Category Archives: National News/Commentary
Playing the race card
By Kevin Alexander Gray
Columbia
I hesitantly step into the Hillary Clinton – Barack Obama family scuffle over South Carolina’s black vote. Both candidates are products of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton is a DLC star, chair of its American Dream Initiative touting free markets, balanced budgets and middle-class know-how, while Obama’s political action committee, the Hope Fund, has raised money for half of the DLC’s representatives in the Senate. This is how America measures progress: the DLC, founded as a vehicle for pro-business Southern white men, is now the arena advancing a black man and a white woman who talk as if the more populist Southern white man in the race were invisible.
The “controversy” over Clinton’s Martin Luther King comment (“it took a president to make the dream a reality”) was, if anything, a set up to push Obama to talk race, something he has taken pains to avoid beyond the occasional King quote he tosses into the mix. Talking race in a white media echo chamber works to Clinton’s advantage. First, it is a subtle nod to subconscious and not so subconscious racism. Secondly, it gives her the chance to expound upon the Clintons’ fictional race history with blacks.
What Bill knows, Hill knows. And Southern politician Bill Clinton has always played race politics to perfection. Many have perhaps forgotten about Bill, speaking in the last pulpit King stood in, telling blacks in 1993 how disappointed “Dr. King would be [in them] if he were alive today”, because of black on black crime. “Crime” has long been a white politician’s code to signal, “I can stick it to blacks.” In his first presidential race Governor Clinton supported the death penalty at a time when the country was split almost down the middle on the issue. For good measure, he made sure to oversee the execution of convicted killer Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man, in the heat of the primaries.
Doctors give Massachusetts health care reform failing grade
Poor early outcomes raise red flags: only private insurers profit
Physicians for a National Health Program
Over 250 Massachusetts doctors have signed an open letter to the country warning that the health reform model enacted by Massachusetts is failing and that a single payer program is the only alternative.
“It is urgent that the rest of the country know that Massachusetts is a living laboratory for the health care reforms being pushed in California and by the Obama/Clinton/Edwards campaigns. Right now the Gov. Romney/Massachusetts’ plan gets a failing grade on the ground,” said Dr.Rachel Nardin, Assistant Professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
We write to alert colleagues and the nation to the disturbing early outcomes of Massachusetts’ widely heralded approach to health care reform. Although we wish that the current reform could secure health insurance for all, its failings reinforce our conviction that only a single payer program can assure patients the care they need.
In 2006, our state enacted a law designed to extend health coverage to virtually all state residents. Political leaders in other states, as well as several Democratic presidential candidates, have embraced this model.
Massachusetts’ law mandates that uninsured individuals must purchase private insurance or pay a fine. The law established a new state agency to ensure that affordable plans were available; offered low income residents subsidies to help them buy coverage; and expanded Medicaid coverage for the very poor. (Immigrants are mostly excluded from these subsidized programs.) Moneys that previously funded free care for the uninsured were shifted to the new insurance program, along with revenues from new fines on employers who fail to offer health benefits to their workers. In addition, the federal government provided extra funds for the program’s first two years.
Fighting for free speech – again
Bursey Continues Fight in Free Speech Appeal
Document Reveals Disturbing Strategy By White House Advance Team
BY DANIEL TERRILL
Free Times
Local political activist and organizer Brett Bursey is persevering in his struggle to win a free speech case that has received national attention.
On Dec. 28, Bursey’s attorneys filed a motion in federal court in Columbia arguing that the U.S. government withheld evidence of White House involvement in suppressing protesters at presidential rallies.
Bursey’s attorneys recently obtained the Presidential Advance Manual, which contains detailed instructions on handling protestors and other disruptions during presidential events.
Bursey, director of the South Carolina Progressive Network, contends that the White House has been using the Secret Service to protect the president politically. “It’s really chilling,” he says. “It’s very bad news for the Bill of Rights, free speech and democracy.”
Yellow Rose bus goes up in flames
Columbia MFSO activist Wade Fulmer forwarded this news about Jim Goodenow’s “Yellow Rose” bus. Jim was on his way to South Carolina.
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Many of you may remember Jim Goodenow and his bus, the Yellow Rose, who was here in Oklahoma last year as part of his one man impeachment tour. In recent months, Jim has been providing transportation to Iraq Veterans Against the War for their various tours and other activities. Last night, Jim escaped a fire of suspicious origins that destroyed the bus. Luckily Jim is all right, this message was passed on by Bill Perry, a vet and anti war activist. I will pass on any further news of this incident.
Jeri
The bus was destroyed by fire around 9:30 pm, Friday night, 1/11/08
This bus, often mired in controversy since the IVAW “Dirty South” tour that left Philly in June, and had Active Duty BBQ’s at Ft Meade, Ft Jackson, Camp Lejeune, Ft Benning, and other Southern Military Posts (including an IVAW benefit by Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine, and AudioSlave, in Virginia) as well as backdrop for many a Demonstration, and Ft Drum, NY, organizing parties, has finally died.
Jim Goodnow pulled into a South Jersey Truck Stop, to catch a 3 or 4 hour nap. Jim saw, in retrospect, some suspicious activity outside the bus, and about 20 minutes later, the entire engine compartment, and back of the bus was engulfed in flames.
Stay tuned…
Be Well, RAISE HELL !
Bill Perry
Delaware Valley Veterans For America
Disabled American Veteran, VVAW, VFP, VFW, VVA
Gloria Steinem comes to Hillary Clinton’s defense
[This article] is a day old and Hillary’s victory is the new, lead story. I think Steinem’s editorial contributed to Hillary’s win, but won’t tell the pundits, the pollsters, or Fox News. Whether you support Hillary or not, she has been ripped apart in the news media in the last few weeks for being a strong, intelligent, accomplished woman and then ripped apart again for “breaking down.” Did any of these commentators watch the video?
This has certainly heated up the steam in my kettle.
Beth Crawford, Columbia
Is incrementalism the way to universal health care?
by Mark Dunlea
CommonDreams
Governor Spitzer and state lawmakers seek an evidence-based plan that will bring comprehensive health care to all of the people of New York State, a result that almost everyone would like to see.
Unfortunately, the Spitzer administration, along with many health care reformers, continually assert, without providing any evidence, that the best way to universal health care is a series of incremental steps that build upon existing programs to bring targeted populations of the uninsured into the “health care” system.
Incrementalists argue that the public opinion polls showing overwhelming public support – not just for a comprehensive government universal health care financing system but also for radical reform – are misleading. They contend that if one digs deeper, one finds that those with health insurance (“those who actually vote”) would rather keep the shrinking (and often already inadequate) coverage they have than see the entire system changed. They murmur that it is not “politically feasible” for our leaders to stand up to the power of the private health insurance industry and big pharma. They redefine the public’s desire for choice in doctors to hospitals to instead be choice among which insurance company to contract with. They confuse access to comprehensive health care with expanding health insurance.
Candidates urged to reject voting machines
South Carolina’s system causes particular concern
A group of state-based civic organizations has urged presidential candidates to call for paper ballots in all 2008 primary elections.
In a letter sent to the major Democratic and Republican candidates last week, the groups Georgians for Verified Voting, Iowans for Voting Integrity, the North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting, and the South Carolina Progressive Network offered evidence of the unreliability of paperless electronic voting systems, and expressed special concern about the paperless machines to be used statewide in South Carolina’s presidential primaries on Jan. 19 and Jan. 26.
“Many of the world’s best computer scientists have concluded that paperless e-voting systems are vulnerable to error and fraud,” said Brett Bursey, director of the South Carolina Progressive Network. Last year, a task force that included Howard Schmidt, former chief security officer of Microsoft, called strongly for voter-verified paper records of each vote cast.
MoveOn maps primary polling data
Over the past year, MoveOn asked about 30,000 members each week who they favored in the Democratic primary. Here is what they said:
Ladies’ choice
By Dana Goldstein
The New Republic
Candidate is trying to mount a feminist challenge to Hillary.
For Barack Obama, it has all come down to the mommies.
Hillary Clinton’s commanding lead among Democratic women – as high as 20 points in some nationwide polls – has long been cited as a strength Obama can’t overcome. A November Zogby poll found that nationwide, Clinton’s 11 percent advantage over Obama was due entirely to her 18 percent lead among women.
But in recent weeks, Obama brought female voters into his column as he pulled even with Clinton in the early primary states. The Des Moines Register’s December 1 Iowa poll showed Obama not only winning the overall race by a narrow margin, but for the first time beating Clinton among women, 31 to 26 percent. As the air of inevitability around Clinton vanishes, so does her lock on female voters. And the Obama campaign is trying to lock down his new supporters with a very special appeal to the peacenik earth mother it apparently believes is lurking within every woman (or at least every Democratic primary voter).
A few weeks before Oprah Tour ’07, the Obama campaign rolled out a 19-minute web documentary on “why women across the nation are supporting Barack Obama for president.” It features a bevy of babies gurgling happily to the strains of folk rock. And with babies, of course, come mommies. Mommies supervising in the park, cutting their children’s food up into tiny squares, and generally worrying about stuff. “Ever since I gave birth to my son, which was two and a half years ago, I have felt this, like, my heart ripped open to the world,” says a choked-up Gabrielle Grossman, a stay-at-home mom and Obama supporter from Exeter, New Hampshire. “I want to create a world that’s safe for my son and has harmony rather than sadness and poverty and grief and fear.”
Lord help us if the right wing decides to use this video – it’s almost a parody of Democrats as the Mommy Party. We meet Obama campaign COO Betsy Myers as she prepares dinner for her little girl. After all, there’s lots of time for those home-cooked meals on the trail! “Women have a guilt gene that men don’t have,” Myers says. “We’re the ones who handle the school, and the days off, and the doctor’s appointments.”