24th State is making fun of the film I put up of Jake Zimmerman speaking Monday afternoon at the union rally at the CWA hall. And what Naevius contends is, well, it’s so contradictory and juvenile that it’s almost cute.

In a last minute effort to get the unions to pour money and effort into his election bid, Jake Zimmerman goes nuts screaming about Scott Walker and the Wisconsin unions.

He makes Jake sound pretty desperate, doesn’t he?–right before admitting that Jake’s going to win the race.

Zimmerman, with the help of hundreds of thousands of dollars, is a heavy favorite to win today.  In this clip, he exposes himself as the far left paid for union lawyer he always was.

Aside from the fact that the writer can’t decide whether Jake is a desperate beggar or a shoo in, he also assumes Jake is crooked. His rationale for that accusation is that Jake associates with, gasp, unions. Wait now. The right wingers on SCOTUS made it possible with the Citizens United decision for corporations to inundate elections with their money. But if and when any left wing guy actually gets ahead in the money race, rare though that may be, that makes him bought-and-paid-for. Because union money stinks.

Blink.

I rarely read right wingers. They’re too fact-challenged and juvenile. And this posting at 24th State is one more reminder of that truth.

I’ve never heard anyone do this convincing a job of explaining why every piddly-assed April election matters.

Think maybe the union diehards like Jake Zimmerman?

He was speaking at a ‘We Are One’ rally at the Communication Workers union hall in St. Louis County Monday afternoon. I’ll post pics and interviews from that event next.

Jake’s on the air and the ad is just, well … jake (see definition #1). Count on him to have an ad with a sense of humor.

If you live in St. Louis County, you WILL vote on April 5th. For Jake.

The office of St. Louis County Assessor–which will be an elective office as of April 5th for the first time ever–is not and should not be partisan. The winner of that election should leave his party affiliation at the door, and I have no reason to suppose that Republican L.K. (Chip)–you gotta love that nickname–Wood or Democrat Jake Zimmerman will do otherwise. Like many taxpayers, they both believe that the office has been drunk on high handedness.

Jake–since Zimmerman’s website calls him Jake, so will I–tells the tale he got from a friend of his, a progressive guy:

someone who likes paying his taxes. He just thought the assessor’s office got it wrong. You know, they took a snapshot at a particular time in the real estate market, and he said ‘Look, I’ve got the facts, I’ve got the sale value of the house down the street, and I can tell you, my house is not worth this much.’ And he knew that he would win during the appeals process, so he went in not during the appeals process but in the initial stage, the informal hearing, when the assessor’s staff has the opportunity to say, ‘you know what, you’re right, we’re gonna change it.’ And he goes and he meets with the woman and he very carefully lays all this out and he gives her the documentation. And she says, ‘You know I think you may be right, but the law says we can do it this way, so we’re going to do it this way.’ [With his wicked grin, Jake twirls a finger in the air and in a high pitched voice hoots at the stupidity of it, then continues his story.]  And the guy says ‘Look. I knew I was going to win. I had to go to the Board of Equalization, but once I got there, it took five minutes. I gave them the documentation, they said of course you’re right, and they reduced my assessment.’

The question is, why was he forced to jump through a totally unnecessary bureaucratic hoop? It’s not like it saved the assessor’s office any time. It’s not like it made the process more efficient. It’s not like St. Louis County got any more money out of it at the end of the day. That’s just public management stuff.

By the same token, Chip Wood tells the story of waiting several hours when he challenged his assessment. When his name was called, the staffer took his papers and dismissed him. He could have mailed them in and saved hours. Both these candidates get it, that the cavalier treatment of St. Louis County property owners has to stop. So as far as who wins, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, right? Uh-uh.

Because the winner doesn’t just wave a magic wand and get staffers to change their habits. So how might the new assessor reform his work force? I suspect L.K. Wood doesn’t know. At a recent forum for employees of the County Assessor’s Office, Wood opened his remarks by saying that he doesn’t trust the government, and that he’s going to do something about it. He may not have even noticed his foot in his own mouth, but if your first message to the people who might work for you is ‘I don’t trust you,’ you set up a self fulfilling prophesy. If you tell people they’re a bunch of dirty bureaucrats, they’re going to behave like dirty bureaucrats.

Jake wants to communicate a “we’re all in this together” culture with his employees if he wins.

If you want public employees in a tiered level management structure, if you want them to have your back, you’ve got to demonstrate that you’ve got theirs. So to me, that means I’ve gotta be prepared to take some slings and arrows. I’ve gotta be prepared to go out and do a bunch of town hall meetings. I’ve gotta be prepared to listen to taxpayers about what their grievances are. … I feel like if I can demonstrate to the people in that office that I’m committed to them and that I’m gonna support them if they do their jobs right, but we’re gonna have a one hundred percent commitment to listening to the taxpayer? Then my hope and my philosophy is that that’s how you sort of build a culture of responsiveness to the taxpayer that maybe wasn’t there before.

Instead of focusing on responsiveness, Chip Wood is taking aim at inefficiency in the office. Nothing wrong with eliminating waste, except that his mantra reveals some disturbing ignorance: “The cost per assessment in St. Louis County is $33.42 per Assessment when compared to the State Average Assessment of $14.00 per Assessment.” Jake points out, though, that 60 percent of the economic activity in the state occurs in St. Louis County. Franklin County doesn’t have Centene’s or Express Scripts or the Galleria, and those commercial properties are much more complex to assess. A real estate magnate like Wood should be aware of that.

Jake will look at wasteful spending, of course, but it isn’t his priority. He lays out on his website the job he’ll expect staffers to do and what he himself will do. It’s common sense stuff:

• No more drive-by inspections. The inspector has to get out of the car and examine the property, as well as know the value of homes in the neighborhood.
• If the value of your home goes down, so should your assessment.
• The process of challenging an assessment will be simplified.
• Jake will fight to freeze assessments for seniors. “[N]o one should live with the fear of being taxed out of their home.  If your income is frozen your assessment should be too.”
• Jake is so determined that the office will be responsive to people that, not only will every call be answered promptly, but “You will have the direct number of the person handling your case.”
  

• Jake intends to stop politicians from using assessments for backdoor tax increases. “Assessments should not be used to raise taxes and I will stand up to politicians who think otherwise.”

Jake’s history makes his claims of concern for ordinary taxpayers credible. As an Assistant Attorney General, for example, he prosecuted internet scammers.

I inherited, when another lawyer moved on, a tech geeks case, and the tech geeks had a very innovative business model. They would advertise a laptop on e-bay for fifteen hundred bucks, and you would send them fifteen hundred dollars, and they would not send you a laptop. They would keep the fifteen hundred dollars. It’s a great business model, and I’m sure you can’t find anything wrong with it.  So, needless to say, people were unhappy, and I remember talking to a guy who was a college student–not at one of the state universities, but at a community college. He had saved up enough money for this laptop, but he did not have a few extra hundred dollars sitting around for tuition. He was tremendously aggrieved. I mean, these people had ruined probably a year of his educational future.

Anyway, we got them. We sent the investigators out and got a confession out of the woman who had done it and ended up getting an arrest made. And then I found out after the fact, someone said, ‘You know the last woman who had this case, she wanted to close the file. She said it was small potatoes, you know, gonna take too much time to track down.  The AG’s office has better things to worry about than fifteen hundred dollar computer fraud.’ My philosophy is that fifteen hundred dollars may be small potatoes to the lawyer, but it isn’t small potatoes to the guy who got defrauded.

Similarly, I don’t care if you’re a big commercial real estate developer who has the resources to fight the county assessor’s office all the way through the appeals process, but you hate that it takes three years and you’re infuriated at stonewalling; or if you’re a senior citizen who is potentially looking at being taxed out of your home over a difference of a couple hundred bucks. It ain’t right  to give people the bureaucratic back of your hand no matter which person you’re dealing with, but the difference is that it’s frustrating for the commercial developer. But to the senior citizen, it’s a difference of two hundred bucks, but they cannot afford to hire a lawyer to represent them. If they don’t have a way to get through, and if they don’t know that someone’s going to return their phone call, then that’s the person who gets taxed out of his house.

That’s a Democrat talking. Good on him. I expect him to leave his politics at the door if he’s elected. But I’d still rather have the Democrat than the Tea Partier in that office.

If you live in St. Louis County, get your fanny to the polls on April 5th. It matters.

CORRECTION: Jake’s office informs me that he misspoke when he said that 60 percent of the economic activity in the state occurs in St. Louis County. It’s more like 25 percent.

Representative Jake Zimmerman (D-83) is a candidate for St. Louis County Assessor.

Yesterday, at the Missouri Ethics Commission:

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Sandy Rothschild & Associates 7751 Carondelet Ave. St Louis MO 63105 2/10/2011 $2,500.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Stone, Leyton & Gershman 7733 Forsyth Blvd. St Louis MO 63105 2/10/2011 $5,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN AT&T Missouri Employee PAC One AT&T Center St Louis MO 63101 2/10/2011 $1,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Electrical Workers Voluntary Political 5850 Elizabeth Ave. St Louis MO 63110 2/11/2011 $1,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN One Missouri Fund P.O. Box 16761 St Louis MO 63105 2/11/2011 $1,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Central St. Louis Co. Fire Fighers PAC 115 McMenamy Rd. St Peters MO 63376 2/11/2011 $600.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Professional Fire Fighters of Eastern MO Local 2665 PAC 115 McMenamy Rd. St Peters MO 63376 2/11/2011 $1,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN McCulloch for Prosecutor Committee 928 Kimswick Manor Ln Ballwin MO 63011 2/11/2011 $5,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Kirsten Kaufman 41 Central Park West New York NY 10023 Homemaker 2/10/2011 $1,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Kenton Knickmeyer 10 Douglass Ln St Louis MO 63122 Attorney 2/10/2011 $1,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN David Kaplan One PO Box Square Boston MA 02109 Attorney 2/10/2011 $1,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Terry Bloomberg 47 Frontenac Estates Dr St Louis MO 63131 Developmental Child Care 2/11/2011 $2,500.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Janet ONeal 2214 Lakewood Dr. Cape Girardeau MO 63701 Homemaker 2/11/2011 $2,400.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Stephanie Peterson 129 Lodge Creek Circle Charlottesville VA 22903 Homemaker 2/11/2011 $1,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Patricia Wolkowitz 11581 New London Dr St Louis MO 63141 Retired 2/11/2011 $2,500.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Kenneth Kranzberg 50 Picardy Ln St Louis MO 63124 Kranson Industries 2/11/2011 $2,000.00

C051130 02/11/2011 CITIZENS FOR JAKE ZIMMERMAN Robert Blitz 61 Portland Dr. Saint Louis MO 63131 Attorney 2/11/2011 $2,500.00

[emphasis added]

That’s $33,000.00 if anyone wants to keep track.

No, those are not the fires of hell swirling around Jake Zimmerman (state rep from Olivette). He spoke a week ago at a picnic, standing rather near the barbecue pit. He urged us to fight back against Republicans between now and November. (If you’ve never heard Jake speak, you’re past due.)

In looking forward to the coming legislative session, State Rep. Jake Zimmerman, D-Olivette, acknowledged that he will be working with a number of unhinged members of the Missouri House. He waved Cynthia Davis aside as by no means the most wackadoodle of them and called to the attention of the audience at West County Dems two Republicans who have outdone even Cynthia.

Jim Guest, R-Pluto (pictured at right), believes that the government has been implanting electromagnetic chips in citizens’ brains in order to control them and torture them. Blink. This assertion was striking enough to get Guest a mention in a New York Times article about a British psychologist who tracks the crazies on the internet. Unfazed by the notoriety of one of its members, the House leadership, as Fired Up! points out, has granted Guest tacit support by appointing him chair of the Real ID and Privacy Committee.

Ed Emery, R-Lamar, is out there too. In 2006, he inserted language into a special committee report claiming that abortion causes illegal immigration. Seriously. (We’ve killed so many of our babies that now we have to have Mexican workers come here to fill the gap.) Democrats on the committee refused to sign the report, but nine Republicans signed it.

Zimmerman’s reaction?

“It makes complete sense if you’re insane. … These are our colleagues. But that’s okay. Such has ever been the way with state legislatures. It wasn’t so long ago that an Arizona legislator introduced a bill to change Pi from 3.14159 to 3.10 so that it would be easier for math students.

So anytime Zimmerman is tempted to get impressed with himself, he says:

“I look in the mirror and I remind myself that I make the same salary and have precisely the same job as Jim Guest and Cynthia Davis.

The upside of all their nuttiness is that it’s so easy for Democrats to point all that out in campaigns. And besides:

“There are serious and substantive Republicans. That creature exists, but that creature has been drowned out and dominated by the folks who are in charge of the current team.”

In fact, Zimmerman thought he had found one of those serious, substantive types last year. He and Brian Yates, R-Lee’s Summit, co-sponsored some ethics legislation that included such ideas as forbidding ex-legislators to become lobbyists for a year after the end of their term–you know, the sorts of ideas that are already in place in Illinois for god’s sake. And Zimmerman looked forward to pressing that legislation again this year. Until he found out that Yates–after blasting Republicans for their corruption–had resigned. To work for a PayDay company. As Fired Up! points out: “H’ray usury!”

In any case, Zimmerman predicts that the House Republican caucus won’t listen to the anonymous Republican rep who wrote the caucus a letter accusing Jetton and the new House Majority Leader, Steve Tilley, of interconnected corruption and urging Republicans to clean house. Not gonna happen. Here’s what will happen:

“And so while this session will be filled with sturm und drang–we will fight about the budget; it will be ugly. But remember that at the end of the day the only ballgame they’re gonna be playing is to leave the difficult decisions in Jay Nixon’s lap. When all the budget fight is boiled down,that’s what they’re going to be about. And there’ll be sturm und drang over women’s reproductive rights as there always is. (cell phone ringing) There will be meaningless fights picked over immigration (cell phone ringing) as there always is. (cell phone ringing) It’s for me, Ken. (Laughter)”

Democrats will continue to spit into the wind talking about ethics reform, campaign finance reform, early voting and green jobs. They won’t be heard, but then again, neither will the Republicans in a way. Their tired memes about abortion and immigration are losing their appeal and, more important, Republicans are fighting among themselves.

That’s what you want to see when you’re a member of the minority party.

For those of you haven’t heard State Rep. Jake Zimmerman (D-Creve Coeur) speak, let me see if I can recreate the experience. He begins discussing a topic by sounding like an Ivy League math professor. Then gradually, almost without you noticing it, he morphs into … a NASCAR announcer. Yes, definitely. But with wit. And a grin.

At the West County Dems meeting on Monday, he started his analysis of the race for Bond’s U.S. Senate seat in the measured tone of a Harvard professor–with only the name he gave an imaginary Republican candidate belying his seriousness:

This is likely to be, as we discussed before, a not so hot Democratic year, right? Let us engage in a thought experiment. Let us say that the Republicans had found some random fill-in-the-blank Republican to run against Robin Carnahan. They went to Missouri’s heartland, okay? They went to one of those places named after an exotic foreign land, which is where you find all the good Republicans. They went to Warsaw, MO or Versailles, MO, maybe even to California, MO, Cuba, MO. Possibly they went to Houston, MO, which is by the way in Texas County. And once there, they found Eldridge McGrinchypants. And Eldridge McGrinchypants sits on the back of his tractor and dispenses homespun wisdom with just a hint of Paul Bunyan style tall tales. And old Eldrige doesn’t have much money in the bank, but by God, Eldridge McGrinchypants knows a thing or two about common sense. Let’s suppose that they had found Mr. McGrinchypants and they had invested a couple million dollars in him, which they found from their big donors. They’re Republicans. They’re good at finding a couple million dollars when they need to.

Here’s the gradual transformation to NASCAR announcer:

And you know what, they would have had the McGrinchypants versus the incumbent Democrat campaign in a 50/50 kind of state in a year when incumbents aren’t popular and Democrats aren’t popular. I’d have given them a 65 percent chance at winning on the back of the feared McGrinchypants express. But they didn’t do that.

And the complete metamorphosis:

They found a guy who’s been in Washington for decades! They found a guy who left his wife to marry a lobbyist! They found a guy whose last name is Blunt, the least. popular. political name in Missouri right now! They are doing everything humanly possible to give this election to Robin Carnahan! That’s pretty good in an election year like this. In spite of that, we could lose. We could lose because it’s gonna be a bad year. But we ought to win! We have every structural advantage favoring us. We have a spectacular candidate. People still like Carnahans in rural Missouri, but they don’t like Blunts. They’re suspicious of Democrats right now. (And some of our Democrats aren’t gonna show up.)

You want something to do? You want something to make sure we’re cheered up? Go do a little extra for Robin. Right? We can win! We have what is possibly the number one and, at a minimum, one of the top three senate races in the country. Millions of dollars of national money will be spent here so that a progressive woman, who is young, will have a good shot at winning a statewide election. Think about that. In this year, in this very likely Republican election year, we could wind up in a world with Claire McCaskill and Robin Carnahan as our two U.S. senators, and Jay Nixon as our governor, and controlling every statewide office except for the fearsome … Peter Kinder? That’s not so bad! Especially when you consider what everybody says about Missouri: “Oh god, it’s becoming a red state oh it’s as red as the day is long we couldn’t even vote for Obama we’re DOOOOOOMED!’

All they got is Peter Kinder and Roy Blunt! They can’t even figure out who’s running against Susan Montee. It’s their second most important race in the state and they are squabbling with each other. They’ve got Allen Icet running against Tom Schweich-ch-ch. Tom Schweich-ch-ch has a Harvard degree. You wanna know how good that is? You wanna know why you shouldn’t be too impressed by those credentials? Tom Schweich-ch-ch can’t even figure out who’s endorsing him. He publicly announced a bunch of Republican endorsements the other day. Some of those Republicans had endorsed the other guy. Welcome to the Republican primary for State Auditor. It’s awesome. Sit back and buy some popcorn. That one’s gonna be fun to watch.  All this for the pleasure of running against an incumbent who is popular, hasn’t done anything wrong, and is quite likely to win.

And then Jake Zimmerman paused for breath. And having cheered us up with prospects of the statewide races, he offered to bring us back down to earth with tales of what the upcoming legislative session will be like. About that in my next posting.

After Jake Zimmerman regaled the West County Dems with his version of why, at the national level, Democrats and the country are not doomed, he led his remarks on the state scene by wailing in the same mock Old Testament prophet of doom voice as he had for the national scene.

“Jay Nixon is not a Democrat! He’s not working on health care for children! He’s screwing the city of St. Louis! Nothing good is happening! Republicans control the legislature. They are going to drive us off the cliff! Cynthia Davis is going to make it so that we can’t get divorced anymore and God knows what else! Everybody’s going to prison! (He paused in the tirade to confide: “That part’s true.”) “We’re DOO-O-O-OOMED!”)

Then, morphing back into a 21st century man, Zimmerman smiled and asked the crowd: “Jay Nixon’s been dealt a rough hand of cards, hasn’t he?” Zimmerman likened it to the hand that Bob Holden was dealt: both governors found themselves in tough economic situations where they were forced to make unpopular budget cuts. And both started off with a “silly scandal.” In Holden’s case, it was the “one million dollar inauguration”; in Nixon’s case, the e. coli outbreak at Lake of the Ozarks. Zimmerman’s take on the recent scandal was “I for one am stunned that the Lake of the Ozarks is anything less than crystal clear, pure drinking water.”

The real problem for both, of course, is the sick budget. The state of Missouri is in “perpetual structural imbalance.” Revenue is fixed, and the only way to get more funds is to go to the voters–who are none too fond of voting for more taxes, especially in the middle of a recession. In both cases, the legislature passed a pie in the sky budget and forced the governor to make the realistic cuts. Holden, for example, because the legislature had overspent, was forced to withhold funds. In the middle of Holden’s State of the State address, Rod Jetton stood up and, in Joe Wilson “You lie!” style, yelled: “Release the funds, governor! Release the funds!” The accusation stuck, and Holden owned that problem like an albatross.

But, Zimmerman asked, have you noticed that Nixon is not getting beat up in the press in the same way that Holden did for the painful economic cuts he’s been making? Zimmerman pointed out, for example, that despite the cuts that had to be made in higher education, Nixon was not labeled a villain:

“The administration quietly worked proactively with the universities and … announced a deal, with the presidents of all the major state universities standing up and saying, ‘We’ll take our budget cut; it won’t be as bad as it could have been. But we’re making a commitment to freeze tuition.’ You know what that is? That’s shrewd politics. Shrewd politics is helping people understand that you’re doing what you’ve got to do and reaching out to the constituencies in the right way and learning from what happened to the guy before you.

At that point, Zimmerman began building steam in his defense of Nixon, never approaching the mock prophecy of doom tone he used at the beginning, but evincing sincere admiration.

Governor Nixon has been dealt the worst hand of cards imaginable for a new governor, with the possible exception of what got dealt to Bob Holden, who also had a brand new angry Republican majority to deal with. And in spite of all that, in my judgment, he has handled the big stuff, the stuff that matters, leaving aside the silly political stuff, masterfully. And that will pay dividends by the time 2012 rolls around. It may or may not pay dividends next year.

But by the way, for anybody in the room who is of the opinion that Jay Nixon, because he doesn’t deeply and passionately share the progressive ideology, becauses he and I would differ on a whole host of substantive issues because he is a guy from Jefferson County through and through and he acts and thinks like a Jefferson County Democrat–lest you be tempted to think that he ain’t so much of a Democrat and that we might be just as well better off with the other team in charge, let me make this observation: Jay Nixon is devoted to one political task right now and it’s the only thing he’s been focused on all year, and it will be the only thing he’ll focus on next year–raising money, roughly a couple million dollars, to employ a team of staff that are fanning out around the state to get Democrats elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. That is not the act of a selfish bastard who cares only about himself. That is not the act of a guy who is not a real Democrat. That is not the act of a governor who is not interested in making meaningful change in Missouri. That is the act of a realist, of a guy who understands that there ain’t much he can get done with this team in charge.

So. If you’ve been kvetching about Nixon, does Zimmerman’s defense soften you up?

I’ll have more to say about Zimmerman’s take on state politics in coming postings. His description of the bizarro world of Republicans had us in stitches.

State Rep Jake Zimmerman always brings out an SRO crowd at West County Democrat meetings, and Monday’s gathering was no exception.  Summarizing the feelings of  “disconsolate” progressives everywhere, Jake wailed, “We’re dooooommed.”  Truthfully, it’s not hard to find things to complain about these days what with Loopy Joe Lieberman gumming up the works on health care reform and the relentless repetition of Sarah Palin’s latest nonsense in the media.

But Zimmerman cautioned his audience to take a step back and look at the long view.  A year ago, no one had heard of a “public option.”  The goal was to get more people insured and to put an end to some of the more outrageous acts of venality committed by the insurance companies.  And it looks like some of those major goals are going to be achieved soon.  Keeping in mind how long it has taken to get to this point, we really should be at least a tad optimistic about the future.

Yes, the filibuster thing is a pain in the…………..

 

but let’s not be hasty about changing the Senate rules.  As Jake reminded us, if it weren’t for the power of the minority party to gum up the works, G.W. Bush would have privatized Social Security and gotten away with tons more stupid stuff than he did.  Checks and balances work both ways.

President Obama has accomplished some amazing things in less than a year in office.  E.g, he’s appointing people to run agencies who actually believe in the mission of those agencies.  As a friend of Jake’s who works for Housing and Urban Development said,  Obama has put the “UD” back in HUD.  We now have people protecting public lands after two terms of Bush’s people giving the green light to some of the most egregious acts of violence against our national treasures.  We are already seeing a reversal in attitude at the FCC – thank goodness.   And who would have believed we’d see money budgeted for high speed rail in our lifetime?

(Aside: Obama’s loyalty to Geithner and that whole Wall Street insider crowd did not come up but probably should have.)

Sure, the media megaphone blasts Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, but what we aren’t talking about is how Russia and China are quietly agreeing with us on major problems like Iran and North Korea.   What a difference an election and a new president make. Obama’s foreign policy is based on long-term, strategic thinking.  He’s playing chess while his critics are playing checkers.

What about the tea bagger threat?  Zimmerman says we can, again, look at history.  Fringe groups, whether to the right or left, always end up fighting amongst themselves and fracturing whatever movement they manage to achieve.  Thus it is with the current slugfest over what TEA Party really means and who should control the club treasury.  Zimmerman admits the Dems might lose a couple of seats in Congress next year, but as we start to see the economy turn around and people aren’t as susceptible to the poisoned pills being dispensed by right wing quacks, things will settle down, and Obama will be re-elected in 2012.  

In answer to the complaint by some several members of the audience that  Democrats seem to be afraid to confront their critics,  Zimmerman reminded us that the best way to fight them is to win elections.  On that front, we need to get Robin Carnahan elected.  Even though the Repugs are doing everything they can to help us win by nominating a career politician who left his wife to marry a lobbyist and who has one of the most hated names in Missouri, we must pull ourselves out of our blue funk and work our butts off for Robin……starting now.

http://www.robincarnahan.com/