Anderson@Large

Riled Up and On the Go

In this summer of no love, a new Rasmussen survey found that 57 percent of Americans want to divorce members of Congress.

Some of those who want to replace the entire 111th Congress plan to march on Washington on Sept. 12. Indeed, the “Tea Party Express” is on a cross-country tour to rile up conservatives.

The activists will hold 33 tea parties as they head to Washington. Their message: We’re going to vote you out of office and take our country back.

The bus sponsors include the Multi-Cultural Conservative Coalition. I visited their website and it appears to be a, er, coalition of three people – a husband and wife and the ubiquitous Alveda King.

Alveda’s claim to fame is she is the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As blogger David Hart notes:

“Dr.” Alveda King does not have a doctorate. The anti-gay, anti-choice activist seems to issue a press release a week through Priests for Life. Her distance from the truth is becoming a disturbing pattern. The degree issue is relatively minor but it gives us insight into Ms. King’s self-absorption. In point of fact, she has an honorary degree. To make matters worse, her web bio states, “Alveda is also the recipient of a Doctorate of Laws degree from Saint Anselm College” which could lead some people to conclude that she is an attorney. She is not.

Having had two abortions herself, Ms. King would like to deprive everyone else of the choices that she had. In classic self-victimization, Ms. King now refers to herself as the “victim of the harsh aftereffects of abortion.” Ms. King is also unable to utter much more than a paragraph without a reference to “Uncle Martin.” Thus, Ms. King is defined by her phony doctorate, two abortions and an uncle who was a great man who died when Ms. King was a child.

Suffice it to say there are more black folks on the “Double Dutch Bus” than the Tea Party Express.

From Fired Up to ‘Wee-weed Up’

A year ago today, Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Obama’s supporters left Invesco Field “fired up, ready to go.”

A year later, President Obama’s job approval rating is 50 percent and his supporters are “wee-weed up.”

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently wrote:

It’s still early, but people are starting to lose faith in the president. I hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle. Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in.

More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.

As for Obama’s supporters having “nowhere else to go,” Obama voters in, say, Virginia and New Jersey may decide to go to the mall rather than their polling place in November.

Obama may not have lost his mojo, but it ain’t working on a broad cross-section of Americans, according to Gallup’s weekly poll.

Among black Americans, Obama’s job approval is 91 percent, down from 96 percent at the beginning of August.

Women’s Equality Day

Between the town-hallers and racial contretemps (here and here), I didn’t get a chance to note that yesterday was Women’s Equality Day.

While we have come a long way, baby, women still earn less than men. And women are still more likely than men to hold jobs that don’t offer healthcare benefits.

A study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found:

Median weekly earnings for men are higher than those for women in almost every occupation. Of the over 500 individual occupational categories for which there are sufficient data to calculate a wage ratio, in only five occupations do women earn as much as or more than men. Among ‘counselors’ female and male median earnings are identical at $787 per week (women are two-thirds of ‘counselors’). There are four occupations where women marginally outearn men. Two of these are traditionally male occupations, where women account for less than four percent of all workers. Another is ‘special education teachers,’ where women are the large majority of workers, and the fourth is a subcategory of ‘physical and social science technicians,’ where women are just under half of all workers. In all other occupations, women’s median weekly earnings are lower than those of men in the same occupation.

In a proclamation, President Barack Obama observed:

Today, our country renews its commitment to freedom and justice for all our citizens. As we prepare to celebrate this women's day of equality, we reflect on the sacrifices once made to allow women and girls the basic rights and choices we freely exercise today. The future we leave to our daughters and granddaughters will be determined by our willingness to build on the achievements of our past and move forward as one people and one Nation. The fight for women's equality is not a woman's agenda, but an American agenda.

For more info, check out the White House Council on Women and Girls.

Progressives Push Public Option Resolution

It may be too late but progressives are trying to catch up with conservatives who beat them at their online game.

In fact, conservatives out-organized the Community Organizer-in-Chief. It brings to mind the Louis Jordan classic, “Somebody Done Hoodooed the Hoodoo Man.”

So, CREDO Action, Democracy for America and FireDogLake.com have joined forces to mobilize grassroots support for the public option. They are seeking citizen co-sponsors “of our resolution demanding inclusion of a strong public health insurance option in any health care bill passed this year.”

Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager for CREDO Mobile writes:

All politics is local. So the work you can do in your community to fight for a robust public option can have a huge impact…

The first thing you can do to help in this effort is to become a citizen co-sponsor of the resolution. That way, when our volunteers approach local groups asking them to sign onto the resolution as well, the groups will see that the community supports them taking a strong stand.

The local progressive groups our volunteers will ask to pass our resolution are uniquely suited to pressuring members of Congress.

To sign on to the Public Option Resolution, go here.

Race Doesn’t Take a Holiday

President Barack Obama may be on vacation but the debate about race never takes a holiday.

The latest racial brouhaha involves New York Gov. David Paterson who attributed his low poll numbers to racial bias:

The whole idea is to get me not to run in the primary.

We’re not in the post-racial period.

The reality is the next victim on the list - and you can see it coming - is President Barack Obama, who did nothing more than trying to reform a health care system.

No, he didn’t!

The New York Post reports that Obama’s people told Paterson not to drag the President into his mess:

President Obama’s aides were so furious that Gov. Paterson dragged him into a rant about racism that they sent a message sharply criticizing the governor’s comments just hours after he made them.

But Paterson is sticking to his story. He told blogger Gerson Borrero that calling him “the accidental governor” is racial code:

It was not an accident, it is a constitutional mandate. I became governor by a constitutional mandate.

Paterson added:

The “accidental governor” reference bothered me then and it still does.

Whatever. Mr. Accidental Governor, meet “The Accidental President.”

Paterson was just warming up:

Part of what I feel is that one very successful minority is permissible, but when you see too many success stories then some people get nervous.

Paterson is legally blind. But none is so blind as those who will not see.

Paterson’s sorry job performance is the reason New Yorkers want to kick him to the curb. Indeed, in a Siena College poll, black voters prefer Attorney General Andrew Cuomo by 20 points.

March for Health Care

As the battle lines over healthcare reform harden, folks are taking to the streets.

On Saturday, conservatives rallied outside the offices of members of Congress to protest “socialized, government-controlled healthcare.” Protesters included seniors who are beneficiaries of government-controlled healthcare, i.e., Medicare.

When Congress returns from recess on Sept. 8, Rep. Chaka Fattah plans to introduce a resolution calling for a national march in Washington to mobilize support for a public option:

The confusion, misinformation and scare tactics about a “public option” trumpeted by the opponents of real healthcare reform have dominated the national debate long enough. It is way past time for the vast majority favoring healthcare reform with the public option to show up and speak up at the Capitol’s doorstep and make their views known to their elected representatives.

Robert Reich is to be commended for his leadership on this proposal for a Grandparents Day march. What better time and place to refute these false claims about how President Obama’s healthcare reform would threaten older Americans.

Grandparents Day is Sept. 13. If the march jumps off, the streets of DC will be real crowded that weekend.

Tea Party-goers are planning to march on Washington on Sept. 12.

Talking Health Care

I listened to talk-show host Michael Smerconish interview President Barack Obama on the Big Talker 1210.

Philadelphia-based Smerconish and Rush Limbaugh are both heard on WPHT-AM. The big-talker mouthed Rush was interrupted by the man he hopes will fail.

Smerconish, who endorsed Obama in the 2008 election, did not lob softball questions. And neither did his callers.

Tracy asked Obama to “quickly list five or six bullet points of what legislation must include for you to be willing to sign it. For instance, employer mandates, tort reform, illegal immigrants -- what about them? Must it include a public option?”

Obama’s response:

Now, Tracy, you had a good point about what are the bullet points that I want. Number one, it’s got to be deficit-neutral. This has to be paid for, because in the past, some of the health care plans that we’ve put forward have not been paid for. A good example of this was the prescription drug benefit for seniors. That was a important thing to do, but we never actually figured out how to pay for it. That just went directly into the deficit and the national debt. We can’t afford to do that. So that would be point number one.

You can read points two, three and four here

On whether illegal immigrants would be covered, Obama said:

This has been an example of just pure misinformation out there. None of the bills that have been voted on in Congress, and none of the proposals coming out of the White House propose giving coverage to illegal immigrants -- none of them. That has never been on the table; nobody has discussed it. So everybody who is listening out there, when you start hearing that somehow this is all designed to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants, that is simply not true and has never been the case.

Under comprehensive healthcare reform, illegal immigrants would still be eligible for emergency room treatment:

Well, that will continue because we don’t want a situation in which some child, even if they’re an illegal immigrant, shows up in an emergency room with tuberculosis and nobody is giving them treatment, and then they’re going back to the playground and playing next to our kids.

So I think there is a basic standard of decency where if somebody is in a death situation or a severe illness, that we’re going to provide them emergency care. But nobody has talked about providing health insurance to illegal immigrants. I want to make that absolutely clear.

While Obama says healthcare reform is a “moral obligation,” a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found the American public is losing faith:

Public confidence in President Obama’s leadership has declined sharply over the summer, amid intensifying opposition to health-care reform that threatens to undercut his attempt to enact major changes to the system.

Among all Americans, 49 percent now express confidence that Obama will make the right decisions for the country, down from 60 percent at the 100-day mark in his presidency. Forty-nine percent now say they think he will be able to spearhead significant improvements in the system, down nearly 20 percentage points from before he took office.

By contrast, African Americans are keeping the faith. Gallup’s weekly tracking poll shows that 92 percent of black folks approve of the job Obama is doing as president.

If Obama starts to lose black support, he will be “all wee-weed up.”