Apolitical Youth? Guess Again.

1. An Important Message from Deborah Leveen, with link from Paula

2. An Equally Important Message from Don Bechler

3. Who Says Today’s Youth Is Apolitical? Meet Robbie Bruens.

4. I’ll Take Progress Where I Can Find It!

5. The Tea Partiers’ Lost Origins: 1950’s France?

1. An Important Message from Professor Deborah Leveen:

“There is growing consensus among progressive legislators and advocacy groups around the strategy of using Reconciliation to fix the Senate bill and then passing the Senate bill.

“Reconciliation” is the process created to allow legislation with budgetary importance to pass the Senate with a simple majority—51 votes. Reconciliation could be used to incorporate the changes needed to win support from the House for the Senate bill, and indeed the House and Senate negotiators had reached sufficient agreement on the Friday before the Massachusetts election to send something to the CBO for scoring. We really were on the one-yard line.

Now that we don’t have 60 Senate votes to approve a revised bill—the product of House and Senate negotiations—the only option is to use Reconciliation. The support for this strategy is increasing daily.

Because Reconciliation only requires 51 votes, it’s possible to include some provisions that failed to gain support from 60 Senators, most importantly, the public option.

And two freshmen Representatives are gathering the signatures of other representatives on a letter (the Polis/Pingree letter) asking that Majority Leader Reid do just that. They have gained over a hundred congressional signatures and are still working for more.

Paula makes it easy to help Polis and Pingree get the signatures with a great link to "Bold Progressives'" website.

2. An Equally Important Message from Don Bechler

I caught up with Single Payer Now’s legendary organizer, Don Bechler, by phone on Monday. This is a man who has put his whole heart and soul into the single payer movement. I didn't realize how large his group was until I attended their December dinner. Wow!

As you know, Bechler’s group is again hoping to get a single payer bill (this one is SB 810) to the Governor’s desk. Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed single payer bills, but each year there is more public support for single payer, a trend noted in many of your email comments. And quite a few F1200’ers who still hold fast to the public option are recognizing the value of holding tight to an important bargaining chip: If we had gone to the negotiating table with a single payer plan, we might have a public option by now.

There is still work to be done on SB 810, which you can learn more about through http://singlepayernow.net/

And in March, Single Payer Now will be hosting a very interesting training event. As you know, this is the group that flew the passionately Democratic Congressman Eric Massa out last December to speak to a packed house at St. Mary’s. I’m sworn to secrecy on the special guests who will appear the March event, but if you like linguistics and framing, I think you’re going to want to attend. Stay tuned…

3. Who Says Today’s Youth Is Apolitical? Meet Robbie Bruens.

Turns out one of our men at Cal is already working on Lakoff’s initiative, which was discussed in yesterday’s newsletter. Smart, enthusiastic and very hard-working, I’d make note of the name - you may someday be voting for him. Robbie offers to field questions directly from you on the initiative, and adds this note:

“I am a big advocate for majority rule on budget/taxes, and have been volunteering on the campaign for theCalifornia Democracy Act. It's really a great grassroots effort - the Democratic establishment in the state is too cowed to embrace it because of polling (as mentioned in those articles you posted). I have been organizing the effort on the Berkeley campus, and it's an idea that seems to be catching fire among every progressive who cares about the future of our state.

“We just started on campus and we have more than two dozen student petition circulators. We have Majority rule campus groups at every UC except Riverside, and groups are getting started at a lot of community colleges and CSU’s. I also know the state campaign PAC has almost $50,000 raised so far, which is obviously far short of what we'll eventually need but fundraising is just now going into overdrive. Everything is sort of just starting to click, and there's a ton of enthusiasm out there for this kind of initiative that is now beginning to be tapped. The deadline for ballot qualification is April 15th.

“It may be the professional political consultant’s job to make judgments about what's possible and then tell politicians to try to do that, but it's up to the grassroots activists to decide what's essential and then make that possible. My job is to make it possible.”

4. I’ll Take Progress Where Found…

If you’re in the position of possibly dying for your country, shouldn’t you at least be treated with respect instead of shaming? Finally, an Admiral speaks up against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

5. Don’t Tell the Tea Partiers – They Won’t Be Able to Handle It

Many of us in the F1200 interacted throughout the summer and fall with tea partiers at various town halls when we were supporting the public option. So I thought you’d get a kick out of this article in The New York Times which compares tea partiers to a similar movement in France in the 1950’s. (Don’t tell the tea partiers – they’re still trying to get over the shock of learning that General Lafayette came from the land of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”)

Thanks for hanging in there, we'll have more over the weekend if not earlier.

Eva