Cafe de Mello

Dear reader,

Whether you are anti-abortion or pro-choice, if your Representative is a Democrat, I urge you to write them and demand that they commit to voting for the current health care reform legislation. In my proposed letter, below, I will explain why concern over the language used to prohibit federal funding of abortion should not be used to block this legislation.

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No Kidding! Wednesday March 3, 2010 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) laid out a major condition for Democratic success in the mid-term elections. The Democrats must pass the current health care reform legislation.

That, of course, is not what McConnell said. He said that if Democrats succeed in passing this Health Care Reform Legislation it will ruin them. He said Republican candidates will win by running to repeal this reform. He said red unicorns will descend from dark clouds and trample Democratic voters right at the polls.

But consider this,

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The Senate’s grand and noble tradition of suppressing all commercial, social, and cultural progress through the use of the filibuster is about to be ripped to shreds by savage democrats slashing the senate’s grand body with the shunned and shameful bloody blade of reconciliation. Ah, wait. This Republican version of reality may be a tad hyperbolic.

On aspect of this discussion is actually quite frightening, according a January 28, 2010 Pew Survey only 26% of Americans know that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to cut off a filibuster. That means that 74% of the country does not understand the Senate legislative process well enough

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This weekend I got the chance to watch Battleground. A nominee for best picture, among other awards, in 1950, Battleground lacks the blood, guts and explosions of modern war films, but it is big on heart. It is one of those war films that centers on the lives of a group of enlisted men and noncoms coping with the demands of war—the little men who in every war fight and die to get the job done. These are the kinds of people I try to root for in my political writing.

For fairness sake, I would love to write about how Republican politicians also are out their working for the little guy, the everyman/woman,

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President Obama’s exchange with Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) on catastrophic coverage and health savings accounts was one of the highlights of the Bipartisan Health Care Reform summit and shows the kind of worker-centered communication that Democrats need to adopt. It is their natural vernacular.

Senator Barrasso, illustrated the much repeated--but sadly erroneous—claim that the US has the best Health Care system in the world by noting that the primer of a Canadian province and a member of the Canadian Parliament had recently sought medical treatment in the United States. He went on to advocate the use of catastrophic coverage and health savings accounts.

President Obama asked Senator Barrasso, “Would you be satisfied if every member of Congress just had catastrophic care? Do you think we'd be better health care purchasers? I mean, is that a change that we should make?” which led to the following exchange:

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