Tonight's Random Notes... And Al Franken Contest

Eric Cantor moved rapidly to expel Boehner's wealthy Ohio buddy Rich Iott from the Young Guns program once it came out that Iott likes dressing up as an SS trooper and reenacting the Nazis' most glorious moments. Boehner responded by reassuring Iott that he wouldn't ask him to return his campaign contributions. (Other than what Iott gave his own campaign, he got more money from Boehner than any other donor.) Then Iott went on TV and defended the Nazi thing by claiming that the SS volunteers were just "defending freedom." That "defending freedom" thing is a little misleading when you hear a rightist talking about it. It means, very specifically, defending the freedom of the rich and powerful to exploit the vulnerable and society at large. And now John Boehner is camapigning with Iott against Marcy Kaptur in Lucas County.

Elan Steinberg, the Vice-President of American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants had a message for Boehner. "We ask Congressman Boehner to understand our pain and reconsider his appearance at the side of an unrepentant Nazi re-enactor. Congressman Boehner, your place is at the side of the victims of the SS-- civilian adults and children, Allied and American POW's-- not with someone who dresses up in the garb of mass murderers."

Tomorrow afternoon we'll be discussing the current campaign in Arkansas in greater depth. Meanwhile, though, I want to make sure that if there's anyone reading this blog in that state, there is an alternative to the two repulsive corporate whores, Blanche Lincoln and John Boozman. And that would be Green Party candidate John Gray, around whom progressives are rallying. Gray was the hands-down winner of the Senate debate.

Gray said, among other things, that:

—There is no reason for a private health insurance industry even to exist. No health insurance company ever stitched a wound or tended to a broken bone. We could save money by expanding our nonprofit and low-overhead Medicare to be the single-payer to doctors for everyone, not just the elderly. Doctors make plenty of money and they would continue to make plenty in such a system, Gray said. We’d have less need for torts, and thus for tort reform, he argued, if the single-paying government had the right to kick out of its reimbursement pool any physician who mangled patients.

—If you rely on cheap labor alone for jobs, you are doomed because there always will be somebody who will come along and work people or children for less.

—This idea that corporations and people have the same free-speech rights is “nonsense” because his 91-year-old mother is ailing and hearing-impaired and there is no way in the world her speech rights are as accessible and powerful of those of, say, Wal-Mart.

—There is no remotely sane reason to deny a gay person the right to serve openly in our military. Our military needs competent people and we behave as some kind of “American Taliban” if we worry about what people are doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

—Any graph will plainly show that Republicans run up deficits and Democrats bring them down, which is one reason that he, in the miraculous event he got elected, would caucus with the Democrats.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the Gold's Gym franchise owner was more than a little embarrassed when it came out that the owner of Gold's Gym International Inc. (rabid right-wing nutcase Robert Rowling, who also owns the Omni Hotels) has been helping to finance Karl Rove's execrable anti-gay jihad (AKA, the Republican election campaign) to the tune of $2,000,000. That's a big donation which basically comes right from the pockets of a lot of gay muscle boys.

"Our member base made us aware of this, and we decided on a course of action," Don Dickerson, the franchise's director of operations, said in an interview. After 22 years, he said, it's walking away from a storied brand whose name is affixed to gyms in more than 40 states and 30 countries, and has a claimed 3 million members worldwide."

Do you think voters enjoy negative ads? Meg Whitman was vociferously booed at a non-partisan woman's conference when she decided to stick with the negative ads even after Jerry Brown proposed ending them on the spot. He's now turned her gibberish into the ultimate negative political commercial-- her talking:



And... tonight's contest: autographed copies of Al Franken's book The Truth and Al Franken's DVD God Spoke. How do you get 'em? Well, just pick one Democratic candidate running for Congress and donate to his or her campaign at the Blue America '10 page. Any candidate you like, any amount you can afford. Tomorrow I'll pick one winner randomly to get the Al Franken signed book and DVD. Easy, huh?

Will Arkansas Voters Decide They've Had Enough Of Blanche Lincoln?

Yesterday, as expected, Lincoln voted against the public option in the Senate Finance Committee-- twice. She has a history of always sticking with her campaign donors when what they want conflicts with what Arkansas voters want. In this case only 38% of Arkansas voters-- almost all of them Republicans-- oppose the public option. 81% of Arkansas Democrats support the public option-- as do 55% of all Arkansas voters. During the committee markup process yesterday John Ensign taunted the Democrats on the committee by asking them why they couldn't pass a public option in the Senate with such large majorities in the country wanting it. Unlike almost everything Ensign said yesterday, this is a worthwhile question to ponder.

In fact when polling companies have asked voters in conservative-leaning states and districts if they will be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who votes to kill the public option, the answer is consistently coming back that it would make them less likely to vote for that candidate. Lincoln can hardly afford to lose any of her base. Her unfavorability rating is 49% (favorables are down to 43%) and so far the only thing keeping her from joining the ranks of the political walking dead is the fact that the Republicans can't come up with a credible opponent. (In fact yesterday the first poll came out showing her actually losing to any Republican who runs against her.) No one is polling the impact of the two independents in the race, Trevor Drown and Green Party nominee John Gray. Gray, a single payer advocate didn't mince words in his analysis of what happened yesterday in the Senate:

I’m not at all surprised. She has a rather large campaign chest, almost half of which is from the medical industries. The fact that she is loyal to her sponsors is not at all surprising... Eliminate the health care insurance industry… and you would save enough money to cover every man woman and child in the United States. Nobody blinks an eyelash if we lay off 40,000 autoworkers, who actually produce something. These health insurance brokers, it’s hard to say what they produce.”

The answer to Ensign's question applies equally to Democrats and Republicans. Most of the Senators on the Finance Committee should be in prison for taking bribes. Some, like Baucus, Grassley and Lincoln, have allowed the special interests over whose fate they were sitting-- the Insurance Industry and the Medical-Industrial Complex-- to finance their political careers. Not having the ethical compass or the common decency to recuse themselves after finding themselves in a direct conflict of interest between their donors and their constituents should mean they spend the rest of their days behind bars. But it's America... so forget that.

This afternoon while Grassley was babbling on incoherently I took a short break and ran down to the Blue America P.O. Box where I found the latest report of our cable TV ads running, this time in Benton and Washington counties. The ads ran on a Thursday and Friday night when she was speaking in the area. They ran on Larry King Live, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Colbert Report, The O'Reilly Factor, Headline News, Countdown With Keith Olberman, Hardball, The Chainsaw Massacre, Anderson Cooper 360, Showbiz Tonight, The Ed Show, Fast Money, CNN Newsroom and lots of other similar programs-- Nancy Grace and Shepard Smith but no Glenn Beck.

Keep in mind that Tom Harkin told The Hill yesterday that he feels he has enough Democrats, now that Massachusetts has their second seat covered, to break the Republican filibuster, get a bill with a public option onto the floor and pass it with 51 votes. That isn't reconciliation; that's simple cloture and majority rule. Would anyone break from the party and vote with the Republicans to filibuster the bill? Look at the photo up top; those are the two. The more female-looking one is Senator Blanche Lincoln. (The less female-looking one is Ben Nelson.) Those are the only two who could conceivably keep the public option from even reaching the floor. Lincoln, who also opposes climate and energy legislation and has already declared that she will join the Republicans in filibustering Employee Free Choice, is not a good player. She doesn't deserve another term. You say, "neither do Nelson, Baucus or Conrad?" I agree. But they're not up for election in 2010. Lincoln is.

We'd like to run some more ads. In fact, we're going to. If we raise enough money we'll put them on network TV. If not, we'll keep running them on cable. The 3 ads are on the Blue America Campaign For Health Care Choice page, which is also where you can donate to the cost of running more spots if you're so inclined.



UPDATE: Bye-Bye Blanche?

Although Rasmussen has been discredited as a reliable source of polling data-- we have a post coming up at 2pm explaining this-- it's still worth noting that they are another firm, even if a compromised one, showing that Blanche Lincoln is likely to be looking for a new line of work next year.

Arkansas' Blanche Lambert Lincoln trails all four of her leading Republican challengers in the first Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 survey in the state.

Lincoln fails to get 50% of the vote in any of the match-ups, and any incumbent who falls short of that level is considered vulnerable.

And here's some of the right-leaning twisting of facts that has made Rasmussen a joke: "The two-term senator, who was reelected with 54% of the vote in 2004, is perhaps made more vulnerable by her seat on the Senate Finance Committee which is now wrestling with the national health care reform plan, a measure which is highly unpopular in Arkansas. Just today she voted against including in the bill the controversial “public option” being pushed by liberal senators in her party."

Unbiased polling firms have shown that Arkansas voters overwhelmingly favor a public option. The Republican Rasmussen firm implies the opposite and implies that Lincoln is failing because she is identified with "liberals." The monkey business of tampering with numbers is what we'll be discussing at 2pm (PT) though.

Blanche Lincoln Continues To Lose Support

Blanche knows plenty of oil millionaires but I hope Arkansas voters aren't counting on her introducing them to Shep Huntleigh

When Blanche Lincoln announced that she was going to bend to pressure from her constituents and do some town hall meetings, she didn't actually mean town hall meetings per se. She meant, she would, in the words of Kevin Sack at the NY Times attend a few "controlled events before respectful crowds, like business forums and civic club luncheons." So when she finally did announce two semi-public events Blue America decided to run some more of the cable TV spots she seems to hate in the two places she had decided to favor with her presence. This morning I went through the logs to see what times of the day and which exact programs the spots ran on.

First of all I was delighted to see that the cable networks had all abided by the rule Blue America has is that we would rather pass on advertising than allow any of our ads to be run on the racism-promoting Glenn Beck Show. There were plenty of ads on O'Reilly, Hannity, Fox and Friends, Neil Cavuto, and Greta Van Sustren-- sickening enough to be a party to-- but not a single ad went to underwrite the anti-American gibberish that Glen Beck spouts daily. We'll hold to that policy under ColorOfChange asks us to reconsider.

The cable provider that covers Benton County in the extreme northwest of the state is out of Springfield, Missouri and they ran spots for us the day before, the day of, and the day after her appearance, mostly on CNN plus a few on Fox, a schedule similar, though smaller of course, than the one we ran in Little Rock-- everything from Larry King Live to American Morning and Anderson Cooper 360.

Meanwhile, Lincoln is running scared. Her re-elect numbers are in the toilet. In fact no senator in recent years has been re-elected with numbers a year out as low as hers are now. What she has going for her is the nature of Arkansas as a one-party state, the corporate party. She has a grotesque excuse for a Democrat, state Senate President Bob Johnson threatening to primary her from the right. Yes, as bad as she is-- among the 3 worst Democrats in the Senate-- Arkansas (a state whose voters say they prefer Rush Limbaugh over Barack Obama; I hope someone polls what they think of Glenn Beck next) has even worse ready to take her place. The moribund state of the Arkansas Republican Party is protecting her on that flank, since the 7 GOP pygmies huffing and puffing about running against her are all so much political chaff.

However there are two independents in the race, Greenland Mayor John Gray, running as a Green, and Afghanistan War vet/Teamsters Union member, Trevor Drown. The Greens have shown that they can be counted on to bring in double digit returns against a reactionary Democrat, as their candidate did last year against Mark Pryor (20%). Meanwhile Arkansas voters are waiting to hear more on where Drown stands on specific issues, while already impressed that his emphasis has been on ordinary working families rather than on powerful corporate interests-- like the politicians from two parties that have made up the one-party state. This morning he told me on the phone that he's worried the health care debate is missing the point. "It appears," he said "anger and party politics have overshadowed what the real need is-- affordable health care for Americans without coverage. The politicians need to think about the impact to the rest of country and come up with a workable solution which will alleviate all of our concerns. In history so many leaders and influencers have said a number of variations of this quote. It has never been more important than it is right now. 'Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; the last, the least, the littlest.'"

If you'd like to watch the 3 ads or donate to keeping them on TV while Lincoln works with the GOP to undermine health care reform, Employee Free Choice, fair taxation and climate and energy legislation, please click here.