subversive and brutally honest half-hours of television in recent memory. It’s a sad commentary that it takes a comedy program to provide more news and information on one of the most critical subjects in American politics that anywhere else in our broken media and political landscape, but I’ll take this argument wherever I can get it. Colbert spent two full segments of his show focusing on the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which could – and probably will – lead to deregulating the entire campaign finance process, allowing corporations to give unlimited money to any candidate of their choosing. This severe step backwards with enormous implications has been barely discussed in any traditional media setting, but Colbert went after it vigorously, discussing the consequences and even the flawed legal rationale, a true third rail of American politics, corporate personhood. Colbert explained that the 1886 case (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad) that conferred 14th Amendment equal protection rights onto corporations wasn’t even in the original ruling. But when the Chief Justice made an off-hand comment that the Court wouldn’t hear an argument on whether the 14th Amendment applied to these corporations (saying, “We are all of the opinion that it does”), the court reporter wrote it into the ruling opinion, and the precedent has held ever since. And that reporter of the Supreme Court didn’t only have ties to the railroad barons, he used to run one.

These are subjects you just never hear about in the American media, precisely because the American media is owned by giant multinational corporations, who benefit from the corporate personhood rule and would stand to benefit more from deregulating elections so they could use their “speech” to buy candidates and fund their own with unlimited resources. And despite being on a Viacom-owned network, Colbert says, skewering the immorality and psychopathology of the corporation, “Corporations are legally people… they do everything people do, except breathe, die, and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River.”

There’s some backstory to that remark. Colbert actually worked with Robert Smigel on the “TV Funhouse” bits from Saturday Night Live (he’s one-half of the Ambiguously Gay Duo), including the infamous episode from March 1998, Conspiracy Theory Rock. Here are some of the actual lyrics (remember this aired, albeit one time, on NBC, whose parent company is General Electric):

It’s a media-opoly
A media-opoly.
The whole media is controlled by a few corporations
thanks to deregulation by the FCC.

You mean Disney, Fox, WestingHouse, and good ol GE?
They own networks from CBS to CNBC.
They can use them to say whatever they please,
and put down the opinions of any one who disagrees.
Or stuff about PCB’s.

What are PCB’s?
They come from power plants built by WestingHouse and GE.
They can give you lots of cancer that can hurt your body,
but on network TV, you rarely hear anything bad about the nuclear industry […]

But the bigshots don’t care.
They’re all sitting pretty.
Thanks to corporate welfare.
What’s that now?

They get billions in subsidies
from the government.
It’s supposed to create jobs,
but that’s not how it’s spent.

They pulled this cartoon from the rerun broadcasts and it never aired again.

Colbert didn’t just provide this lesson in corporate control of government in his “The Word” segment, but then had Jeffrey Toobin on to explain how the expected Supreme Court ruling would impact elections:

COLBERT: If this goes through, if they decide in favor of the corporations here, what’s going to happen to elections?

TOOBIN: Well, they will be essentially deregulated. Corporations will be allowed to give money, corporations will be allowed to broadcast programs that are in favor of one side or another, it’ll basically be no more rules about what corporations can do in political campaigns.

COLBERT: Now when I ran for President in 2008, as the Hail to the Cheese Doritos Stephen Colbert campaign for President, I was told that I actually couldn’t do that, that I was breaking federal election law by being sponsored by that corporation. But if this goes through, if this court case, if they win, does that mean that I retroactively won the election?

TOOBIN: I don’t think it means that.

COLBERT: But could you do that? Could I actually just wear a NASCAR suit and just have logos all over me and run for President as the sort of Gatorade Thirst for Justice campaign for President?

TOOBIN: You definitely could. No question.

COLBERT: What does it mean to individual donation? A corporation, as a person, gets to give any amount of money, but I as a person can give only $2,500.

TOOBIN: That’s what’s potentially the next legal challenge. Because if giving money is a form of speech, as the Court has held at various times, you can’t prohibit a company from giving money. And then presumably the next step would be that you couldn’t have limits on how much individuals could give either. That’s the potential implication of this decision.

COLBERT: So right now, corporations would actually have more power as people than people, until people catch up with corporations.

Here’s the point. Stephen Colbert, a comedian, devoted his show to arcane campaign finance law to show the power of corporations to engage in a hostile takeover of government and extract virtually any law they choose, with no consequences for any wrongdoing. Consequently, the self-described populists on the right – aided by a hapless political class – are working their minions into a frenzy over some unidentified alien “other” coming to take your hard-earned tax dollars, without the pernicious influence of rapacious corporations ever entering into it. Anonymous Liberal had a great post on this yesterday.

But even if you take these film-makers at face value and assume the worst, the reality is that ACORN has thousands of employees and the vast majority of them spend their days trying to help poor people through perfectly legal means (and receive very little compensation for doing so). Even before yesterday’s Senate vote, the amount of federal money that went to ACORN was very small. This is a relatively insignificant organization in the grand scheme of things, but it’s an organization that has unquestionably fought over the years to improve the lives of the less fortunate in this country.

That the GOP and its conservative supporters would single out this particular organization for such intense demonization is telling. In September of last year, the entire world came perilously close to complete financial catastrophe. We’re still not out of the woods and we’re deep within one of the worst recessions in U.S. history. This situation was brought about by the recklessness and greed of our banks and financial institutions, most of which had to be bailed out at enormous cost to the American taxpayer (exponentially more than all of the tax dollars given to ACORN over the years). The people who brought about this near catastrophe, for the most, profited immensely from it. These very same institutions, propped up by the American taxpayer, are once again raking in large profits.

But rather than focus their anger on these folks, conservatives choose to go after an organization composed almost entirely of low-paid community organizers, an organization that could never hope to have even a small fraction of the clout or the ability to affect the overall direction of the country that Wall Street bankers have. ACORN’s relative lack of political influence was on full display yesterday, when the U.S. Senate (in which Democrats have a supermajority) not only entertained a vote to defund ACORN, but approved it by a huge margin (with only seven Democrats opposing).

Absolutely. Set aside the fact that the Glenn Becks of the world are smearing community organizations that help low-income folks, often at variance with the facts. It’s the intensity of focus from the privileged on the poor, the disenfranchised, and yes, minorities, when measured against the influence and giant multinational corporations who are on the verge of buying American elections, that strikes such a discordant note. But not for the hucksters pushing the smears and the paranoids and racists who lap it up. They want to believe that black people have the power in America and they’re coming for you and your children, so they can ignore the fact that they’ve been duped – that the ruling class has controlled the political machinery to keep them underfoot, and handed them welfare queens and illegal immigrants and all sorts of other members of the “lower orders” on which they can focus their attention. This boils down to a largely homogenous class of people not wanting their money, or anything, really, to go to people who don’t look like them. “Illegals” or the undeserving poor need not apply. It’s been a time-tested tactic going back to Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy. And it allows a majority ruling class of whites, terrified that their stranglehold on the country is slipping away, to pretend that a race war is coming when it’s the class war grinding them into the dust.

Matt Taibbi called it the peasant mentality. The powers that be get the lower classes to fight amongst themselves and split along ideological or tribal or other identifying lines, leaving room for them to prosper. For Republicans, that means painting their opponents, who are less homogenous and are made up of so-called “outsiders” of society – the poor, the disenfranchised, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, etc. – as undeserving of really anything; and painting the leaders of that party – whether it be a Governor from Arkansas or a war hero from Massachusetts or South Dakota or a multicultural community organizer from Illinois – as the head of a movement to destroy American culture. That’s really basically it.

And all the while, both sides in DC studiously ignore the near-complete capture of the country by companies seeking only profit, and the corporate-owned media just follows the manufactured drama and goes mute on the critical stuff, such that it takes a comedian to shine a spotlight on this unexamined corner.

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Roots

by digby

The cable shows are all going gaga today on Carter’s comments about race and there seems to be a lot of discomfort with the idea that many of the teabaggers might have racist motivations. Even some of the comments to my post on the issue earlier indicate that a lot of people don’t think race is a factor in these protests, that it is really an attack on liberalism, and akin to what happened to Clinton and others in the past.

I agree that it is akin to what happened to Clinton and others in the past, but the fact is that attacks on liberalism (certainly since 1968) are intrinsically concerned with race. In fact, America’s long standing unwillingness to create a decent program of social insurance — the fundamental cause of the various progressive movements — is tied to the fact that many white Americans just didn’t want their tax dollars to go to racial minorities. Now, many white Americans today may not make that direct connection (I would argue that plenty of them do) but the underpinning of the ongoing American antipathy to expansion of the safety net has many of its roots in racism.

Yes, racism has diminished and it has certainly changed its outward character. But it is one of the foundational principles upon which anti-communism, anti-socialism and anti-liberalism were built. It’s baked in to one degree or another and it’s no surprise that the dittoheads who have organized their lives for the past few decades in opposition to liberalism are particularly agitated by the election of a black president. It’s all part of the same tapestry of fear and loathing that brought them to the teabaggery in the first place.

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Stop The Presses

by digby

Headline of the day:

Uninsured Americans hope reform brings health coverage

I guess at this point, this has to be said.

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Who Needs Republicans?

by digby

Either Barack Obama is not very good at leading his own party or he really doesn’t want a health reform bill that’s worth a damn:

President Obama promised last week, in his address to Congress, that he wouldn’t sign any health care reform bill that added “one dime to the deficit, now or in the future.”[emphasis added]

That pledge could get him in trouble as the Senate Finance Committee considers asking the Congressional Budget Office to change the way it calculates an impact on the deficit.

Instead of measuring the impact of health care reform over ten years, the CBO will use a 20-year window, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) told reporters Tuesday. “You have to do that if you’re going to know whether you’re bending the cost curve,” he said.

If you had any remaining thoughts that Kent Conrad had any good intentions whatsoever, I think you can put them safely out of your mind.

It’s impossible to know for sure what’s going on, but if this is what it appears to be it looks like Obama either doesn’t want a decent bill or he foolishly walked into a trap. The endless kowtowing on the deficit (in the middle of a recession!) is bad enough, but throwing in the promise that he wouldn’t ever add to the deficit in the future opened him to this nonsense.

Kent Conrad does not want a health care bill that does anything but shrink government spending. It’s all he cares about. If he could end the medicare program too, he would — he’s been fighting “entitlements” for years. So he is an enemy of any process which provides universal coverage for all Americans — because in lean times the government will run deficits to keep it going.

Ever since the Republicans showed their “Waterloo” hand in the stimulus debate we’ve known that the real obstacle to reform is the overlapping corporate lackey/deficit hawk wings of the Democratic Party, of which Obama is at least a nominal member himself, if not a full fledged devotee. Coming so late to the public negotiations and then making absurd promises not to raise the deficit (on top of the sweetheart deals with the industry) leads one to naturally conclude that he is part of that camp. If he isn’t, his people are going to have to be hell on wheels behind the scenes from here on in, because the lackeys and the hawks are closing ranks and he’s not going to have any room to maneuver.

I have to say that with all the chatter about how they studied the Clinton years, it seems unlikely that they didn’t read the chapter on the egomaniacal, pampered Democratic princes of the Senate deciding that they owned the agenda and crossed the president at every turn. It was one of the more instructive parts of the legislative history. One has to wonder if they did read it and decided that this time they threw in with them rather than fought them.

I have heard that the 20 year fortune telling …. er projections, could actually come out looking favorable to reform. I wouldn’t count on it. But I guess that’s something to cling to. Otherwise, this is yet another nick in the death by a thousand cuts — many of them by the CBO, by the way. Conrad knows what he’s doing.

Not that anyone else does:

Democratic aides were alarmed Tuesday to learn of the CBO’s plans, which were first reported by CQ. One Senate Finance Committee aide, however, said that the 20-year estimate would not be an official “score” but rather a broad estimate.

Other longtime aides noted that any estimate after five years is just a guess because of the variables at work and they were hard-pressed to think of any prior occasion in which a 20-year window of time had been used. Monkeying around with the window, however, is one of the older tricks in the budgetary bag.

Some aides speculated that Conrad wouldn’t want to do anything to harm the finance committee bill, which he is invested in. But others noted that while it would harm that bill, it would likely be more damaging to the more generous health committee and House bills. The more parsimonious finance committee package would be relatively less impacted, elevating its stature.

What a win, win for Conrad if that’s so. Now that Obama’s promised not to ever raise the deficit, Conrad can make even Baucus’ hideous bill look bad, much less the others. If he holds the President to his promise, maybe he can succeed in getting rid of medicare and social security too — and then everything will be perfect. After all, only Nixon could go to China …

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Government Insurance Salesmen

by digby

In an otherwise dullish article on health care reform being thrown into chaos by Obama creating new obstacles in his speech ( I guess we are supposed to believe that the White House hasn’t been talking to anyone up to now) I spied this little bit of phrasing that I think is interesting:

Baucus’ proposal is certain to shun the liberals’ call for the government to sell insurance, and rely instead on co-ops to offer coverage in competition with private industry.

Yeah, right co-ops shmo-ops. But what about this:

the liberals’ call for the government to sell insurance

Isn’t that an interesting way to describe the public plan? Has anyone heard that before? Is it good or bad?

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Calling Them On It

by digby

I wrote this in the comment section, but I think it’s worth discussing a little bit more seriously. Responding to dday’s, post below I said: “I just want to add that the whole point of a hissy fit is to render a powerful criticism or critic off limits by evoking a sacred cultural totem. The key to this particular hissy fit was the accusation that Wilson and the teabaggers are racists. I watched the Fox Allstars today and they couldn’t stop talking about Maureen Dowd’s column and were practically rending their garments that anyone could possibly think Wilson said what he said because of race. It’s clear that this is the soft white underbelly and the Dems needed to be far more explicit if they wanted to really hammer their point home.”

And if you doubted they are racists, read this little anecdote at Sadly No! by Dave Riehle :

Let’s roll the tape:

A 9/12 Experience: Dangerous Times Michelle has a disturbing video posted. It’s of several black students beating a white student on a school bus in St. Louis. Here’s the deal. I haven’t mentioned it before. Riding out of DC on the Metro, 9/12, there were some folks from South Dakota and also another Mid-West state I can’t recall in the same Metro car. We were talking, nothing special, really – politics, of course. In the back were maybe ten or so black kids taking up that section of the car. There was no confrontation, just one or two of them talking loudly enough to make sure they’d be heard. Without resorting to the poor diction it was along the lines of, these are the people who think Obama is the anti-Christ. That McCain he wasn’t chit. Obama’s going to be president as long as he wants, so these people better get used to it, etc. It went on but not really to a level that was so loud, or so confrontational that it needed to be addressed. We just ignored them without much trouble at all. Yeah, they were technically thugs. But the reality was they were still wannabes really, pretty young, not that big, or many. And if the several adults there for 9/12 actually needed to do something about it, the kids wouldn’t have lasted very long.

Keep in mind that these are the same people who were just carrying signs calling Obama Hitler and saying that Acorn groups and his arrogant wife should be sent back to “their own” country and be stripped of their rights. I’d say those so-called thugs were the polite ones.

More seriously, these people are a perfect example of the modern racists. They don’t go around calling black people “boy” (to their faces) and they certainly don’t think of themselves as bigots. But in their minds, racial minorities are dangerous barbarians who are threatening to destroy their way of life. Hence, when they find themselves in a group of loud teenagers, they see it as a test of their own manhood to “put them down.” (Of course, that’s why they need all those guns.)

A black president is threatening to them, even if they don’t really understand it, because while he is unquestionably a very accomplished individual in anyone’s estimation, the loyalty he inspires among African Americans frightens them — and his sometime feints to popular culture and black solidarity make them very, very uncomfortable. That’s why this obsession with ACORN has such resonance. The black army is forming.

I have always been somewhat impatient with those who insisted that racism was over in American life and that anyone who brings it up is holding on to outdated modes of thought. The fact is that racism is one of the fundamental, defining features of American culture, changing and evolving, getting less and less potent over time, but so intrinsic to who we are that it remains in certain social pockets quite strongly. It isn’t the noxious open racism that characterized the south during Jim Crow — it’s morphed into a more general sense of paranoia and fear. And there is little doubt in my mind that a good bit of the outsized hysteria we see against Obama exists within those pockets.

We are living in a new world where racism is a minority position. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t find political expression is some powerful ways. It behooves liberals to be vigilent about this and keep these impulses in check with frequent reminders that it is not acceptable in modern America to be a racist.

It’s also obvious that nativism and immigration are the great racial undercurrent of the moment and they have long been the animating feature of toxic right wing populism. We ignore this stuff at our peril.

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They Can’t Even Muster A Decent Hissy Fit

by dday

The House is taking up a “resolution of disapproval” for Joe Wilson today, carefully writing it so nobody thinks they actually disapprove – just a technical rules violation is all – and the Republicans are cleaning their clocks with it on the House floor.

In a clear sign that Republicans intend to turn the disapproval vote against Joe Wilson into a rallying cry for their own base, far more Republicans than Democrats have been speaking during the floor debate on the resolution.

The subject of their talk: That the American people are done with this and don’t want to talk about it anymore. The message here is that the Dems are wasting time with the proceeding, and abusing their power to persecute Wilson.

“There is definitely a sense that House Republicans aren’t dealing with the same hot potato they were dealing with on Thursday morning after the president’s speech,” a GOP leadership aide just told me. “The president’s acceptance of Joe Wilson’s apology has left the Democrats looking petty and possibly on the verge of overreach. The fact that White House has now adopted some of Wilson’s policy proposals is evidence that this is no longer the political loser Democrats once thought it would be just a few days ago.”

The highlighted portion above took any teeth completely out of the hissy fit, and partisan Republicans used it as a rallying cry. The resolution passed 240-179, BTW, with a whopping seven Republicans crossing the aisle to vote yes (12 Democrats voted no and 5 “present”).

The point is not whether or not Wilson’s outburst represented some violation. The point is that Democrats gradually made a decision to try and beat up Republicans over a universally despised high-profile action, and they managed to blow it. And get the policy wrong by tailoring it to the universally despised person. Who’s also a serial liar (Just throwing that in because I think it’s funny. You can literally say anything as a Republican and never get called on it).

If you can’t even pull off the hissy fit, about the easiest two-step in politics, particularly in this day and age when the cable news channels might as well rename themselves “Umbrage 1,” “Umbrage 2” and “Republican Umbrage 3”, then really, it’s time to get a new batch of consultants.

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I Never Would Have Guessed

by digby

… that George W Bush was a trash talking, puerile frat boy:

Last month, we noted that former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer’s new book, Speech Less: Tales of a White House Survivor, was making Republicans nervous.

The book is out next week and, from brief excerpts obtained by the New York Daily News, it appears President Bush “dissed pretty much everyone in Washington.”

On Barack Obama: “This is a dangerous world and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.”

On Joe Biden: “If bull was currency, Joe Biden would be a billionaire.”

On Sarah Palin: “I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. What is she, the governor of Guam?”

On Hillary Clinton: “Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk.”

But he brought honor and dignity back to the White House, which is what matters.

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First They Came For Van Jones

by digby

… now they are going after Campaign For America’s Future:

Recently, Fox News’ Glenn Beck interviewed one of his favorite right-wing pundits, David Horowitz, who revealed the “horror” that Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) worked with Van Jones to bring together businesses and unions to create clean, green American jobs. Well, here’s the truth. CAF was the co-founder of the Apollo Alliance, and we are proud of it. And this is what makes Glenn Beck so mad. Help us fight Glenn Beck’s smear machine! Please contribute $10, $25 or $50 so Campaign for America’s Future can get the truth out. Horowitz told Beck: “The Apollo Alliance is a broad coalition to advance very radical agendas. And it includes very respectable businessmen … but its muscle is unions and radicals. And it was created out of Bob Borosage’s Center [sic] for the American Future … [Jones and Borosage] are still seeking to overthrow the system and to create a socialist future.” In their warped world, generating jobs by investing in the clean energy vital to our future is an effort to “overthrow the system.” For that, the right tags me as one of the most dangerous men in America. Fact stands, we are proud of the Apollo Alliance, and all of the heavy lifting we’ve done to build the coalition to create our new energy future. We are proud of working with Van Jones, a gifted leader, who has labored tirelessly to make certain that those left out of the old economy are included in the new one. Join us in building America’s future – and in spurning the hate politics of Beck and his ilk. Please contribute $10, $25 or $50 to Campaign for America’s Future. We are proud the Campaign has been targeted by Beck. It is testament to our effectiveness. We led the effort that beat Bush when he tried to privatize Social Security. We co-founded the Apollo Alliance to make the case for jobs and new energy. We helped build the alliance that is demanding affordable health care for all, and we have only just begun to push for change! It’s no surprise that we gained the attention of the rabid right. We have just begun, and we are not changing our course. We are proud to challenge those standing in the way of the change we need. Help us keep raising Glenn Beck’s blood pressure. Please contribute $10, $25 or $50 to Campaign for America’s Future. CAF has not only been a steadfast voice for change, but we carried the fight against the entrenched lobbies and know-nothing right that stands in the way – and with your help, we are going to continue to earn Glenn Beck’s ire. What does it mean to us that we are being targeted by Glenn Beck? It means we are doing our job. Thanks, as always, for your commitment to America’s future. Sincerely,

CAF is doing righteous work, not only working on those causes that Bob Borosage outlines above, but it is instrumental in creating alliances across a wide range of liberal issues and interests. For instance, they were a major sponsor and participant in this year’s Netroots Nation, sponsoring everything from tours to steel plants to hosting batting practice at the baseball field, working hard to facilitate understanding and common purpose across the progressive coalition.

I’m just surprised the conservatives took so long to go after them.

link fixed
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