I showed up to see Joe Donnelly (D-Indiana) this morning. There was a pretty good turnout in an extremely Republican county, but I’m pretty sure more of us were in favor of reform than against it. I even saw some guys with t-shirts promoting HR 676.

People filled out a card, and given a number and Joe spoke with each person who signed up individually. Which seems like a good way to avoid all the hooliganism we hear about across the country. The whole thing went without incident.

He’s a blue dog, so I don’t know how he’ll vote, but he saw support support for real reform this morning.

Here’s the “healthcare” issues page at Donnelly’s website. Some of it is good, while other parts seem a bit too Blue Dog-ish. Glad you and your neighbors turned out to visit with him.

Good to see some reports that the supporters of the GOPranos haven’t shut down a town meeting.

I support HR 676.

Please sign these 2 petitions for HR 676

http://bit.ly/HR676

http://bit.ly/single_payer_ross

Read our blog http://blog.democratz.org

Sounds like the police were doing really good work at your coffee meeting. 1 officer to 75 people might be a little light, but I imagine that there were reserves ready in a hurry if things did get ugly. That level doesn’t make the police presence intimidating.

That was my impression, too, even before I heard their little chat.

Truthers, so-called, are RW nuts?

The free-fall collapse of WTC 7 and what’s known about the Pentagon attack suggest the official story of 9-11 is a tissue of lies.

I love the term GOPranos. *S*

Just nuts, not RW nuts.

I also think that the TeaBaggers would be on their better behavior going up against an African-American congressman. It would just make the whole thing too damned obvious otherwise and could really boomerang against them if they did.

I’m amazed some of these congressman are not ready for bigger crowds. Is it incompetence? Laziness? Do they not read or watch TV?

Jim Costa (Blue Dog) abruptly cancelled the meet and greet that was to have taken place at the State Building downtown Fresno this a.m. No word on the reason.

Oh I like this crap.

A full laden 767 carries 150 metric tonnes of jet fuel.
One half of this fuel is consumed to reach cruising altitude, 35,000 ft.
Let’s say these 767s had 100 metric tons of fuel left on board when the 767 hit the WTC.
Now 100 metric tons of jet fuel won’t burn on impact.
If it did the top of the WTC would have lifted off. Like a rocket. Or the sides of the building would have landed in NJ and CT.
It burns. And burns and burns.
The draft from the air rushing up the WTC (heat rises and sucks up air),
Raising the combustion temperature of the jet fuel (kerosene) to over 2200 deg Celsius.
Try it yourself. Put you hand into an propane or butane torch. keep it there.
Steel looses its structural integrity (gets soft) at about 600 to 700 deg Celsius (red heat). Ask any blacksmith.
Then the steel structure fails.
The building comes down.

Burn 100 metric tons of jet fuel in any high rise steel building, and its not a question of if it come down, but how long it stays up.

And don’t ask me about WTC 7, the fire department say they pulled it. Read the reports.

Yes Eureka, use the term GOPranos early and often. I make a GOPranos mug. Check out http://store.democratz.org and look for the link that reads see our newest products at zazzle. You can then enter the search term maximus7 gopranos.

You might like this term also the Republi KLAN party.

I also call their party the party of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Tomas De Torquemada. Their economic policies come from a fantasy character and their religious big government plans come from the originator of the Spanish Inquisition.

Save your key strokes, they’ll never give up. It gives people something to be angry about for the rest of their lives.

Too busy interviewing ladies of ill-repute, one-on-one.

yea Betray Us worked out really well.

True, there is no fixing stupid. Thanks.

Why did the buildings implode perfectly?

What’s the point? What are you going to do about it, what does it matter?

Book Salon up at the Mothership with Chris Mooney’s Unscientific American hosted by JD Stemwedel

Because Vince Foster set some explosives inside at the right locations. That’s why Hillary had to kill him, duh.

I don’t appreciate your tone. I have just wondered about it. Not saying I believe 9-11 was an inside job.

Thanks for that. I always thought you killed Vince.

Yep, Bush/Cheney did enough criminal shit right out in the open to render most speculation about criminal shit they MIGHT have done in secret moot.

Thanks for going this morning Peterr. I wanted to go but my kids had a slumber party last night. I was at the mercy of a livingroom full of sleeping bags. It’s nice to know things weren’t too ugly, and thank you for reporting, I’m sure your post will provide much more important details than the teevee.

Pretty good, you can judge tone in a post. What exactly was the tone, sarcastic, ironic, incredulous? And wtf does 9/11 have to do with the post? Sounds like a goddamn Guliani campaign appearance.

Raven and Synoia,

You wish to believe authority.

That’s fine for sixth-graders.

I asked a question to someone who seemed like they knew what they were talking about because I have wondered why the buildings fell the way they did. Someone else brought up the subject. I wasn’t talking to you in the first place and don’t ever compare me to fucking Guliani.

Everyone should believe in something
I believe I’ll go fishing

but you just have a ball jerkin it to your theories.

You were talking to me when I answered. And if you were a fucking critical reader you would have figured out I was talking about the subject not you. How ya like me now?

Going… good idea

You attacked me first. WTF do you expect.

nobody attacked you, if I had it would have read something like, “hey you fucking moron, what’s that got to do with the price of tomatoes?” Now nothing like that was said was it?

Thanks for this report, Peterr. You are very lucky to have Congressman Cleaver as your representative. As I recall, he was among the first to take the FDL Pledge.

That’s why he’s a Health Care Hero.

Support them, please — they support us!

The revelation today that the Obama administration has worked out a sweetheart deal with big pharma should be the straw that tips the scales. It’s obvious whose side he’s on. We should have known the day after the election when he appointed Rham Emanuel COS. It’s time for progressives to let him know he has lost trust and support. The U.S. doesn’t need 8 years of Bush Lite. Time to start thinking about making him a one termer and finding a challenger in the primaries. Here’s an interesting essay.

http://www.infowars.com/progre…..rat-party/

Taibbi on the truthers

truthers, damn almost sounds like birthers now doesn’t it?

Peterr,

I believe you get correct the big story.

To me, the details are important.

BUSH: So, what’s the plan again?

CHENEY: Well, we need to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. So what we’ve decided to do is crash a whole bunch of remote-controlled planes into Wall Street and the Pentagon, say they’re real hijacked commercial planes, and blame it on the towelheads; then we’ll just blow up the buildings ourselves to make sure they actually fall down.

RUMSFELD: Right! And we’ll make sure that some of the hijackers are agents of Saddam Hussein! That way we’ll have no problem getting the public to buy the invasion.

CHENEY: No, Dick, we won’t.

RUMSFELD: We won’t?

CHENEY: No, that’s too obvious. We’ll make the hijackers Al Qaeda and then just imply a connection to Iraq.

RUMSFELD: But if we’re just making up the whole thing, why not just put Saddam’s fingerprints on the attack?

CHENEY: (sighing) It just has to be this way, Dick. Ups the ante, as it were. This way, we’re not insulated if things go wrong in Iraq. Gives us incentive to get the invasion right the first time around.

BUSH: I’m a total idiot who can barely read, so I’ll buy that. But I’ve got a question. Why do we need to crash planes into the Towers at all? Since everyone knows terrorists already tried to blow up that building complex from the ground up once, why don’t we just blow it up like we plan to anyway, and blame the bombs on the terrorists?

One of the Truthers I overheard talking with someone else was clearly a rightwinger. His “don’t trust government with health care” views were part of a larger “don’t trust government at all” mentality — and part of that mistrust had to do with 9-11.

As you say, the details are important — and that detail of my post is correct.

These are generally face-to-face, one-on-one constituent services conversations, with his aide sitting there taking notes (things like “check with the VA about getting so-and-so his new leg” and “find out why the SBA is dragging their feet on so-and-so’s loan app”).

Are these folks too stupid to know that what you do is contact the Caseworker in the Congressman’s office? He/she does all the heavy lifting, and the only thing the Congressman ever does is sign the “so glad we were able to help” letter.

I guess under “normal circumstances” the Member likes to make it look like he’s providing these services, but this is really a monumental waste of his time.

um, yes

9-11 just reinforced it, not initiated it. These are the same people that think if we’d just killed another million or so Vietnamese we would have “won”. Sold out by the government, just ask em.

I was at the coffee this morning until about 10 am. For the most part. It was amazingly civil, and the crowd did a good job of self regulating. Rev. Rep. Cleaver was smart to stick to his regular monthly format and let the crowd take care of itself.

It was interesting that when dialogue took place, nearly everyone there, on both sides, wanted change, they just disagreed on details, particularly on whether or not they believed gov was competent to administer healthcare. (This, of course despite the fact that the US government already administers Medicare & the VA very successfully)

There were a small subset of racist wingnut jerks, but they were pretty well marinalized even by their own side. One was carrying a sign with the new Obama as Joker wingnut meme. When a nurse who was for reform challenged him on the racism of the sign, he screamed “how many black babies have you adopted”. Apparently there’s a new test for ally status I was unaware of.

It seems that the original intent of this thread was diverted to the 9/11 tragedy. Then those of us who don’t believe the government version are called stupid and nuts and implied that we are rightwing whackos. You may call me all of those names, but none fit. I have to say that believing the government story of w/dick, et. al. is hardly how you see the rest of what they did in governing the country. In fact, in most instances, it seems that it is the only thing that you believe that they said. I must say that if you believe the story of how the building fell, then you believe that the Warren Commission tells the whole story of how JFK died. Many of you who now are touting the 9/11 Commission version were pointing out how the people appointed to the commission were chosen to whitewash the results.

” guess under “normal circumstances” the Member likes to make it look like he’s providing these services, but this is really a monumental waste of his time.”

Yes, but every problem solved is probably ten to twenty votes in the next election. People talk about getting their personal problems solved, which is why expert caseworkers on the hill and in district offices are so valuable.

And people are not stupid to use Senators and Congresscritters this way. Many do know that they can look in the telephone book and find the number for the proper agency, but they also know that an elected official gets attention in the way John Q Public does not. Far more effective than leaving a message in voice-mail Hell in an agency office out in the regions.

Gravity, maybe? Top steel buckles, floors pancake due to increasing weight, no lateral force to spread the fall.

Can we lose the effing 9/11 stuff, permanently?
Half the people spreading it have no clue about materials, structures, and engineering, and the other half seem to want to believe anything as long as it makes government look bad.

Sure we can lose it. In a monumentally intellectual effort the whole thing can go away and we who don’t believe the story can disappear never to raise any bothersome questions. Why should this be pushed away while you or others like you continue to credit obama with playing some kind of 3-dimensional chess. I’m still not sure why you are so satisfied with the story.

I agree with this comment – we can rehash this stuff until the last trump sounds, and nobody’s gonna change their minds. Same with the Birther nonsense.

Now, back to the topic: I agree that a visible and interacting police presence was probably a deterrent to the usual astroturf tactics. However, it’s probably a temporary solution because someone will test their nerve to see how far they can push it.

Hi Peterr,

great post. How amazing that so many showed up for coffee! The police force sounds very appropriate in tone and amount. How nice!

I wondered also how out of touch some congresscritters are if they don’t know what kind of reception they are going to get this August.

Also, if I may say, I get pretty ticked hearing these loser teabaggers say “it’s time to take back the country” like they didn’t have it for eight fricking years. If they want to “take back the country” they can do it at the ballot box just like the rest of us.

“It seems that the original intent of this thread was diverted to the 9/11 tragedy. Then those of us who don’t believe the government version are called stupid and nuts and implied that we are rightwing whackos. You may call me all of those names, but none fit. I have to say that believing the government story of w/dick, et. al. is hardly how you see the rest of what they did in governing the country. In fact, in most instances, it seems that it is the only thing that you believe that they said. I must say that if you believe the story of how the building fell, then you believe that the Warren Commission tells the whole story of how JFK died. Many of you who now are touting the 9/11 Commission version were pointing out how the people appointed to the commission were chosen to whitewash the results.”

First of all — there is absolutely no logic in saying that patterns of critical thinking that apply to how you assess the Warren Report predetermine how you will critically address the 9/11 report, and other investigative aspects of accounting for who and why were behind 9/11.

Second, the 9/11 Commission’s work has to be looked at as one piece, indeed a major piece, of a far more elaborate assessment of what happened and why it happened, than what is for all practical purposes a homocide investigation. What appals me in looking at those who are heavy advocates of dismissing the 9/11 report is their failure to account for so much of the evidence which comes from other than US sources. Recently, for instance, I was reading in German, a detailed article about what German Police work assembled while tracking the vast detail about the Hamburg Cell from which Atta sprang — it was from a center leftie journal, that long had a fairly permissive editorial approach to matters Muslim in Germany. Strong support for Turkish children born in Germany acquiring “natural born citizenship status” — something that would require adjustment of German Bloodlines criteria for citizenship in the basic law and the German Legal Tradition. The point is they have much enhanced their editorial perspective, given the detail they have assembled from 9/11 investigations in Germany. They don’t question that Atta did 9/11, they have totally independent evidence of this from the Muslim Community in Germany. They have pre-9/11 materials about the plan to blow up Strausburg, they have detailed materials from Spanish, Italian, French and British investigative work — from Dutch and Scandinavian sources. They are attempting to weave together the hard evidence that some folk are trying to blow us up, with a determination to preserve something of an open and progressive society. And the fact is they look with great distain on the Progressive American contribution to this effort. We get dismissed as too fixed on obtuse details, such as to softening point of steel, and not conversant with the larger picture, and thus useless in a debate about what really matters.

I really don’t like to see American dialogue on the progressive side trapped in irrelevancy — and I would suggest this is a good case in point.

good thing citizens don’t have to have “peace officer” insurance in order to get police services.

It used to be common for there to be independent, commercial fire stations. Individual homeowners and businesses had to pay for “fire insurance” for their services and in turn were given fire marks to hang on the front of the building to show what company they contracted with. If a structure caught on fire and someone raised the alarm, the closest company would come out but would do nothing if their plaque wasn’t on the house.

After a few “great fire of x” events it became pretty apparent that it was a common interest to have fire stations provided for the protection of all as a community service.