OK, so I reserved for Congressman Adam Schiff’s Town Hall on Health Care tonight in Alhambra. Here’s what I’ve now found out: I’m one of Seven Thousand Two Hundred people who have RSVP’d for this event. (At a library that accommodates at most 300.)
I wonder how many of those Seven Thousand Two Hundred will actually show up, and how many will show up to behave like the guy in the video below?
My pal April Winchell has created an iPhone app designed to further the gay agenda of “destroying marriage, recruiting children and doing lots of cardio.” Here’s where you can get it.
By the way, the White House has (finally) put out some videos to counter the health-care disinformation campaign being spread by the usual suspects. Here’s the Chair of Economic Advisors explaining how the administration’s health-care proposals would actually lower the cost of health-care for small business. As the owner of a small business myself, I would be happy to save some money, but I would dance naked jigs of joy if I could save time and frustration on paperwork.
Thirty-five years ago, Richard Nixon announced on national television that he was resigning as president. I lay on the living room floor to watch, my cherished black leatherette-encased black cassette tape record at my side and its mike placed as close to the television as possible because I wanted to record every word. I was 12 years old and I knew this was going to be important. My parents were quiet, although I knew my father’s feeling: that somehow Nixon was getting railroaded. Looking back, I wonder if they weren’t a little scared.
A year before, the Arab Oil Embargo had put my father out of business. He was 52. He went back into the union as a heavy-equipment operator, but I’m not sure that our family’s finances ever truly recovered. Now it looked like the presidency was going out of business, too, with a twice-elected president being replaced by one nobody had voted into executive office, someone who was plucked from obscurity to replace another scandal-plagued predecessor.
I just watched the resignation speech again. I remember keenly feeling that history was being made. It was. But I had no way of knowing that 35 years later I would feel that we were just coming out of an even darker time, one that would make the trespasses of Watergate seem quaint.
Yesterday I noted that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes Barack Obama’s health-care proposals. Here are some more specifics, although you’ll note that the specifics aren’t terribly specific: They’re just opposed. I’m opposed to all sorts of things too — like uninsured sick people showing up at emergency rooms and bankrupting hospitals. And I’m opposed to the staggering (and rising) costs and inefficiencies of the current system. So what’s their counter-proposal? Unless somehow fixing this situation doesn’t seem important.
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.
At this year’s Comic Con, I saw previews from several upcoming films that I’m eager to see. But none moreso than this one, which comes out on Christmas day. This trailer gives only a hint at the wonder and fun I saw in the clips Terry Gilliam screened from “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”