West Virginia Blue
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New York Times editorial points out the efforts by Democrats to pass mining safety improvements are being met with resistance by Congressional Republicans:
As investigations proceed into the biggest mine disaster in 40 years, Congress is its usual study in partisan obstruction, with Republicans in no hurry to rectify lethal workplace risks laid bare by the disaster. The majority Democrats' reform measure, endorsed by the Obama administration, would crack down on reckless mining companies with stronger monitoring and criminal penalties, subpoena-empowered investigations, and protections against the dismissal of miners who dare to complain about risks to life down below.
Congressional Republicans, echoing the message of Big Coal, complain that there's a rush to make new law. One of their authoritative colleagues, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, finds the need for action now obvious. The proposal he co-sponsors aims at repeat offenders of mining regulations, like Massey Energy, that game the penalty system with extended legal appeals. It also would require better tracking of methane and coal dust and crack down on the practice of advance warnings when federal investigators approach.
If the Big Branch disaster were a terrorist deed, Republicans would be jamming the hopper with legislative antidotes. But dead miners? No rush, although it's clear that existing regulations are porous, underenforced and in crying need of repair by a responsible Congress.
"They got everything else in the entire bureaucracy that they need to control our healthcare system ... with the signing of this bill. ... That's why repealing this bill has to be our No. 1 priority."
- Republican Minority Leader John Boehner on a live radio show announcing his intention.
Repubs are pulling this out on the week that the first b$250.00 Medicare supplement checks are going out to seniors. Tim Kaine, head of the Democratic National Committee is daring the Repubs to make this destructive repeal move the focus of their fall campaign to win back Congress and has challenged Boehner and Company to reveal the things they'd take away from Americans and give back to Insurance Companies.
As I thought about Florida Rep. Ted Deutch's quote in my previous post this morning, I also recalled a discussion I head either on Olbermann or Rachel Maddow last night ( I really wasn't looking at who was talking, but was lying flat on my back after taking a pain killer for my cracked ribs) in which a Republican said he was really in agreement on the nuclear decisions that the President had come to, but in terms of voting for the treaty with the Russians he would probably have to vote NO. The reason? Because the Party Leaders are insistent on not supporting anything the President does prior to the November elections.
The goal is, still, to make the current Administration a failure.
OK... while many are watching the NCAA Basketball games, I'll be watching the big sports action of the weekend: The Health Care bill in the House of Representatives.
CSPAN is showing BOTH the debates in the House and the Reconciliation Bill debate in the House Rules Committee (on CSPAN 2). The major players will all be out there, making the points or stalling to try and get the bill bogged down. Whatever happens today will determine what gets voted on tomorrow.
I listened to a Congressman from Alabama give the Republican's weekly statement (after the President's weekly statement) on NBC this morning and was told that despite what Pelosi and Reid want, despite the threat of using reconciliation to push the Health Care bill through, the American People don't want the Health Care bill as it has been debated and argued over the past year. He said the American People want Congress and The President to "start over on a new page."
Here in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, about as American a location as you can find, I sit watching this knowing that I WANT a Health Care bill to be passed NOW. I know that if the government starts on a NEW PAGE it will be in the face of a rate-raising, highly profitable private insurance system and a 10-to-1 ratio of lobbyists who are NOT starting on a new page, who will work day and night to weaken any progress.
A release from the West Virginia Democrats points out interesting numbers:
What Republican Surge?
WV GOP Fails to Field Candidates in 31 Seats; Surrenders One Seat to Dems
Charleston, W.Va. - The day after the deadline for political parties to make appointments for vacancies on the ballot, the West Virginia Republican Party failed to find any candidates for thirty-one (31) of the state's 117 legislative races on the ballot this year. By contrast, Democrats only left eleven seats uncontested. Only a few years ago the GOP filled the entire ballot. In one House District, state Republicans were not even able to field a candidate to defend one of their own seats.
"Nationally there has been a great deal of chatter about a Republican tidal wave coming in 2010, but clearly that is not the case in West Virginia," Democratic Party Chairman Nick Casey said. "When you do not have quality candidates stepping forward to challenge incumbents that speaks volumes."
Statewide the GOP failed to find candidates in four State Senate seats and twenty-seven House of Delegates seats. Democrats left just one Senator unopposed and only ten Delegates. In Hancock County (House District 1), the GOP failed to field a candidate for one of their currently held seats which guarantees another Democratic Delegate there.
Remember the post the other day how the West Virginia Republican "thinktank" blog hadn't had a post up in months? it is not just West Virginia Republicans bereft of any ideas. It's a major problem for the Republican Party nationally.
Does the Republican Party have any ideas? The query may have a familiar ring. Five years ago, the question of substance was demanded incessantly of the Democrats. Indeed, in one of those intellectual fads that periodically sweep through Washington, the political class became obsessed with the notion that conservatives had unambiguously won what everybody was calling "the war of ideas."
The notion was everywhere. The right gloated. ("Conservative thought," boasted right-wing foundation maven James Piereson, "has seized the initiative in the world of ideas.") Republicans scolded the opposition. (President Bush chastised Democrats in Congress: "[I]f they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead.") And Democrats internalized the accusation. ("It makes me realize," observed labor leader Andrew Stern in 2005, "how vibrant the Republicans are in creating twenty-first-century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending sixty-year-old ideas.")
We don't need the benefit of hindsight to grasp how silly it was to claim that the Bush-era Republican Party had risen to power on the crest of policy ideas whose time had come, or that the Democratic Party lacked an agenda of its own. The taunts about Democrats' lacking ideas was less a serious analysis than an attempt to bully the party into cooperating with Bush's plan to gradually privatize Social Security. (Click here to read about the history of conservatives opposing insane progressive ideas, such as women's suffrage and child labor laws.) [1]
The obstructionist Party of No is also the Party of No Ideas.
Still, the purity test does provide a convenient check list. You too can be accepted as a Republican if you promise to hate gays, poor people, immigrants, and the environment (which, come to think of it, has been the Republican standard for decades). Out of pure bullet-point envy, I propose that Democrats must also have their own list. Ten litmus tests which every potential Democratic candidate should be able to ace before they ever hope to put (D) after their names. In fact, I'll go so far as to be more pure than the Republicans. If you can't pass every one of these tests, don't bother to sign on.
(1) We support the rights extended to Americans extended under the Constitution. All the rights. For all Americans.
(2) We support thoughtful, pragmatic solutions that protect American lives, American standards, and American pocketbooks. This includes finding solutions that don't require bombing anyone.
(3) We support an America that has diversity in race, thought, background, and religion not out of some hazy idealism, but because it is our nation's greatest strength.
(4) We oppose torture in any form, in any place, at any time, for any reason.
(5) We support American business, and recognize that an unregulated market is an unfair market, an unstable market, and a market doomed to failure.
(6) We support American workers, and know that when workers are allowed to organize they make their jobs, their companies, and their nation stronger.
(7) We believe that the reputation of our nation is valuable and must be zealously guarded against those who place expediency ahead of law.
(8) We believe in spreading democracy and human rights to the rest of the world by vigorously upholding those ideals here at home.
(9) We believe that access to our government is not for sale. Not in the courthouse, not in the White House, and not in the legislature.
(10) We believe that the health of our planet is not a zero-sum game, not a game of "you go first," and not a game.
Not a particularly detailed set of positions, I know. But then it's not supposed to be. Unlike the GOP, we aren't short of ideas, and unlike Newt, we don't have to dream up a batch of legislation with cute names. We already have real legislation out there that meet these goals. Bills like the Employee Free Choice Act, the Clean Water Protection Act, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the Affordable Health Care for America Act and many others.
It's not a perfect list, but I'd say that's a pretty darn good one. In the way they meant them, I was 0 for 10 on the Republican list (some are too vague to say for sure). This one I'm 10 for 10 in agreement with.
Did you think they were doing a pretty good job? Well think again. All you have to do is look at the following Resolution that is making the rounds of Republicans called "RNC RESOLUTION ON FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF CANDIDATES," and you'll see why they have only begun to place the gun to their collective foot:
Let us never forget the horrors inflicted upon our nation by President George W. Bush and the Other President Dick Cheney. This originally appeared in November 2007 at Daily Kos. Carnacki
At this point in the rule of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, I thought I had reached shock fatigue. We've seen illegal invasions, torture, unprecedented levels of corruption, a warrantless wiretapping on a nationwide scale, and an erosion of national credibility on everything from the environment to the rule of law.
Yet this morning I read a story that filled me anew with fresh outrage and I think exemplifies the horrors - the absolute horrors - of this administration and the political ideology behind them.
The article is in Vanity Fair's November edition, The People vs. the Profiteers. (If this was diaried earlier this month, my apologies. I did a search on several key words and did not see it. Vanity Fair is a very thick magazine and I read it from front to back so I usually read it spaced out over the entire month).
In it, the writer, David Rose, covers how an attorney, Alan Grayson, has led a campaign against government corruption. He's done so for 16 years. In the past the Department of Justice often allied with him to root out corrupt officials. But when it has come to the Iraq war, the DOJ has thrown up roadblock after roadblock.
In this administration corruption on a massive scale is a statistic. It's an example Rose uses from among the cases that is the outrage.
Consider the case of Grayson's client Bud Conyers, a big, bearded 43-year-old who lives with his ex-wife and her nine children, four of them his, in Enid, Oklahoma. Conyers worked in Iraq as a driver for Kellogg, Brown & Root. Spun off by Halliburton as an independent concern in April, KBR is the world's fifth-largest construction company. Before the war started, the Pentagon awarded it two huge contracts: one, now terminated, to restore the Iraqi oil industry, and another, still in effect, to provide a wide array of logistical-support services to the U.S. military.
In the midday heat of June 16, 2003, Conyers was summoned to fix a broken refrigerated truck-a "reefer," in contractor parlance-at Log Base Seitz, on the edge of Baghdad's airport. He and his colleagues had barely begun to inspect the sealed trailer when they found themselves reeling from a nauseating stench. The freezer was powered by the engine, and only after they got it running again, several hours later, did they dare open the doors.
The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. "Inside, there were 15 human bodies," he recalls. "A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again." The corpses were Iraqis, who had been placed in the truck by a U.S. Army mortuary unit that was operating in the area. That evening, Conyers's colleague Wallace R. Wynia filed an official report: "On account of the heat the bodies were decomposing rapidly.... The inside of the trailer was awful."
(As an aside, I have smelled the sickly scent stench of putrified corpses more times than I care to recall. It is one of the worst smells in existence. I cannot imagine what 15 trapped inside a metal trailer for two weeks in the desert heat would have been like.)
Under any consideration, the rule of civilian or military regulations or laws, religious taboos, and basic human decency, there are prohibitions against carrying food and water in the same containers that had been used to carry human corpses - yet alone putrid corpses.
But that is exactly what is being done in Iraq. To our soldiers. With our tax dollars.
But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice-ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers's grisly discovery. "You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn't even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.-the public warehouse center-several times. There's nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded."
This is where a Republican ideology leads us. The for-profit contractor used a refrigerated tractor trailer permeated with human remains in the wood floor and on the floor itself to carry ice and probably food.
Profit over people - even when it comes to the troops they claim to support. They outsourced a basic government service of the feed and care of the troops for a for-profit enterprise which didn't care about their health or human decency.
It came down to a shortage of refrigerated trucks. Rather than buy more, Kellough Brown and Root kept it running from corpse hauling to food hauling. Conyers was fired by KBR for not being a "team player."
How KBR treated Conyers would itself be an outrage but after hauling ice for human consumption with the remains of putrid corpses, anything KBR does under that pales in comparison. The entire story is well worth a read, including how the DOJ is using a provision of the whistle-blower law probably to keep incidents like this covered up rather than to investigate them as it should.
Grayson has hope that one day the deep-rooted profiteering and corruption of the Iraq war will come to light.
There are a few encouraging signs that a day of reckoning is drawing near. Committees in both the House and the Senate have held hearings on contracting in Iraq, and several plan to hold more. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, has introduced a War Profiteering Prevention Act, which would make it much easier to investigate corrupt contractors and call them to account. And in August, the news that tens of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces had vanished or been stolen prompted the Pentagon to announce that its inspector general, Claude M. Kicklighter, would lead an 18-person team to investigate "contracting practices" in Iraq.
In the more distant future, a Democratic administration might open up the vaults and expose the American public to the scale of what has been looted. "What we have seen up to now is the worst of the worst in terms of a deliberate cover-up," Grayson says. But if and when it comes to an end, he thinks it's entirely possible that Congress will appoint a special prosecutor-one whose targets might one day reach "an extremely high level."
We can only hope. But I think the stench will linger forever.
It's like we're in a Saturday morning kids scifi show... the goodguy robot (in this case MSNBC) is telling us that the Repubs are getting ready to attack the Senate's vote on a Health Care Plan any way they can.
To start with, more than one of the Repub Senators (led by Lamar Alexander - R, TN) have called for new "Town Hall" meetings, like the ones the House members had in August - and it looks like the groups of lobbyists are ready to bus the same people in.
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