You may remember that Sam Graves loyally voted last fall against the SCHIP program that would have expanded health insurance coverage for 10 million children. His votes were absolutely critical to upholding Bush’s veto. It’s not like this is a new occurence, either; Graves voted with Bush 95% of the time in 2006.

It looks like he’s going to be rewarded for his “good work.” Not only has Dick Cheney already headlined a fundraiser for Graves, but now Bush is headed to Parkville for a $1000 a head dinner for Graves. This will make Graves the only Republican candidate thus far to get a fundraising visit from from the Terrible Two this cycle. Either they are very confident in Bush and Cheney’s popularity in NW Missouri, or they are desparate for cash.

Graves’ Democratic opponent, Kay Barnes, has a nice slogan on her website. A Flash animation reveals that Bush and Graves both arrived in Washington in 2001. “They came to Washington together. On November 4th, let’s send them home together.”

Barnes is trying to raise $15,000 online by February 1st, the same day as George Bush’s little visit. I just put in $50 for Edwards this morning, and now I’m going to add $25 for Barnes. You can donate here.

Here are links to three items that might interest you:

There’s a thirty second ad called “The Grinch Who Stole SCHIP” that’s funny and that vividly makes the point about George W. Grinch.

The Monday Post-Dispatch pretended to ask a number of Missouri power players to answer Virginia’s question about whether Santa Claus is real, then the P-D writer put more truth into their mouths about their beliefs than they would ever dare speak. My favorite:

Virginia,

Of course there is a Santa Claus. But thanks to environmental policies I’ve supported, the North Pole is melting, and he’s got to learn to swim. Since I believe that waterboarding is really like training for a swim competition, I say we tie him up and find out what he knows.

Christopher “Kit” Bond

U.S. Senator

This last one isn’t Christmassy, but Gone Mild curls its lip eloquently at CAFOs and at Chris Koster for having sold himself out to Big Ag:

I’m no PETA member, but even I don’t like the idea of eating something that has spent its entire life jammed in a stinky stall like the most crowded and flatulent elevator you have ever imagined.

Setting aside any porcine pity or tenderness for tenderloins, though, CAFOs are huge canker sores on the environment. They pollute ground water with unimaginable quantities of pig feces and urine. Their smell can make your eyes water, or worse – airborne micro-particles of pig feces can pollute entire zones of beautiful Missouri countrysides.

Ever the statesman, Senator Kit Bond is now, in the wake of the failure to override Bush’s SCHIP veto, urging compromise.  He has signed a letter to congressional leaders, urging consensus.

Bond surprised me by voting for the bill in the first place and urging Bush not to veto it:

“SCHIP is a valuable safety net for needy children in families who don’t have the means to purchase affordable health care. Millions of children receive the vital well-child and preventative care, vaccinations, and emergency care they need to grow, learn and thrive thanks to the SCHIP Program. I am proud of my votes to create SCHIP in 1997 and to reauthorize the program today.”

Can this be the Kit Bond we know and love to hate?  Having seen him be such a Republican for his entire career and such a godawful one under Bush, it’s not easy for me to believe he has any good impulses at all.  One part of me interprets his actions in the most cynical light:  he knows what a loser voting no on SCHIP is and knew it from the beginning.  See?  No need to give him any credit for humanitarian concerns. 

But in general he isn’t smart enough to back away from losing policies.  He still supports Bush’s addle pated  policy in Iraq.  So I have to say, that he might be acting on conscience here.  Even if he’s not, at least he’s smarter than Sam Graves, Todd Akin, Roy Blunt and Kenny Hulshof.

Certainly he’d like compromise because it would make Republicans look less like monsters.  But it is possible that he feels uneasy about depriving millions of kids of health care.  Just sayin’.

Still, even if Bond’s concern is genuine, I’ll bet he wouldn’t approve of this snarky video. In it, a comedian impersonates a smug George Bush, in all his malapropistic glory, gloating about the SCHIP veto.

The SCHIP veto override failed in the House 273-156 just a little while ago. Had it passed, the expansion of the SCHIP program would have provided thousands of middle class families who currently squeezed out of insurance with access to health care.

Sam Graves was one of the 156 who voted against the override. Kay Barnes is going to have a field day with that one.

As the SCHIP bill comes up for debate Thursday, and that will be tomorrow folks, expect plenty of righteous indignation to emanate from the Republican side of the aisle. They will snort and stamp and say that the Democrats are trying to insure rich kids at the expense of poor kids.  And the Do-Right Republicans, of course, definitely want to do right by the poor. 

This argument has its base in the hypothetical figure of 83,000 dollars. This figure is the amount of income that a SCHIP recipient’s family might earn if New York’s proposal for funding for families earning 400% of poverty level were to be honored.  It will not be honored. The White House has rejected the request stating that it may pull children out of private insurance plans to put them in SCHIP programs.  Right now, New York’ s program is capped at 250% of poverty level.  Currently the only state with an income cap of over 300% of poverty level is New Jersey, at 350%, but children from higher earnings families are often charged premiums and co-pays via sliding scale. 

Although the Republicans will try to punch through the impression that the bill will allow families earning up to 83,000 dollars per year into the program, it is, in fact, a baseless argument. That would only happen if a State wanted to insure kids at 400% of poverty level.  But states must receive approval from the Secretary of Health and Human Services before they can expand income eligibility.  A recent survey by the Congressional Research Service found that 32 states had capped at 200% or less of poverty level and that 17 states had caps of 200% to 300%.  Missouri has been a 300 per center in the past. 

According to Krugman in a BuzzFlash interview.

“The reason that Bush is so opposed to SCHIP is the same reason he was so determined to privatize Social Security, which is that they’re both programs that work.  You have to understand, that is the point of view of somebody who really wants to undo the New Deal — and if possible … get things back to the way they were before Teddy Roosevelt and the ‘Socialists’ came in.

“The worst thing is a government program that actually does help people, so the SCHIP is a really bad thing, from Bush’s point of view, because it works so well. It might lead people to say, well, if we can do this for lower-income children, why can’t we do it for lots of other people who need guaranteed health care? So it’s the determination, on his part, to do this veto, even though there’s a short-term political cost, because they’re deathly afraid that people will look at SCHIP and say, gee, actually the government can do some good.”

So everything boils down to the role of government.  The Decider and his cohorts are radically and shamelessly anti-government.  Recall if you will the Decider on taking the office of president stating “this would be easier if this was a dictatorship and I was the dictator.”  Neither Freudian slip nor joke, the Decider uses manipulation and exploitation with skill to further his ambition to dismantle our government.  He was stopped dead on the privatization of Social Security, but managed to cut funds enormously for Medicaid and slide through a shady Medicare Part D program that gives more to Big Pharma that it does to older adults. 

Support for the bill and now for veto override has been quite unprecedented. We still  need to keep up the furor going into the vote.  In addition to calling your reps, I will add a listing of web sites to access to suppport the bill asap.  It’s never too late!
Here are the contacts:

[ http://capwiz.com/am… ] for the AMA veto override campaign.

[ http://www.catholics… ] for Catholics United  ad campaign pressuring Republican holdouts.

[ http://pol.moveon.or… ]  for a MoveOn.org SCHIP vigil in your town.

[ https://secure.truem… ] for Ben and Jerry’s True Majority campaign.

[ http://www.americans… ] for SEIU, AFSCME and Americans United for Change campaigns.

Somewhat overshadowed this past week by the FISA discussion, the vetoed SCHIP bill will be subjected to an override vote by Congress on Thursday, the 18th. Whether or not the Presidential Veto will be sustained remains unclear.

But what is very clear is that there are a lot of twitchy Republicans in the press and on national TV valiantly arguing their talking point in the earnest hope that they can bamboozle their constituents one more time.  They don’t mind getting down and dirty either. You may recall the case of 12-year-old Graeme Frost, the brain injured child who delivered the Democratic response to one of the Decider’s weekly radio addresses.  Frost and his sister, who were injured in a car accident, still need physical therapy.  Both are covered by SCHIP in Maryland.  The right wing thought they had glimpsed Nirvana, both kids in private schools (scholarships) and a home in a newly gentrified neighborhood. Led by principled stalwarts, Malkin and Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell’s office took up the cry, only to have to back off as the case fell apart. Turned out that the parents have combined incomes of $45,000 per annum.  Prior to the accident they might have purchased insurance for $14,500 a year, after the accident no insurance would cover them.  And then in Maryland, SCHIP covers kids from families with incomes under 200% of poverty, $55,220, so the Frosts definitely qualify. 

Republicans are also cheesed off at the Decider’s lack of interest in consultation when the compromise bill was being written.  It was perceived that he had already made up his mind and had no interest in further exploration. Now he offers to compromise without offering anything concrete to describe a compromise position that he would endorse.  In the words of Nancy Pelosi this AM on ABC, “Mr. Bush sincerely believes that the meaning of the word compromise means do it his way”. 

According to a NYT editorial piece, the Republican response to the bill is being driven by The Decider’s Assertion that to expand SCHIP is a step toward “government run health insurance”.  Speaking of double standards and utter hypocrisy, do they not know that they are covered by government run health insurance”, that their children are covered by “government run health insurance”?  And adding insult to injury, their premiums are paid for by tax dollars from the very families for whom they would deny SCHIP benefits.  Deliver me!

Even more distasteful, if that is possible, the Christus Medicus Foundation, a catholic right wing organization focusing on “sanctity of life issues” is worried that SCHIP dollars are going into family planning, contraception and sterilization programs.  They conclude:

Teenage females can be signed up for a CHIP program by schools family planning organizations and social services organizations and be give contraception, abortions and in some cases even be sterilized without parent’s knowledge or consent. State and federal tax dollars are violating  Health Care Right Of Conscience by forcing Americans to subsidize the undermining of the parent/child relationship.

Well! Health care for near poor children has suddenly become a reproductive issue.  I am curious as to just how many people worship in their tent of disinformation. 

The AFL-CIO, Move-On.org and Americans United for Change are but a few of the organizations stepping up to champion SCHIP.  The DNCC has targeted eight vulnerable Republican veto supporters in their home districts with radio ads  opposing their positions.  Our Sam Graves is one of them.  Democrats are adamant regarding a compromise with the Decider.  They say that they have already compromised, having chosen the less expansive Senate version of the bill as a model for the compromise bill vetoed by the Decider. 
Nancy Pelosi is reported as “cautiously optimistic” that she will peel off an additional 15-20 votes to support a veto.

Our mission in MO, should we choose to accept it, is to discourage the following MO members of the US House from voting to sustain the Presidential Veto.  They are Sam Graves, Roy Blunt, Todd Akin, and Kenny Hulsof.  Tell them that the Democrats will gain politically if the veto is blocked.  Tell them that you’ll “remember in November” (08) when we liberals don’t have poor George to kick around anymore.  Tell them to just do the right thing!

While praising MO Republicans, Senator Kit Bond and Joann Emerson of Cape Girardeau for bucking party leadership to vote in favor of the SCHIP compromise bill, the SLPD (10/4) states that:

Just about everything the President and his surrogates have said about the bill is wrong.  It does not cover illegal immigrants and upper income children. It is not designed to get families to drop private insurance and, instead get a free ride from a public program.  Nor is it a “socialized type medicine”…as Dana Perino said last week.

To be perfectly clear, SCHIP was never intended to insure “poor” children, or kids living below the poverty level.  It was developed to insure children of parents who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to purchase insurance on their own.
Perino’s socialized medicine argument, is rendered moot by the fact the several months ago, the Decider himself received, in the form of a colonoscopy performed by government
employed physicians at government run hospitals, a piece of the finest socialized medicine in the world. Indeed, as the SLPD states, “Mr. Bush will qualify for this same socialized health care for the rest of his life.”
And about the covering of children of illegal immigrants, Dennis Kucinich, the most liberal democratic presidential candidate voted against the compromise bill because he thought it should have covered the children of legal immigrants.
Finally the cost issue, as Eugene Robinson of the WaPo puts it so succinctly:

The cost of covering an additional 4 million children was estimated at around $35 billion over five years. That’s a lot of money. But in the context of a $13 trillion economy — and set against Bush’s history of devil-may-care, “buy the house another round” spending — it’s chump change.

The Decider, feeling a chill from the Hill, has offered to throw a little more money into the pot and call that a compromise.  But Harry Reid has said that “We are not going to compromise” while calling The Decider’s offer to “add a little extra money” to the program an insult.  Reid is not alone in standing firm. Recent polls show that  68% of Americans know that Bush vetoed the SCHIP compromise bill and 72% support the bill.

  Any changes that may come to the bill in the area of overall cost or eligibility apparently will come only after a failed override vote.  And to according to Republican, Phil English (R-Pa), “The changes necessary to get more Republicans on the margins are actually fairly modest”.  And how about this from your good friend and mine, Roy Blunt who states bluntly “Five billion is not enough!”  Charles Grassley sputters on and Orrin Hatch states the President has received bad advice. Right on pragmatic ones!

But wait!  Here comes MO’s nattering nuisance, Sam Graves, with a KC Star op-ed published on 10/03 in which he holds forth:

This legislation that President Bush vetoed Wednesday would make it easier for illegal immigrants to get taxpayer funded health care. …would wipe away the current requirement for multiple sources of identification and require merely a name and a Social Security number to apply for benefits.  The only safeguard would be a single statement that says no illegal immigrants can get benefits…

What does he want? Tattoos!  Todd Akin is on this talking point also, referring to “little hidden gizmos” in the bill.

Sam Graves should be excused from the House in order to spend more time tilting at windmills, although I daresay the original tilter was an honorable man with good intent, while Graves may be somewhat short on knightly virtue. Ditto, Todd Akin.  Kit Bond is looking somewhat firmer and Roy Blunt seems not at all convinced about anything.  Maybe he’s just scared.  Some gentle rallying outside his office could work to some good.  Opinion is divided on whether or not Congress will override.  We have two weeks to call, to rally, to make a difference. 

Not to be overlooked, Dennis Kucinich’s vote against the compromise bill.  I am sure his reasoning is correct, however he needs to vote to override the veto taking care not to end up siding with Bush.

AlterNet has the video of Jon Stewart skewering Bush for his veto.  You wouldn’t want to miss it.

About 50 people, ranging from babes-on-hips to the very elderly converged on 63rd and Ward Parkway in Kansas City Thursday during the evening rush hour to protest the veto of SCHIP legislation by President Bush earlier in the week.

Getting 50 people to 63rd and Ward Parkway during rush hour is in and of itself an accomplishment.  There isn’t exactly a handy freeway on/off ramp – it is smack in the middle of the city.

Medical students from KU were in attendance, and social activists from across the spectrum.  There was a newscrew there, and if our little gathering makes the local news I will update with a link.

But the reception we got from motorists was amazing!  I only saw one person flip the bird, everyone else was laying on their horns.  Even the city busses were honking and waving and showing their support.  It was very encouraging, and I am hopeful that rallies like ours throughout the country will put enough pressure on congresscritters that they will be  forced to stand up to the incumbent and stand up for children,  and shove his veto back down his craven throat.  And may he choke on it like it was a pretzel. 

Photos below the fold…

Future Democrats

Raising ’em right!

Angry young mothers.

Angry grandmothers.

Looking east – the greenway crowd.

Looking west – the streetcorner crowd.

Damned good advice!

ProVote organized a meeting at Rep Hulshof’s Columbia office today with about 20 people representing all walks of life, calling for Hulshof to vote to over ride the President’s veto of the SCHIP program. SCHIP is the health insurance program covering children from low income families.
Tim Farmer, the local field director for Hulshof accepted a gift of 77 colorful bandaids , each representing 1000 Missouri children who will lose their health care coverage with the loss of SCHIP. Physicians and nurses present spoke to the health crisis the lack of insurance will cause. Children not receiving preventive care and presenting to Emergency Rooms for every medical need will increase the overall expense for all of us. SCHIP, even in its expanded form, is a net money saver for this reason.
Mr Farmer politely accepted the appeal. Could there be hope for Kenny to do the right thing, this time around…for the children?
Time will tell.
Here it is as reported on KMIZ (Jef City):
http://www.kmiz.com/…
Meanwhile lets keep those letters to the editor, and to our representatives going!