GRAYSON FOR CONGRESS AZ-06

Congratulations to Democrat Rebecca Schneider for Running the U.S.'s Most Cost-Effective Campaign Against Extremist Do-Nothing Congressman Jeff Flake

2008-11-09T05:22:00.005-07:00

Congratulations to Democrat Rebecca Schneider, who ran a brave do-it-herself campaign against extremist do-nothing Republican Congressman Jeff Flake in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District.

According to unofficial results, Rebecca received 103,930 votes, all the while receiving no money and no support from the Arizona Democratic Party, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee or netroots blowhards like Markos Moulitsas on Daily Kos.

Instead, these Democrats concentrated their support and money to Third Congressional District candidate Bob Lord, who received only 102,215 votes - or about 1,500 votes fewer than Rebecca Schneider.

Rebecca received over 25,000 more votes than Democrat Rep. Ed Pastor in the Fourth Congressional District and more than twice as many votes as Jeff Flake's last Democratic opponent.

But Rebecca had only $4,890 in her campaign while Bob Lord, getting fewer votes, had $1,510,470, more than 300 times as much money.

Rebecca Schneider got more votes for less money than any unsuccessful Democratic U.S. House candidate in the country.

Congratulations to her on a brave and lonely campaign!

Unfortunately, telegenic but clueless Congressman Jeff Flake will, as he wrote after the election in the Washington Post, continue to be a right-wing extremist show horse, doing nothing but grandstanding for the voters of his district for the next two years.

But, Rebecca, you did good! We're proud of you!

Worthless Arizona Democratic Party Won't Give Even Token Support to Rebecca Schneider in Her Race Against Extremist Right-Wing GOP Rep. Jeff Flake

2008-10-10T02:38:00.007-07:00

I received this email from the campaign of Rebecca Schneider, who won our Democratic party primary for Arizona's Sixth Congressional District with 74% of the vote:

Greetings Arizona Democrats,

We have a big election coming up. Besides the Presidential Election, we have a lot of great local candidates. On every level, we are working hard to turn Arizona blue. We have 8 Congressional seats in the House, currently split between 4 Democrats and 4 Republicans. I live in Jeff Flake's district, CD-6. I have called Jeff Flake's campaign office now 5 times (480-415-0232), left my name and phone number, and no one has called me back. I want to know when the debate is between Jeff Flake and Rebecca Schneider. The "buzz" is that Flake feels he doesn't have to debate Schneider because she is not supported by the Democratic party. And lo and behold, I get this email from the Arizona Democratic Party, and two names and pictures are missing.

Rebecca Schneider CD-6
John Thrasher CD-2

So, yesterday, I give Don Bivens a call, and I am told it's not a "targeted race". The man practically hung up on me since he had the Attorney General on the other line, and I'm only a mere voter. Well, I live in CD-6, so for me this is a "targeted race" ! I called and left a message for Maria Weeg. No return call there either. Great, now both Republicans and Democrats are dissing me. Even if the Democratic Party does not want to pour money into this race, they could at least put the name and picture of the candidates for CD-6 and CD-2 on their "Early Voting Has Begun" email.

If this makes you mad too, here are some names and phone numbers:

Contact ADP Staff
Statewide Headquarters

Arizona Democratic Party Headquarters
2910 North Central Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85012
(602) 298-4200
Toll Free: 1-877-298-6837

Executive Director – Maria Weeg
Communications Director – Emily DeRose
Finance Director – Devin Rankin
Field Director – Daniel Graver
Deputy Political Director – Justin Unga
Deputy Finance Director – Vanessa Barrera
New Media Communications Manager – Jeff Goodman
ADC Coordinator – Sara Ahmad
African American Outreach Director – AJ Miller
Hispanic Outreach Coordinator – Ayensa Millan
Tribal Outreach Field Organizer – Arista La Russo
Faith Outreach Organizer – Adralyn Wendel
Office Manger – Amanda Jaksich
And here's the link to the head honchos: http://www.azdem.org/contact/117
Lots of email addresses on that link.
Thanks to everyone for all the work you do.

Peace, Janet

P.S. Feel free to forward to other Arizona Democrats

When I declared my candidacy for this seat back in mid-2007, I knew how this would be way the worthless Arizona Democratic primary would treat any nominee against Jeff Flake, so I can't say that I'm surprised.

I understand that our priorities must be to keep the seats of our first-term incumbents Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08) and Harry Mitchell (AZ-05) and to make sure we can win the open seat in AZ-01 with Ann Kirkpatrick. But even with an Arizona U.S. senator heading the Republican ticket as presidential candidate, these candidates seem likely to win in what's shaping up as another Democratic election year. AZ-01 may be the congressional seat in the U.S. most likely to switch parties.

And it's vital that we help Bob Lord defeat Rep. John Shadegg in AZ-03. This was a race that the national Democratic party didn't view as winnable, but it's becoming clear that Bob Lord has run a well-financed, flawless campaign and the Republicans are panicking - as they should be.

Now I don't think Rebecca Schneider has a chance to win against Jeff Flake in this gerrymandered district, any more than Republicans have a chance in AZ-04 or AZ-07. But not even to list the AZ-06 (or AZ-02) candidate on its "Early Voting Has Begun" email is reprehensible.

That isn't financial support; it's not sucking up any resources that could be better sent elsewhere.

It's just mere decency.

Shame on Don Bivens, Maria Weeg and the bigwigs of the Arizona Democratic party.

Meanwhile, I expect that Rebecca Schneider - unsupported by her party, running a campaign without adequate funding, with only the power of her convictions - will again shock everyone with the number of votes she will get against Jeff Flake, whose laissez-faire extremism is completely out of touch as his extremist ideology is repudiated daily with our financial meltdown.

Please support Rebecca Schneider.

Please Support Democrat Rebecca Schneider for Congress in AZ-06 This November Against Do-Nothing Extremist Republican Incumbent Rep. Jeff Flake

2008-09-03T11:49:00.003-07:00

Please support activist Democrat Rebecca Schneider for Congress in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District this November against the do-nothing extremist incumbent, Rep. Jeff Flake.

Check out earlier posts here for shocking examples of Rep. Flake's terrible record of ignoring the needs of the East Valley's middle class families and you will see that he should be replaced by someone who will fight for regular people - Rebecca Schneider.

Ladies and Gentleman, This Is My Last Blog Post. You Won't Have Dick Grayson to Kick Around Anymore.

2008-05-26T07:08:00.016-07:00

Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.
-- "Slacker"

Just about one year ago, over 170 posts and 8200 pageviews ago, I began this blog as "Grayson for Congress AZ-06" with this:

I am a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives from Arizona's Sixth District. Thank you.

* * *
Last October, I started posting more regularly, as in this post, "Welcome to the Sixth Congressional District of Arizona, Bitch...Uh, Candidate!":

Arizona's Sixth Congressional District was created as a safe Republican House seat in the redistricting following the 2000 census, when the Cactus State gained two Congressional seats. It encompasses parts of Maricopa and Pinal counties. It is mostly made up of eastern suburbs of Phoenix, what we in the East Valley call "the East Valley": Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Queen Creek and my hometown of Apache Junction (though I've also lived and worked in Mesa).

It's one of the fastest-growing parts of the United States. Of cities over 100,000, Gilbert is the fourth fastest-growing and Chandler the ninth fastest-growing. Queen Creek's population is doubling every four years. In parts of the district, nearly all the buildings date from the 21st century.

According to Wikipedia:

It is currently represented by Jeff Flake, a Republican. George W. Bush received 64% of the vote in this district in 2004. The district has a Cook Partisan Voting Index score of R +12.
Population (2000): 641,329
Male 49.3%, Female 50.7%
Median age: 34.1
Median Household Income: $47,976
Racial Composition: 84.2% White, 2.1% Black, 1.8% Asian, 1.0% Native American, 0.2% Pacific Islander, 8.2% Other, 17.2% Hispanic (of any race)

In 2002, Republican Jeff Flake won his second term with 65% of the vote. (He first won a Congressional seat in the old First District in 2000).

Deborah Thomas, the only Democratic candidate who's ever run in this district, got 42,653 votes, or 32%. Libertarian Andy Wagner got 3%.

In 2004, Rep. Flake won 79% of the vote against the Libertarian candidate, Craig Stritar, who got 21%.

In 2006, Rep. Flake got 74% of the vote to 26% for Libertarian Jason Blair.

Why did no Democrat run in the last two elections? Why am I pushing for some Democrat to run in 2008? Why have I so far been able to convince only myself to run? See future posts.

* * *
The day after Thanksgiving I posted this about AZ-06:

Call us the Speedy Gonzales District.

According to Reid Wilson's post at Real Clear Politics, the just-published edition of The Almanac of American Politics notes that Arizona's Sixth Congressional District -- hey, that's us -- is the fastest-growing in the nation:

Arizona Reps. Jeff Flake and Trent Franks come in at numbers one and two, and new residents of the state have registered overwhelmingly Democratic, according to the East Valley Tribune. Neither Flake nor Franks are in immediate danger, but a generation from now, the districts will not look the same as they do today.

Between 2000 and 2005, AZ-06 grew 36.3%. We Democrats need to at least run someone in 2008 -- are there any Latina billionaire businesswomen abuelas with civic experience in Mesa? -- but I will represent the party next November if no politician with potential agrees to run.

I am sure that Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, or whatever district replaces it in parts of the Southeast Valley after the next decennial census -- will one day shift from Republican to Democratic control. The demographics and history are on our side.

This do-it-yourself campaign by a non-politician is taking a hiatus for the holiday as we speedily run to the supermarket for tofurkey and trimmings. I'm incredibly grateful that I live in a country where, um, anyone can run for national office.

Happy Thanksgiving.

* * *
In early January, I wrote:

The New Year's Day column by conservative David Brooks mostly concerned Mitt Romney's presidential campaign but went on to make more general remarks about the political situation we are facing in 2008:

As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.

That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.

Since I filed to run as a candidate for the Democratic nomination in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District last May, I have not heard from anyone in the state Democratic party. For that matter, I haven't heard from a single Democratic voter in AZ-06.

I originally filed to run because I believe in contested elections and because I was frustrated that Sixth Congressional District Democrats like myself did not have a candidate to vote for in November 2006, when our party won back the U.S. House, or in November 2004, in a crucial election that got many Democrats energized.

All along, I have said I would happily step aside if a more credible Democrat would just step forward and run. That remains true.

Look, I know I am a horrible candidate for our party. I am no politician. Anyone glancing at the posts on this blog can see that. I am running only because no one else will.

I completely understand why state and national Democrats have little interest in AZ-06. It has the lowest percentage of registered Democrats of any congressional district in the Cactus State.

Our party needs to ensure that Rep. Harry Mitchell in AZ-05 and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in AZ-08 win their first re-election campaigns; their victories in 2006 brought Democrats 4-4 parity in the state's U.S. House delegation.

In 2008, we have an excellent chance of picking up the Republican seat in AZ-01 where an unpopular incumbent is retiring. We also have a very good chance to pick off another of Arizona's conservative Republican congressmen in AZ-03, where Bob Lord is a terrific candidate for our party.

Arizona's Sixth Congressional District should and must take a back seat to these eminently winnable races. But the national and state Democratic party should not abandon us.

I believe 2008 is the year, as Brooks said, the Reagan conservative coalition has come apart. The impending Republican primary fight between Rep. Jeff Flake and Russell Pearce in AZ-06 is a sign of this, as is the chaos in the GOP presidential race.

In my posts over the past few months I've tried to show that Rep. Flake is vulnerable to attack as a rigid right-wing laissez-faire ideologue at a time when this ideology is being rejected by many voters -- including those who have long voted Republican. If Russell Pearce somehow upsets the incumbent in next September's GOP primary, many more Republicans will join AZ-06 Democrats in seeking an alternative.

Please, leaders and members of the Arizona Democratic Party, let's build for the future in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, the fastest-growing district in the entire nation.

Find a better candidate than Richard Grayson.

One who doesn't talk about himself in the third person would be a good start.

[campaigning children in the photo at top are supporting their father, Democratic candidate Alan Grayson in FL-08]

* * *
In mid-April, I posted some "GrEaT nEwS":

As Hubert H. Humphrey would say, I'm as pleased as punch to report that two new Democrats have entered the race to represent Arizona's Sixth Congressional District in Congress.

Rebecca Schneider of Mesa is a librarian at ASU who has the compassion sorely lacking in Rep. Jeff Flake.

Chris Gramazio of Queen Creek is a working man, married father of one (and one on the way), who has the common sense so foreign to Rep. Jeff Flake.

Either of them would be a vast improvement over the Sixth Congressional District's current pathetic excuse for a people's representative.

I started this campaign and blog last year because I was mad that I had no Democrat to vote for in the 2006 U.S. House race.

If either Chris or Rebecca, or both, successfully file their petitions to get on the September 2 Democratic primary ballot, I will gratefully step aside and enthusiastically vote for our party's candidate. If by some chance, neither gets on the ballot, I'll run as a write-in candidate.

Till there's clearly a Democratic candidate in November, I'm going to continue this furshlugginer blog, not trying to promote my own candidacy but explaining why Rep. Jeff Flake needs to be replaced by a progressive Democrat.

Good luck to both Rebecca and Chris. I am really, really happy you are running.

* * *
In this blog, I've posted a lot about what I feel are the failures of Rep. Jeff Flake. Often I used over-the-top language, meant as kind of a parody of the attack ads seen in what passes for political discourse over the airways.

I still stand by all my criticisms of Jeff Flake's record as a congressman (as well as my occasional praise for some of his forward-thinking actions), but I am sorry if the words I used offended anyone, particularly Rep. Flake or his family. I think he's a decent guy and a very intelligent man who happens to have a view of government that is out of step with our times.

After it was clear that other candidates were in the race, I changed the name of the blog from one promoting my "candidacy" to "Defeat Jeff Flake." Now, with Chris Gramazio having filed his signatures to get on the September 2 AZ-06 Democratic primary ballot and Rebecca Schneider filing her petitions next Tuesday, it's time for me to step aside and let a real candidate take over. I'm leaving to spend the summer in Brooklyn. Thanks to everyone who came to the blog.

* * *
Here is my final post:

I am no longer a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives from Arizona's Sixth District. Thank you.

Goodbye and good luck!

Chris Gramazio Has Filed His Signatures to Get on the AZ-06 Democratic Primary Ballot. We Will Defeat Jeff Flake!

2008-05-23T02:53:00.004-07:00

Good news comes in an email from Chris Gramazio. He has filed his petitions with enough signatures to get on the September 2 Democratic primary ballot so we will have someone to defeat Jeff Flake this November.

Sneering Elitist Rep. Jeff Flake Takes Break from Bashing Middle-Class Families to Call for Killing of Cats

2008-05-22T03:21:00.016-07:00

On Wednesday the House of Representatives voted to pass H.R. 1464, the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act of 2008, sponsored by Rep. Tom Udall (D-NM), the next Senator from New Mexico.

Rep. Jeff Flake took a break from bashing America's hardworking middle-class families to express his hatred of defenseless and endangered cats by voting no.

As the astute blogger That's My Congress notes,

The legislation provides for the financial support of conservation programs around the world that protect endangered wild cats and dogs. In the case of wildcats, every species on Earth is endangered. Half of wild dog species, ranging from the red wolf to the arctic fox, are in danger of going extinct.

The bill was passed in the House of Representatives late yesterday afternoon, but only barely. With just a few more votes against it, the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act would have been killed, and programs to conserve these magnificent animals would have been cut off from support.

119 members of Congress voted against this law.

Why? Why would anyone vote to deprive conservation programs for endangered species of support?

Could it be money? Could it be that 119 members of Congress decided that, as much as they like the idea of protecting wild cats and canids from extinction, it would be fiscally irresponsible to spend the money?

That explanation doesn’t hold up, if you do the math. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the total expense for the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act of 2008 in 2009 would be only 7 million dollars. Compare that to the supplementary war spending Congress is set to approve: 168.9 billion dollars. Remember that, as supplementarywar spending, that 168.9 billion dollars is in addition to the hundreds of billions already in the federal budget to pay for war war.

7 million dollars next to 168.9 billion dollars is like a grain of sand next to an ostrich egg.

It makes no sense for anyone in Congress to deny the seven million dollars in funding for felid and canid conservation, and then to vote in favor of throwing hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars away on war.

This was a bipartisan conservation bill, with some Republicans among the co-sponsors, and even more Republicans voting in favor. However, opposition to the Great Cats and Rare Canids Act was not at all bipartisan. Of the 119 members of the House voting against the bill, only one was a Democrat.

That's My Congress ends by nominating Jeff Flake for the Congressional Coalition Against Cats.

Obviously it's no surprise that a do-nothing congressman like Jeff Flake, who wouldn't lift a pinky to help struggling American middle class families, couldn't give a shit about helping members of the cat family.

Unless, of course, they're the Maker's Mark-swilling, cigar-chomping, arugula-eating Club for Growth fat cats who've lined elitist Jeff Flake's campaign coffers to the tune of a cool million.

This blog post is dedicated to the memory of Eisenhower, the best cat who ever lived on East 54th Street between Snyder and Tilden Avenues in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, in the 1950s.

Lazy Do-Nothing Rep. Jeff Flake's Accomplishments for the People of Arizona's Sixth Congressional District: Less Than Zero

2008-05-18T10:31:00.005-07:00

Lazy dilettante Rep. Jeff Flake has been in the United States House of Representatives for nearly eight years. Can you name one thing he's done for the families of our congressional district? Other than send out self-serving press releases and get his photogenic mug in the media?

OpenCongress details Rep. Jeff Flake's utter lack of accomplishments:

Not a single bill that Jeff Flake has sponsored has ever become law.

He ranks 419 out of 435 House members in the number of bills he's co-sponsored -- and that 435 includes members who've died in the middle of a session!

Worst of all, he ranks 424 out of 435 House members in getting the few bills he's bothered to co-sponsor to pass Congress.

Do-nothing Jeff Flake. When it comes to promoting himself, he's a dynamo. When it comes to helping hardworking families in his district, he doesn't lift a pinky.

Anti-Veteran Elitist Rep. Jeff Flake Favors Millionaires Over Vets, Votes Against New G.I. Bill

2008-05-16T05:12:00.011-07:00

More good news from Congress yesterday. As the email I got from the hardworking group, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), noted:

You did it. Just a few minutes ago, the House of Representatives passed the new GI Bill by a vote of 256-166, as an attachment to the emergency supplemental. Click here to view the full list of who voted for it and who voted against it.

Earlier this week, we told you that the new GI Bill was facing opposition from a small group of Representatives in the House, who were threatening the bill despite its deep bi-partisan support.

We asked for your help, and you stepped up to the plate. Thousands of you took action by calling your Representatives, signing the petition at www.GIBill2008.org, and spreading the word to your friends and neighbors. Today, your dedication paid off and together, we made history.

But Rep. Jeff Flake, on the wrong side of history, voted against helping vets.

As I wrote in a February blog post, "We Need a New G.I. Bill":

I'm sure anti-government extremist Rep. Jeff Flake opposes a new G.I. Bill for the same reasons he opposes any kind of government help for ordinary people.

But yesterday there was even more reason for an elitist like Jeff Flake who's constantly favored the interests of millionaires over those of struggling middle class families to vote against the G.I. Bill. As the New York Times stated,

Congressional Democrats began to put into practice their philosophy of asking the wealthy to shoulder more of the cost of government programs on Thursday as the House approved an expansive new veterans education benefit that would be paid for by a tax on affluent Americans.

In pushing the tax plan, Democrats are banking on the idea that most Americans will have no quarrel with requiring those on the highest economic rung to pay for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to receive the equivalent of a free four-year college education at a public university.

The proposal is the most striking example so far of a Democratic refrain being heard increasingly in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail: Americans with significant financial resources need to contribute more to efforts to help those less prosperous.

Individuals earning $500,000 or more would pay a surtax of 0.47 percent on income above $500,000 and the tax would apply to couples on incomes above $1 million.

Democratic officials said one analysis estimated that about 440,000 people would fall under the new tax and would pay an average of nearly $9,000 a year.

“We are talking about people who are making over $1 million to make a small sacrifice to pay for this war when our military families are making a huge sacrifice,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois.

Middle-class-hating, millionaire-loving Rep. Jeff Flake sided with the people he's constantly favored in his eight pathetic years in Congress.

And our miserable excuse for a representative once again sided against hardworking regular people -- in this case, the brave veterans who've given everything they've got for America.

A creepy hypocrite like Jeff Flake talks about supporting veterans, but then when push comes to shove, he votes against them because he's more devoted to his ideology than he is to the needs of regular people.

Seriously, how can he sleep at night?

And even more seriously, how can we re-elect this sneering enemy of middle class families?

Out-of-Touch Greed-Worshipping Extremist Rep. Jeff Flake Tells Hardworking AmeriCorps Volunteers: Get Lost, Drop Dead

2008-05-15T04:17:00.014-07:00

Rep. Jeff Flake is well-known on Capitol Hill for being a nasty foe of anything that smacks of government giving a helping hand to struggling working-class and middle-class families.

"You're on your own, folks," is the mantra of our do-nothing congressman.

His sponsors, like the anti-family Goldwater Institute and the greed-is-good elitists of the Club for Growth, have a perfect representative in the selfishness-worshipping Rep. Jeff Flake. Too bad those of us stuck with a congressman who makes Ayn Rand look like Mother Teresa can't say the same thing -- unless we've suddenly been thrust into Bizarro World.

Yesterday a routine resolution came before the House. It was simple: to honor the 542,000 American citizens who since 1994 haven taken the AmeriCorps pledge to 'get things done for America' by becoming AmeriCorps members.

These unselfish folks have served a total of more than 705,000,000 hours nationwide, helping to improve the lives of our nation's most vulnerable citizens, protect our environment, contribute to our public safety, respond to disasters, and strengthen our educational system.

Members of the House were asked to simply agree to this:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) encourages all citizens to join in a national effort to salute AmeriCorps members and alumni, and raise awareness about the importance of national and community service;

(2) acknowledges the significant accomplishments of the AmeriCorps members, alumni, and community partners;

(3) recognizes the important contributions to the lives of our citizens by AmeriCorps members; and

(4) encourages citizens of all ages to consider serving in AmeriCorps.

All Democrats and the vast majority of Republicans voted aye.

Horse's ass Jeff Flake voted nay.

Why does Jeff Flake hate AmeriCorps? Because it proves, time and again, that a little helping hand from the government can make some people's lives easier. And that contradicts the rigid ideology that Jeff Flake has sworn allegiance to, much to the detriment of his constituents with real needs.

Jeff Flake wants to get rid of AmeriCorps. As an editorial in the Everett (WA) Herald titled "AmeriCorps should be lauded, not threatened" explains:

Let's face it: Not everyone has the desire or the opportunity to go to college and pursue a traditional career in public service. That doesn't mean young people shouldn't get the chance to focus on doing good in their community. The federal AmeriCorps program is a great way to create a valuable pool of volunteers to do just that.

Even though it's billed as a volunteer program, participants receive awards once they complete their assignments. The grants are meant to be used to further volunteers' education or to pay off student loans.

The award - less than $5,000 - is hardly an incentive by itself to commit to a yearlong project. The partial-year stipends are even less, about $2,300 for between 300 and 900 hours of work. AmeriCorps volunteers are mostly in their mid-20s and make the conscious decision to put better-paying career paths on hold in order to perform admirable tasks.

Last week in the House of Representatives, AmeriCorps faced funding cuts from two different amendment packages. One, sponsored by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), would have cleaved $25 million from its federal grant package, divided between a program focused on underprivileged youth and various programs for the elderly.

Stearns wrote a letter to others on the House Appropriations Committee in which he mischaracterized the nature of AmeriCorps, calling the stipend a contradiction for volunteers.

The other, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), would have removed all $226 million funding AmeriCorps receives at the state and federal levels, effectively ending the program.

Fortunately, neither of the amendments gained enough support to continue up the legislative chain.

Officials for Washington Campus Compact, a service learning organization housed at Western Washington University, said that $27 million in AmeriCorps grants have been spent at state schools. Locally, Everett Community College has seen $847,349 of that money and $583,570 has been used to finance education at Edmonds Community College.

For some people, public service means holding elected office. For others, it's tutoring adult literacy classes, working in a soup kitchen, doing clerical work for a health clinic or planting trees.

AmeriCorps volunteers do that kind of work because they believe in the causes and take pride in offering their time and skills. Government should commend them and the organization shouldn't have to worry about having to scrounge for donations in order to operate.

Shame on you, Jeff Flake.

And shame on us for having an enemy of hard-working American families as our congressman.

Wackadoodle AZ-06 Congressman Jeff Flake Hates Mother's Day -- But Normal People Disagree

2008-05-11T08:47:00.010-07:00

A few months ago I reported how wackadoodle Rep. Jeff Flake sent out a press release attacking his congressional colleagues for supporting some measly funds to help out the International Mother's Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia, on today's centennial of the start of Mother's Day there by Anna Jarvis in 1908.

Last week, Jeff Flake, crazy as ever, tried to take back a vote he'd apparently cast in error supporting this year's observance of a day honoring American mothers. His fellow House Republicans joined him.

Dana Milbank reports in the Washington Post:

It was already shaping up to be a difficult year for congressional Republicans. Now, on the cusp of Mother's Day, comes this: A majority of the House GOP has voted against motherhood.

On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, "Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother's Day," when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.

"Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote," he announced.

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt's request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.

It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.

Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: "Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother's Day."

By voting against it?

I guess it's clear now that Rep. Jeff Flake really does hate American mothers.

Perhaps Sigmund Freud could tell us why, but he's dead -- so the source of our wacky congressman's animus against the middle class moms of Arizona's Sixth Congressional District and the rest of America, proven with hundreds of his votes against working families, will remain a mystery.

Thanks to Rep. Kathy Castor for challenging mom-hating pols like Jeff Flake. Back when I lived in Florida, I had dinner with Kathy and her husband at the Tampa home of her wonderful mom, Betty, who was then president of the University of South Florida, and whose U.S. Senate candidacy I worked for in 2004. If only our district was represented by a Democrat like either of the Castor moms.

Maybe miracles can happen this November.

Happy Mother's Day to my own wonderful mom in Apache Junction and to every mom in our district and elsewhere.

House Votes 410-11 to Expand Federal Enforcement of Copyright Law, With Rep. Jeff Flake in the Tiny Minority Voting No -- And This Time He's Right!

2008-05-09T02:44:00.011-07:00

Now that other candidates are running for the Democratic nomination in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, I've been continuing to post, explaining why Rep. Jeff Flake should not be re-elected. There are a lot of reasons.

Nevertheless, I'd be intellectually dishonest if I did not post occasional pats on the back to Jeff Flake. There are times when his out-of-the-mainstream views get it right, as on his foresighted and lonely crusade to end our embargo of Cuba.

Yesterday, Rep. Flake was in a familiar place: in a tiny minority voting against the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act of 2008. The House passed it overwhelmingly, with only 11 members voting no. They include not only Jeff Flake but also his ideological soulmate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX); another former presidential candidate, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH); and Silicon Valley's Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

I believe Jeff Flake was right on the mark to oppose this bill. As a staff attorney at the Center for Governmental Responsibility back in the 1990s, I worked a lot in the nascent field of digital copyright law as well as other intellectual property issues. I'm the author of a dozen books and a content provider online and for various print publications, so I have a particular interest in this area.

To explain why I agree with Rep. Flake's vote here, I go to an the blog of an organization I'm affiliated with, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which noted that

The bill would nonetheless significantly expand federal enforcement of copyright law.

The most outrageous provisions would create new and unnecessary federal bureaucracies devoted to intellectual property enforcement. None seems more ridiculous than language creating a Cabinet-level "IP enforcement czar" that would report to the President and coordinate enforcement efforts across government, a proposal that has been loudly opposed by the Department of Justice. Why is Congress spending our tax dollars on a new layer of officialdom that the cops themselves don't want or need?

Moreover, the bill also includes provisions — such as expanded forfeiture penalties and language "clarifying" that copyright registration is not required for criminal enforcement of the copyright -- that could be read to open the door to increased prosecution against individuals or innovators as well as large-scale commercial pirates.

Similarly, a Daily Kos contributor called Berkeleygrad writes:

It is backed by all the usual industry suspects (grouped together under the name of "the Copyright Alliance") and is a potential disaster insofar as it threatens to impede fair use and balanced enforcement while increasing the criminalization of non-commercial copyright infringement. H.R. 4279 would also create a new "Copyright Czar" within the federal government, a position that appears to be loosely modeled on the "Drug Czar" positions that have done so much to perpetuate the wasteful, expensive, and ineffective "war on drugs."

Those of us who value our digital rights and civil liberties should be concerned...

Rep. Jeff Flake was right this time, although for most middle-class families in Arizona, this issue won't matter much. More important was his other vote no yesterday, against helping those whose homes are being foreclosed.

Still, Rep. Flake should be commended for voting against PRO-IP.

Rep. Jeff Flake's PAC Violated Federal Law, Admits to Wasting Money in Campaign

2008-05-07T19:24:00.005-07:00

From yesterday's Boston Globe:

The Porkbuster PAC set up by US Representative Jeff Flake violated federal contribution limits and, by its own account, wasted $2,100 to rent Granite State hotel rooms that were never used.

In response to inquiries by the Globe, PAC treasurer Steve Voeller said the excess in-kind contributions were an oversight and notified the McCain campaign, which said it wrote a $1,896.52 check to reimburse the committee for the excess contribution.

Flake, an Arizona Republican, set up the PAC last year, but the campaign of fellow Arizonan McCain is the only beneficiary so far. In reports covering last November and January, the campaign reported in-kind donations of airfare and lodging costs of about $4,200. The expenses were incurred by Flake and aides who campaigned in New Hampshire for McCain, Voeller said. Under federal law, the PAC has a $2,300 limit on in-kind contributions to a candidate. . .

Porkbuster PAC apparently intended to spend even more on behalf of McCain, however. Last Jan. 10, two days after the primary, the PAC reported paying $2,161 in "lodging expenses not utilized" at a hotel in a Manchester, N.H. suburb. Voeller, in an e-mail said: "The $2,161 should not be listed as an in-kind, since nobody stayed in those rooms and the PAC had to eat the charge (lesson learned about buying over the Internet). We checked with the (Federal Election Commission) on that one."

Because of high demand for rooms before the primary, the hotel required a minimum stay of more than one day, but Flake and two staffers did not use the rooms, Voeller said.

Well, as his constituents can attest, our do-nothing, lawbreaking total waste of a congressman doesn't use his heart or his brain much, either.

House Votes 345-73 to Help Families Keep Affordable Housing as Middle-Class-Hating Rep. Jeff Flake Sneers, Protests and Votes No

2008-05-07T18:19:00.008-07:00

In 1975, right near where I grew up in Brooklyn, responsible developers and a consortium of labor unions built Starrett City, the nation's largest affordable rental housing development, by the waters of Spring Creek.

My friend Randy's Grandma Sarah and Poppy Joe moved there, and it was and still is a great place for diverse working class and middle class folks. The 20,000 people who live in the high-rises there aren't concerned with social engineering so much as they want good schools, a safe place for kids to play, and a clean spot of the city to call their own.

But in the last couple of years, one of the last affordable places for families to live in New York has been threatened by greedy developers who want to throw out the tenants and turn the property into luxury housing for the rich. Residents of Starrett City have been scared they will be thrown out on the street as the complex becomes another place that only the wealthy can afford.

This afternoon, the House of Representatives voted 345-73 to pass H.R. 5937, which will enable Starrett City to remain affordable. The majority of Republican members of Congress, led by the bill's co-sponsor, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), joined all the Democrats in support of affordable housing for middle class and working class families.

Rep. Jeff Flake sneered and voted no.

In his eight years in Congress, Jeff Flake has done everything he could to stop any helping hand for families who aren't the richest of the rich. He would have voted against this bill had the residents of Starrett City lived in his own district.

Not every family can afford to buy their home, as many Arizonans have learned in the past couple of years. As the sponsor of today's bill, Rep. Ed Towns (D-NY) said, "With the weakening economy and rising gas and food costs, it is urgent now more than ever that we fight to preserve affordable housing for tenants.”

Only if we defeat Jeff Flake in November will our representative in Congress be fighting for middle class families, not against us.

Re-elect Jeff Flake? Fuhgeddaboudit.

House Passes Bush-Backed Bill to Ensure Access to Student Loans, 388-21, With Arrogant Family-Hating Rep. Jeff Flake Voting No Again

2008-05-03T10:45:00.003-07:00

So much for moderation. Out-of-step ideologue Rep. Jeff Flake may have simply have reversed his position on genetic discrimination on a whim. He seems to get a kick out of showing voters that he's boss since he still doesn't seem to understand that a congressman's first mission should be to help the families in his district.

On Thursday the House agreed, 388-21, to the Senate amendments on the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act. All the Democrats voting supported it, as did 89% of Republicans.

Student-hating Rep. Jeff Flake, not caring about the costs of higher education to struggling East Valley families, smirked and voted no.

President Bush got it right when he said in a statement released by the White House after House passage,

In order to ensure that Americans can continue to compete in the global marketplace, the federal government has an obligation to encourage and support people pursuing higher education. By granting the Department of Education greater authority to purchase federal student loans, today's action should ease the anxiety many students may feel about their ability to finance their education this fall.

The legislation was important because the credit crisis has forced about 50 lenders to stop writing some forms of student loans. The companies cite increased borrowing costs, cuts in government subsidies for education loans and a lack of investor interest in securities backed by loans.

Without this law, demand for federally backed student loans would outstrip supply, industry officials said. According to Education Department estimates, about 7 million borrowers will need more than $68 billion in federal loans this academic year.

College students and their families will now have ensured access to educational loans thanks to an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress and the support of the Bush administration.

No thanks, of course, to rigid ideologue Jeff Flake, who haughtily sneers when anyone, even President Bush, says that the federal government has an obligation to encourage and support people pursuing higher education.

Really, we should be going further and expanding grants to college students instead of forcing them to borrow. I can just see Jeff Flake rolling his eyes when I say anything like this that attempts to give middle class families a helping hand.

Arrogant Jeff Flake assumes he's smarter than everyone else in Congress, the President, business leaders and you.

And every time he assumes this, he's making an ass of u and me.

Rumors that Rep. Jeff Flake is Noticing our Blog, Moderating Extremist Positions; He Votes Against Genetic Discrimination & May Vote to Help Veterans

2008-05-01T10:27:00.008-07:00

Most days someone from Capitol Hill checks this blog. In the beginning they were doing Google blog searches for "Jeff Flake," but now we're getting blog searches for "Richard Grayson" too.

I've been trying to point out, often employing deliberately ludicrous and outrageous language, just how Rep. Jeff Flake's out-of-the-mainstream ideology has proven to be of no help to regular people in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District and elsewhere in the state and nation.

Word is coming to me that Rep. Jeff Flake has taken notice and has started to moderate his positions in view of the coming election.

The estimable blogger Random Musings discusses Rep. Harry Mitchell's H.R. 5740, the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, which "is garnering widespread support among his colleagues (250 cosponsors and counting)." And then surprises us with this news:

Jeff Flake (R-AZ6), who, like Mikey of Life Cereal fame, 'hates everything' related to government spending, may sign on in support of the bill (which, by the way, would be this year's "Phoenix freezes over" moment if that comes to pass :) ). . .

Jeff Flake, the putative anti-government crusader, who is almost physically incapable of supporting anything that has even a hint of a whiff of help for the average American, veteran or otherwise, is considering throwing his support behind Mitchell's bill?

(Random Musings kindly links here to what he calls "Richard Grayson's chronicle of Jeff Flake's extremist ideology and ineffective representation of his district.")

Now today I check and see that the House passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (which I blogged about a few days ago) by a vote of 414-1, with Rep. Jeff Flake not joining Ron Paul (R-Pluto), his buddy from other lopsided votes, most recently one I blogged about yesterday).

Jeff Flake voted for against genetic discrimination. Good for him.

But, really, with every member of the Senate and House but one voting the same way, it's the least we can expect of Jeff Flake.

He's got a new campaign slogan:

Rep. Jeff Flake: I do the least you can expect from a congressman.

Wacko Middle-Class-Hating Extremist Rep. Jeff Flake Votes No as House Supports National Financial Literacy Month, 402-2

2008-04-30T09:51:00.012-07:00

I know I'm running against him, but I'm really beginning to worry a little about Rep. Jeff Flake's mental health.

It's almost a given that when I check House roll call votes and there are just two or three members of Congress voting against a bill everyone else from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats supports that I find one of the teeny-weeny minority of wackos voting no on noncontroversial legislation is out-of-control Jeff Flake.

What is he trying to prove? Is this just a desperate cry for attention?

Last week he was the only one in the entire House of Representatives to vote against a totally innocuous bill encouraging government documents be written in plain English.

Today we find he's against financial literacy too.

This morning the House passed a resolution "supporting the goals and ideals of Financial Literacy Month 2008." The vote was 402-2.

Out-of-step Jeff Flake voted no. Why?

Is he against 6,500 bankers teaching savings skills to young people during Teach Children to Save Day, started by the American Bankers Association Education Foundation in April of 1997? Is he annoyed that this program has helped more than 45,000 bankers teach savings skills to nearly 2,300,000 young people?

Is he against staff from America's credit unions making presentations to young people at local schools on financial topics such as student loans, balancing a checkbook, and auto loans during National Credit Union Youth Week?

Is he happy that the average baby boomer has only $50,000 in savings apart from equity in their homes?

Is he totally unconcerned that the April 2007 National Foundation for Credit Counseling consumer financial literacy survey found that only 39 percent of American consumers keep close track of their expenses; less than half have ordered their credit report; and one-third do not know where to go for financial advice?

Is he glad that as many as 10,000,000 households in the United States are "unbanked" or are without access to mainstream financial products and services?

What did out-of-touch Jeff Flake find so objectionable about a simple resolution supporting consumer education?

Or does he just hate regular middle-class families so much that he enjoys the equivalent of spitting in their faces every time he casts a vote?

Out-of-step, out-of-touch, out-of-control Rep. Jeff Flake seems determined to prove he is wrong for America every time he steps onto the House floor.

How much longer will you let him get away with it?

Extremist Laissez-Faire Flunky Rep. Jeff Flake Flunks Math & Science; Unlike Most Republicans, He Votes Against the 21st Century Competitiveness Act

2008-04-29T07:40:00.005-07:00

It's hard to understand why Rep. Jeff Flake's votes are so consistently out of the mainstream of his own party. He's so wedded to the dogma that government can do nothing that he's made being a do-nothing congressman his life's work.

Take for example, the issue of education, one that's critical to America's competitiveness in the world.

Just a few days ago Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas expressed the views of most Republicans and certainly most Democrats and independents in an article called "Keep America Competitive" that she wrote for The Austin American-Statesman:

There is a growing consensus that America's future prosperity is threatened by an erosion in our educational capabilities. Compared with children in other countries, our nation's students are underperforming in the vitally important fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). These areas of expertise spur creativity and new technologies, which are essential for economic growth. In fact, as much as 85 percent of the measured growth in per capita income is due to technological advancement. . .

Our neglect has led to China surpassing the United States as the world's largest exporter of information-technology products. We must redouble our efforts to ensure that America is the world's technological leader in the 21st century...Many economists predict that, in 10 years, London will supplant New York as the world's financial capital. . .

[We must] build upon the highly successful America Competes Act, which Congress passed last year. This legislation expands research by 2001 by doubling funding levels for the National Science Foundation to $11.2 billion and substantially increases funding for the Energy Department's Office of Science by 144 percent to more than $5.2 billion.

Second, the act also strengthens the skills of teachers in science, technology, engineering and math. According to the Center for the Study of Teaching, the most consistent predictor of student achievement in STEM is the presence of teachers who are fully certified and have at least a bachelor's degree in the subject they teach. That's why we're funding Teachers for a Competitive Tomorrow, a grant program modeled after the UTeach Program at the University of Texas that encourages undergraduate students to gain degrees in their STEM fields of study with teacher certification obtained through required electives. In addition, the legislation increases the number of Advanced Placement courses in underprivileged schools and the supply of teachers who are able to teach those courses.

Altogether, the America Competes Act is a major step forward in meeting the economic challenges of the future. Congress must advance legislation that strengthens our long-term prosperity.

Last August the House passed the America Competes Act, with 143 Republicans joining all but one Democrat in favor of strengthening American competitiveness.

Out-of-step, wrong-for-America Rep. Jeff Flake voted against this bill even though most of his party joined Democrats in support of this groundbreaking legislation aimed at ensuring the United States’ strong footing as a global economic leader and retaining our “brainpower advantage.”

President Bush proudly signed the bill after passage.

What's wrong with Jeff Flake that he doesn't want to help America retain its competitiveness in a global economy where high-level math, science and technology skills are needed?

Why does Jeff Flake always put his rigid extremist ideology first and America last?

And why does this do-nothing, uncaring, wrong-for-America ideologue who does nothing to protect our kids' future keep getting re-elected?

Maybe it's because he hasn't had a serious opponent since gas was $1.29 a gallon.

US Senate Unanimous Against Genetic Discrimination; House Agrees, 420-3, with Uncaring, Elitist, Wrong-for-America Wacko Rep. Jeff Flake Voting "No"

2008-04-27T18:17:00.010-07:00

Great news! On Friday, the U.S. Senate passed S.358, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2007 (GINA), by a unanimous vote. The bill would ban the use of genetic testing for the purposes of making health insurance and employment decisions.

If it becomes law, people learning through genetic testing that they might be susceptible to devastating diseases wouldn't also have to worry about losing their jobs or their health insurance.

The bill, described by Sen. Edward Kennedy as "the first major new civil rights bill of the new century," would bar health insurance companies from using genetic information to set premiums or determine enrollment eligibility. Similarly, employers could not use genetic information in hiring, firing or promotion decisions.

A year ago a similar bill, H.R. 493, backed by the White House,already passed the House in a lopsided 420-3 vote. Guess who was one of three congressmen who voted in favor of genetic discrimination.

That's right: the extremist representative from the Sixth Congressional District of Arizona, out-of-touch, out-of-step Jeff Flake.

Now the House needs to vote again on this issue, possibly as early as this week.

Will wrong-for-America, wrong-for-Arizona uncaring elitist Rep. Jeff Flake once again prove to be the oddball who votes for genetic discrimination?

House staffers have reportedly heard Rep. Flake muttering, "If their genes don't fit, let's treat them like shit," so we can make an educated guess...

Another Bill to Help the Middle Class that Rigid Ideologue Rep. Jeff Flake Opposes: Making College Textbooks More Affordable

2008-04-25T13:28:00.006-07:00

I've been teaching undergraduate classes since 1975 in a variety of settings: state universities like ASU and SUNY and Florida International; community colleges in Mesa, north and south Florida and New York City; a Catholic university and a Jewish college; an art school; technical institutes; private universities large and small. I've also been a faculty member and administrator at two law schools.

There have been numerous changes in higher education since I started teaching a generation ago but two of the biggest have placed great financial burdens on students and their families: the incredible rise in the cost of tuition -- and the outrageous inflation in textbook prices.

As today's New York Times editorial, "That Book Costs How Much?" notes,

College students and their families are rightfully outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles.

That bill is H.R. 3512, the College Textbook Affordability and Transparency Act, introduced last year by the late Rep. Julia Carson (D-IN).

"Students are suffering from sticker shock after going through their colleges' bookstores," Rep. Carson said last year, just a few months before her death from cancer. "This bill addresses many of the concerns we have heard related to this issue, and it assures transparency in textbook pricing. It seeks to bring the market's stakeholders together for the benefit of students."

Rep. Carson's co-sponsors -- Reps. David Wu (D-OR), Steve Kagen (D-WI), Robert Scott (D-VA) and Darlene Hooley (D-OR) -- want this bill to pass not only to help students and their families but as a tribute to a congresswoman who, even as she was dying, cared about middle-class and working-class Americans enough to devote her final days in Congress to this needed legislation.

The contrast with uncaring Rep. Jeff Flake, who opposes this bill because it offends his extremist laissez-faire ideological principles, could not be more stark.

Jeff Flake knows this bill will reduce expenses at least a little for the families of college students. But he doesn't care, because it regulates business.

And in Jeff Flake's hard-hearted view, it's more important that even money-grubbing multinational corporations be unfettered than that families of students at Chandler-Gilbert Community College and Arizona State University and Central Arizona College and Mesa Community College and all over the U.S. save a dime.

Okay, this bill will not solve all the problems of textbook inflation. The Times editorial rightly suggests that colleges make more use of cheaper digital textbooks, which I do when I can; ASU Geography Prof. Ronald Dorn did a study that suggests that students using free online textbooks do just as well in their classes as students with expensive copies from traditional publishers.

But H.R. 3512, endorsed by the American Association of University Professors, is a good start in helping cash-strapped students and their families get relief from exorbitant textbook prices.

As Paradise Valley Community College nursing student Khoi Le told the PVCC Puma Press, high textbook prices cause students to lose study time because they have to work extra hours in order to pay for their textbooks.

Unfortunately, Rep. Jeff Flake will do everything he can to prevent this bill from becoming law.

You don't need an expensive textbook to teach Jeff Flake a lesson this November.

Small-Business-Hating Fanatic Rep. Jeff Flake Votes Against Helping the Little Guy

2008-04-24T19:25:00.007-07:00

Yesterday the House voted overwhelmingly to help small businesses by amending the Small Business Act to improve the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, and for other purposes.

The vote was 368-43, with 149 Republicans voting in favor of giving a helping hand to the little people who run our nation's small businesses.

Rep. Jeff Flake, of course, laissez-faire extremist that he is, violently opposed the bill.

Jeff Flake wants to make sure the government doesn't spend a single penny to help the little guy innovate.

Why should he care? Supposedly guaranteed re-election, Jeff Flake gets the million dollars in his bulging campaign treasury from the richest fat cats and corporations in the country.

Jeff Flake doesn't need help from little guys and he's determined to see that little guys get no help from any government that he's a part of.

Why doesn't his congressional office just put out a press release headlined "Rep. Jeff Flake to Middle Class: Drop Dead"?

Maybe I shouldn't have given the Maker's Mark-drinking, cigar-smoking, smirking right-wing fanatics on Jeff Flake's staff the idea...

Small business owners, make no mistake: Jeff Flake is your enemy. He's proved that time and again with his votes.

Now what will you do with your vote in November?

Nutty Out-of-Step Rep. Jeff Flake Has a Tantrum as House GOP, Dems Join to Pass Coast Guard Reauthorization Act, 395-7

2008-04-24T15:03:00.004-07:00

Once again Arizona's nutty out-of-step Rep. Jeff Flake has decided to throw a tantrum and be one of only seven (7!) weirdo House members to vote against a bill overwhelmingly supported by all Democrats and 96% of Republicans.

Today the House overwhelmingly approved Coast Guard Authorization for 2008. The vote was 395-7.

My uncle Matt was in the Coast Guard and I spent a bunch of summers as a kid sleeping on his Coast Guard hammock. The Coast Guard has consistently gotten the short end of the stick in funding.

What could weirdo Jeff Flake object to in a bill funding the Coast Guard that nearly every one of his conservative Republican colleagues voted in favor of?

Jeff Flake likes to show off that he can vote no just for the sake of voting no. It's childish and part of what makes him such an ineffective Congressman.

Or maybe he just hates the Coast Guard and feels free to express his disdain because thinks he can coast to re-election anyway.

Our district needs to change course and throw Jeff Flake overboard.

House Republicans & Democrats Vote to Protect New Wilderness Areas in the Monongahela National Forest, 368-17, But Anti-Green Rep. Jeff Flake Votes No

2008-04-23T02:45:00.008-07:00

Yesterday 161 House Republicans joined all Democrats voting to pass the Wild Monongahela Act: A National Legacy for West Virginia’s Special Places.

Rep. Jeff Flake, the reddest opposite of green there is, of course voted no. Maybe he hates nature? Hikers? Trees? Creeks?

The Wild Monongahela Act will protect over 47,000 acres of forest as wilderness – existing wilderness Areas as well as protecting 4 new wilderness areas across the forest.

Allen Johnson, founder of Christians for the Mountains, emphasized the religious values of wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest, saying

My organization not only supports wilderness, but has been working for the past year to convey to other faith based organizations and congregations the spiritual value these places hold. Protecting Wilderness, however, is more than about what it can do for humans. Wilderness is space for God's untrammeled creation. Wilderness is a reminder that ‘The Earth is the Lord's, and everything in it belongs to God’ (Psalm 24: I). Wilderness is an ecological yardstick to measure our ability to use the rest of the earth well.

As noted on the Wilderness Society website, wilderness areas are also critical in protecting our native trout streams. “Wilderness is the watershed management most conducive to healing and recovery of trout streams.” stated Don Gasper, retired DNR fisheries biologist and long-time fisheries manager on the Monongahela National Forest. In a poll conducted on wilderness in West Virginia in 2006, 90% of respondents who identified themselves as hunters or anglers supported wilderness for the Seneca Creek area which has been rated as one of America’s top 100 trout streams.

Over 100 West Virginia businesses supported this legislation for more wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest. Nearly all GOP House members joined them. But not Jeff Flake.

Exactly 38 years ago I was at the first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970 and wrote about it here.

Like any Democrat -- like almost all Republicans -- I would have voted to protect West Virginia's wilderness in the House yesterday.

Jeff Flake is an ineffective publicity hound whose contrary-for-the-sake-of-controversy view makes him a terrible Congressman.

For the sake of Arizona's Sixth Congressional District, for the sake of our children and our planet, Jeff Flake must be replaced by a Democrat.

Huffington Post Quotes Democratic Congressional Candidate Grayson on Jeff Flake: "He gets some good media...but he never accomplishes anything."

2008-04-22T18:31:00.008-07:00

No, it's not this Democratic congressional candidate. On the Huffington Post today, Howie Klein wrote a post about whether our candidates should pledge that we're not taking the national health care plan afforded members of Congress until we pass a plan that's available for the public.

He quotes the very capable and exciting candidate in FL-08, Alan Grayson of Orlando:

It's a very interesting question. I think that the problem goes a lot deeper than that. The problem is not only that Congressmen have a good health care plan, but that they are paid over $170,000 a year, with plenty of other perks beyond that. And the problem is not only that Congressmen are treated that way, but also TV news anchors, newspaper editors, judges, generals, and bosses of all kinds. All of these people act in concert to protect their privileges.

In my experience, no group of people ever acts to reduce their own privileges. It's far more likely that you will see corporations adopt "green" environmental policies than you will see corporate executives give up their private jets. It's far more likely that you'll see baseball players submit to weekly drug testing than a salary cap. And it's far more likely that you'll see national health care than you'll see any cut back in health care for members of Congress.

Congressmen also get free haircuts. If we all take a pledge against that, you'll still see plenty of mullets in Tennessee.

Here's an analogy. Jeff Flake of Arizona constantly attacks "earmarks." The result is that his district never gets any earmarks, he never passes any bills of any kind, and his committee assignments are lousy. He gets some good media out of it, but he never accomplishes anything. People think he's a flake. Not just a Flake, but a flake.

I'm not saying that cutting health care for members of Congress is a bad idea. Actually, as you can see, I'd not only be in favor of that, but a lot beyond that.

I agree with Alan Grayson on all of this except I don't approve of making fun of anyone's name. (People with an odd name like his should know better.)

Hey, I may be one of the few uninsured people who's filed to run for Congress and if I somehow were elected, could you blame me for getting health insurance?

Of course, with a House member's salary, I could probably afford to do what I can't now and buy my own coverage.

We all need health insurance. I'm still in favor of Medicare for all Americans.

Rep. Jeff Flake Rakes in the Dough: New FEC Report Shows He's Got More Money Than He Knows What to Do With; No Wonder He Doesn't Care About You

2008-04-19T04:09:00.005-07:00

From the East Valley Tribune's estimable expert on local politics, Paul Giblin:

The latest national campaign finance reports underscore one of the benefits of incumbency – access to money.

In seven of the eight U.S. House races across the state, the incumbents, regardless of their parties, are far ahead of their challengers in collecting campaign contributions. . .

Over in the 6th District, four-term Republican incumbent Jeff Flake is running practically unopposed. He has raised $891,000 and had $975,000 cash on hand, thanks to spill-over from his previous campaign. His top three industry sectors were finance, insurance and real estate at $149,000 combined; miscellaneous businesses at $110,000; and construction interests at $54,000.

His Democratic opponent, author Richard Grayson hasn’t filed campaign finance reports.

The 6th District takes in parts of Mesa and Chandler, plus all of Gilbert, Queen Creek, and Apache Junction.

I didn't bother filing an FEC report because my arthritic fingers hurt from writing all those zeros.

You can check out where Jeff Flake got all that money from. The PAC of Orbital Sciences? New Orleans's Freeport-McMoran Copper & Gold? The United Egg Association?

Whatever, as long as Jeff Flake's coffers are bulging, right?

Uh, since he is, as Paul Giblin notes, running virtually unopposed (I can't speak for the other Democrats, but I'm pretty certain I don't exist), what is Jeff Flake going to do with all that money?

Grayson for Congress AZ-06's Latest Celebrity Endorsements!

2008-04-19T03:44:00.007-07:00

Todd Park Mohr

Sandra Lilia Velásquez

Vusi Mahlasela

Beth Ditto

Grazie molto a tutto!

GrEaT NeWs fOr AZ-06 DeMoCraTs: Chris Gramazio & Rebecca Schneider are Running for Congress!

2008-04-18T05:02:00.006-07:00

As Hubert H. Humphrey would say, I'm as pleased as punch to report that two new Democrats have entered the race to represent Arizona's Sixth Congressional District in Congress.

Rebecca Schneider of Mesa is a librarian at ASU who has the compassion sorely lacking in Rep. Jeff Flake.

Chris Gramazio of Queen Creek is a working man, married father of one (and one on the way), who has the common sense so foreign to Rep. Jeff Flake.

Either of them would be a vast improvement over the Sixth Congressional District's current pathetic excuse for a people's representative.

I started this campaign and blog last year because I was mad that I had no Democrat to vote for in the 2006 U.S. House race.

If either Chris or Rebecca, or both, successfully file their petitions to get on the September 2 Democratic primary ballot, I will gratefully step aside and enthusiastically vote for our party's candidate. If by some chance, neither gets on the ballot, I'll run as a write-in candidate.

Till there's clearly a Democratic candidate in November, I'm going to continue this furshlugginer blog, not trying to promote my own candidacy but explaining why Rep. Jeff Flake needs to be replaced by a progressive Democrat.

Good luck to both Rebecca and Chris. I am really, really happy you are running.

Rep. Jeff Flake Expresses His Disdain for College Students and their Parents as House Votes 383-27 to Save Student Loan Program

2008-04-18T03:01:00.011-07:00

Yesterday, House Republicans and Democrats united to save the imperiled student loan program, voting 383-27 to pass the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, which would allow dependent students to borrow a total of $31,000 through federal programs to pay for undergraduate education, up from $23,000.

Independent students could borrow $57,500, up from $46,000. The bill would also give the Education Department the ability to buy federally guaranteed loans from private lenders, giving banks cash to make new loans.

“This bill is a first step to prevent a crisis before it happens,” Representative Howard (Buck) P. McKeon (R-CA), said in a speech on the House floor. “And its consideration comes not a moment too soon.”

Rep. McKeon, the ranking Republican on the House, had earlier noted the problem in a press release:

The turmoil in our nation’s financial markets has spread to the federal student loan program, creating uncertainty among students and families preparing for the coming school year. Congress has an obligation to act quickly in the face of these challenges to restore market confidence and assist those borrowers grappling with a weakened economy.

The Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act represents the first concrete, legislative steps to address weaknesses in the student loan market. Though it is not the final word on market restoration, this bill will begin to restore investor confidence, address liquidity shortages, and most importantly, provide assistance to student and parent borrowers.

Market instability coupled with the deep funding cuts enacted last year has created a perfect storm for the student loan programs in which investor confidence has been shaken and program viability has been called into question. Although I continue to harbor serious concerns about the reduction in federal support for student loans, I believe the legislation introduced today will send a powerful signal that Congress continues to support a strong, stable student loan program now and into the future.

Thank God for the overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats like Buck McKeon who actually care about the scary situation facing middle-class families who must deal with the incredibly expensive costs of higher education.

As a college teacher and administrator for 33 years, I've seen student seen more than one student cry because she couldn't come back for another term due to lack of money.

But Rep. Jeff Flake couldn't care less about helping families afford college expenses.

That's why he was one of only 27 House members to tell the student loan program to drop dead.

Some of us want to lower or eliminate interest on student loans. Rep. Jeff Flake, on the other hand, simply has no interest in student loans.

The very idea of government helping students and parents offends his extremist laissez-faire ideology.

Jeff Flake flunks a bunch of courses that a congressman should at least get a C in: Compassion, Concern and Common Sense.

Jeff Flake doesn't care about you or your kids.

Jeff Flake knows his own future, and his seat in the corridors of power, is safe.

Maybe next November will be the time to teach him a lesson.

Arizona is Turning Blue, Indie...And Green! Congratulations to Arizona's Green Party, Now an Official Political Party!

2008-04-17T09:04:00.009-07:00

As Arizona voters abandon the failed Republican party in droves, the latest registration figures show independent registration is way up and Democrats are adding to their ranks more than twice as fast as the hobbled GOP is.

But this week there's a new official party in the Cactus State and their platform and ideals are the most progressive of all: the Green Party of Arizona.

As Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune notes,

The Greens achieved official status by filing at least 20,449 voters signatures, as well as affidavits from 10 voters asking that they be recognized as Greens, according to the Secretary of State’s office. The Greens did better than required. They submitted 22,570 signatures on April 8.

As an official party, they’ll have their own primary elections on Sept. 2, and their candidates will be listed on the general election ballots on Nov. 4.

According to the Arizona Green Party’s Web site, it will adhere to the four pillars of Green parties everywhere – grassroots democracy, social justice, non-violence and ecological wisdom.

The Green Party's ten key values are ones most thinking Americans share.

There are local Arizona Green Party groups active in both Maricopa County and in our own city of Mesa.

Maybe we can even get a Green Party candidate in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District. To qualify for the ballot in the Green Party primary on September 2, you need to gather only 121 signatures.

We need all the alternatives to Jeff Flake that we can get.

(All of the artworks above were created by the extremely talented New York artist/designer Bryan Farevaag. You can see more of his work here.)

Out-of-Touch Weirdo Rep. Jeff Flake a Minority of One as House Votes 376-1 to Pass the Plain Language in Government Communications Act

2008-04-15T08:45:00.006-07:00

Okay, let me put this in plain English: Jeff Flake is a nutjob.

How else to explain his being the only member of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote against an innocuous bill titled the Plain Language in Government Communications Act yesterday?

Democrat Carl Hayden, the Arizona legend who holds the record for longest service in Congress, started his first term in the House in 1912, a few days after Arizona became a state. He never forgot the advice of Maryland Democrat Frederick Talbott, who advised the new legislator:

"Son, there are two kinds of Congressmen — show horses and work horses. If you want to get your name in the papers, be a show horse. But if you want to gain the respect of your colleagues, don't do it. Be a work horse."

Carl Hayden remained a work horse in Congress for 56 years until his retirement at the end of his seventh Senate term in 1968. Then a high school senior, I wrote to him that year and I treasure the letter I got back, safely enclosed in a plastic album in the bedroom closet in my Apache Junction home.

Jeff Flake is no Carl Hayden. In a 2006 poll, House staffers of both parties voted Jeff Flake one of the three biggest show horses in Congress.

Jeff Flake seems to confuse being a legislator with being a stunt man or a publicity agent for himself.

How else but publicity-chasing to explain his solo vote, in a chamber of 435 lawmakers of various political beliefs, against a bill "establishing plain language as the standard style for Government documents issued to the public, and for other purposes"?

I guess Jeff Flake prefers obfuscation ("the concealment of meaning in communication, making it confusing and harder to interpret") to putting things plainly.

If I had his pitiful record in Congress, I would too.

Delicate Laissez-Faire Pantywaists Like Rep. Jeff Flake May Faint When They Hear This, But the Free Market Doesn't Work for Prescription Drugs

2008-04-14T06:54:00.008-07:00

Out-of-touch laissez-faire ideologue Rep. Jeff Flake blindly believes the free market is the solution to everything.

So do his clueless friends in the middle-class- hating Goldwater Institute and among the Humvee-driving, Kobe-beef-devouring, Maker's-Mark-swilling Club for Growth fat cats who've sponsored Rep. Flake's political career and now have their eye on him for a higher office than our poor little Sixth Congressional District.

Memo to Jeff and his fancy-pants cronies: The free market fails. Often.

We've seen a lot of that lately, but here's just another example, taken from page one of today's New York Times. It deals with health care, which in every other advanced industrial society is a right and not a privilege -- specifically with the problem of medications:

The health insurance companies that bankroll the campaign coffers of right-wing ideologues like Rep. Jeff Flake (his PAC now has more than a million dollars!) are now asking patients to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for prescriptions that may save their lives.

With the new pricing system, insurers abandoned the traditional arrangement that has patients pay a fixed amount, like $10, $20 or $30 for a prescription, no matter what the drug’s actual cost. Instead, they are charging patients a percentage of the cost of certain high-priced drugs, usually 20 to 33 percent, which can amount to thousands of dollars a month.

The system means that the burden of expensive health care can now affect insured people, too.

No one knows how many patients are affected, but hundreds of drugs are priced this new way. They are used to treat diseases that may be fairly common, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia, hepatitis C and some cancers. There are no cheaper equivalents for these drugs, so patients are forced to pay the price or do without.

Rep. Jeff Flake is interested only in the macroeconomy, not the lives of struggling middle class families, but here's the story of one woman, Robin Steinwand, 53, who has multiple sclerosis:

In January, shortly after Ms. Steinwand renewed her insurance policy with Kaiser Permanente, she went to refill her prescription for Copaxone. She had been insured with Kaiser for 17 years through her husband, a federal employee, and had had no complaints about the coverage.

She had been taking Copaxone since multiple sclerosis was diagnosed in 2000, buying 30 days’ worth of the pills at a time. And even though the drug costs $1,900 a month, Kaiser required only a $20 co-payment.

Not this time. When Ms. Steinwand went to pick up her prescription at a pharmacy near her home in Silver Spring, Md., the pharmacist handed her a bill for $325.

There must be a mistake, Ms. Steinwand said. So the pharmacist checked with her supervisor. The new price was correct. Kaiser’s policy had changed. Now Kaiser was charging 25 percent of the cost of the drug up to a maximum of $325 per prescription. Her annual cost would be $3,900 and unless her insurance changed or the drug dropped in price, it would go on for the rest of her life.

“I charged it, then got into my car and burst into tears,” Ms. Steinwand said.

She needed the drug, she said, because it can slow the course of her disease. And she knew she would just have to pay for it, but it would not be easy.

“It’s a tough economic time for everyone,” she said. “My son will start college in a year and a half. We are asking ourselves, can we afford a vacation? Can we continue to save for retirement and college?”

These are the fears and concerns of middle-class voters that Rep. Jeff Flake's airy-fairy laissez-faire ideology can't deal with.

So he ignores them.

Jeff Flake's lack of concern for the problems of families in his district is stunning. He's more concerned with raking in the campaign contributions he's getting from the same insurance companies now making life difficult for everyday people.

And yet he's still a shoo-in for re-election.

What's wrong with this picture?

Maybe nothing's wrong with it and something's wrong with me.

If I weren't uninsured, I might go to a doctor to find out.

Rep. Jeff Flake Doesn't Get It: We Must Strengthen the Middle Class

2008-04-13T07:29:00.005-07:00

At the NDN blog, Michael Moynihan has a great post on "The Real Strength and Weakness of the American Economy." Here's an excerpt [emphasis mine]:

The source of the recent financial crisis--the inability of sub-prime borrowers to make monthly payments- has its roots in middle class stress. The sub-prime lending boom helped push home ownership from about 65% of American households to about 70%. This last 5%, what might be termed, if flipped around, the 30 to 35% percentile of American households, proved unable to make monthly payments. The conventional wisdom is that they deserve their fate-for taking out no doc loans or choosing to walk away from houses once their equity disappeared. The fact that incomes for the lower four quintiles of Americans have been flat or declining in real terms for years, that sub-prime borrowers typically must pay double digit interest rates in contrast to their well heeled counterparts and that budgets are being devoured by rising health care and gas costs has gone ignored.

Indeed, when one looks at proposed solutions to the housing crisis, conspicuously absent are provisions to strengthen the middle class. The housing bill passed by the Senate yesterday contains billions in funds for home builders and money to demolish housing to reflate prices, but not one provision to raise the after tax incomes of American families.

NDN has highlighted a series of specific ways to rebuild the American middle class from putting a laptop in every backback to strengthening our ideas based economy to reforming health care. Investment in new clean technologies promises to restore American technology leadership while updating environmental standards has the potential to create millions of new green collar jobs. It can be done! During the 1990s, income inequality began to decline thanks to the positive influence of Clinton era policies only to expand as a result of the Bush tax cuts and related measures.

The recent unprecedented activities of the Fed-designed to stem the financial crisis-may indeed be ushering in a new era of Fed activism. While they have an emergency quality, reform of our financial architecture is needed to keep pace with changes in financial markets. However, the Fed's actions and reform at the Fed will not address the problem at the root of the recent crisis-the growing financial stress experienced by America's working families. As Paul Krugman has tirelessly observed but as others have refused to acknowledge, the Gini index of inequality and numerous academic studies unequivocally show the gulf between the wealthiest Americans and every one else increasing at an alarming rate. The next president and Congress must deal with this issue.

Unfortunately, Rep. Jeff Flake -- who, according to The Arizona Republic, appears not to be as frugal with taxpayers' money as he so self-righteously claims -- doesn't get it.

A die-hard laissez-faire ideologue, fanatical Jeff Flake will do everything he can to block programs to strengthen the middle class, all in the name of some pointy-headed intellectual doctrine he's too rigid to give up.

It's sad when someone can't change with the times.

It's even sadder when that someone has power over our lives.

Let's kick Jeff Flake out of Congress and help strengthen the struggling middle class.

In Bed With Fat-Cat Special Interests and In Thrall to an Outdated Ideology, Rep. Jeff Flake Doesn't Care About Struggling Middle Class Families

2008-04-10T13:57:00.012-07:00

American middle class families are struggling and pessimistic.

But uncaring, clueless, don't-worry-be-happy Rep. Jeff Flake simply admonishes them for not having his unshakable faith in laissez faire conservativism and the "magic" of the free market.

A new report by the Pew Research Center indicates:

-- Fewer Americans now than at any time in the past half century believe they're moving forward in life.

-- For decades, middle-income Americans had been making absolute progress while enduring relative decline. But since 1999, they have not made economic gains.

-- For the past two decades middle-income Americans have been spending more and borrowing more.

-- Americans say it has become harder to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

-- Most middle class adults agree with the old saw that the Republican Party favors the rich while the Democratic Party favors the middle class and the poor.

In Jeff Flake's case, the old saw is as sharply accurate as ever. He was one of very few Republicans to vote against the recent economic stimulus package, just as he's voted no on every bill to help struggling middle class Americans with the rising costs of health care, higher education and energy.

You'd think from the way he votes that Rep. Jeff Flake has an absolute disdain for regular everyday people.

Maybe that's because he's a captive of the rich fat cats who bankroll his campaigns and his sponsors, the anti-family Goldwater Institute and the Club for Growth, aptly called "the Club for Greed" by Mike Huckabee.

As David Leonhardt noted in his business column in yesterday's New York Times,

the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?

In the second half of the 20th century, the United States passed the test in a way that arguably no other country ever has. It became, as the cliché goes, the richest country on earth.

Now, though, most families aren’t getting any richer.

“We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

More than anything else — more than even the war in Iraq — the stagnation of the great American middle-class machine explains the glum national mood today. As part of a poll that will be released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center asked people how they had done over the last five years. During that time, remember, the overall economy grew every year, often at a good pace.

Yet most respondents said they had either been stuck in place or fallen backward. Pew says this is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in almost a half century of polling. . .

Real median family income more than doubled from the late 1940s to the late ’70s.

It has risen less than 25 percent in the three decades since. Statistics like these are now so familiar as to be almost numbing. But the larger point is still crucial: the modern American economy distributes the fruits of its growth to a relatively narrow slice of the population. We don’t need another decade of evidence to feel confident about that conclusion. . .

It’s hard to see how the economy will get back on track without some fundamental changes. This, I think, can fairly be considered the No. 1 economic project awaiting the next president.

Fortunately, there is an obvious model waiting to be dusted off. The income gains of the postwar period didn’t just happen. They were the product of a deliberate program to build up the middle class, through the Interstate highway system, the G. I. Bill and other measures.

It’s easy enough to imagine a new version of that program, with job-creating investments in biomedical research, alternative energy, roads, railroads and education.

You can be sure that if he's re-elected this November, Rep. Jeff Flake will be voting no on every aspect of such a program to build up the middle class.

If Jeff Flake is re-elected, he will make sure that unless you're one his millionaire cronies and contributors, you will be worse off in two years -- just as you're worse off than you were eight years ago when Jeff Flake and George Bush first took office.

It's hard to find a greater enemy to American middle class families than Rep. Jeff Flake.

He just doesn't care.

Hearings Show Only That It's Time to Get Out of Iraq

2008-04-10T06:17:00.005-07:00

There's been a lot written about the last two days of testimony before Congress by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, but a letter writer to today's New York Times, Susan Stern of Newton, MA, expressed what I feel most succinctly [emphasis mine]:

How many times have we heard that the latest war strategy is successful? The only difference this time is that, according to Gen. David H. Petraeus, lasting success may take many years to achieve.

We should have never started the Iraq war; it was bungled from the beginning; we have lost our place of leadership in the world; and there is no end in sight.

As bad as it is for Americans, only a small fraction of us bear the brunt of the war. For the Iraqis it is a disaster, hundreds of thousands maimed and killed by coalition bombs and sectarian violence, millions of Iraqi refugees, young jobless men, easy recruits for Al Qaeda.

Some of our senators and representatives say the Iraqis should step up to the plate and reconcile their differences; others say we made the mess and we should stay in Iraq until there is a return to stability. I do not believe that either is possible. I think we should get out of the way as quickly as possible.

As is the case in many regions that have been colonized or invaded by foreign powers, it will take generations to repair the damage we have done. I hope that future presidents will learn from history, Vietnam and Iraq, and will never again try to “liberate” a country from its own dictator.

A member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Jeff Flake said yesterday at the hearings, "I still have a hard time seeing the big picture and what constitutes success."

Success is no longer possible in Iraq, Jeff. We need to get out -- now.

Do-Nothing Rep. Jeff Flake Doesn't Care About the Jobless, But We Need Extended Unemployment Benefits Now!

2008-04-07T17:13:00.007-07:00

The horrendous March jobs report -- over 80,000 jobs lost, far more than economists' estimates -- points up the need for Congress to do what it has almsot always done when the economy is in a severe recession: extend the period laid-off workers can collect unemployment benefits.

I myself collected extended benefits during the long downturn at the start of the Reagan administration, and those extra checks were a lifeline until I was able to find work again.

Rep. Jeff Flake, one of the few members of Congress to vote against last year's stimulus package, will no doubt vote against extended unemployment benefits.

If it were up to Jeff Flake, no one would get any unemployment benefits. They are one of the New Deal programs despised by laissez-faire extremists like our congressman.

Here's part of a good analysis by the Brooking Institution's Rebecca M. Blank discussing why extended unemployment benefits are necessary:

Job losses are not limited to one or two areas of the economy, but are increasingly evident in all almost industries.

Most troublesome, long-term unemployment is higher than it has ever been at this point in the economic cycle. Almost 20 percent of all unemployed persons have been out of work for six months or longer. At the beginning of the last two recessions, that number was closer to 12 percent. This suggests that a substantial fraction of those who lost jobs in 2007 are having serious difficulties finding new jobs.

By my calculations, 9 percent of the labor force is in trouble right now. I’ve added the number of unemployed to those who are involuntarily working in part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work, and included those who say they want to work but have given up looking. . .

The overall unemployment rate among men would be about 8 percent higher if those in prison were out and experiencing the same labor market as others of their race and age. By expanding our prison population, we have reduced the unemployment numbers.

In short, today’s unemployment rate cannot be directly compared to unemployment in earlier periods. If we had a similar population in the labor force today as in earlier periods, our current unemployment rate would much higher.

It’s also important to note that unemployment is always a lagging indicator in an economic slowdown. Unemployment rises during recessions and often peaks after a recession has ended. If, like me, you believe that the U.S. economy is in a recession, then unemployment rates are likely to increase steadily in the months ahead.

Given this, now is the time to enact extended Unemployment Insurance benefits. Unemployment payments typically end after six months. Extended benefits would provide longer-term payments to those still seeking jobs and can assist these workers as they continue to look for work. Waiting for the unemployment rate to rise higher before we take action in the current economic slowdown would be a mistake.

Of course, none of this matters to Rep. Jeff Flake.

Jeff Flake will tell you the free market is just working its magic and that your own situation is not really important.

Jeff Flake doesn't have to pay your bills, put gas in your car, give your kids lunch money, pay your mortgage or rent.

He doesn't care a whit whether you've got a job or not.

Thanks to his gerrymandered Sixth Congressional District, Jeff Flake knows that the only person with a job that he cares about -- himself -- is safe from unemployment.

Really, Jeff, don't you ever think about anyone's job but your own?

More Than Ever, Bankruptcy Reform Needed to Stem Foreclosure Crisis; Beholden to Special Interests, Rep. Jeff Flake and Colleagues Do Nothing to Help

2008-04-05T14:30:00.008-07:00

I posted this two months ago and am reposting it in full because, given our worsening economy -- the horrendous news yesterday that 80,000 jobs disappeared in March confirms that the mortgage/credit/financial crisis is spreading fast through the system, and lots of folks may up shit's creek unless the federal government steps in to help save them from losing their homes -- and drastically lowering the values of the homes of their solvent neighbors.

Arizona is one of the states most affected by the imploding housing disaster. Many homeowners in the East Valley have learned it's possible to be underwater in the desert.

Senate leaders are patting themselves on the back for passing a bipartisan bill that they claim will help solve the current mortgage nightmare. But because Senators of both parties, like Rep. Jeff Flake, are beholden to the banking and construction industries for their campaign funds, they've avoided a real solution. The Washington Post headline got it right: "Housing Accord Puts Builders First; Strapped Homeowners Offered Little Aid":

After working through Tuesday night to flesh out a bipartisan agreement, lawmakers unveiled a bill that rejects the most ambitious plans for aiding distressed homeowners, including a Democratic proposal to permit bankruptcy judges to modify the mortgage on a person's primary residence.

Instead, lawmakers settled on a sharply scaled-back array of measures that would provide $4 billion in grants for cities to buy foreclosed properties, temporary tax breaks worth up to $7,000 for home buyers who purchase foreclosed properties, and new tax deductions for almost every American who owns a home.

This bill will do little to help the estimated 8,000 families a day who are facing foreclosure.

What would help them? Here's my February post:

The subprime mortgage crisis that triggered this recession is spreading.

As a front-page story in today's New York Times indicates, now people with good, or prime, credit histories are falling behind on their payments for home loans, auto loans and credit cards. Many will be facing foreclosure and bankruptcy:

An example of the spreading credit crisis is seen in Don Doyle, a computer engineer at Lockheed Martin who makes a six-figure income and had a stellar credit score in 2004, when he refinanced his home in Northern California to take cash out to pay for his daughter’s college tuition.

Mr. Doyle, 52, is now worried that he will have to file for bankruptcy, because he cannot afford to make the higher variable payments on his mortgage, and he cannot sell his home for more than his $740,000 mortgage.

“The whole plan was to get out” before his rate reset, he said. “Now I am caught. I can’t sell my house. I’m having a hard time refinancing. I’ve avoided bankruptcy for months trying to pull this out of my savings" . . .

“You don’t mind making a $2,000 payment when the house is going up” in value, said Steve Walsh, a mortgage broker in Scottsdale, Arizona, who has seen several clients walk away from their homes because they couldn’t refinance or sell. “When it’s going down, it becomes a weight around your neck, it becomes an anchor.”

Several years ago, Rep. Jeff Flake did the credit card industry's bidding and voted for a bill that made personal bankruptcy much harder and more punishing. To their shame, so did many Democrats (including Sen. Hillary Clinton) because they're as hooked on banking industry contributions and as beholden to them as Jeff Flake is.

On October 26, 1997, I published an op-ed column in The Orlando Sentinel opposing an earlier version of this bad law that Jeff Flake supported, one introduced by another right-wing Republican, Rep. Bill McCollum of Florida:

The legislation is cynically designed to make bankruptcy more costly and
intimidating to already frightened and confused consumers. It would drive up the
cost of bankruptcy for most debtors who can't afford to pay attorney fees to
defend against the complicated motions proposed. It would remove the discretion
of bankruptcy judges to rule on who is abusing the system and have numerous
social costs as a result of increased debt.

Moreover, the bill ignores a major cause of bankruptcy: the lack of accountability by credit-card companies. Indeed, it would encourage them to extend even more credit to people who are shaky risks, in the belief that bankruptcy would no longer permit the discharge of those debts.

Inexpensive and effective bankruptcy relief is more necessary than ever because of the unprecedented amount of consumer debt that creditors have extended by bombing American families with enticements to go further and further into debt on more and more credit cards. It is hypocritical for those same creditors...to turn around and blame these same families when they become unable to pay for all of the debt that was pushed on them.

Similarly, in our present crisis, corrupt lenders played on the naivete of homeowners and homebuyers.

A few changes to the U.S. bankruptcy code could save many troubled homeowners from foreclosure as the recession and credit crisis worsens over the next year.

A proposal in Congress, backed by consumer groups but opposed by the lending industry, would give bankruptcy judges new authority to modify mortgage terms for homeowners deemed to be insolvent. It would let bankruptcy judges extend the life of a home loan, change the interest rate or simply mark down the loan amount. (Currently, judges have authority to modify other types of debt, including money owed on credit cards or auto payments, but not home loans.)

The House and Senate must pass this measure that would allow bankrupt homeowners to modify their mortgages under bankruptcy court protection. It would help more homeowners keep the roof over their heads, as well as be an incentive to lenders to work more diligently to modify loans before they wind up in bankruptcy court.

Other bankruptcy reforms, such as those proposed by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), are also needed, but this bill must pass right away. It could save 600,000 Americans from foreclosure.

Yet Rep. Jeff Flake, with his naive faith in the free market and his distaste for helping struggling middle class families -- not to mention his big campaign contributions from those forces opposed to bankruptcy refrom -- will oppose this bill.

I believe Jeff Flake is as wrong on this as he is on many other issues.

All around the East Valley and the rest of metropolitan Phoenix, signs of the credit crisis are -- literally -- evident. Families are suffering. They need help.

But Rep. Jeff Flake will say they're on their own.

Forty Years After MLK's Assassination, It's Time to End Dominance of Conservatives like Jeff Flake

2008-04-04T10:47:00.006-07:00

I had this post today at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn in my native borough:

I can remember exactly where I was around on the Thursday evening forty years ago when, as a 16-year-old high school senior, I heard the news that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. It was around 7:20 p.m. and I was lying on the floor of my tiny bedroom in our house in Flatlands, my loose-leaf notebook in front of me, half-trying to answer some end-of-chapter questions for my social studies class (History of Latin America) at Midwood, half-watching channel 2’s CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

The day’s main news over, they’d switched to a human interest story about a carpenter in England who’d designed a table he thought could be used at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam. The talks had been stalled for months on the famous “shape of the table,” how to seat all the parties: the U.S., North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong.

Suddenly the filmed report (no videotape back in 1968) stopped in the middle and Walter Cronkite was onscreen, reading wire copy of the breaking news of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis.

As I’d done five years before when, home sick from school, watching Nancy and Grandpa Hughes on “As the World Turns” when it got interrupted by Cronkite in shirtsleeves and wearing unfamiliar clunky black-framed glasses, shakily announcing the shooting in Dallas, I screamed for my parents.

As a kid, I worshipped Martin Luther King Jr. A couple of summers before, working as the cashier in my uncle’s pants store on Fulton Street, I sold pen-and-ink drawings of Dr. King I’d made, amateurish copies of a Time Magazine cover done by Ben Shahn, to some of our customers. (See “The Boy Who Could Draw Dr. King”).

As I write in that piece, King’s assassination devastated me:

I was depressed and too scared to go to school for the next week. There were riots. For some reason I wrote a letter expressing my sorrow and fear and sent it to Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president and the top black official in the city. His chief of staff called my mother while I was out and told her I’d written a beautiful letter. All I can remember about it is that I ended by quoting a corny speech from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (I’d read it in Mrs. Sanjour’s ninth grade English class at Meyer Levin Junior High) that went:

His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world “This was a man!”

This morning I read the rave review of the new Lincoln Center production of one of my favorite musicals, “South Pacific.” The summer before King’s assassination, on July 4, my parents took me and my brothers, who were 12 and 6, to a holiday matinee of Lincoln Center’s last production of “South Pacific.”

We sat in the third row center of the New York State Theatre’s orchestra, close enough that I could see that the star, Florence Henderson as Nellie Forbush, had cellulite on the back of her thighs. For me, every song in that show is a classic, but I mostly remember Henderson’s real shampoo in “Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” Giorgio Tozzi’s operatic “Some Enchanted Evening” and David Doyle’s comic turn as Luther Billis, cavorting in drag in grass skirt with coconut breasts.

But forty years after April 4, 1968, most of all I can recall the young actor playing Lt. Cable’s rendition of what at 16 I thought of as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s corniest song:

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught. . .

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught

When I read the hateful posts on Arizona conservative political blogs like Seeing Red AZ and Sonoran Alliance, demonizing immigrants, Hispanics, Muslims, gays, lesbians and other people the Cactus State's mean-spirited Republican activists see as less than human, Rodgers and Hammerstein's song seems more relevant than corny.

To his credit, Rep. Jeff Flake has not indulged in this kind of bigotry. But for forty years -- ever since Martin Luther King was killed on April 4, 1968, conservatives and their doctrines have dominated the United States. Here's today's E. J. Dionne column from the Washington Post:

From the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966, liberals were triumphant, and what they did changed the world. Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps and federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began to ebb when Lyndon Johnson's Democrats suffered broad losses in the 1966 voting. The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4, 1968.

Liberals themselves share blame for the waning of their movement. Just because right-wing politicians used "law and order" as a code for race did not mean that concern about crime was illegitimate. On the contrary, the country was in the opening stages of a serious crime wave and had good reason to worry about rising violence.

Liberalism itself was cracking up in 1968. Liberals had turned on each other over Johnson's Vietnam policy. The old civil rights coalition splintered as advocates of racial integration warred with defenders of Black Power, a slogan voiced in 1966 by a young activist named Stokely Carmichael.

Martin Luther King left this earth at a moment of gloom, at least about the short term. "I feel this summer will not only be as bad but worse than last time," he said, four days before his death, in a sermon at Washington's National Cathedral. He was referring to the urban riots of the previous summer. And then came the days of chaos that followed his assassination.

"For those who had dreamed the dreams of the New Frontier, and shared the hopes of a Great Society, this was perhaps the darkest moment of the entire decade," wrote Godfrey Hodgson, a British journalist who stands as one of the wisest chroniclers of the 1960s.

Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did?

In "The Liberal Hour," an important new history of the '60s that will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period of liberal sway "demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy."

For decades before the 1960s, conservatism was held in contempt by large swaths of the intellectual and political class. It was one of the great achievements of William F. Buckley Jr., whose death we mourned a few weeks ago [and whose memorial service was this morning at St. Patrick's Cathedral], to insist that respect be paid to the great tradition whose cause he championed.

Now is the moment to put an end to our contempt for liberalism. There was business left unfinished on that fateful day in 1968, and it is time to take it up again.

Amen.

Had he lived, Martin Luther King Jr. might have become the most powerful, dynamic leader in the U.S. since he was not only leading the movement for civil rights but had also moved to take leadership of the struggles of poor people and workers (he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers) and of the struggle against a war in Vietnam that was every bit as misguided and seemingly endless as our current fiasco in Iraq.

It's time for a change.

Fanatical College-Student-Hating Jeff Flake Votes No as House Approves, 411-4, Life Support for Higher Education Act Through the End of This Month

2008-04-03T19:46:00.007-07:00

Rep. Jeff Flake apparently hates college students.

Rep. Jeff Flake apparently hates the parents of college students.

Rep. Jeff Flake apparently hates any federal aid for higher education.

Rep. Jeff Flake is against "throwing money at education."

He's such a laissez-faire fanatic that he doesn't care what struggling families are doing to cope with the high cost of sending their kids to college.

He's such an extreme ideologue that he doesn't want to spend a single penny to help colleges educate American students for the future.

He's so out of step with mainstream American values that he was one of only four members of the House -- the others were fellow fanatics like the aptly named Rep. John Doolittle and extremist Rep. Ron Paul -- to vote against the reauthorizing of the 1965 Higher Education Act just to the end of this month, April 2008.

The law expired in March, and all this was doing was keeping it going temporarily till the end of April.

If Rep. Jeff Flake had his way, no college students would have gotten their student loan disbursements this month.

This was a simple housekeeping measure, supported by all the Democrats, 188 Republicans, President Bush, Education Secretary Spellings and every sane educator in America.

As a recent Republican vice president of the United States once said, bollixing up the slogan of the United Negro College Fund, "What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all."

Has Rep. Jeff Flake finally lost his mind?

Or did he ever have one, at least as far as helping middle class families is concerned, in the first place?

If the voters of Arizona's Sixth Congressional District -- especially college students and their parents -- don't mind Jeff Flake's crazy votes and vote to re-elect him this November, one has to question whether we should be looking for their minds at the local Lost and Found.

Let's find a better Congressman than family-hating Jeff Flake.

Rep. Jeff Flake Votes No (Naturally) as House Overwhelmingly Approves Renewal and Tripling of Successful U.S. Global AIDS Prevention Effort

2008-04-03T10:06:00.009-07:00

Yesterday, thanks to a bipartisan compromise brokered by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard L. Berman (CA-28), the House voted overwhelmingly to expand the landmark U.S. effort to combat HIV/AIDS worldwide that, during the past five years, has saved millions of lives.

The Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Reauthorization Act (H.R. 5501) was approved 306 to 116. It renews the mandate of an initiative proposed by President Bush in January 2003 to combat these three lethal diseases; the legislation authorizing this initiative expires in September. The Foreign Affairs Committee passed a five-year reauthorization with a bipartisan voice vote on February 27.

Heartless cheapskate ideologue Rep. Jeff Flake, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, voted no both times, of course. He cares nothing about the poor and sick of the world, just as he cares nothing about struggling middle-class voters in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District or anywhere else in the U.S.

Rep. Berman noted,

As a direct result of the extraordinarily successful law we passed five years ago, the United States has provided life-saving drugs to nearly 1.5 million men, women and children; supported care for nearly 7 million people, including 2.7 million orphans and vulnerable children; and prevented an estimated 150,000 infant infections around the world.

The new measure contains provisions that move the global HIV/AIDS program beyond the “emergency” phase of implementation under the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and seeks to make the programs that it supports more sustainable over the long term. It dramatically boosts HIV/AIDS programming related to women and girls; strengthens health systems in countries hard-hit by the virus that causes AIDS; authorizes HIV/AIDS programs to include linkages to food and nutrition, education and health care programs; and increases U.S. contributions to the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The legislation overturns the controversial and ineffective 1/3 abstinence-only requirement that applies to global HIV/AIDS prevention funding, which was included in the 2003 law over the objections of the then-Democratic minority. This restriction has subsequently proven to hamper the effectiveness of health care efforts in the field, as documented in recent, independent reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Instead, the Executive Branch will be directed to promote a “balanced” prevention program in all countries where the program operates, including every element of the Abstinence, “Be Faithful,” and Condoms (ABC) approach toward HIV transmission prevention.

As Rep. Berman said upon passage, "Each and every day, another 6000 people become infected with HIV. We have a moral imperative to act, and to act decisively.”

Kudos to President Bush for initiating PEPFAR and kudos to the Republicans and Democrats in the House who supported this legislation, which will save countless lives.

As for Rep. Jeff Flake, I wonder how he sleeps at night.

Unfortunately, knowing he will coast to re-election regardless of his votes in Congress, he probably sleeps a lot better than any of the people with malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS that he gave the back of his hand to yesterday.

Recession-Battered Families Need Food Stamps, But Heartless Laissez-Faire Ideologue Rep. Jeff Flake Says "Let Them Eat Cake"

2008-03-31T04:43:00.010-07:00

The New York Times reports in a front-page story today that as jobs vanish in the recession and prices of bread, milk, and other staples rise drastically, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million this year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.

Of course, Rep. Jeff Flake, who long ago swallowed the Kool-Aid of laissez-faire ideology, is against the food stamp program altogether. He's voted against any increase in benefits and would like to do away with the program. Had his brand of extreme right-wing Republicans had their way, there'd be no food stamps.

Food stamps were a lifeline for me in the summer of 1980 during another time of recession, unemployment and high inflation. I was 29 and living in Rockaway Park, Queens, in a $240-a-month studio ten blocks from my grandparents' apartment. A severe and unexpected illness that spring had left me too sick to work more than part-time, and I was down to my last $25 or so in my savings account.

I never expected to apply for food stamps, but my grandmother convinced me to swallow my pride and apply. The people at the welfare office examined my financial records and employment history and approved me right away. I was able to take the subway to Manhattan and collect a booklet of food stamps that day.

By the next month, the fall semester had begun, and I managed to secure three part-time college teaching jobs that provided me with a steady income, so I didn't need the food stamps anymore. But in August 1980, they allowed me to buy groceries I otherwise couldn't have afforded.

Here in Arizona, the number of food stamp recipients was up 10.9% in the year from December 2006 to December 2007, totalling close to 600,000 people. Recipients must have few assets and incomes below 130% of the poverty line, or less than $27,560 for a family of four. Because they spend a higher share of their incomes on basic needs like food and fuel, poorer families have been the hardest hit by the recent price jumps in groceries and gasoline.

Rep. Jeff Flake voted against the recent bill that would have unfrozen the "standard deduction" for living costs passed by the right-wing Republican Congress of 1996. If that deduction had continued to rise with inflation, the average mother would be receiving an additional $37 a month, according to the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Jeff Flake has no sympathy for families struggling to buy bread. Like Marie Antoinette, he'd tell them to eat brioche like his Maker's Mark-swilling fat-cat friends at the Goldwater Institute and the Club for Growth.

Last September, Rep. Raul Grijalva joined members of the Jewish community and others in Tucson who spent a week living on a typical food stamp budget of $21. They found themselves eating filling, high-calorie food over fresh produce because of cost.

Unlike his Democratic colleague Rep. Grijalva, don't expect our Congressman to try to understand the challenges that those receiving food stamps face.

The only thing Jeff Flake has ever been hungry for is power.

Rep. Jeff Flake to Middle Class Families: Go F--- Yourselves!

2008-03-29T14:21:00.010-07:00

If you think the F word in the title of this post is obscene, I've got something really obscene to show you: Rep. Jeff Flake's voting record on congressional bills designed to help struggling middle class families.

Don't take my word for it. Check out TheMiddleClass.org, a project of the respected Drum Major Institute, which every year produces a scorecard grading members of Congress on middle-class issues.

Their 2007 ratings are in. Jeff Flake's grade: F

And having voted this year against middle class families on such bills as the Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act, the Recovery Rebates and Economic Stimulus for the American People Act, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act, the revised Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act, and the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act, Jeff Flake is well on his way to earning another F in 2008.

At least he's consistent.

To earn his F last year, Jeff Flake voted against these 2007 bills designed to help struggling middle class families, most of which I've blogged about previously:

The FDA Amendments Act, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the College Cost Reduction Act, the Improving Head Start Act, the Shareholder Vote on Executive Compensation Act, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act, the Employee Free Choice Act, the CLEAN Energy Act, the Energy Independence and Security Act, the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act, the Fair Minimum Wage Act and the Temporary Tax Relief Act.

Man, does this guy hate middle class families!

Of course, Jeff Flake's more comfortable protecting the interests of the Maker's Mark-swilling fat cats who have bankrolled his campaign PAC to the tune of a cool million.

On his 2006 Middle Class Scorecard, Jeff Flake earned an F.

On his 2005 Middle Class Scorecard, Jeff Flake earned an F.

On his 2004 Middle Class Scorecard, Jeff Flake earned an F.

On his 2003 Middle Class Scorecard, Jeff Flake earned an F.

Jeff Flake has been the East Valley's congressman since January 2001.

Are you worse off than you were eight years ago when Jeff Flake was first elected to the first of three terms he promised to limit himself to?

Are you worse off than you were six years ago, the last time Jeff Flake faced a Democratic opponent?

Are you worse off because of Jeff Flake's anti-middle class bias? Because of his votes against programs and policies that would help struggling middle class families?

Are you worse off because Jeff Flake has repeatedly voted to f--- regular people like us?

If so, it's time for East Valley voters to give Jeff Flake an F this November.

F as in Former Congressman.

Five Years of War Is Enough; I Join Darcy Burner & Other House Challengers in Support of a Responsible Plan for Iraq

2008-03-19T04:54:00.018-07:00

I was against the Iraq war before it started exactly five years ago tonight.

Working then as director of academic resources at Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center in Fort Lauderdale, I joined the Broward [County] Antiwar Coalition, which had its meetings at Gay & Lesbian Community Center of South Florida, and Peace South Florida, which had its meetings at St. Maurice Roman Catholic Church in Dania Beach.

In January and February 2003, as millions of other Americans did in their towns, I attended rallies at Bayfront Park in Miami and in downtown Fort Lauderdale and I marched with members of Pax Christi and other organizations in downtown Hollywood. I recall being heckled by bar patrons who'd come out to yell at us, "What about 9/11? What about 9/11?"

Unfortunately, even today a lot of people believe our invasion of Iraq had something to do with 9/11. It didn't. But then Sen. McCain said yesterday that Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq, a ridiculous notion to anyone who knows the difference between Sunni and Shi'a.

Because of the stupidity of Sen. McCain and others, five years tonight I found myself at St. Maurice’s chapel. Father Roger had called for an interfaith prayer meeting on the eve of the Iraq war.

The few others attending were from Peace South Florida: our leader Myriam Velez, a Colombian immigrant with a nephew headed for Iraq; an old New York Jewish couple from Century Village at Pembroke Pines; two elderly Quebecois snowbirds who wintered in Hollywood; three high school students with piercings and tattoos; and two others my age whom I’d seen at the futile meetings and marches.

Father Roger distributed prayers from various religions he’d gotten online that afternoon. For the first time since a 1964 performance at Flatbush Park Jewish Center, I got to recite something in a house of worship. That night I asked for peace about ten times in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

* * * * *

According to today's Miami Herald, there's a vigil tonight at St. Maurice to commemorate the last half-decade of shame and death:

Dania Beach vigil: A Stand for Peace will be from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Maurice Catholic Church, 2851 Stirling Rd. Participants are encouraged to wear black. The event is sponsored by St. Maurice Pax Christi and Women in Black.

Here in the Valley, peace groups are protesting this evening outside Sen. McCain's office on North 16th Street. The End the War Coalition meets every Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m. in the basement of Grace Lutheran Church, 1124 North 3rd Street, Phoenix.

As strongly as I opposed the Iraq war before it began, I never foresaw how badly it would turn out and never imagined that I'd still be protesting the war five years later, after nearly 4,000 Americans and countless Iraqis have lost their lives.

This war must end.

At the Take Back America conference currently going on in Washington DC, ten progressive Democratic congressional challengers have endorsed a Responsible Plan for Iraq.

The plan, which calls for no residual troops and a diplomatic “surge”, will be announced formally here at the Take Back America conference in DC at 5:30 Eastern today. Brig. Gen. John Johns has also made a video supporting a Responsible Plan.

These Democratic House candidates are headed by Darcy Burner (WA-08).

According to the Mother Jones blog,

A former Microsoft middle manager who is taking her second run at Congress in Washington State, Burner said that she was fed up with telling voters she wanted to end the war, only to be stymied by the question of how she planned to do so. So she met with Paul Eaton, the retired army general responsible for training the Iraqi military between 2003 and 2004, and developed a comprehensive withdrawal plan.

Other Democratic House challengers who are supporting A Responsible Plan include:

Jared Polis (CO-02)

Donna Edwards (MD-04)

Eric Massa (NY-29)

Chellie Pingree (ME-01)

Tom Perriello (VA-05)

George Fearing (WA-04)

Larry Byrnes (FL-14)

Steve Harrison (NY-13)

Sam Bennett (PA-15)

I've read the plan and ask you to read it too. Nobody's asked me, but I join these candidates in supporting Take Back America's Responsible Plan for Iraq.

The Responsible Plan will:

End U.S. military action in Iraq
Use U.S. diplomatic power
Address humanitarian concerns
Restore our Constitution
Restore our military
Restore independence to the media
Create a new, U.S.-centered energy policy

Sen. McCain says American troops may have to be in Iraq for a hundred years. That is madness.

Stop the insanity.

Five years is enough.

Rep. Jeff Flake's Belief that the Market Is Always Right Is Wrong

2008-03-17T07:30:00.003-07:00

Two dollars a share?

From Paul Krugman's column today in the New York Times:

Between 2002 and 2007, false beliefs in the private sector — the belief that home prices only go up, that financial innovation had made risk go away, that a triple-A rating really meant that an investment was safe — led to an epidemic of bad lending. Meanwhile, false beliefs in the political arena — the belief of Alan Greenspan and his friends in the Bush administration that the market is always right and regulation always a bad thing — led Washington to ignore the warning signs.

The result of all that bad lending was an unholy financial mess that will cause trillions of dollars in losses.

Rep. Jeff Flake not only stood idly by and allowed this mess to happen, he encouraged it.

What does he have to say about the magic of the free market today?

Prostitution-Enabling Jeff Flake Makes It Easy Out There to Be A Pimp; When House Votes to Protect Sex Slaves 405-2, He is One of the 2 Against It

2008-03-15T20:45:00.012-07:00

A lot's been written about the creepy prostitution scandal that ended New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's political life.

But Rep. Jeff Flake has his own problem with prostitution.

In the Sunday New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof's column, "The Pimps' Slaves," details the nauseating horrors that young prostitutes face and then notes,

when the girls are black, poor and prostituted, there is either indifference or an assumption that they are consenting to the abuse.

“It’s about race and class,” said Ms. Lloyd, who is bewildered when she sees Amber alerts for abducted children. Last year she worked with 250 teenage girls who had been prostituted, and not one of them ever merited an Amber alert.

“If we served 250 white girls from upstate middle-class homes, we’d be rolling in money,” she added, “and we’d be changing the law.”

Changing the law is on the agenda. The House of Representatives passed a landmark bill in December, by a vote of 405 to 2, that would make the federal authorities much more involved in cracking down on pimps and trafficking.

But the Justice Department is fighting the House bill, and Senator Joe Biden, who is chairman of a crucial subcommittee, has dawdled on it. A broad coalition of antitrafficking leaders from left and right sent the Justice Department a furious letter scolding it for being soft on pimps.

That may be the only letter in history signed by both Gary Bauer and Gloria Steinem, by executives of the National Organization for Women and the National Association of Evangelicals.

Knowing Jeff Flake's wise-guy reputation for always being one of a handful of House members to vote against an issue Republicans and Democrats with some sanity are almost unanimous in endorsing, and I checked the roll call for last December 4 on the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2007:

Four hundred and five (405) members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to make life tough for sex traffickers.

Just two congressmen voted to enable prostitution and sex slavery.

I'm not surprised, but I'm sorry to say that Jeff Flake was one of them.

Shame.

Listen Up, Jeff Flake: Put Earmarks in Perspective

2008-03-15T03:57:00.003-07:00

Gail Collins, in a New York Times column on President Bush's pathetic response to the financial meltdown, reports on a bumbling speech to Wall Street leaders yesterday, just as the Fed's extraordinary bailout of Bear Stearns was announced (emphasis mine):

“One thing is certain that Congress will do is waste some of your money,” he said. “So I’ve challenged members of Congress to cut the number of cost of earmarks in half.”

Besides being incoherent, this is a perfect sign of an utterly phony speech. Earmarks are one of those easy-to-attack Congressional weaknesses, and in a perfect world, they would not exist. But they cost approximately two cents in the grand budgetary scheme of things. Saying you’re going to fix the economy or balance the budget by cutting out earmarks is like saying you’re going to end global warming by banning bathroom nightlights.

Changing Gears: It's the Recession, Stupid

2008-03-14T09:22:00.004-07:00

Today Paul Krugman writes in his New York Times column:

I used to think that the major issues facing the next president would be how to get out of Iraq and what to do about health care. At this point, however, I suspect that the biggest problem for the next administration will be figuring out which parts of the financial system to bail out, how to pay the cleanup bills and how to explain what it’s doing to an angry public.

I had thought the thrust of my do-it-yourself congressional campaign -- see the blog subtitle on top -- were going to be my advocacy of immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Medicare for all Americans.

But the recesssion and the economic mess we're in has changed everything.

It seems as if everything's going wrong with the American economy all at once. We've got a mortgage/foreclosure/housing crisis, a credit crunch, a liquidity crunch, a sinking dollar... well, it's too depressing to go on.

Earlier I'd proposed increasing federal taxes on gasoline as a means of fostering energy independence. That was before it cost me more to fill up the Cavalier with regular at the Diamond Shamrock on Ironwood and Southern than Congress allocated for one of Jeff Flake's egregious earmarks of the week.

Inflation has hit commodity prices other than oil, as I'm sure you've noticed when you go for groceries at Fry's, Safeway, Alberston's or other supermarkets. Whole Food prices have come to the food aisles of the Wal-Mart SuperCenter on Apache Trail.

And getting a dozen bagels at the Einstein's on Gilbert Road by Baseline or ordering a slice at NYPD Pizza at Santan Village? Flour is rising! Fuhgeddaboudit.

Rep. Jeff Flake was one of a handful of those in Congress who voted against the bipartisan stimulus package. He's called it one of the three worst pieces of legislation of the year.

Admittedly, the stimulus package is too little, too late. But Rep. Flake, as a leading intellectual light of the extreme laissez-faire ideology, has an obligation to tell us what he's going to do to help the struggling families of the East Valley -- and all over this country -- cope with economic hard times.

The Fed's monetary tools don't seem to be working and may even prove counterproductive. Surely fiscal policy and economic regulation and financial system reforms have to play a role in getting us out of this recession.

Arizona's families are crying out for help, Jeff Flake. Is your response just going to be more of the same: tax cuts for the rich, spending cuts for everyone else? Letting the market work its "magic"?

Right now Jeff Flake's mantra seems to be: Don't just do something, stand there.

Rep. Jeff Flake Says U.S. Cuba Policy "Bears No Relation to Reality" and He's Right

2008-03-14T05:03:00.005-07:00

"Every American should go to Cuba." -- Rep. Jeff Flake (on Reason.TV)

As someone whose parents honeymooned in Havana, taking a plane from Miami in June 1949, I couldn't agree more.

When I ran for Congress in Florida advocating an end to the Cuban embargo, both Democrats and Republicans treated me as a pariah for that view. Look what happened in Miami when Barack Obama wrote a Miami Herald article advocating travel to Cuba:

In 1995 when I was a staff attorney at the Center for Governmental Responsibility at the University of Florida law school, our director, the foresighted Jon Mills, former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and future dean of the law school, arranged for a panel discussion on resolving property claims in post-socialist Cuba.

The inclusion of some academics from (gasp) Cuba itself caused an incredible uproar. We were denounced in the state legislature. Our funding was threatened. While the conference did take place, Cuban-American protestors -- including at least one Republican state legislator -- picketed outside.

I could not believe it was 1996 and I was seeing people carry placards saying BETTER RED THAN DEAD. I remembered that from my childhood in the 50s and 60s, but we were now living in a post-Soviet world in which China was one of our biggest trading partners.

I couldn't agree more with Rep. Jeff Flake on Cuba policy even though I'm running against him for other reasons. He's a lonely voice of sanity on this issue. Check out the video.

1970 Teenage New York Politics Pics

2008-03-13T06:09:00.025-07:00

The recent sordid episode involving the soon-to-be-ex-governor of New York (yeah, it's disgusting even to someone whose alleged involvement with Brooklyn hookers the New York Post once detailed) has an upside: the new Democratic governor will be a stand-up guy, David Paterson. I worked for David's father Basil Paterson when I was a teenager in 1970. Basil was then a state senator from Harlem (as his son would be) running for lieutenant governor on a Democratic ticket headed by former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg. Here are two photos of him at a rally at the Junction, the intersection of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues, just a few blocks from Brooklyn College.

In the first picture, Basil is being introduced by Adam Walinsky, our candidate for attorney general, for whom I'd worked the previous year when he was directing the New York office of the Vietnam Moratorium, a very successful nationwide strike and series of rallies for peace on October 15, 1969. The moratorium HQ on lower Fifth Avenue, near my family's pants factory/showroom, was also where I met a girl named Peggy Kerry, whose brother John, then stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was the pilot who flew Adam to Moratorium rallies all over New York State that day.

Later Adam became more conservative and achieved notoriety as the foremost opponent to a gay civil rights bill in New York City. In 1977, some friends I knew from the Gay Activist Alliance told me they were planning a “zap” of Adam’s house in the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale. The Scarsdale “zap” became an important event in New York City gay history, “the night they raided Walinsky’s.” They said Adam’s wife was so upset she pressured him into not talking about gay rights again.

Adam eventually became New York Commissioner of Investigation and lobbied for the Police Corps, a proposal that finally passed Congress in the Clinton administration.

Meanwhile, Basil Paterson later became New York's first African American deputy mayor (under Ed Koch) as well as Secretary of State in Albany. He also was the first black vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee after that less-than-successful 1970 campaign.

Here's a shot I took of our gubernatorial candidate Arthur Goldberg at the world-famous Nathan's in Coney Island:

He was a terrible candidate, actually. He had incredible credentials, having served as President Kennedy's Labor Secretary and President Johnson's UN Ambassador as well as on the Supreme Court, but it was his first time running for office, and Goldberg seemed uncomfortable politicking.

Here Goldberg is at my friend Mark's synagogue near Brooklyn College:

I had been supporting another candidate in the Democratic primary for governor: Howard Samuels, always called "an upstate industrialist" in the papers (he invented Baggies, the original zip-loc plastic bag). Here is Howard Samuels campaigning along Blake Avenue in Brownsville, where my family lived when they came to this country from eastern Europe over a century ago. My great-great-grandparents owned a nearby candy store in the 1920s and 1930s.

Even in 1970, there were still a few pushcarts left in Brownsville, once the most densely populated neighborhood in the world and home of the world's first children's library and Margaret Sanger's first family planning clinic (a bigot, she really wanted birth control among the Jews and Negroes who lived in the neighborhood):

Samuels later became head of OTB, the Off-Track Betting parlors that Mayor Bloomberg is now shutting down. Nicknamed "Howie the Horse," he tried again for governor but lost the 1974 primary to Rep. Hugh Carey from Park Slope, Brooklyn (I used to see him walking his dog at night -- you'd think someone who was not just the governor but a widower raising 14 kids could get someone else to do that), who served two terms as the state's chief executive and is still spry in his 90s.

At the 1972 Democratic national convention in Miami Beach, I was in the Diplomat Hotel on a pay phone to my grandma when I heard Howard Samuels say, "It's Eagleton!" -- meaning that our presidential nominee George McGovern had chosen Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton as his candidate for vice president. Later, of course, Eagleton was dropped from the ticket when it was revealed he'd had shock treatments for depression. Kind of stupid from today's more enlightened point of view, I guess.

Although 1970 was a great year for Democrats nationally, our gubernatorial ticket lost to Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican governor then running for his fourth term. Here's a pic of Rocky I took at Prospect Park on April 25, 1970, the first Earth Day observance. Concern about the environment was pretty new then, and Gov. Rockefeller actually made the statement, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the pollution."

Pollution, not green, was the buzzword then. Leaving the park, I was startled when Gov. Rockefeller was coming up behind me riding a bicycle. (A few years later I was almost run down in Central Park by a bike-riding Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had to yell, "Look out!" to me as she rode by with little John on his bike.)

Rockefeller resigned in the middle of his fourth term and was appointed vice president by Gerald Ford once Ford took over when the disgraced Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. Rocky was dropped from Ford's 1976 ticket in favor of the more conservative Bob Dole, though the vice-president, in campaigning for the Ford-Dole ticket, made headlines by raising his middle finger to a group of hecklers.

The millionaire former governor later made a nice exit from this world during an assignation with a woman not his wife. And though he was one of the richest men in America, apparently he didn't have to pay anything except his life!

The guy who really got me my start in politics was the great Paul O'Dwyer, an Irish immigrant lawyer, fighter for rights, and younger brother of a rather crooked mayor from 1940s New York who ended up fleeing to Mexico. Paul was a New York City Councilman from Manhattan when I was 14 in 1965 and wanted to help his campaign for mayor. He lost the primary but helped introduce me to a bunch of people in Democratic politics in New York.

In 1968, running against the war, he stunned everyone by winning the Democratic nomination to oppose Sen. Jacob Javits, a liberal Republican. Paul lost, and in 1970 he ran again in the Senate primary. Here he is at a peace rally that year in Brooklyn Heights, on Hicks and Montague Streets by the promenade with its spectacular views of the skyline:

Although Paul never lost his brogue, he did lose a lot of elections before serving as New York City Council President, a citywide office then second to the mayoralty, in the late 1970s. At his O'Dwyer and Bernstien law offices in the city (where his son Brian now presides), he let me take the ashes of the great writer Dorothy Parker ("men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses") out of his filing cabinet.

It's a long story how Parker ended up there, but the moral is: never make a meanie like playwright Lillian Hellman executrix of your estate. Thankfully, Parker's remains are now ensconced in more suitable digs, in a dignified place of honor at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore, where I paid my respects in June 1996.

The winning 1970 Democratic Senate primary candidate was Rep. Dick Ottinger of Westchester, in whose campaign I also worked that year. City University of New York, after the Kent State/invasion of Cambodia protests that had shut it down along with nearly every other college in May 1970 (you can see my photos of the Brooklyn College strike here), gave us students two weeks off in late October and early November to campaign for peace candidates.

Here's Ottinger campaigning along Kings Highway, now pretty much a Russian enclave, in Brooklyn. Note the cigarette in his hand!

My friend Mark and I were assigned one day to drive the candidate's wealthy, imperious mother all over Brooklyn to various rallies. Since she was bankrolling her congressman son's campaign, our codename for her was "Moneybags." She was not a barrel of fun.

Liberals and peace activists in New York in 1970 were split between Ottinger and incumbent Republican Sen. Charles Goodell, who'd been appointed after Robert Kennedy's assassination and who became a champion of the antiwar movement in Congress. This split allowed the election of Conservative Party candidate James Buckley, brother of Bill, whose campaign appealed to the hardhat silent majority.

As far as I know, Buckley was the first candidate to use the American flag so conspicuously in all his campaign materials. His slogan, "Isn't it about time we had a Senator?," appealed to those alientated by us dirty Commie fag hippies. Buckley served one term and in 1976 was defeated by Pat Moynihan; he went on to become a respected federal judge in Connecticut.

Here are a couple of pictures from August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women's suffrage. It was a historic day and it opens Gail Collins' recent magisterial history of the American women's movement.

Here's fiery Manhattan Congresswoman Bella Abzug, well known for her floppy hats and her fighting liberalism:

Abzug would never win her primaries for mayor or senator but remained in Congress for a number of years. Next to Speaker Tip O'Neill, she was probably the most well-known member of the House. In the pic above, she's talking to New York City Consumer Affairs Commissioner Elinor Guggenheimer (who the previous year had finished fifth in the primary for city council president, managing to beat only Norman Mailer's ticket-mate, the incomparable writer Jimmy Breslin).

Here's Guggenheimer talking to the press in City Hall Park at the start of the rally. New York Mayor John Lindsay (for whom I'd worked the previous year, in his unsuccessful June Republican primary and for his winning general election campaign as candidate of the Liberal Party) refused to grant a permit for a march up Fifth Avenue at first, and there was a standoff that later got resolved.

To Guggenheimer's right in the photo you may recognize Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique, in which she discussed "the problem with no name" that American women faced, really launched second-wave feminism in this country.

I've worked in a lot of losing campaigns for Congress, most of them for candidates who should have won. Here's another candidate I did canvassing for amid the projects of Williamsburg and Bushwick, a young guy named Pete Eikenberry, running aginst very hawkish, very conservative Rep. John Rooney, a longtime machine pol who represented much of northern Brooklyn.

Here Eikenberrry is campaigning in Brooklyn Heights. It was really hot that day, I recall.

It took a long time before we unlodged Rep. Rooney. I actually did work for another Rooney opponent, a liberal minister named Richard John Neuhaus, who later morphed into one of the intellectual powerhouses of the religious right as a conservative Catholic priest.

In Brooklyn in those days, as now, Democrats rule. But back then we we were split between "reformers" and "regulars" and organized into clubs. At one point I belonged to several Democratic reformer clubs, including the Walt Whitman Independent Democrats. (Whitman, of course, had been the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.) The "independent" clubs were reform, not with the organization of then-boss Meade Esposito.

Here's one more 1970 political pic, of State Senator Leroy Bowser, with the Park Slope Independent Democratic Club, speaking at the same antiwar rally in Brooklyn Heights as I showed in the pictures of Pete Eikenberry and Paul O'Dwyer.

I'm not sure whatever happened to the good state senator. I am glad to know that another good former state senator, and the son of one, will be New York State's chief executive come Monday. Good luck, Gov. Paterson!

So I leave 1970 and my teens for 2008 and my senior years. I know I'm as bad a photographer as I am a political opponent for Jeff Flake, but you can't say I don't have experience in politics.

Here's the kid behind the camera circa '70, if you're interested.

What's a future Gator doing wearing a University of Miami t-shirt? Obviously I had a misspent youth.

Although all my 1970 campaign work may have been for losing candidates, there was always a next time.

Support Glenn Ray for State House in Legislative District 22

2008-03-11T06:24:00.005-07:00

Glenn Ray, who would have made a much better Democratic candidate than I for the Sixth Congressional District seat, has instead decided to run for the Arizona state House of Representatives in Legislative District 22.

As Zelph at AZNetroots notes,

Glenn Ray will kickoff his campaign for the Arizona House on Friday, March 28th at Vine Expressions Wine Bar in Gilbert at 7pm. Glenn is a vet who served in both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom and was awarded a Bronze Star. He has made affordable medical care a centerpiece of his campaign. Glenn has a Master's Degree in Technology Administration and is employed as an Information Technology Project Manager at U.S. Airways.

He has a tough slog in heavily Republican District 22 against Andy Biggs and Eddie Farnsworth.

If you'd like more infomation, contact Megan M. McPherson at megan14L@gmail.com or (602) 430-2248.

Please help Glenn Ray in his campaign for the Arizona House.

I Support an End to Earmarks

2008-03-10T17:03:00.008-07:00

Although I've often criticized Rep. Jeff Flake for being obsessed with earmarks to the point of caring more about the relatively small sums expended for individual projects that probably are worthwhile and deserve government funding at some level, I do realize the process is corrupt.

Just as Rep. Flake is wasting some of his time and energy with his crusade against earmarks, I recognize that other members of Congress waste a great deal of time and energy in procuring them -- rather than concentrate on the important issues of the day and the needs of the American people.

So I am glad to hear, that according to Robert Novak's column today in the Chicago Sun-Times that Democrats are moving toward getting rid of earmarks. As Novak notes,

The congressional Republican establishment's charade, pretending to crack down on spending earmarks while actually preserving their uncontrolled addiction to pork, faces embarrassment this week when the Democratic-designed budget is brought to the Senate floor. . .

Sen. Jim DeMint, a first-term reform Republican from South Carolina, will propose a no-loopholes one-year moratorium on earmarks as a budget amendment. [Sen. John] McCain has announced his support for the DeMint amendment and will co-sponsor it.

I do support an end to earmarks. Let's get rid of them once and for all.

Novak ends with a quote from Jeff Flake (called "a darling of the conservative press in Washington" by the New York Times Opinionator):

The GOP may be falling behind the Democrats, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moving toward a moratorium. In the Senate, courageous freshman Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri supports the DeMint amendment. She could be joined by her choice for president, Barack Obama. These developments encouraged Flake to say: "If Democrats actually move ahead with an earmark moratorium before Republicans, the Democrats will get the credit for eliminating earmarks, and, frankly, they'll deserve it."

Rep. Jeff Flake (Hater of Earmarks, Not Earwigs), Meet the Beetles! (Asian Long-Horned, Not Liverpudlian Long-Haired)

2008-03-09T00:58:00.012-07:00

So here's Rep. Jeff Flake's latest self-promoting Friday "egregious earmark of the week" by-the-numbers press release:

Mesa, Arizona, Mar 7 - Republican Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents Arizona’s Sixth District, today highlighted a pork project contained in the Omnibus Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008.

This week’s egregious earmark: $351,000 for the Asian long-horned beetle in Illinois.

“This earmark really bugs me,” said Flake.

Yeah, I can just picture him sitting at his desk saying that. Let's just say I'm not the only fiction writer running for this congressional seat, just the only one who can write dialogue with some verisimilitude.

So here's my long-winded response (but I'll end with a pun, too):

Leaving buggery aside, Congressman Flake, the $351,000 wasn't for the Asian long-horned beetle, it was against it.

The money was for saving Chicago's beautiful, hardworking trees from destruction. (So you voted against this before you knew who it was for?)

The Asian long-horned beetle was believed to have arrived in New York City in the 1980s from wood packing material and the first infestation was found on a Saturday in 1995 within walking distance of my pied-a-terre in my native Brooklyn, in the Greenpoint neighborhood, better known for its "Mowimy po polsku" store signs, kielbasa and hipster bands with names like Vesper, Grizzly and The Ghost of Anwar Sadat.

The mission of these little critters (the Asian long-horned beetles, not the hipster bands) was to make sure A Tree Doesn't Grow in Brooklyn. Explains Wikipedia:

An invasive species in the United States, the larvae of this beetle have a voracious appetite for wood. It is especially damaging to maple trees: Norway, sugar, silver, and red maple are among its preferred foods. The species also feeds on horse-chestnut, poplar, willow, and elm. Females of this species chew into the bark and lay eggs. When the eggs hatch, the immature beetles, which look like big white worms, chew their way farther into the tree. When they mature, the full-grown beetles chew their way out of the tree. The beetle life cycle leaves trees riddled with holes, oozing sap. The USDA believes this beetle can probably survive and reproduce in most sections of the country where suitable host trees exist.

Over 6,000 infested trees have been cut down and destroyed to eradicate ALB from New York and over 1,550 trees in Chicago and almost 23,000 trees in New Jersey. Infested trees continue to be discovered.

The US Federal government is trying to eradicate this species primarily for two reasons:

1. If it becomes established it could significantly impact natural forests and urban environment.

2. Due to the current limited infestation size, it is believed that eradication efforts can be successful.

The steps that have been taken to eliminate the Asian long-horned beetle include:
Quarantines. Quarantines have been established around infested areas to prevent accidental spread of ALB by people.

Infested trees cut, chipped and burned. All infested trees are being removed, chipped in place, and the chips are being burned. The stumps of infested trees are ground to below the soil level. All tree removal is done by certified tree care personnel to ensure that the process is completed properly.

Insecticide treatments. Research is underway to determine the effectiveness of certain insecticides such as imidacloprid against ALB. Insecticidal treatments have begun in New York and Chicago in hopes of preventing and containing infestations. Chicago's program of imidacloprid treatments for healthy trees of potential host species within a one-eighth to one-half mile radius of infested trees successfully removed Illinois from quarantine in August 2006.

Extensive surveys. All host trees on public and private property located within an established distance from an infested area are surveyed by trained personnel. Infested areas are re-surveyed at least once per year for 3-5 years after the last beetle or infested tree is found.

I love the Windy City and its suburbs -- well, in the summer anyway. Along with other writers, artists and composers, I spent June 1997 and June 2001 at the Ragdale Foundation in suburban Lake Forest and got to appreciate the summer charms of Chicagoland. Among them are the leafy trees everywhere from the Loop to Skokie to Oak Park -- and I want to prevent more maples from being done in by the voracious beetles.

Illinois has been winning the war against this pest -- even kids have been enlisted into the Beetle Busters program, established two years ago to teach Chicago public school students how to recognize the Asian long-horned beetle, and whom to contact if they discover one. And this war is a lot cheaper than the debacle in Iraq, our enemy is more well-defined, and victory is in sight if it's funded right.

We've got to save the trees of Illinois and every state, and to me, the money allocated by Congress -- a drop in the bucket of the oceanic federal deficit -- will be worth it if we can rid America of this destructive pest.

Speaking of destructive pests...

It's a tossup whether Jeff Flake cares less about maple trees or the struggling middle class families in his district, but either way he ends up looking like a sap.

His Democratic Opponent (Um, That Would Be Me) Asks Rep. Jeff Flake Three Questions

2008-03-08T18:58:00.003-07:00

I know it is unlikely I will ever get the chance to debate Rep. Jeff Flake in our congressional race, but if I were able to ask him just three questions, here is what they would be:

1) Congressman Flake, do you believe that health care in America is a right or a privilege?

2) Do you believe the war in Iraq, which you supported, was a mistake, and if you think it was a mistake -- I'm thinking now of John Kerry's line about how you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake -- how soon can we bring our overburdened troops home?

3) Congressman Flake, you consistently vote against aid for health care, education, the environment, job creation and economic assistance like the the recent bipartisan stimulus package designed to mitigate the effects of the current recession.

Apart from the laissez-faire conservative Republican mantra of cutting taxes and regulation on business, Congressman Flake, what role does Congress have in funding programs to help the working poor and struggling middle class families?

Although I know he can cruise to re-election paying no absolutely no attention to me, I honestly would love to hear Jeff Flake's answers to these questions.

Rep. Jeff Flake Can Be Funny

2008-03-06T18:42:00.007-07:00

Okay, I've criticized my opponent's bad puns in his "egregious earmark of the week" press releases (who will be the target tomorrow?) but I have to be fair. Someone directed to me a very funny remark by Rep. Jeff Flake from this post by Jason Allen at Progressive America Times from a year and a month ago, when House Republicans were trying to deal with losing their majority:

House Republicans Suffer From Airplane Envy

This is the most ridiculous story that has come out of Washington this year. The conservative Washington Times published an article a week ago, and the Right Wing Smear Machine has picked it up and run with it, facts be damned. The Washington Times article claimed that Nancy Pelosi was demanding access to military flights to shuttle her and her supporters, staff, and family members around the country. The fact that the article is false hasn't stopped Republican talk show hosts, bloggers, or FOX News from reporting it.

This demand is not being made by Pelosi. It was made by the House Sergeant At Arms. A House Sergeant At Arms voted into that position by the Republican Congress back in 1995, and reelected to that position with each new Republican Congress since then. The Sergeant At Arms regrets "that an issue that is exclusively considered and decided in a security context has evolved into a political issue." Bill Livingood felt he should "request an aircraft that is capable of making non-stop flights for security purposes, unless such an aircraft is unavailable. This will ensure communications capabilities and also enhance security."

Nancy Pelosi has said she has no problem with flying on commercial flights. In fact, during her first flight to her district when she was informed that her plane wouldn't make it, she said "Well, that's fine, I'm going commercial." It is only at the urging of the Sergeant At Arms that she has attempted to keep Republican Dennis Hastert's habit of private military transport alive.

Even the White House has confirmed that the discussions over this issue have not had any direct involvement from the Speaker's office. Tony Snow said that "This is a silly story," and has apparently sided with Nancy Pelosi on this issue.

The support of the White House has not been enough to silence many critics in the Republican Party. Because her plane needs to travel to the other side of the country, as opposed to Illinois, it is logical to assume that it would be larger than Hastert's. That upsets some Republicans. Republican Eric Cantor of Virginia said that "I hardly think these amenities help with security, and I personally would describe them as inappropriate and unnecessary extravagances." The third highest ranked Republican in the House of Representatives, Adam Putnam of Florida, called it ""an extravagance of power that the taxpayers won't swallow."

As evidence of the Republican minority's maturity, an amendment was proposed to an existing bill suggesting that America should decrease its demand for fuel for jets "such as passenger planes with 42 business class seats capable of transcontinental flights."

Representative Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, recognizes the ridiculousness of this situation and said that "Next week, we are going to steal their mascot and short-sheet their beds."

That is funny.

* * *

Rep. Mo Udall, in whose 1976 presidential campaign I worked, was a funny Democrat who represented Arizona in the House for many wonderful years. Here's a story he once told at a roast for then-House Speaker Tip O'Neill (D-MA):

Tip O'Neill is sometimes accused of being too partisan in the carrying out of his duties, to which Tip has replied, "You can never be too partisan."

That kind of partisanship was encountered by President Teddy Roosevelt in a 1904 whistlestop speech. His passionate oration was repeatedly interrupted by a man of obvious Irish extraction who kept shouting, "I'm a Dimmycrat, I'm a Dimmycrat." The exasperated President departed from his speech and asked the heckler why he was a Democrat. "Because me grandfather was a Dimmycrat, me father was a Dimmycrat, and I'm a Dimmycrat," the Irishman replied.

With no small amount of sarcasm, Teddy responded, "My friend, suppose your grandfather had been a jackass, and your father had been a jackass? What would you be?"

Instantly the Irishman replied, "A Republican."

If You Expected Cheapskate Ideologue Jeff Flake to Help the Mentally Ill Get Treatment, You Need to See a Psychiatrist

2008-03-06T05:27:00.013-07:00

In the fall of 2000, I was taking grad classes in journalism and teaching first-year English composition at ASU and I was not doing well.

I would wake up at 2 a.m. and not be able to go back to sleep. I worried about everything and felt very nervous. I began having panic attacks when I'd drive on the 202 or while shopping for groceries at Albertson's on Baseline. Sometimes my heart started beating so fast that I was sure I was having a heart attack.

One Thursday morning at 5 a.m., after being unable to sleep for days, instead of walking up Dobson Road to the 7:30 a.m. class I taught at Mesa Community College, I crossed the street to walk into the emergency room at Desert Sam Hospital instead.

A week later, after a long session with a nurse-practitioner at the ASU health clinic, she diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder. "I think you've had this your whole life," she said.

She was right. As I wrote in a 2003 autobiographical essay in the reference book Contemporary Authors:

When I was 15, I began having severe panic attacks daily. I would get nauseated, my heart would beat wildly, I’d sweat and shake and feel like the world was ending. The term “panic disorder” was not then known, but I realized that my problem was psychological, so I asked my parents if I could see a psychiatrist.

In the late 1960s, anxiety disorders and depression were rarely treated with medication; instead, psychoanalysis was the norm. Although I learned a lot about myself in sessions with Dr. Lippman, my panic attacks kept getting worse and more frequent. I soon began avoiding going out in public and skipped events like family weddings and my own high school graduation...

I wasn’t well enough to go to college. I then entered a period where I gradually cut myself from the world. I stopped taking phone calls from friends, as I was too ashamed to tell anyone about my panic disorder. My agoraphobia got more severe as winter came and I rarely left the house.

My panic attacks reached a crescendo in February 1969, and Mom insisted that my psychiatrist prescribe some medication. Although at the time it seemed a coincidence, Triavil – a combination of a tricyclic antidepressant and a tranquilizer – slowly helped relieve the anxiety. As spring approached, I started going out little by little. I still had panic attacks, but every day I would force myself to ride buses and then subways, seeing how far I could go before anxiety overwhelmed me. Eventually I could go all the way to Manhattan.

By summer, soon after my 18th birthday – when I had to register for the draft – I was well enough to start college.

So I am one of those people whose life was saved by proper mental health care -- not once, but twice.

In 2000-2001 I got through my severe bout of anxiety with the help of sessions with a wonderful psychologist in Tempe and her husband, a North Phoenix internist who prescribed medication that eventually helped me recover.

But the number of my treatments were severely limited by my HMO, United HealthCare. In January 2001, I suffered a setback after I was mugged and beaten outside my west Mesa apartment by two teenagers who'd followed me from the parking lot one night after I'd come back from class at ASU. I suppose getting an additional diagnosis of acute stress disorder was a blessing, as it allowed me four extra sessions with my therapist.

Later, though, after my HMO would no longer pay for therapy, she was kind enough to continue to treat me for my co-payment even though she was not reimbursed. I will forever be grateful to this dedicated and kind psychologist. I had a rough year, but at the end of it, I was well enough to accept a position as a senior administrator at a South Florida law school.

* * *

Yesterday, after more than a decade of struggle, the House on Wednesday passed a bill requiring most group health plans to provide more generous coverage for treatment of mental illnesses, comparable to what they provide for physical illnesses.

The vote was 268 to 148, with 47 Republicans joining 221 Democrats in support of the measure.

Needless to say, Rep. Jeff Flake voted no.

Under the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act, H.R. 1424, when employers provide mental health or substance abuse benefits to employees, the benefits must be comparable to any medical and surgical insurance coverage. This would apply to all mental illnesses and disorders covered by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan, the standard health insurance for all federal workers.

Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA), a psychologist, said:

As a psychologist, what are we supposed to tell a person suffering from depression or a parent of a bipolar child who does not have coverage? I’ve worked in the system for 25 years, I know how it works. People with mental illness are either going to be treated by a trained professional or treated elsewhere. Do we send those without coverage to the unemployment system, or the welfare system? Do we send them to the emergency room for treatment, or watch them end up in the criminal justice system? If we really want to save money, let’s look at employers such as PPG, AT&T, IBM, and Pepsi that have saved billions of dollars in indirect costs by offering mental health coverage. Everyone who needs it should have the opportunity to get mental health treatment.

A person suffering from anorexia or bulimia may enter the hospital because of dehydration or malnutrition. When they get out their insurance may not cover sufficient mental health treatment and they end up being prescribed medication by a primary care physician. More than 75 percent of psychotropic drugs are prescribed by someone other than a psychiatrist, someone who does not have the training in mental health treatment. But that is the only choice in the current system. If we leave the system the way it is we will see more wasted money, more deaths, and more people mistreated or lacking treatment. This is not just a compassionate measure, but a cost saving measure. It is time to do the right thing and get people with mental illness the care they need.

As this Republican congressman has said, this was a cost-saving measure as well as a compassionate one.

Why didn't Rep. Jeff Flake vote for this cost-saving measure?

I've looked through the DSM, and there's no diagnosis called Chronic Laissez-Faire Ideology Disorder.

Maybe Jeff Flake simply doesn't care about people.

What Is Rep. Jeff Flake Doing to End Our $2-Trillion Nightmare War?

2008-03-05T17:53:00.011-07:00

From Monday's Bob Herbert column in The New York Times:

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more...On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers...

Mr. Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first gulf war, which lasted just a month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.

“Imagine then,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “what a war — that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years — will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems”...

Mr. Stiglitz and Mr. Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.

Mr. Hormats told the committee:

“Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war. Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good ... And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War.”

Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”

Two trillion dollars? Maybe even three trillion? What was Congress thinking of?

Of course I have to give Rep. Jeff Flake credit for being a fiscal watchdog. Here's his latest Friday press release, which explains how we can pay for the Iraq war -- at least for about fourteen seconds:

Mesa, Arizona, Feb 29 - Republican Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents Arizona’s Sixth District, today highlighted a pork project contained in the Omnibus Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008.

This week’s egregious earmark: $98,000 for restoration of the 1883 Lighthouse at Sleepy Hollow, New York.

“Earmarks make Members of Congress lose their heads,” said Flake.

So the Richard Grayson for Congress Campaign May Not Yet Have Momentum. But We Do Have...

2008-03-01T20:44:00.003-07:00

Mementos

Mentos

Mnemonic

Um... Net Mom?

Join the Online Rally for Healthy Families and Tell Rep. Jeff Flake to Support the Healthy Families Act

2008-02-29T03:33:00.009-07:00

Last evening, at one of the colleges where I teach, I posted a note on a classroom saying that an instructor was sick and class would be cancelled.

My friend and colleague had called me the previous evening. I'd seen her Tuesday evening at school and she really seemed ill; even then, she was running a temperature of 101 but had still come to work. The next day she went to the doctor who told her she had bronchitis and might get pneumonia if she didn't get some rest.

Having had pneumonia after a bout with bronchitis three years ago -- it was the sickest I'd ever been in my life, but I'd felt compelled to work long days at my law school job until I eventually collapsed -- I warned my friend to rest.

The reason I posted the notice, the reason this college instructor called me, is that we part-time instructors do not have to be paid if we are out sick. My friend called me to avoid letting the school know about her absence. She needs every penny of her income to pay her bills.

Have you been sick lately?

Did you go to work anyway?

Almost half of American workers in the private sector — and 79% of low-income workers — don't have a single paid sick day.

And 94 million workers don’t have paid sick days to care for a sick family member. That's not compassionate, it's not family-friendly, and it's just not right.

Today, Leap Day, February 29th, there's a special online event hosted by the National Partnership and the Healthy Families Act coalition — the Online Rally for Healthy Families.

You can join the rally by visiting http://www.everyonegetssick.org/ — and voice your support for paid sick days by sharing your story, uploading a photo, taking action, and more.

The Online Rally for Healthy Families features video statements from elected officials, women’s leaders, union members, workers and students alike. It will also showcase stories and photos submitted from people across the country, like you, who support paid sick days.

The Healthy Families Act is proposed federal legislation that will guarantee workers up to seven paid sick days a year to recover from an illness or care for a sick family member.

As Healthy Families Act co-sponsor Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT) said,

Paid sick leave is a basic right of people in the workplace and the price paid for denying employees paid sick leave is felt by all of us. The parent working in the health care or food industry who goes to work sick and infects the entire office … the working mothers’ fear that their colleagues will not understand when they miss work – that their job evaluation will suffer as a result of their absence – and you start to understand what this legislation could mean to them – peace of mind. We have all experienced the strain of trying to balance family and work and the Healthy Families Act will give millions of people – middle class families – who are working hard to make ends meet a small modicum of relief.

Will Rep. Jeff Flake support the Healthy Families Act?

No. He will vote against it. His extremist laissez-faire ideology tells him government should not interfere with the workings of business.

But if you support the Healthy Families Act, please let Rep. Flake know.

And if you support it, you can also support my campaign.

Everyone gets sick, but not everyone has time to get better.

If I were elected to Congress, I would try to help people get better and take care of their families.

William F. Buckley Jr., RIP

2008-02-28T11:46:00.008-07:00

Seeing Red AZ, like many newspapers and websites, mourns the death of William F. Buckley Jr., who was rightfully (no pun intended) beloved by many conservatives. The Seeing Red AZ post stirred me to write this comment, which I reprint here:

Most liberals liked Bill Buckley, too. As a teenager in 1965, I worked in the campaign of Republican-Liberal candidate for New York mayor, Rep. John Lindsay, but Buckley’s campaign on the Conservative Party line was a delight to watch. His erudition and wit shone through everything he did, as did his joie de vivre.

As someone wrote today, he may have hated the things liberals believed in, but Buckley never hated liberals, many of whom were his close friends.

He harkens back to an era of elevated public discourse when we did not see the crass and often vulgar insults that pass for political discourse on the airwaves and online.

Buckley was a terrific writer on any subject, and as an author, I’m grateful to his inclusion of me in his Buckley-Little Catalogue project back in the 1980s. I met him once at an Authors Guild event at the Lotos Club in Manhattan and he was as charming as I expected.

I had told him the story of my first HIV test. At that time, in the early 1980s, Buckley was calling for mandatory tattooing and confinement of HIV-positive people. When my doctor told me I should be tested, he also advised me to sign the form with a pseudonym so that no one could track me down in case of such an action as Buckley had recommended — easy to believe in a time of hysteria like 1986.

So I signed my AIDS test consent form “William F. Buckley Jr.”

Buckley laughed when I told him this and said he was happy to find out he tested negative.

* * *
When I was 16, I got Buckley's autograph on the above Time cover caricature by David Levine from November 3, 1967. With a very-fine-point red pen, he signed "Wm. F. Buckley Jr." in a small space on his shirt collar.

And in this campaign I can only echo Buckley's words from his 1965 campaign when asked what he would do if he won the election:
If I do win election to Congress this November, I'll demand a recount.

Rep. Jeff Flake's Report Card: He Gets an F in Helping Kids

2008-02-28T06:33:00.004-07:00

The estimable blogger Random Musings today has a post noting that the Children's Defense Fund Action Council has released its 2007 Congressional scorecard. The scoring was based on 10 key votes each in the House and Senate (the list of votes was slightly different for each chamber.)

As Random Musings notes, Arizona's Congressional delegation got worse votes than the delegations from all but five states:

As could be expected, the Arizona delegation split along party lines -

In the House, Democrats Ed Pastor and Raul Grijalva each scored 100%, Gabrielle Giffords 80%, and Harry Mitchell 60%.

On the Republican side, Rick Renzi scored 60%, Trent Franks and John Shadegg scored 10%, and the ever-reliable Jeff Flake earned a big ol' goose egg (he's like Mikey from the Life cereal commercial - he hates *everything.*)

Jeff Flake voted against

-- the first increase in the minimum wage in a decade, bringing it from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour by 2009, which is expected to benefit the parents of approximately 6.4 million children under 18.

-- access and quality improvements in Head Start to help more young children start school ready to succeed.

-- additional funds for student loans to help many more youth attend college.

On helping American kids, as I've noted repeatedly, Rep. Jeff Flake is a big zero.

I think I could do a lot, lot better.

Rep. Jeff Flake Is Wrong to Support Tax Breaks for Big Oil

2008-02-28T05:49:00.008-07:00

Yesterday the House passed the Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008, an $18 billion tax package that would rescind a tax break for the five biggest oil companies and use the revenue to boost incentives and encourage the production of energy for solar, wind and other renewable sources and promote energy conservation and efficiency.

Wanting to keep the needless tax breaks for Big Oil, Rep. Jeff Flake voted against it.

Seeing no reason why the oil industry can't pay an additional $1.8 billion a year in taxes over the next 10 years, I would have voted for it.

As Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said, "We don't think it's asking too much to ask them to assist in a partnership to help find out whether there's a better way to meet our energy needs."

The rescinded tax breaks would amount to less than 2 percent of the profits of the five biggest oil companies. Even if the companies were to pass along that entire cost to gasoline consumers, it would amount to about a penny a gallon.

I agree with Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-IL): "Americans are being asked to pay twice -- once at the gasoline pump and then through tax subsidies to the oil companies."

Jeff Flake is wrong to do Big Oil's bidding.

Why Does Rep. Jeff Flake Hate American Mothers?

2008-02-26T05:27:00.013-07:00

It's rare that a politician comes out foursquare against motherhood as Rep. Jeff Flake has.

Man, this guy knows he's got a Congressional seat so safe he can say anything. Maybe after Senator McCain's mother is finished washing out Chuck Norris's mouth with soap, she can go over to Jeff Flake's office.

In his silly little "egregious earmark of the week" last week, Rep. Flake's target was

$123,000 for the International Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia.

“This is the mother of all pork projects,” said Flake.

Okay, this is the Congressman's funny little schtick and he's schticking to it. We can look forward to these Friday press releases, probably put together by some bushy-eyed twentysomething right-wing Capitol Hill staffer, for as long as Rep. Flake remains in the House.

Um, $123,000? Given the huge federal budget, our deficit, our real problems with spending (entitlement costs, interest on the federal debt, and huge defense outlays for an expensive, unnecessary war), this amount is akin to a penny dropped on the floor of Sky Harbor's Terminal 4. You think anybody's even gonna bother to pick it up?

I did some investigating. I actually know Grafton, West Virginia, which was on the way to Parkersburg, where my Aunt Shirley and Uncle Herbert Shapiro lived. It's a nice little town that had once been an important railroad hub and Gen. McClellan's HQ during the Civil War.

Grafton suffered greatly when the last passenger train pulled out of the station in 1971, but in recent years this spunky little town has taken advantage of some its best features, such as renovation of the amazing architecture from Grafton's 19th-century heyday. The town's economy is being revived as it becomes a tourist attraction.

Crucial to that economic revival is Grafton's treasure, the International Mother’s Day Shrine at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, built in 1873. The shrine's Community Education Institute sponsors and supports programs that provide social, cultural, and health-related activites free of charge to a diverse and underserved community audience.

For example in January, in this nearly all-white community, the Shrine's Institute sponsored a lecture titled "Kross Kolor Kommunication" by Grammy-winning musician Daryl Davis. One of the attendees was local writer MK Stover:

Juggling my own three children plus a few of their friends, a basketball game, pre-teen social visits, an emergency haircut (gum), shoe shopping, and general teenage surliness, I managed to make it to the Shrine just 20 minutes late. I’m glad I went.

Mr. Davis’ presence on the stage of a lecture hall is as powerful as his typical musical performance. A part of his power is the simple fact that he is a clear and coherent speaker, but his skill does not stop there. He ties facts and seemingly trivial elements together to make a strong and commanding point; there are no dead ends, loose tangents, or insignificant details: an accomplished storyteller could learn a thing or two from him. If his speaking style isn’t enough to mesmerize, add in his (potentially touchy) subject material and it’s a sure recipe for a spellbinding experience.

His sizeable audience sat in rapt attention as he spoke –unflinchingly- about a subject that is obviously close to his soul. Essentially, he said, it’s ignorance that breeds fear; fear breeds hatred; hatred breeds destruction. Education and respect –especially respect- is a cure for many things, including hatred based on something as superficial as skin color. It’s hard to argue with a black man who has intentionally and repeatedly made contact with high ranking members of the Klu Klux Klan, even debating and befriending numerous white supremacists and attending Klan rallies.

Davis’ stories, eloquently interspersed and supported with video clips, exemplify human kindness. He has reached across chasms of hate and threats to offer help in ways that most of us would never dream. He helped a Klanswoman and her children visit their imprisoned husband and father, an Imperial Wizard, half a continent away. This family has since renounced the Klan and deeded their Klan robes and hoods to Mr. Davis as a testament to his compassion and belief in the equality of each member of the human race...

When Mr. Davis asked for questions, I glanced at my watch and realized that nearly two hours had disappeared!

And a couple of weeks ago, the Shrine had a lecture on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright that probably brought a lot of knowledge and some pleasure to the people of Taylor County, West Virginia, and its visitors.

As for the International Mother's Day Shrine itself, well, this spring is the centennial of the church being the first Mother's Day celebration on May 10, 2008. Some of the funds Rep. Jeff Flake objected to are probably going to this event.

Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother's Day, was born in Grafton in 1864 and lived there a long time. She wanted to honor American mothers like her own mother Ann, who worked very hard to provide nursing care and promote better sanitation for Civil War soldiers, helping to save thousands of lives on both sides of the conflict. Shortly after her mother's death,

in 1907, on the second Sunday in May, Anna invited several friends to her home in Philadelphia, in commemoration of her mother's life. On this occasion, she announced her idea - a day of national celebration in honor of mothers - a Mother's Day.

The following spring, Anna wrote to the Superintendent of Andrews Methodist Church Sunday School in Grafton, suggesting that the church in which her mother had taught classes for twenty years, celebrate a Mother's Day in her honor. The idea appealed to Mr. Loar and on May 10, 1908, the first official Mother's Day service was held in the church. Anna established the white carnation as the symbol of the celebration and developed other text and visual tools in honor of the event. It was Anna who coined the term, "Mother's Day Association", used during the period she was developing her concept of what Mother's Day should be. Subsequently, West Virginia Gov. William E. Glasscock issued the first Mother's Day proclamation on April 26, 1910. In 1912, at the General methodist Conference in Minneapolis, MN, Anna was recognized as the founder of Mother's Day. A joint resolution in the United States Congress designated the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day. The official resolution was approved by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914.

I guess the point of this long post, a response to Jeff Flake's short, sweet and punny press release, is to say that behind every "egregious earmark" are people, human beings, our fellow Americans. Many earmarks serve smaller rural communities like Grafton, West Virginia, which make easy targets for an ambitious mediagenic politician like Jeff Flake.

My own mom, Marilyn, will turn 77 next Monday. She's got Alzheimer's, but our family cares for her at home in Apache Junction. Mom is very sweet (to be honest, sweeter than she was before dementia struck) and is still able to enjoy rides through the East Valley. She likes to see the new housing going up in places like the mountains between Mesa and Apache Junction and down in Queen Creek.

Mom spends a lot of time playing with our Lhasa apso, Shana, to whom she often says: "You are the best girl in the whole world." Sometimes she says it in Yiddish, a language I'd never heard my mother speak before (except the usual words we all know, like schtick.) I figured out, and Mom confirmed it, that that is what my mother's grandmother, my Bubbe Ita, Yetta Saretsky, used to tell Mom when she was a little girl in the 1930s. (Mom never had any girls, just me and my brothers.)

Last week, Mom watched a video of her wedding back in 1949. She said it reminded her of how much she missed her mother and grandmother. I miss them too. I lived with my Grandma Ethel at the beach in Rockaway (part of Queens) when I was in my thirties, and she was my favorite person on earth. But I was lucky to have her till I was 42 and my other grandmother, Sylvia - for whom I founded a fan club that made the national news - till I was 31. My great-grandmother died when I was five, but I still remember her clearly, and I certainly recall my funny step-great-grandmother Bessie, the mother of my Uncle Herbert in Parkersburg, who was around until I was 35.

I understand that Rep. Jeff Flake hates earmarks. The process is pretty terrible, and as we've seen, it can lead to corruption.

I guess I could forgive him more for his slap at American mothers and the International Mother's Day Shrine in Grafton if he voted to expend funds to help struggling families and their kids.

Anyway, I don't begrudge the $123,000 going to the Shrine. Jeff Flake has taken in more than eight times that amount for his campaign fund to run against a hopeless candidate like me. And, really, spotlighting that tiny amount in our massive, massive federal budget is like a child throwing a tantrum over nothing.

A wise mother would make little Jeff take a time-out.

My mother would have. But then I have the best moms in the whole world.

Rep. Jeff Flake Is Wrong on Global Warming; We Need a Mandatory Cap-and-Trade System to Curb Emissions

2008-02-21T06:02:00.008-07:00

Rep. Jeff Flake and five other members of Congress are on a weeklong trip to Brazil to represent the U.S. House of Representatives at a forum by the Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment, according to a story in The Arizona Republic, which notes that the "international network of legislators, is meeting in Brasilia to craft a post-Kyoto framework for reducing global warming."

I'm glad Rep. Flake is in Brazil, meeting with top climate scientists, biofuels experts and ambassadors to discuss global warming, forest preservation and ethanol production. This kind of Congressional trip is a worthwhile use of funds.

Unfortunately, Rep. Flake's devotion to his laissez-faire ideology has not made him open to any new ideas. While all three Senators who are presidential candidates support a mandatory cap-and-trade system to curb emissions,

Flake opposes such a system, said his spokesman Matthew Specht.

"He would favor a market-based approach rather than action from Congress," he said.

No surprise. Jeff Flake favors a market-based approach to everything.

But global warming is serious enough to warrant government intervention, and I support a mandatory cap-and-trade system.

As Sen. Obama has said, "Businesses don't own the sky, the public does, and if we want them to stop polluting it, we have to put a price on all pollution."

As Sen. Clinton's campaign position paper notes, "a market-based, cap and trade approach. . . was used successfully to limit sulfur dioxide and reduce levels of acid rain in the 1990s."

And as Sen. McCain wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "The 'cap and trade' system is a constructive, business-friendly approach to countering global warming. Ignoring global warming threatens our environment, our economy and our international credibility."

I Agree With Rep. Jeff Flake on This: We Must Change Our Backward Policy on Cuba

2008-02-20T13:14:00.007-07:00

Rep. Jeff Flake's safe seat in the House of Representatives -- it would be extremely hard for any Democrat to challenge him in the highly Republican, very conservative Sixth Congressional District of Arizona and it's pretty much impossible for a non-politician like me with my DIY campaign -- does allow him the freedom to take some stands I believe are courageous and progressive.

Among them is Rep. Flake's take on Cuba. He's been a leader in the drive to remove sanctions against the island republic and create a dialogue between the U.S. and Cuba.

Yesterday, reacting to the news that Fidel Castro will no longer be Cuba's president, the Congressman said this:

Let's hope that his resignation opens a new chapter. Whether that new chapter will be open, however, largely depends on a new approach to Cuba by the U.S. government. . . The U.S. embargo gave Fidel a tremendous advantage in terms of lengthening his tenure. Let's not give his successor the same advantage by keeping the embargo in place.

I could not agree more.

For many years I lived in South Florida and so I had many friends, students and colleagues in the exile community. In the mid-1980s I often did teacher training in computer education in Little Havana schools like Coral Way Elementary, which was the first school to establish bilingual education. I also taught at Florida International University, which at the time had a majority Cuban-American student body.

I love Calle Ocho and the great Cuban restaurants and music we were lucky enough to have in South Florida. While I can recall the same brand of anti-Hispanic xenophobes currently ascendant in Arizona used to have racist bumper stickers that read "Will the last American leaving Miami please take the flag?" -- the truth is that Miami was a second-rate city before Castro's takeover of Cuba led to hundreds of thousands of the island's best and brightest crossing the Florida Straits and eventually becoming Americans.

The younger generation of Cuban-Americans has moved from the hardline rigidity of their parents and grandparents -- some of them, shockingly, even vote Democratic.

In 1996, when Republican U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen ran for reelection in her Miami-based district and no Democrat was on the ballot, I registered as a write-in candidate running on a platform of ending the Cuban embargo. As her sole opponent, I got exactly eight votes. Also a couple of death threats I didn't take very seriously.

So I applaud Rep. Jeff Flake for standing up for reason regarding U.S.-Cuba relations. As he wrote in "How to Hurt Castro," a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece:

A genuine get-tough policy with Cuba would export something Americans know a little about: freedom. Let's get rid of travel license applications altogether. Recently, Oswaldo Paya, Cuba's leading democracy activist, repeated his opposition to the United States embargo and issued an invitation. ''We appeal to all foreigners who come to our country as tourists to show solidarity, to take part in demonstrations,'' he said. ''To support the opening up of Cuba.''

We should heed this advice and end the American policy of Soviet-style travel controls. All Americans should be free to go to Cuba without government interference. Cuban officials would then have to determine which are the ''good'' visits and which are the ''bad'' ones, which Americans are sunbathers and which are pro-democracy demonstrators. Cuba would be flooded with American visitors -- and American ideas.

In December 2006, Rep. Flake and Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA) led a 10-member delegation to Havana, the largest Congressional delegation to visit Cuba. Rep. Flake has joined with Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) to sponsor legislation to end the economic embargo.

He's right on this when the vast majority of politicians in Washington, Democrats as well as Republicans, are wrong. People like Barack Obama and Jeff Flake are right.

On this issue, at least, Jeff Flake is leading the way for his party.

(What kind of candidate writes a blog post praising his opponent? One who's not a politician, I guess. But there's much, much more on which Rep. Jeff Flake and I disagree, and that's why I'm running against him.)

We Need a New G.I. Bill

2008-02-19T15:50:00.006-07:00

Joseph L. Galloway had an op-ed column in yesterday's Arizona Star outlining the case for a new G.I. Bill for post-9/11 military veterans. (Hat tip, Blog for Arizona.)

As a draft dodger and war protestor during the Vietnam War (the closest I got to the military was my four-hour draft physical on January 8, 1970 at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, which resulted in my getting a 1-Y temporary deferment due to expire in a year; the Selective Service apparently forgot about me by 1971 and I never bothered to notify them of their oversight), I guess I don't have any military credentials.

But I taught returning Vietnam vets as a teacher in Brooklyn College's Veterans' Outreach Program in the late 1970s and discovered that they were not getting anything like the government support that World War II veterans, like most of my friends' fathers, received from the original G.I. Bill.

As Galloway notes,

When 15 million Johnnies came marching home from World War II, a package of benefits enacted in 1944 and signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was waiting for them, extending assistance for education, unemployment and the purchase of a house or a business.

More than half of those who served in World War II — 8 million of the 15 million veterans of that war — signed up and had their college tuitions or technical school fees paid by Uncle Sam. They also received monthly checks to cover housing and food.

It was expensive, but for every dollar the U.S. government spent on educational benefits for WWII veterans, the government recouped between $5 and $12 in taxes paid on the higher incomes earned by college graduates, says the Congressional Research Service.

Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) has proposed a new G.I. Bill, the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, which has received enthusiastic support from groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Galloway explains:

Under his bill, which has attracted three dozen other sponsors, the government would resume paying full college tuition for these veterans for a period linked to their times in uniform, but for no more than 36 months or four academic years. Every eligible college veteran also would receive a check for $1,000 a month to help cover living expenses.

This would cost the government about $2 billion a year, which is about what we're presently spending every 36 hours in Iraq.

President George W. Bush and the Pentagon oppose any such improvement of this miserly benefit for our young veterans. Why? The president says it would cost too much and be too hard to administer, and he's threatened to veto Webb's bill if it ever passes.

I'm sure anti-government extremist Rep. Jeff Flake opposes a new G.I. Bill for the same reasons he opposes any kind of government help for ordinary people.

Hey, the thoughtless, ungrammatical and moronic comments to Galloway's article complaining about this as a "communist" proposal are typical of the reaction we can expect from the right-wing extremists who support Jeff Flake and his reactionary ilk.

But sensible people agree with Rep. Bobby Scott (D-MA), a reservist and member of the National Guard:

The United States has an obligation to provide our service men and women fighting overseas with the benefits they so rightly deserve. This means we must support our troops while they are overseas and also when they return home and attempt to better their lives through education.

If I were in Congress, I'd be supporting a new G.I. Bill. That would be one of the fifteen zillion differences between me and Rep. Jeff Flake.

Earmark-Obsessed Jeff Flake Blackballed from Appropriations Committee by His Fellow Republican Representatives

2008-02-18T11:09:00.004-07:00

As predicted by me and everyone in the known universe but the moronic extremist anti-government bloggers promoting Rep. Jeff Flake's appointment to the House Appropriations Committee, the Republican leadership instead favored another GOP member, Jo Bonner of Alabama, for the vacancy. And apparently House Minority Leader John Boehner will make sure the disliked Rep. Flake won't get appointed next year either.

Jeff Flake spends enormous amounts of energy and time that he could be spending on the people's business in his idée fixe to eliminate earmarks.

Of course, it gets him lots of time in the media so he can bad-mouth his colleagues and come off as pure and innocent and not as someone who never lifted a finger to help his constituents with funding for any needed projects in our district. (Rep. Bonner, who got the seat on the committee, obtained almost $17.3 million for 14 projects in his district.)

While accountability would be nice and the system undoubtedly needs to be fixed, he is wasting his Congressional salary obsessing about trivial amounts.

Por ejemplo, his latest "egregious earmark of the week" includes money for presidential libraries inluding this sum:

• $750,000 for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York

I can understand that Jeff Flake hates FDR for initiating programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and workers protection that the Congressman wants to eliminate. But making a big deal out of $750,000?

If Jeff Flake had been in Congress during the Great Depression, he'd probably be wasting his time investigating the cost of dog food for Fala.

The $750,000 to the FDR library Jeff Flake is so upset about is what we spend on the disastrous Iraq war every seven and a half minutes -- about how long it will take a brain-damaged "Make It Flake!" blogger to read this post.

How much money of the two billion dollars we spend on Iraq every week is accountable to oversight?

I've been to Hyde Park, and I trust the FDR presidential library to spend its funds a lot more than I do the idiots who brought us this misbegotten misadventure in Iraq.

What Rep. Jeff Flake's Laissez-Faire Ideology Has Wrought #244: Deadly Uranium Mines at the Grand Canyon!

2008-02-14T09:48:00.008-07:00

It's bad enough that uranium mining has destroyed the health and environment of residents of Navajo Country, as I noted in the previous post, but now Rep. Jeff Flake's extremist laissez-faire philosophy has led to the Forest Service awarding a British company the right to explore for uranium on 39 separate sites on national forest land just outside Grand Canyon National Park, less than three miles from the popular outlook over the canyon's southern rim.

This action was taken with no environmental review and little public notice. The Coconino County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted Tuesday to ask Congress to put most of the federal lands around the Canyon out of uranium miners' reach.

Congress needs to do so, but more importantly, it needs to reform the antiquated General Mining Law of 1872, a product of the first robber baron era, which made these Grand Canyon mining permits not only possible but mandatory.

As the December 20, 2007 Forest Service approval documents note:

The 1872 Mining Law specifically authorizes the taking of valuable mineral commodities from Public Domain Lands. A ‘No Action’ alternative is not an option that can be considered.

Former Forest Service Chief and former Director of the Bureau of Land Management, Michael Dombeck told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in January that "once claimed, it is nearly impossible to prohibit mining under the current framework of the 1872 Mining Law, no matter how serious the impacts might be."

Last November 1, by a vote of 244-166, the House of Representatives passed the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act, a reform bill that would empower the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to prevent mining near places such as the Grand Canyon.

The bill’s prospects in the Senate are uncertain thanks to opposition from extremist right-wing anti-environment politicians like those House members who voted last November against mining law reform.

These extremist right-wing anti-environment House members include Jeff Flake. See his vote for uranium mines invading the Grand Canyon here.

If you are happy to see uranium mining the next time you visit Grand Canyon National Park, you should be happy to re-elect Rep. Jeff Flake.

What Rep. Jeff Flake's Laissez-Faire Ideology Has Wrought #243: Cancer Deaths in Navajo Country

2008-02-14T07:46:00.004-07:00

Years of shameful government neglect on the part of federal officials unwilling to apply oversight to the thousand or more closed uranium mines in Navajo Country have led to a litany of horrors: open mines leaching contaminated rain into drinking water tables; home construction from uranium mine slabs; wind-blown radioactive dust; and even kids playing in radioactive swimming holes and ground pits.

Although Navajo tribal elders, alarmed at the sudden doubling in cancer deaths and rise in certain birth defects, finally forbade uranium mining, the federal government sealed only half the mines. A series exposing the shocking neglect appearing in the Los Angeles Times led to hearings before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last fall.

Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) called the situation "a modern American tragedy," but it's one that might have been predicted when our long-standing disregard for Native Americans met the anti-regulation, anti-government, laissez-faire ideology that has dominated thinking among the extremist conservatives like Jeff Flake who've been in control of the federal government.

Now, according to the New York Times, the nuclear power industry wants to resume uranium mining near the Navajo reservation. A mining company has applied for permits for a new mine on privately-owned land in New Mexico just outside the reservation's boundaries.

Regulators and Congress must stop this outrage from proceeding -- and they must correct the grievous govermental inaction of the past. Fourteen long years ago the House Natural Resources Committee heard a plea from the tribe's frustrated environment director for "speedy, thorough and permanent remediation of all sites."

It's long past time, as Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-VA) said, for Congress to get federal agencies to "focus and accelerate clean-up efforts," capping the 40 most dangerous open mines, limiting groundwater contamination and conducting human-health surveys.

And it must prevent any new uranium mines from opening in Navajo Country. Talk about adding insult to injury.

But that's what happens when laissez-faire anti-regulation extremists are in charge.

Rep. Jeff Flake, what are you doing to help?