I got an email today that said that my Congressman, Brad Sherman, had canceled his Town Hall on health care because of a death threat. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the manipulated level of outrage attending to this issue is appalling. Even if I weren’t already generally disposed toward a national health-care plan, I think having a lynch mob show up against it would put me there.

Burbank’s other Congressman, Adam Schiff, is hosting his own town hall meeting on health care on Tuesday night. It’s at the Alhambra Civic Center Library Community Room from 7 to 8:30. The word is already out that an astroturf mob is going to show up to protest, so I’m going to go in support.

What’s an astroturf mob? It’s a group of fake grassroots activists — fake because they’re actually funded by corporate special interest groups. As Rachel Maddow explains below.

By the way, I think mind people who disagree with me showing up at events. The more the merrier. (It’s when nobody shows up for anything that I get concerned. When apathy rules, power is unchecked.) On Friday I was handed what I took as a thoughtful analysis by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of current health-care proposals; whether or not I agree with their analysis (probably not), it wasn’t claiming that Obama’s health-care initiative puts out a contract on Grandpa so junior can collect his social security, or whatever the latest alarmist lie from Rushland is. If people want to show up for a town hall so they can debate the issues, I welcome that. If they show up to shout down the event, we should all throw them out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.