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Paul Ryan has mesmerized the media because intelligence is so lacking in Congress that its appearance alone induces interest. But Paul Ryan is if anything a more facile and worse liar than Romney. He has virtually no explanations for his draconian budget and his criticism of Obama is a lie whole cloth. This page of tweets is a good introduction to Ryan as an apostle of untruth.
The President goes as far as he can go. He suggests cogently that elections exist for the purpose of purging the Congress of recalcitrants and naysayers.
I am sure he will do the same for financial reform as for health reform. He will go as far as he can go.
2010 is the second act of an eight-year change scenario. Either the electorate will get the message and we will become a 21st Century nation, or the electorate will cave.
My money is on a hard-won progressive victory. Including eventual passage of a public option and eventual creation of independent regulation of our rogue banking industry.
Meanwhile, watch for more executive orders to do what a cowardly Congress will not do. And continue to at least slightly modify misplaced blame of the President.
A List of Senators and Congress Members and Their Receipts from Health Care Interests
I found the following list. I have looked for such a list for a while. I assume its accuracy. I found it here. The link was to here.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ): $7,504,867
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA): $7,341,399
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA): $2,149,503
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT): $1,795,949
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): $1,743,835
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT): $1,685,890
Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC): $1,350,454
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): $1,346,574
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ): $1,321,457
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA): $1,160,826
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH): $1,081,378
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC): $ 999,611
Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN): $ 994,699
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT): $ 980,417
Sen. Thomas Harkin (D-IA): $ 935,711
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA): $ 919,793
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR): $ 896,067
Sen. Debbie Ann Stabenow (D-MI): $ 827,294
Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD): $ 797,185
Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT): $ 788,650
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA, 6th): $2,090,127
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ, 6th): $1,627,024
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX, 6th): $1,518,285
Rep. John Gingrey (R-GA, 11th): $1,392,343
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY, 15th): $1,304,569
Rep. John Dingell (D-MI, 15th): $1,148,060
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA, 7th): $1,136,519
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO, 7th): $1,102,468
Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA, 7th): $1,058,786
Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA, 9th): $1,046,519
I would like to see this list enlarged if anyone has sourced information. The second link above is to a piece in the Huffington Post which is trying to create some standards for claiming that they are operating on a competent journalistic basis.
I see lots of bile being spread around about President Obama’s efforts to get a green economy bill through. Congress has passed a green bill. It’s the Senate’s turn.
Today I want to flag a statement by the President that I saw on TV so I do not have the exact language.
In essence he said, A green economy will put us in the lead in the 21st century and failure will leave us a declining nation.
This was the argument of this site before I went whole hog for Obama in Iowa. It is absolutely true.
Our recession has everything to do with the need to shift gears to green. Not just laws. Lifestyle. Spending less for junk and more for quality.We are being forced to build a new and more sustainable world.
There are prophets of this movement and I do not mean the obvious environmentalists. I mean writers like Robert Pirsig who elevated the word quality into the lexicon of politics and thinkers like Thorstein Veblen who dissected the consumer society before it became an obnoxious stain on the surface of the globe.
Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysic of Quality (MOQ) Relates to Nietzsche’s Revaluation of Values Project
President Obama is faced now with a huge choice. But happily it has already been made. He cares enough about his commitment to green and its value to the country to go with Democrats alone if he would otherwise have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
David Brooks says the energy bill in the House version is a quilt of special interest concessions rather than a clean executive procedural bill.
I am sure the President wants the strongest of bills and if he has to muscle Republicans and Blue Dogs to get it, he will. And if, God forbid, these retrograde folk should succeed in watering down green, we will go at it incrementally with replacements at the polls for the Senators and Representatives who did not cotton to the Obama agenda.
The energy bill is important but similar things could be said about health care. Watch for a July 4 peaking of the Obama counterpunch on this issue. The President is just as adept at being President as he was at being a candidate. And the MO has not changed. Nor for that matter has media obtuseness in failing to recognize it.
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Things I have thoughts on but refuse to blog about:
Bernie Madoff
Sarah Palin and Family
Governor Sanford
Michael Jackson
Obama’s Green Bay Health Care Pushback
Click Here for the full ABC Dispatch
Do you not believe that the President will make this entire effort intelligible to the majority that elected him? Do you not believe that he will box in the Republicans so that they either go with what will be a measure that holds promise, or find themselves seriously contemplating work beyond the halls of Congress in 2010 or 2012? Do you not believe we will have health care reform this year?
If you do not believe these things, check out this snippet from the dispatch noted above.
The bottom line, the president told residents of the Badger State: the time is now. He wants a health care reform bill on his desk by October.
“This next eight weeks is going to be critical,” the president said. “And you need to be really paying attention and putting pressure on your members of Congress to say, there’s no excuses. If we don’t get it done this year, we’re probably not going to get it done. “
If you want to get involved, click the link below:
STAND WITH DR. DEAN
Stephen Curtiss Rose 