In ohio right now
SINGLE PAYER ADVOCATES HAVE ENTERED THE OFFICE OF SENATOR VOINOVICH AND ARE DEMANDING THAT HE SUPPORT AN EXPANSION OF MEDICARE! CALL NOW AND MAKE THE FOLLOWING DEMANDS! PHONE NUMBERS, FAX NUMBERS, AND SCRIPTS BELOW:

Senator Voinovich
1-866-220-0044 (Congressional Switchboard – Toll Free)
216-522-7095 (Cleveland Office)
216-522-7097 (Cleveland Fax)

“I am calling as a constituent from Ohio and I am demanding that Senator Voinovich vote for the Sander’s amendment, a national single payer plan. As a self proclaimed fiscal hawk, Senator Voinovich should realize that this is the only method that will provide health care to ALL Americans while saving costs. Some inner city school districts in Ohio could save up to 28 million dollars a year on their health care costs. Medicare for All would also create approximately 2.6 million jobs, slightly less than the total number of jobs lost in 2008. In the Senator’s last term in Congress, he should stand up for this moral issue, and realize that health care is a human right. A group of activists in Cleveland are currently sitting in outside the Senator’s office to demand that Sen. Voinovich support the Sanders amendment, and that he donate the $582,516 he received from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries during the 2008 election cycle to The Free Clinic of Greater Cleveland. They will remain at the federal building until Senator Voinovich agrees to these terms or law enforcement removes them. The Senator works for them, and we all say Medicare for ALL, support the Sander’s amendment!”

Senator Sherrod Brown
1-866-220-0044 (Congressional Switchboard – Toll Free)
202-228-6321 (Washington DC Fax)
216-522-7272 (Cleveland Office)
216-522-2239 (Cleveland Fax)

“I am calling as a constituent from Ohio, and I’d like to thank Senator Brown for cosponsoring the Sander’s amendment for a national single payer health care plan. Medicare for All is the only way to provide health care to everyone in America and cut health care costs. We hope to see Senator Brown continue to advocate for real health care reform.”

Once you have made a round of calls, start at the top and make them again! Our goal is to make sure that our legislators know that we support single payer Medicare for All, and any less will not do. Thanks for all of the great work you do!

Yours in solidarity,

Drew Smith
Coordinator
Mobilize Ohio Movement
http://www.mobilizeohio.org

Please help us out in Ohio. Let’s apply pressure on Voinovich. Please help us

1st, There is NOTHING bigger than HealthCare this term, this a once ib thirty years opportunity. 2nd, what you call to our attention re: the House is old news. It’s been uncomfortably stuck in Dick Chaney’s craw for decades. So, Jon, what’s really up?
Have you finally reached your exasperation point with HealthCare? I would hope so, I can’t imagine how you lasted so long. Have you come to realize our feckless Dems are every bit as corrupt as the Repubs we put out of power? Sorry, but this also is not new news. Personally, I read you regularly, & agree, for us it’s all about sharing real pertinent info. & making informed decisions. Unfortunately, we’re in the minority.
Life goes on, hopefully not for the Democratic Party, but for the rest of us who are lucky enough to not be ruined by our current healthcare system.
Jane, listen up: Give Jon a few very well earned days off & pick a new cause because our HealthCare opportunity ended the moment they somehow got Rockefeller to sign on. Jon, thx, you couldn’t have done more or better.

Our House of Lords (the Senate) keeps getting more byzantine, presuming more rights, and grabbing more power, while our House of Commons (the House of Representatives) withers into a purely symbolic vestigial chamber with no real power.

This is even bigger than health care reform. This is about our future as a Democracy.

I hope this will get the focus it deserves. On climate change, on jobs, on banks, secrecy, wars, anything, the House of Lords has rendered the lower House moot. They’re just the warmup act. Restoring majority rule needs to become an issue in its own right.

Just to play devil’s advocate (again?), I would presume that there’s no better way to blow up the negotiations in the Senate than for Pelosi to say, “Whatever the Senate agrees to is dead on arrival, because we’re going to have a conference committee and insist on our version of the public option.”

The moment that happens, the next step is for Lieberman, Nelson, et al. to say publicly they’ll block the bill unless Reid guarantees in writing not to change the Senate language in conference.

Which, of course, they may do anyway. And, of course, reconciliation might avoid much of this nonsense. But still. :-)

I’ve been referring to DiFi as The Duchess of California for a while now.

Why on earth would it? There’s Tiger Woods’s texts to talk about.

She did not need to go that far. Just say of course there will be a conference committee that is how legislation is done.

Pelosi’s a gutless wonder, as is Harry Reid. Both need to replaced by the caucuses this January.

This is about our future as a Democracy. If the members of the House will not go crazy about this huge power grab by the Senate, it is truly a dark day for American democracy.

But we’ve already had this discussion and conclusion: when Mike Stark asked Madame Nancy if the Constitution is worth defending, in that conference call a few years back. What was her dumbass answer: “Well, yes, if we can.” something about as simpleton and equivocal.

The fact that reporters need to even ask the question, “Will there be a conference committee?” is sickening to me as an American.

Let’s face it. It’s not possible to get any sicker than we all are today. They gutted it all. When it comes to balance of power, limits on authority, meaningful opposition, and preserving & protecting the rights of the people, the Democrats have more or less clear-cutted the whole forest. Not too many old trees left standing.

I do not say this blithely: Once the Cinton Democrats killed off Howard Dean, and kicked his bottom-up wily-notions into oblivion, rapidly returning top-down command & control to its rightful place on the throne, the biggest threat to the status quo of the past 50 years — and the single force most likely to move American in a significantly new, corrected direction that defines the next 50 years or even 100 — was snipped at the root.

They couldn’t kill the root; but though the Dean Progressive root has grown, and remains untainted by DailyKos-style centrism, the field has substantial overgrowth of the hard to kill off centrist weed, crowding out and stunting progressive growth.

I don’t see America correcting, that is, I don’t see an ability now for America to correct itself. The power has concentrated again, and even though the charade of oppositional politics continues to play out with our leading goofballs Reid and Madame, the amount of energy and tireless effort to continue to seed progressive change, to fight that battle again next year, or in 2 years, or in 4 years, to me seems misapplied.

Why Don’t We Just Go A Step Further And Abolish The House?

I actually take this literally. More or less. We don’t have the power to abolish the House or the Senate, but I believe the focus on trying to influence that system is just not capable of producing the escape velocity needed to finally legislate what this country needs.

I believe a community like this one could be the right one to begin a parallel focus on what I call “para-government”. A progressive structure that chooses to exist in parallel to the formal government we have. It’s really time to have a summit, begin a task force to plan for a workable methodology to develop a true platform, a realistic vision for the future that charts out the next year, 2years, 5 years, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years. But in an unrestricted thinking manner. Then begin to operate like a business with a mission, and shift all fundraising to internal operations of this thinktank and 50-state para-government structure, most likely anchored by the old Meetup Leaders from the Dean campaign.

I could go on, but this is not the place.

But I did read this blog post title and decide to explain that I’ve put a lot of planning work into such a para-government structure. To be clear, it is the antithesis of a third party. It is a complete break from the model we currently use to try to influence a corrupt and seemingly impenetrable system. I call this parallel structure “i-org”, which stands for the Interorg.

P.S. I just want to add: Over the past 6-7 years I have met a lot of people who self-identify as liberal or Democrat or progressive. By far, most are not progressive. But I wanted to say that the people I met cross-country and worked with for 2 years on the Dean campaign in 03-04, then for several years after, are probably the finest specimens of people I have met in my life. They’re the real thing. The people that take commitment seriously, and mean what they say.

There. Now I am done. I’ve never written this anywhere before. Now I have and I feel better that it exists as a statement somewhere.

The House is occupied by petit-senators, not commoners. Get rid of the parties and bring back property qualifications/ disqualifications.

In colonial MA, the assembly could “ostracize” (from Greek democracy) representatives the body deemed no longer represented the interests of the people. Ostracized representatives went to serve in the upper house, keeping the government more properly balanced.

What John Adams feared would happen with a unicameral legislature has pretty much happened under the party system. Moneyed elites have taken control of everything and those who seek to represent the interests of commoners are effectively “ostracized” within each party and in both houses.

Of course, I’m not sure how this would work today. Today, it may be too easy to buy out representatives irregardless of their background. That so many American live hand to mouth and are toast without their paychecks can not have done otherwise than to facilitate a shocking lack of integrity in the workplace–so long as that’s what upper management decides it wants. Mortgage originations, for instance.

Or, to put it another way–in what fantasy land is Nancy Pelosi “a commoner”? In what fantasy land is she even most people’s idea of a “democrat”?

Another way to approach this might be to force the Republican party to integrate so that well off women and non-white people, all culturally driven politicians, can properly represent their own interests in the Rockefellar Republican party rather than hijacking the House of Commons in the age of party politics.

I’m totally serious about this. I’ve had it. How does it happen that Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and all their ilk can hijack the Democratic Party rather than having to do the hard work of integrating the Republicans?

We need to start asking these questions. I see plenty of women in the Republican Party at local level. These are more or less the same people who give me dirty looks when I go to vote in the Dem Primary.

They know where their interests lie–why are we still stuck with Nancy and Dianne?

spelling suggestion: trysts instead of texts?

unless you meant text messaging