Senator McCaskill apparently doesn’t just work on federal legislation. She also coordinates with state officials, helping to publicize a state program to provide an advance for first-time homebuyers who will get federal tax credit.

Here’s a video her office put together:

We’re fairly critical of Senator Claire McCaskill around here, but I’ve definitely got her back on this one.

NY Times reporter Matt Bai thinks Twitter is banal and completely superficial, highlighting one of McCaskill’s tweets to prove the point. And Claire resorts to Tumblr for a lengthier response.

Key quote:

[…] I use Twitter because no one can edit me. In a media world driven by an edited sound bite, and a Capitol Hill culture that parses, obfuscates, and works hard at saying nothing, we shouldn’t look down our noses at a few short declarative sentences. While this method of direct communication makes my staff nervous – they think it makes me look less “senatorial” – it is me.  I’m a Midwesterner, and this short simple way of speaking is my native tongue.

As they say, read the rest.

…Adding that in the old media world, the game was played differently. As McCaskill writes in her post, her staff isn’t always by her newfound ability to speak unfiltered and therefore possibly off-key for a senator. I’m sure reporters also find it frustrating to no longer be the sole oracles with direct access to the powerful, interpreting their utterances and putting them into context. Now the average citizen has a much greater ability to access and interpret those same utterances without the middleman. And that’s a good thing!

And Matt Bai should know better. He’s covered the online world for some time now, having moderated a YearlyKos presidential forum in 2007 and written a book on politics and bloggers about the same time. But then again, he’s been skeptical of online activism the entire time, and with all due respect to Claire McCaskill, non-famous Twitter users are changing politics with tweets just as much as famous ones.

New first paragraph provided via Twitter:

“HJR passed 83-74. 6 “absent”. Needed 82. All Ds NO. 2 Rs jumped ship Funderburk and Silvey were NO. Most important labor vote so far.” – John Burnett

If that math holds up, 72 of 74 Dems voted no, 2 were absent. 83 of 89 Reps voted aye, 4 were absent.

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The Missouri State House has a case of the Mondays, which may be why anti-union HJR37 is currently up for perfection.

The following Missouri House Republicans received AFL-CIO endorsements in the 2008 general election.

Doug Funderburk (R-12th), Ryan Silvey (R-38th), Will Kraus (R-48th), Gary Dusenberg (R-54th), Brian Yates (R-56th), Mike Sutherland (R-99th), Steven Tilley (R-106th), Mike McGhee (R-122nd), Scott Lipke (R-157th), and Billy Pat Wright (R-159th)

Dusenberg, Yates, Sutherland, and Lipke are term-limited. Which means that there are six non-term limited Republicans who could jump based off of that endorsement, and there’d still be 83 votes. And it should be interesting to see how many Representatives in districts which received an “open” endorsement will leap in or defect on this matter.

So let’s see who’s going to take the big leap.

Updates via Twitter:

“Debating HJR-37. Democrats taking turns to position themselves for union $$$ and support.” – Scott Dieckhaus. Since those supporters of HJR37 are timid sorts who don’t make donations.

“We could stabilize the budget if every time a member of the MO house referencesd the civil war or slavery, it cost them $1” – Jason Kander.

Update, re: Amendments: Seems as there are 83 votes to strike down Dem amendments (such as one that would disallow violations of the NLRA). So we get closer to seeing who will cliffdive with the Republican leadership.

Final update: 83 Ayes, 74 Nays. HJR 37 perfected. Now on to the third reading sometime soon, and a quiet death in the state senate (we hope).

Update from Clark: Here’s a tweet from the P-D’s Roseann Moring:

Mike Cunningham got booed for asking Jamilah Nasheed how important she thinks the secret ballot was for black people after the Civil War

about 1 hour ago from web

Stay classy, Missouri Republicans!

As we reported here last year, Jewell Patek, former Republican state rep and a close friend of Matt Blunt, was hired as a lobbyist for Smithfield Farms. A CAFO managed by a subsidiary of Smithfield may have been the origin for the swine flu outbreak.

He’s still a registered lobbyist for the agribusiness giant.

Is the swine flu that is a potential pandemic a direct result of factory farming?   One could certainly make that case, as the disease vector appears to be a massive pork production facility in Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated.  The massive breeding facility produces for slaughter nearly one million hogs per year.

Last week the most excellent bio-threat watchdog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak since the first case was identified on March 30, when a Canadian man who had returned from Mexico on the 22nd and felt progressively worse since returning home fell into a coma.  

The violent drug war that has killed thousands kept everyone’s attention on the border and the pacific coast, and a spike in respiratory illnesses in the interior went unnoticed until April 2, when it was reported in the local media in Mexico, but officials were still blaming it on normal seasonal disease arcs.  

On April 6, the disease vector was isolated – a fly that breeds in hog waste.

April 6

Veratect reported local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico.  Sources characterized the event as a “strange” outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February.

Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak. However, health officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they stated the three fatal cases were “isolated” and “not related” to each other.

Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.

Local health officials had implemented several control measures in response to the outbreak. A health cordon was established around La Gloria. Officials launched a spraying and cleaning operation that targeted the fly suspected to be the disease vector. State health officials also implemented a vaccination campaign against influenza, although sources noted physicians ruled out influenza as the cause of the outbreak. Finally, officials announced an epidemiological investigation that focused on any cases exhibiting symptoms since 10 March.

This information was available in our web portal to all clients, including CDC and multiple US state and local public health authorities.

Grist did the yoeman’s work and looked for any acknowledgment of the Smithfield Farms  connection in the U.S. press and found nothing; but it appears that Mexico is at least as complacent and ineffectual about controlling the factory farms that poison water, stink up communities, plummet surrounding property values and sicken – and now kill – the residents who have to live around the damned things, as their neighbors to the north.  

At least in Mexico one media outlet, the Mexico City daily La Jornada has pointed up the connection between corporate hog farms and the outbreak – will the corporate owned American press, underwritten in large part by Archer-Daniels-Midland, do the same?  I’m not holding my breath – unless I’m near a CAFO

Mid-day Saturday 55-60 people gathered at Forest Park Community College to hear representatives of a wide-ranging coalition, Healthcare for America Now (HCAN), at the Health Care Can’t Wait! townhall discussion. The moderator, Jennifer Judd,  was clear about the goal of the meeting — to fire up a well-organized and vocal grass roots campaign to demand that we fix our broken health care system and insure access to quality health care for all.  

A more controversial corollary to this goal was the up-front assertion that a hybrid approach that would allow individuals to choose between private and public health care delivery is the best strategic choice to ensure the success of health care reform. This goal was coupled with an operational goal to lobby Congress to  use budget reconciliation, a parliamentary process which would allow the health-related spending to pass with a simple, filibuster-proof majority — a goal, incidentally, that may already have been achieved.    

Speakers

The formal part of the meeting consisted of brief presentations intended to emphasize the importance of fixing our health care system.  Speakers included:

–a cancer victim who described the travails of securing chemotherapy after losing his job — and his insurance;

–a psychiatrist described the wastefulness and suffering that ensues from our haphazard, after-the-fact approach to dealing with mental health issues such as drug addiction and suicide;

–a priest who described the problem of access to health care from a religious perspective that privileges human dignity which, from a holistic vantage, involves the physical as well as the spiritual person;  

–a representative of the UAW  who talked about the right of everybody to the type of insurance that his Union members enjoy now.

Finally, State Senator Robin Wright Jones, who was present in the audience, took the stage and raised the call to arms (or, actually, ballots), making the point that people get what they don’t vote for — if they don’t vote, that is.  So if you want quality health care for all, her message was that you have to vote for those who will work to to get it for you.

Question and Answer Session

The Q&A session, where a polite version of “the perfect is the enemy of the possible” debate surfaced, was perhaps the most interesting part of the roughly hour-long meeting. At issue was single-payer vs. the hybrid approach advocated by the organizers.

One questioner brought up the superiority of the  single-payer system, specifically as it is represented in HR676. Others also indicated that they believed single-payer was preferable to the hybrid approach that the HCAN alliance intends to pursue.  

The main argument for the hybrid approach advocated by HCAN was that it is the most realistic strategy given the enormous resources that the insurance and related health care industries will bring to bear on the debate. It is the possible as opposed to the perfect if you will. To illustrate the difficulty of the task ahead, an audience member noted that Senator Max Baucus of Montana had become the third largest recipient of funds (i.e., bribes) from the health care industry since he had emerged as one of the leaders in the health care reform effort.

One audience member noted that the hybrid approach could also be understood as the first incremental step on the way to a truly national health care system.  Making realistic decisions about what we can achieve at this point does not preclude an ongoing reform process.

The most pragmatic argument against the hybrid approach was the concern that the public option could not compete in an environment where private providers could refuse all but the young and  healthy. And if publicly delivered health care does not succeed, the ongoing progress toward a true national health care system could be irrevocably damaged. In this scenario, the possible is so far from the perfect that it amounts to essentially nothing.

One audience member, a representative of a retired  steelworkers group, indicated that although he preferred a single-payer option, he understood the strategic implications of the HCAN choice.  In a telling coda, however, he added that if the health care reform failed because of this choice, he and his fellows would turn their anger against the Obama administration for bungling this chance for reform. Comments like this make it clear that hopes are high, but that the cost of failure will also be very high.