Forget the Middle...It Doesn't Exist!

As the Republicans move further to the Right...The Democrats need to move further to the Left!!!!

Who voted for and against the health care legislation that just passed the House of Representatives. The vote was 220 to 215 and only one Republican voted for the bill. There were 39 Democrats who voted against reform. That's right! There were 39 Democrats who voted against changing a system that doesn't cover most people but does support a for-profit system that is creating wealth for the insurance industry. So who are these 39 Democrats?

Of the 39 naysayers, 31 hail from districts won by John McCain in the presidential race. Only one progressive vote against the legislation: Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, who continues to advocate for a single-payer health-care system. The New York Times has a nifty chart that ranks the members according to the margin of victory in their districts for either McCain or Obama in the 2008 presidential election. Here are the 39, listed in alphabetical order. (Links go to their official Web sites, where you can leave them a message.)

1. Adler, John (N.J.)
2. Altmire, Jason (Penn.)*
3. Baird, Brian (Wash.)
4. Barrow, John (Ga.)*
5. Boccieri, John (Ohio)
6. Boren, Dan (Okla.)*
7. Boucher, Rick (Va.)
8. Boyd, Allen (Fla.)
9. Bright, Bobby (Ala.)*
10. Chandler, Ben (Ky.)
11. Childers, Travis (Miss.)*
12. Davis, Artur (Ala.)*
13. Davis, Lincoln (Tenn.)*
14. Edwards, Chet (Tex.)
15. Gordon, Bart (Tenn.)
16. Griffith, Parker (Ala.)*
17. Herseth Sandlin, Stephanie (S.D.)
18. Holden, Tim (Penn.)*
19. Kissell, Larry (N.C.)
20. Kosmas, Suzanne (Fla.)
21. Kratovil, Frank (Md.)*
22. Kucinich, Dennis (Ohio)
23. Markey, Betsy (Colo.)
24. Marshall, Jim (Ga.)*
25. Massa, Eric (N.Y.)
26. Matheson, Jim (Utah)*
27. McIntyre, Mike (N.C.)*
28. McMahon, Mike (N.Y.)*
29. Melancon, Charlie (La.)*
30. Minnick, Walt (Idaho)
31. Murphy, Scott (N.Y.)
32. Nye, Glenn (Va.)
33. Peterson, Collin (Minn.)*
34. Ross, Mike (Ark.)*
35. Shuler, Heath (N.C.)*
36. Skelton, Ike (Mo.)
37. Tanner, John (Tenn.)*
38. Taylor, Gene (Miss.)*
39. Teague, Harry (N.M.)

* Indicates those Democrats who are the anti-choice holdouts among Democrats. These anti-choice Dems were "threatening to oppose" the healthcare legislation "over the issue of abortion to create a question about its passage."

An example of voting the interests of the health care lobby and not the interests of their constituents is Mike Ross (D-AK).

Mike Ross, leader of the House Blue Dog Coalition, lobbed a "no" vote, after having held up legislation in committee before the summer recess. As a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Ross was able to marshal the seven Blue Dog members of his committee to sow the seeds of opposition to the bill.

(As ProPublica reported, Ross not only enjoys the largess of mucho health sector dollars in the form of campaign contributions; he and his wife made a million-dollar killing in what appears to be a sweetheart deal with a large pharmacy chain. In Ross's congressional district, 22 percent of constituents report having no health insurance.)

A message to be sent to these Democrats, Blue Dog or not, is to vote them out of office while voting in a Progressive in their place.

The Real Purpose of Health Insurance Companies

Alter Net has the story via Sick for Profit:

Meet Andy Cobb, a former professional deceiver for Blue Cross Blue Shield. He’s done all the damage he could being a pretty face for Blue Cross Blue Shield’s health insurance, so now he’s branching out toward his next big whitewashing opportunity. Watch the video and vote below: Where should Andy work next: Wal Mart, B...lack...water, Goldman Sachs, or FOX?

Here's Andy and Robert Greenwald on The Ed Show:

Remember, the real purpose of any health insurance company is to make money. That means they need to deny coverage.

Bust Them and Regulate Them!!!

From Brave New Films and Senator Sanders Unfiltered:

More than a year has gone by since Congress passed the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.

Greedy, reckless bankers are responsible for the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression. They want taxpayers to be on the hook if they screw us again.

This is why, Senator Sanders is announcing exclusively through Senator Sanders Unfiltered new legislation that would effectively break up the banks so it never happens again.

If a bank is too big to fail, shouldn't it also be too big to exist?

WATCH:

Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) believes that in order to prevent another massive bailout the banks that are "too large to fail" must be broken up which would break apart the concentration of ownership and ultimately lead to more competition.

Robert Reich agrees with the Senator that the large banks should be broken up.

The right idea is to break up the giant banks. I don't often agree with Alan Greenspan but he was right when he said last week that "[i]f they're too big to fail, they're too big." Greenspan noted that the government broke up Standard Oil in 1911, and what happened? "The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that's what we need to do." (Historic footnote: Had Greenspan not supported in 1999 Congress's repeal of the Glass Stagall Act, which separated investment from commercial banking, we wouldn't be in the soup we're in to begin with.)

The Glass-Steagall Act was passed by Congress in 1933. It was enacted during the Depression and prohibited commercial banks from collaborating with full-service brokerage firms or participating in investment banking activities. In 1999, the act was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowed commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms and insurance companies to consolidate. And we should all now know that this consolidation and lack of regulation led to the problems we have today with banks getting "too big to fail."

If a lesson is too be learned from all this, then Congress would enact a new Glass-Steagall-Act.

Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, whose only problem is he's much too tall, last week told the New York Times he'd like to see the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act provisions that would separate the financial giants' deposit-taking activities from their investment and trading businesses. If this separation went into effect, JPMorgan Chase would have to give up the trading operations acquired from Bear Stearns. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch would go back to being separate companies. And Goldman Sachs could no longer be a bank holding company.

According to Reich, the Obama Administration has other ideas.

But the Obama Administration doesn't agree with either Greenspan or Volcker. While it says it doesn't want another bank bailout, its solution to the "too big to fail" problem doesn't go nearly far enough. In fact, it doesn't really go anywhere. The Administration would wait until a giant bank was in danger of failing and then put it into a process akin to bankruptcy. The bank's assets would be sold off to pay its creditors, and its shareholders would likely walk off with nothing. The Treasury would determine when such a "resolution" process was needed, and appoint a receiver, such as the FDIC, to wind down the bank's operations.

What is the solution?

Whether it's using the antitrust laws or enacting a new Glass-Steagall Act, the Wall Street giants should be split up -- and soon.

Exploiting Sesame Street

Recently a right-wing blog characterized Sesame Street's Oscar the Grouch as a "soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News."

It all began two years ago.

During an episode of Sesame Street that was originally broadcast two years ago, a character tells Oscar the Grouch, who happens to be reporting for “GNN” (Grouchy News Network), that she is switching her news viewing loyalties to “Pox News,” adding, “Now there is a trashy news show.” WATCH:

Right winger Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Hollywood” blog took on the Sesame Street menace this week.

If Mom and Dad watch cable news, it’s better than 50/50 they watch “POX News.” So what gives? PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news? The message is clear, I can’t even sit my kids in front of “Sesame Street” without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority.

It shouldn't be a surprise that Fox News immediately joined in on the attack.

Thursday night on Fox News, host Bill O’Reilly picked up on Big Hollywood’s rant and couldn’t resist defending his network against the smear merchants at Sesame Street. “Say it ain’t so. Sesame Street trashing Fox News!” O’Reilly complained. After airing the segment in question, O’Reilly said wryly, “We may have to ambush Oscar.” Watch it:

Besides the fact that this Sesame Street episode aired two years ago, Sesame Street also spoofed other news organization or media personalities besides Fox News.

“Walter Cranky,” “Dan Rather-Not,” “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler,” all made appearances on the show. And of course, Oscar’s employer, the “Grouchy News Network.”

One great part of our society is the ability to laugh at ourselves. When Fox News and right-wing pundits or blogs start demonizing anything or anyone who spoofs them, then it reflects their inability to laugh. They're just wound up too tight!

Democracy Isn't Always Pretty

An interesting article, The Matrix, 2009, presents an analogy of The Matrix with the concept of democracy.

The Matrix as metaphor: what if the world we know and live in is actually not a world but a simulacrum, created by omnipotent machines in order to numb and distract us while draining us of our labor (in the 1999 film, the machines use our body heat as an energy source). With corporations as the machines, we are numbed and distracted by the purported opposition of free market democracy to socialism, terrorism, and (at least among secular liberals) theocracy, as if the separation of church and state which shifts power—i.e. the power to enslave—from the cloak to the white collared suit is an improvement.

The US government is run not as a democracy—do a majority of us want troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, or bailouts of AIG and Bank of America?—but as a corporation. [...]

The opposition to a public option in the healthcare reform debates, as much as the denunciation of a single payer system as dangerously socialistic (even by Medicare recipients), underscores the corporatization of both government and discourse. At the mercy of private insurance companies, health care becomes completely arbitrary: practitioners are forced to deny coverage or bill for care they never actually provided, dates and descriptions are altered, unnecessary treatment is prescribed and the health care consumer is penalized while the perpetrators avoid accountability. Where else can such large sums of money be exchanged for a product that doesn’t actually exist, only to benefit those further removed from the point of care? [...]

As a culture we’re taught to blame the people victimized by greed rather than the victimizers, whether those with balloon mortgages and subprime loans they can’t afford and didn’t understand or those who max out their credit cards on groceries and emergency room visits. We’re never taught to blame marketing. [...]

Our world runs on exploitation of what does exist (resources, labor) in support of what doesn’t (the power of the simulacrum). [...]

As Morpheus warns Neo in The Matrix: “You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

Today, we need to fight for a society that truly has compassion. We also need to fight to keep reality in the forefront of the news especially when there is faux news such as Fox.

It is most important to understand that nonsense, fear and an imitation of the truth spews forth from talking heads such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and politicians such as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman.

The 'compassionate conservatives' have been taken over by the SSRWNJ's (sanctimonious, shrilly, screaming, right wing nut jobs)!!!!

It is time to take back compassion and call it Democracy.

WATCH: Mark Fiore's cartoon as he muses: Democracy isn't always pretty. But shouldn't it at least be kind of attractive?

Jon Stewart Channeling Glenn Beck

The 11/3 Project

There's a war going on in America, and the stakes are nothing less than Glenn Beck's internal organs.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Something from Nothing

The Huffington Post reports that Kirk Cameron, best known for his role in the 1980s sitcom Growing Pains, now spends much of his time advocating for far-right Christian evangelical causes.

The following videos pick apart Cameron's statements on intelligent design.

Watch them:

The Purge has Begun

Glenn Beck "promises to ensure a continued purging of moderates from the Republican Party."

That's right, Glenn "the Drooling Creatin" Beck is creating a right-wing, wingnut, conservative party. And there are candidates who want to join his movement.

Conservative blogger Charles Johnson of the site Little Green Footballs reported yesterday that Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in the NY-23 special election, signed a pledge to uphold Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project principles in Congress. The signed pledge is available online, and Hoffman touts his endorsement from the 9/12 organization on his website. Like the lobbyist-planned tea parties, the 9/12 Project is a creation of Beck, used to go after Beck’s liberal enemies and to organize hateful anti-Obama rallies.[...]

Along with his corporate front group allies like FreedomWorks and Club for Growth, Beck promises to ensure a continued purging of moderates from the Republican Party.

Unless Republicans start to be as angry in the shift toward the right in their party as they are to whatever Obama does, they might just wake up one morning to find the Republican Party hijacked by the SSSRWNJ's..sanctimonious, shrilly, screaming, right wing nut jobs!!!! h/t Gil Ross

It is Time to Listen to Matthew Hoh

CNN's Fareed Zakaria Interviews State Department Official Matthew Hoh Who Resigned In Protest Over Afghanistan War - 11/01/09

Be Afraid...Be Very Afraid...

...of Republican, GOP'n, Conservatism, Right-Wing'n, Bull Crap'n & Outright Lyin'!!!

This takes the cake from Think Progress:

Few Republican congressional members have served as a greater fount for hyperbolic and uninformed ranting about health care reform as has Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC). As ThinkProgress previously documented, Foxx has claimed Democratic reforms would mean...

seniors are “put to death by their government,” that

health reform is a “distraction,” and that

“there are no Americans who don’t have health care.”

She was at it again today on the House floor, arguing that health reform is a greater threat to our country than “any terrorist right now in any country”:

Everywhere I go in my district, people tell me they are frightened. … I share that fear, and I believe they should be fearful. And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

Watch it:

I really believe these fear mongers and false information peddlers should look at themselves in the mirror and see it is their ignorance and fear hysteria that is doing more harm than good to this country. They are right to be afraid...of their own shadow!

Rebranding or Purging?

Steve Benin at the Washington Monthly has posted an article about "The Great Purge."

In a district represented by a Republican lawmaker in every election since the Civil War, the national Republican Party not only endorsed the consensus choice of local GOP leaders in the special election in New York's 23rd, they also invested $1 million last month. Yesterday, on the verge of an embarrassing third-place defeat, she quit.

The right-wing inmates have decided it's their asylum now, and they're just getting started. [...]

Scozzafava was a respected local Republican, with a record slightly to the right of most GOP state lawmakers in New York, but she was deemed insufficiently conservative. Sen. Arlen Specter was a Republican senator for nearly three decades, but he was deemed insufficiently conservative. Gov. Charlie Crist is supposed to be a rising GOP star from the nation's largest swing state, but his future is in doubt because he's been deemed insufficiently conservative. Eight House Republicans supported energy reform in July, and the base has targeted them for retribution. Newt Gingrich, for reasons I've never understood, is considered one of the GOP's great idea men. But the Tea Party/wingnut crowd has turned on him, too.

When Newt Gingrich is too moderate, and trying to pull the Republican Party closer to the American mainstream, it's safe to say there's something deeply wrong.

Is this now a Republican Party in which "right-wing nihilists are deliberately driving moderates from the party ranks?"

Have They No Decency?

This Memo is from Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way. It is important to put into context the hate talk of today with the hate speech of the past.

McCarthyism is back. Let's call it what it is.

We are seeing one witch hunt after another led by right-wing opinion leaders, media outlets, organizations and even members of Congress. They pursue personal smear campaigns, grasping at straws to create "guilt by association" and challenge the legitimacy, allegiances and patriotism of their opponents.

Remember the Bush-era attacks on the patriotism of anyone who questioned the administration's policies? Those look tame in comparison. Now, with Democrats in power, the insinuation is that the president, his advisers and his political allies are actively trying to destroy America from within and, despite being elected by the people, are inherently unfit to lead.

We stand up to right-wing bullies every day, and we want to help all courageous Americans do the same. People For the American Way is ready to confront this new McCarthyism head-on. In the coming days and weeks we will be exposing the Right's tactics and rhetoric, creating tools to help activists combat them and educating Americans about the insidious nature of what we see happening in this country, and we will impress upon Americans the urgency of stopping it.

In a 1954 Senate hearing, Army head counsel Joseph Welch famously put Senator Joseph McCarthy in his place, saying, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

In that great moment in American history, Welch called McCarthy out for his "cruelty" and "recklessness." After the testimony, the crowd at the hearing erupted in applause and all of a sudden McCarthy's power started its decline.

It's time for all of us to ask that same question -- Have you no sense of decency? -- of those on the Right who have resurrected McCarthy's tactics.

Radical Right activists ("Birthers," "Tea Baggers"), paranoid anti-government extremists and irresponsible media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh (and media outlets like FOX News) -- in many cases with the backing of entrenched right-wing and corporate interest groups -- have simultaneously raised the ominous, not to mention incompatible, specters of socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism and infiltration by foreign elements. This has created a backdrop of suspicion in which McCarthy-like intimidation, guilt by association and character assassination thrive.

In the last two weeks alone, we've seen:

• 53 right-wing members of Congress sign a letter to the President requesting that he fire Kevin Jennings who heads the office at the Department of Education tasked with keeping schools safe, for "promoting homosexuality and pushing a pro-homosexual agenda in America's schools." Jennings, a gay man and founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), has been the target of right-wing groups like Family Research Council for months. He was also the victim of false accusations that he broke the law in counseling an underage student when he was a teacher -- and the congressional letter included that allegation even though the office of the letter's primary signer, Rep. Steve King, had been made aware that the story was wrong.

• Glenn Beck, whose "6 degrees of Obama" guilt-by-association attacks have generally lacked any shred of coherence, has been going after White House Communications Director Anita Dunn for once offhandedly referring to Mao Tse-tung (along with Mother Teresa) as one of her favorite political philosophers. He has repeatedly implied that this means she must endorse his heinous deeds and personal ideology while remaining conspicuously silent about the fact that many icons of the conservative movement have approvingly cited the political writings and tactics of communists like Mao, Lenin and the Viet Cong.

• Just this past Sunday, the notoriously right-wing editorial page of the Washington Times savaged Judge Edward Chen, who is nominated to the Northern District Court of California, opening the piece with the sentence, "Another day, another Obama nominee who doesn't appear to love America." For its 'evidence,' the editorial cites: Chen's acknowledgement of what we all know -- that a judge's life experiences affect how he or she views a case (shades of the attacks against Sonia Sotomayor); the fact that he expressed concern -- as many thinking Americans did -- about potential recriminations for Muslim Americans following the tragedy of September 11; and his former work with the ACLU.

Of course, the use of race-baiting, red-baiting, gay-baiting and lies to characterize people as enemies of America doesn't stop with attacks on administration officials and nominees. There have been many more examples, and sadly, there will undoubtedly be many more to come.

That's why we must all be vigilant. We must call out fear-mongering and intimidation in government, in the media and in our own communities. And when we confront it, we must ask the vital question, "Have you no sense of decency?"

People For the American Way is getting out in front of this troubling and pervasive new trend. Through research, educational materials and activism tools, we'll give you what you need to stand up to the Right and McCarthyism.

You can watch Joseph Welch take on McCarthy in that famous 1954 exchange here:

"Have you no sense of decency?" Let us not forget!

Money is Drying Up for Blue Dogs

In March of 2009, Chris Bowers from Open Left suggested that, "We simply must stop funneling money to the Blue Dog coalition."

Let's take a quick review of the Blue Dog behavior we are ratifying. The Blue Dog coalition has made it clear that they believe they have veto power over the entire agenda of the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership. After a meeting with President Obama three weeks before the election, the Blue Dogs declared:

"He also recognized that we had the numbers to block or clear" legislation coming from the White House if he is elected.

If they are coasting that they can block or clear whatever legislation they want, the Blue Dogs consider themselves to be in charge of D.C., not Speaker Pelosi or President Obama. Some highlight of their past behavior include being the driving force in the Democratic Party behind the 2005 bankruptcy bill (they voted 32-4 in favor), the 2006 ending of habeus corpus, the 2007 Iraq War blank check, and the 2008 FISA re-write (see here for both). So far in 2009, they only allowed the stimulus package to go through after extracting a pay-go promise from the Obama administration. Last month, they joined with the New Democrats to block foreclosure relief legislation, which Evan Bayh's Blue Dogs in the Senate seem to have killed. And most of them will vote against the budget, too.

The Blue Dogs are an overt obstacle to progressive governance. For crying out loud, their entire name comes from feeling "choked blue by the left-wing of the party." In the recent past, they have refused to send money to the DCCC because another member of Congress criticized them on Iraq. They are overtly anti-progressive and anti-left wing. They don't even work to help other members of the party. So, why are we working to help them?

As previously discussed, Blue Dog Sen Evan Bayh has a monetary incentive to stop a real and robust healthcare reform including a Public Option from becoming reality.

Finally, a Center for Public Integrity analysis shows that fundraising for the Blue Dog Democrat Coalition has significantly been cut over the course of the year.

It’s official. The Blue Dog’s fundraising slowdown was not just a symptom of the dog days of summer. Newly released public disclosure forms indicate that over September, the coalition’s PAC took in its smallest monthly total yet this year.

Our analysis of the fiscally conservative and increasingly influential Blue Dog Coalition and its funding noted that the group’s political action committee had averaged more than $176,000 in receipts from other PACs over the first half of 2009. Their monthly haul dropped to a surprisingly low $27,000 in July, rebounded somewhat in August, and but then dropped again to just $12,500 in September.

That September money came from just three donations — $5,000 from accounting and professional services giant Ernst & Young’s PAC, $2,500 from the Food Marketing Institute PAC, and $5,000 from the National Rifle Association of America Political Victory Fund.

After raising $1.1 million from January to June, the committee raised less than $87,000 between July and September — less than it brought in during any one of the preceding five months. And in just three months, the Blue Dog PAC’s monthly fundraising average dropped by more than $50,000 — probably not the sort of fiscal conservatism the 52-member coalition was hoping for.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/27/blue-dog-fundraising-dimi_n_335448.html

Ask yourself, is it undemocratic when our elected officials believe that their constituents are corporate supporters rather than the people who elected them?

Lack of Class of the Conservative in NY-23 Race

The Daily Kos has the lowdown on the NY-23 race.

For all intents and purposes, the special election to replace Republican Congressman John McHugh should have been over the second GOP nominee DeDe Scozzafava decided to fall on her sword and drop out of the election.

With the battle between Democrat Bill Owens and third-party insurgent candidate Doug Hoffman within the margin of error, Hoffman should have picked off the bulk of the Republican vote from Scozzafava's remaining core group of supporters, and that should have been the ball game.

Few people suspected that in an historically Republican district, Owens could survive without split opposition.

But, then, by virtue of his own gracelessness, Doug Hoffman complicated matters...for himself.

Just appreciate the distinction between the candidate statements that emanated from Scozzafava's stunning decision to suspend her campaign.

First, the statement by Democrat Bill Owens, which offered a very conciliatory tone:

"Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava has been an honorable public servant for years now and I have a tremendous amount of respect for her and her commitment to her principles. While we disagree on certain issues, we share a dedication to serving the best interests of Upstate New York and the Obama administration's efforts to get our economy back on track. Those interests will always be my highest priority."

Contrast that statement with this sneering, almost taunting, statement from Doug Hoffman:

"This morning's events prove what we have said for the last week; this campaign is a horserace between me and Nancy Pelosi's handpicked candidate, Bill Owens. At this moment, the Democratic Party, the Working Families Party, ACORN, Big Labor and pro-abortion groups are flooding the district with troops and they are flooding the airwaves with a million dollars worth of negative ads. They are throwing mud; they are trying to stop me."

To give a succinct recap: Owens praised Scozzafava and promised to work for upstate New York. Hoffman cackled a quick "I told you so" before returning on the attack.

That might explain why a large number of Scozzafava supporters, from the head of the state's Independence Party to several voices within organized labor, immediately turned to the Democrat Owens rather than her fellow Republican, Hoffman. This morning, one of the more prominent newspapers in the district, The Watertown Daily Times, followed suit, switching its endorsement from Scozzafava to Owens.

And then, in the second shocker from her in as many days, the Republican nominee endorsed the Democratic nominee:

Since announcing the suspension of my campaign, I have thought long and hard about what is best for the people of this District, and how to answer your questions. This is not a decision that I have made lightly.

You know me, and throughout my career, I have been always been an independent voice for the people I represent. I have stood for our honest principles, and a truthful discussion of the issues, even when it cost me personally and politically. Since beginning my campaign, I have told you that this election is not about me; it’s about the people of this District.

It is in this spirit that I am writing to let you know I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same.

Now, this is not to say that Scozzafava, a social moderate, would have sent an endorsement letter for right-wing ideologue Doug Hoffman if only he had been nicer to her. But her initial statement on Saturday seemed to make a very neutral statement. That neutrality had disappeared just 24 hours later. It is hard not to conclude that Owens' graciousness, and Hoffman's arrogance, might have pushed Scozzafava off of the fence.

In the final analysis, it might not matter, of course. Owens is still fighting upstream in a GOP district against what is now for all intents and purposes a single GOP opponent. But Hoffman's own lack of class might have made this a lot of harder on him than it could have been.

If the Cconservative Doug Hoffman wins, the radical right will claim it as a victory. If Democrat Bill Owens wins, the Republicans will claim foul. This is getting interesting!

Does President Obama Get It?