Rush Holt took to the floor of the House (I think this is from this morning)(Just found out this was from late yesterday). to remind legislators caught up in the kind of frenzy over parliamentary procedure that only Congress could cook up, what the stakes are for the people who need the health care reform.
Over the last generation, there has been an obesity epidemic, especially in American children. Experts place blame on our sedentary lifestyle, increasingly relying on technology, and our food—which with a few exceptions has gone from a natural diet to a processed diet. American families are increasingly relying on processed food for the convenience and taste. Because of federal farm subsidies, processed food is often cheaper than whole foods. (In my opinion this should have been addressed in the health care bill but that’s a diary for another day.) This is not even a close resemblance to the food our grandparents ate in their heyday.
For many American children, their healthiest meal often comes in the form of school lunch. In some cases this is their only meal as hunger is a growing epidemic in these economic hard times. The federal school lunch program gives free or reduced price breakfast and lunch to children from low-income families. However many school lunch menus resemble a children’s menu at a restaurant and serve kid-friendly foods such as hot dogs and macaroni and cheese that lack nutritional value. Most doctors and nutrition experts agree that the average American child does not eat enough fruits and vegetables. At my local school district there is a choice of two meals from the menu. Almost daily, every choice lacks both a fruit and vegetable. In some cases the fruit is juice (which does not offer the benefits of fresh fruit).
However, I worry about the opposition from industry that this bill would receive. Anyone who has paid attention to the health care and financial reform bills knows that industry can make, break, or significantly water down legislation with their lobbying power. And in light of the recent Supreme Court decision, the opposition will be uglier than ever. Industry fought Michelle Obama on her White House organic vegetable garden last year. If this bill makes it out of committee, I could imagine the fight and false advertising.
Industry opposition or not, this bill is a very good idea. Not only would it teach children where food comes from, provide healthier and fresher school lunches, and give local farmers new business, but it would save money in the long term. A healthier population means lower health care costs and a higher quality of life for everyone.
It's the one-year anniversary of the stimulus bill, aka American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which every New Jersey Republican Congressman opposed and every Democrat supported. Rush Holt says "Everyone in Central New Jersey, whether they realize it or not, knows someone who would be out of job without the investments made in the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act." Frank Pallone says "The Recovery Act is putting New Jerseyans to work who have lost their jobs and continued to employ those, who without it, would have lost their jobs." The New York Times talked to independent economists and concludes "the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit."
But to me, we can see how a recovery has started -- and how far we have to go -- in this graph of job losses put out by Organizing for America:
On the one hand, you can see how the jobs losses stabilized and then improved under the Obama Administration. The problem is that to bring unemployment back down, we need years of positive job growth.
So when our Representatives follow through on their promises to continue fighting for us, they should look at this conclusion from the Times article:
The last year has shown - just as economists have long said - that aid to states and cities may be the single most effective form of stimulus.
It's too bad so much of the stimulus went to tax cuts that most people don't even realize they got. Still, all in all, the stimulus is a success and we have averted an even worse disaster.
From Star Ledger's editorial this morning calling for voting machines that can produce a paper record of the vote, a physical record which can be checked against the tally of the voting machine's computer. Quoting Rep. Rush Holt:
Otherwise, in the words of Rep. Rush Holt (D-12th Dist.), "we have faith-based voting."
NJTeaParty.com is announcing a unanimous vote to back Fair Haven mayor Michael Halfacre for the Republican nomination in the 12th Congressional District, hoping he is the man chosen by the GOP to run against Rep. Rush Holt.
This should come as a surprise to exactly nobody, as Halfacre made a splash this summer staging a teaparty people's protest outside the building where Holt hosted a health care town hall this summer in Middletown.
Holt already had two GOP challengers. Oceanport real estate investor Dave Corsi just jumped into the race yesterday. And venture capitalist Scott Sipprelle, who comes from Holt's stronghold of Princeton, got in last month. But Halfacre moved early to ride the teaparty's noisy, sadly ignorant misguided but vibrant populism. And he's gotten mileage out of portraying Holt as engineering his events to keep angry constituents from expressing themselves, which is exactly the kind of thing that would appeal to them, and rile them up. Halfacre's anti-reform protest outside Holt's health care event was called "Open to All Townhall" and he claimed anybody not agreeing already with Holt was shut out of the the congressman's official event. Teaparty people are anti-incumbent, too. From their website (which doesn't mention Corsi):
Asked why Halfacre took the endorsement over GOP primary opponent Scott Sipprelle, Weingarten said the biggest factor was Sipprelle's June 2009 donations to five Congressional Democrats who voted for legislation that the conservative organization opposes.
For those who believe, as I do, that "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is a horribly misguided and discriminatory policy that has done a great disservice to our armed forces, this has been a remarkable week.
During his State of the Union address, President Obama reiterated his intent to end the 17-year-old policy, leading to a standing ovation that included Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Yesterday, at a Senate hearing, Secretary Gates said "I fully support the president's decision" and announced a working group to produce an implementation plan for repeal. At the same hearing, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a strong appeal for repeal, saying that "allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do." The current policy, he said, "forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens."
In 2006, John McCain said, "the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility."
At yesterday's hearing, he said he was disappointed in their testimony. Apparently, the advice of military leadership doesn't count for much now.
It should be evident that it is a matter of when, not if, DADT is repealed and gay men and women will be able to serve openly in our armed forces. I hope we see that day sooner, not later.
Overturning Don't Ask, Don't Tell is not simply about providing equal rights. It's about preventing the hemorrhage of critical military talent from an already-overstretched American military engaged in two wars. When I travel to the Middle East to meet American servicemen and women in the war theater, no one discusses their personal lives. Nobody should because it doesn't matter. What matters is what they are doing to complete their missions and strengthen American security.
The real question is why are we depriving our armed forces of some of their most important resources? Why are we discharging skilled Arabic linguists, fighter pilots, and weapons officers? Why have we discharged more than 13,000 service members since 1994?
There is no good reason, as Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen made clear.
This week's developments are encouraging, but, although Executive Branch action would be good, what is needed is Congressional action that would make equality the law. The bill I support - sponsored by my colleague Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, a Veteran of the War in Iraq - has more than 180 cosponsors. We should not wait to pass it.
No one would agree to deprive our military of ammunition or armor, so why deprive it of its greatest necessity, highly talented servicemen and women?
A ruling yesterday was issued in a lawsuit challenging computerized voting machines that do not produce a paper record:
Mercer County Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg held that New Jersey's 11,000 voting machines have to be re-evaluated by a qualified panel of experts within 120 days to determine whether they comply with NJ law requiring that they be accurate and reliable. Unlike the panel that currently evaluates voting machines, the new panel must have requisite knowledge of computers and computer security.
Does anyone find it disturbing that the current panel which evaluates our voting machines doesn't need to have knowledge of computers and computer security already and we need the court to direct that?
Judge Feinberg also ordered that all voting machines and vote tally transmitting systems be disconnected from the Internet immediately. Judge Feinberg also required that criminal background checks be performed on personnel who work with voting machines and all third-party vendors who examine or transport the machines. Currently, no such checks are in place. Judge Feinberg further required that a protocol be put in place for inspecting the voting machines to ensure that they have not been tampered with. Judge Feinberg found that the State of New Jersey should no longer leave voting machines unattended in polling places, to prevent tampering. Currently they are left unattended at polling places for up to two weeks before and up to two weeks after each election.
But what the Judge did not require is that the state actually follow the 2005 statute that said all NJ voting machines needed to have a voter verified paper ballot. Here's what Congressman Holt said about the Court decision
"If, as the court acknowledges, security vulnerabilities exist, then the court and the citizenry should want the possibility of audits capable of detecting and mistakes or misbehavior," Holt said. "The fundamental purpose of the lawsuit has been to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the vote tallies by requiring the use of paper ballots as the basis of those tallies. Until New Jersey implements a paper ballot voting system, we will have faith-based voting."
Holt's release also noted that there won't be the ability to have an independent audit of the results from the re-evaluation. Assemblyman Gusciora, who was one of the plaintiffs in the case had this reaction to the ruling:
"It defies common sense that this process takes place," said Gusciora. "The state should take note that this is an electronic age, and should retrofit Sequioa voting machines with a paper trail. At least in this decision there is a recognition that there could be security breaches."
Until some of these elected officials start losing their seats in close, contested elections where they don't have the ability to get an accurate recount, we're going to continue seeing half measures that don't truly ensure every vote is counted. You can view the full ruling from the court here.
Evidently Rush Holt's townhall last week got some negative coverage on Fudged News. It seems some windbag wanted to monopolize the microphone complaining about the Canadian health care system and wouldn't let Holt respond. When he tried to take the microphone away she resisted and now the douchebaggers are blogging away at Holt's rudeness.
Just wondering if anyone was there who might like to set the record straight.
At 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 25, Holt will host an in-person town hall in Marlboro at the Marlboro Memorial Middle School, 71 Nolan Road.
At 7:45 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 26, Holt will hold a live telephone town hall meeting. To participate or listen, residents must complete a form on the front page of Holt's Web site at www.holt.house.gov.
Anyone planning to attend the town hall? If you do, feel free to post photos, video and reports in a diary. They list among the topics expected for discussion the economy, health care, education, and national security.
This is an extended quote from a dairy that Rush Holt posted to Talking Points Memo entitled "The Difference Between Talking Tough and Acting Smart".
I urge everyone to read all of Rush said, but I feel this last bit needs to be studied and quoted widely.....ideally, the whole NJ congressional delegation (Democrats and Republicans alike!) should chime in with support and "associate" themselves with these remarks.
".......Our country confronts an implacable and dispersed al Qaeda threat, and the tools of war have proved ineffective against it. This is not to minimize the strength or the viciousness of the threat. We are fighting a pernicious idea that is motivating people like Abdulmutallab. The tools of war are not what would have stopped Abdulmutallab. It is vigilance. (As it happened, it was the vigilance and courage of civilians on the plane who thwarted the act, because the official agents had not been vigilant enough.) We won't defeat the idea with Hellfire missiles, whether in the Afghanistan border areas or in Yemen, missiles which too frequently can miss their intended targets and kill others. And even if they hit the target it is a Pyrrhic victory. I have lost count of how many times we have heard that the al Qaeda Number 3 has been killed.... See More
Do not misunderstand; this is not just a polite clash of ideas. It is deadly and deadly serious. We need our intelligence and law enforcement communities to gather information about radical movements, identify training, penetrate cells, disrupt, discredit, and eliminate those who would harm Americans and innocents anywhere. But most of the work necessarily is unglamorous, meticulous watching and analyzing. Prior to 2001, too much of the thinking in intelligence agencies had been the Cold War spy-versus-spy maneuvering and now too much of it is the warfighting mentality that replaced it over the past eight years. The failure to share information in 2001 was that the intelligence community was still in the Cold War mentality. The failure to share information this month was that the intelligence community had replaced the Cold War mentality with a warfighting one. If the focus is on "kinetic action" it shapes how you evaluate and value information. How irrelevant the movements of disciples of an extremist must seem when the focus is on assassinating him. How unimportant the denial of a visa must seem if what really counts is warfighting. A watchlist takes on less importance at an airport if the purpose of it is thought to be identifying an assassination target on a distant frontier rather than sidetracking a would-be bomber.
It is Cheney, not President Obama, who has misdiagnosed the problem and gotten us off track."
Rush Holt says that yet another classified briefing he and fellow congressmen got raises questions that need answers before our country commits further troops and resources to that conflict. These are good questions, and I want those answers, too.
We have written here at Blue Jersey about Congressman Rush Holt's attempts to get answers about who was responsible for the Anthrax attacks when many have long moved on. Glenn Greenwald provides another reason why we need answers, courtesy of a key British official:
Britain is currently engulfed by a probing, controversial investigation into how their Government came to support the invasion of Iraq, replete with evidence that much of what was said at the time by both British and American officials was knowingly false, particularly regarding the unequivocal intention of the Bush administration to attack Iraq for months when they were pretending otherwise. Yesterday, the British Ambassador to the U.S. in 2002 and 2003, Sir Christopher Meyer (who favored the war), testified before the investigative tribunal and said this:
Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .
On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in "no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation" . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .
But the anthrax scare had "steamed up" policy makers in Bush's administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax.
Greenwald continued:
Here we have one of the most consequential political events of the last decade at least -- a lethal biological terrorist attack aimed at key U.S. Senators and media figures, which even the FBI claims originated from a U.S. military lab. The then-British Ambassador to the U.S. is now testifying what has long been clear: that this episode played a huge role in enabling the attack on Iraq. Even our leading mainstream, establishment-serving media outlets -- and countless bio-weapons experts -- believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this attack and how. And there is little apparent interest in investigating in order to find out. Evidently, this is just another one of those things that we'll relegate to "the irrelevant past," and therefore deem it unworthy of attention from our future-gazing, always-distracted minds.
Yet another reason why it's so important that we get answers as to who was truly responsible for the Anthrax attacks. Unfortunately, many who would be able to get those answers seem uninterested in asking further questions and want to call the case closed.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Rush Holt will tour the University Medical Center at Princeton, a 308-bed acute care hospital tomorrow. Following their tour, they will hold a press conference to discuss healthcare reform.
Let me preface this conversation by stating that I supported Senator Frank Lautenberg's re-election campaign during both the primary and general elections last year, but...
1) ...after seeing him speak in public numerous times at a dramatically reduced level of performance than in the past...
...and...
2) ...after last week's gubernatorial election results...
...and...
3) ...assuming that the aspiring Governors that are currently serving in the State Senate and State Assembly are not going to be willing to rescind the power that the Governor currently has to fill vacated U.S. Senate seats, I think that Democratic Party leaders, electeds, and rank-and-file members should reach out en masse to Senator Frank Lautenberg and ask him to resign his seat.
Of the many heroes today, is my former boss, Rep. Rush D. Holt of New Jersey's 12th congressional district. Hopeful has his full statement from the floor of the House in Comments. Here it is on vid:
In full disclosure, I once upon a time worked on Rush Holt's campaign staff. But more importantly, I used to live in the congressional district he represents, NJ-12. But not anymore. Screw redistricting. I wanna live in Rush Holt's world again.
This is Holt during today's hearing on the Employment Non-discrimination Act (ENDA) before the House Education & Labor Committee:
The federal ENDA would bar job bias based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It's based on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination by employers based on race, gender and religion. ENDA extends those protections to persons, based on sexual orientation and gender identity. There are some exemptions: armed services, veterans' service groups, religious entities, and groups with less than 15 employees.
So, a fool from South Carolina yelled out You lie! at the President while he was delivering a heath care talk to a joint session of Congress. Of course, Rep. Joe Wilson's spontanteous planned outburst blew up in his face. Even his apology is crap.
So now we have congressmen turning joint sessions of Congress into common town halls, and yelling out any fool drivel that pops into their ossified heads. Come on, it's fun. Not the disrespect itself. He should be censured. What's fun is to watch this thing shift on its axis a little because the crazy's come all the way out of the bottle.
And now, all the shouty people at the town halls are stuck with their king, who made such a fool of himself that his opponent, by the end of today, will have raised a million bucks to defeat him.
Which brings me to Rush Holt. He's got two town halls today. One, in Somerset is already underway.
Obama had just wrapped up his health-care speech to Congress and was outside with the first lady, shaking hands with security personnel while walking to his limousine, when U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, standing with Riben, caught his eye.
"President Obama called out to me as he walked by and I introduced my guest to him," said Holt, D-12th. "I told him, "This was one of the people you were talking about tonight,'" as he introduced Riben of Monmouth Junction to Obama.
Riben lost her coverage when her one year contract working for AmeriCorp wasn't renewed. She has taken a part time job, but it doesn't offer health insurance. She has pre-existing and chronic conditions. This is who the President is talking about.
"President Obama showed great leadership tonight and made the case for why health care reform is so important to our economy and of course, the well-being of our families. We need to make quality, affordable and stable health care available to every American so that no individual or family drowns in medical debt or is denied the care they need. I share the President's vision and pledge to fight for reforms that will benefit New Jersey families."
Representative Rush Holt:
"Tonight President Obama clearly stated why the status quo is unacceptable and why we must fix our broken health insurance system. Americans are living sicker, dying younger, and paying more than we should or than residents of other major countries do.
"My guest for tonight's speech was Adira Riben, a Monmouth Junction resident, who recently lost her job and her insurance. She is concerned about the difficulty in finding new health insurance because she suffers from two chronic health conditions. I hear from many residents who are happy with the coverage they have. Before she lost her job, I imagine Ms. Riben was happy with her coverage too. Unfortunately, almost everyone is one stroke of bad luck away from something they can't handle.
"It shouldn't be this way. The fight for meaningful health insurance reform has lasted 100 years. We are closer than ever to ensuring that all Americans - whether they have insurance or not - will have security and stability in their health care."
Senator Bob Menendez, "a member of the key Senate Finance Committee:"
"President Obama stood before Congress and the nation tonight with the true leadership, vision and honesty that the American people respect. It was important for him to explain why the status quo is unhealthy for our loved ones, our family finances and our nation's budget, and how we can fix it. He did all of that with strength and purpose, and we are on our way to healing the health insurance system.
"This is a serious matter that deserves an honest and serious approach. It is time to rise above the politics of fabrication and fear that powerful, entrenched interests have used to turn the debate into a brawl. Americans demanded a change from the cynical politics that took our nation in the wrong direction, and we are standing up for responsible policy and politics. Together with President Obama, many of us are committed to making sure that your health insurance won't drain your finances but will actually be there for you when you need it the most. We are going to pass long overdue reform that makes ours a healthier and wealthier nation."
Update 2: Frank Pallone and Jon Corzine below the fold
And we have gotten some good press and recognition around the intertubez for our efforts in this area. So, when I got an email from Jane Hamsher at FDL telling me that Mike Farrell had recorded a video thanking us for our efforts, I couldn't wait to see it and share it.
That being said, the fight is far from over, but at least we can enjoy some props:
