Blue Mass Group

Thank you Carlotta Hayes, Linda Hickey and Linda Broadford for help with the Video

Thank you Megan Guidi for providing the Live Blog tonight!!!

5:39 PM

Hi there! We’re here at the Stephen Lynch Health Care Forum at Curry College in Milton. With a capacity of 750, the gymnasium is filling up quickly. Walking into the building we were greeted by a large crowd of health care reform supporters from multiple groups including moveon.org and Organizing for America. The audience is fairly quiet and without signs inside (we were asked to leave all signs at the door) it is difficult to determine the mix between supporters and non-supporters.

5:47 PM

From over here in the press area we can see a lot of purple shirts (SEIU members) seated in the crowd…or it that the purple and gold Curry College Bleachers

5:48 PM

Bob Folks has taken the mic to make the usual “turn off your phone” announcements. The forum will begin as close to 6pm as possible.

5:53 PM

People who are holding red tickets can ask questions. The tickets are similar to raffle tickets and will be called at random. Pretty clever system!

5:59 PM

This event is getting great press coverage. We are seeing lots of familiar local news faces here in the press area. Hopefully people who weren’t able to make it will be able to hear some of their questions answered on their local news stations.

6:01 PM

Applause has begun. Kenneth Quiglan (president of curry college) is the moderator. He is presenting opening remarks. He welcomes us on behalf of the students, faculty and staff of Curry. He has asked us to treat one another as guests. And is opening the event with the Pledge of Alliegance.

President of the college reports that Congressman Lynch approached the college and asked for this forum. The president has asked that we respect one another’s views and this will allow the Congressman to inform the decisions he will make. The college believes that congressman and his staff have created a change for all to give their input. The Congressman will give an opening of about 10 minutes. Following this, audiences insights will be take. Insights—that is a great way to put it!

The Congressman has taken the mic.

Anyone who has called Rep. Lynch’s office in these past many months trying to understand his position on the health care reform debate never got an answer from his staff. Many trudged through the Curry College campus to try learn where he stood.   We discovered that the people who think  death panels are part of the new proposals have every right to express themselves- and he doesn’t have to educate people that there aren’t any such thing in the bill.  In fact, he lead people to believe that if its such a bone of contention, it should be left out of the bill.   He showed the most  emotion giving it back to a nurse from MGH who was shamed he didn’t correct or educate a previous speaker and say there were  no so-called “death panels”.  In sad fact, he shouted back down that nurse that the uninformed death panel nuts have every right to be heard. He said that the government is a huge  bureaucracy we have to be careful of.  He told us he has no idea about the bill after he read it, and he came to hear from us. Fieldmouz misses Teddy, pines for political [...]

You know you’re a member of a fringe group when … You think it is un-American to let your child listen to our commander-in-chief. Your leader on the Judiciary Committee, and four of his seven old, white, male colleagues, make the ethnicity of the first Hispanic Supreme Court nominee a central factor in her confirmation hearings. The Old Confederacy is the only part of the country where you have strong support. Your opinion leaders compare the President’s policies to those of Adolf Hitler, to the point where such comparisons become routine [added Limbaugh and revised links in response to helpful comments from esteemed BMGer EaBo. Thanks, EaBo! - Bob]. Your Vice-Presidential candidate is, literally, a joke — a fact of which she appears completely oblivious. What might the G.O.P. do next to make itself look even more out of touch? A free BMG mug to the best suggestion. Add a few more points to Charlie Baker’s spread.

Despite Eabo’s spin that the warped Obama/Hitler comparisons are the sole product of “Democratic” LaRouche loons, Eabo’s owned and operated blog, Redmassgroup, has crossed into the same hateful rightwing fringe that is fanning the flames of hate in our great country. There are so many levels that this is disgusting, but I’ll reflect on one.  Apparently vile cancer is totally acceptable to a mainstream Republican activist and is not on the fringe of the Republican Party (he is a National Committeeman for the Young Republicans).  And they call us moonbats.  

He is leaving with the tide; Distant fires gleam in his eyes, And his head turns to listen To music we cannot hear. We heard him Share stories of his life; Now he casts off all moorings And sails, ahead of us. Ancient of Days, do not forget. Let his light shine, with those who went before; Admit him, forgiven, into that circle Where Spirits shine like eternal flames, reflecting Thee. When beyond time we follow May we all meet, and share, indeed; For the voyage is never ending For those who sail with Thee. c2009 Deborah Sirotkin Butler

even though he’s a hometown hero, we are NOT California or Minnesota, we do not elect on the Roeper and Ebert’s rating(two thumbs up) of their movies or WWE fighting style,and we DO NOT elect sports stars who have absolutely no experience in public service other than breaking an 86 year drought. We elect people of substance and as AG Coakely stated extremely well, We can not fill Senator Kennedy’s shoes they are too big to fill, but we MUST walk in his footsteps

EDIT: Still not a proud day for America – let’s not have fist fights and bite peoples’ fingers off because of political disagreements – but the the hospital spokesperson was incorrect; so my previous headline stating that his pinky was reattached and that the procedure was paid for by Medicare was incorrect.  Although, I’m betting that the visit itself, sans reattachement, was still covered by Medicare.   From TPM: Rice’s pinky was not reattached. He went home without it last night. So why the confusion? “This was totally my error,” Caraway-Bowman said. The spokesperson said that on her way into work today, the nurses on the morning shift told her Rice’s story, and that his finger had been reattached. She said she fielded the AP’s call before she had a chance to verify the story on her own. And when Caraway-Bowman finally pulled Rice’s chart and talked to his doctor — ruh roh. ——————————— ORIGINAL POST: Not a proud moment for America.  

Cross-posted from Blue News Tribune. A partial list of companies who have canceled advertisements on Glenn Beck’s show, thanks to Eric Boehlert: Applebee’s AT&T Bank of America Best Buy Campbell Soup Clorox ConAgra CVS Ditech Farmers Insurance Group GEICO General Mills Johnson & Johnson Lowe’s Nutrisystem Procter & Gamble Progressive Insurance RadioShack Sprint State Farm Insurance The UPS Store Travelers Insurance Verizon Wireless Vonage Wal-Mart I always have some concern over economic targeting of media, because I don’t like it when the other side does it. But Beck … well, he deserves to be heard, like any American does, but he has no Constitutional right to a show. GEICO has already been targeted by a countercampaign, wherein conservatives cancel their insurance. So should we patronize these companies? I think so, where possible and within reason — I for one still won’t shop at Wal-Mart. The last major consumer boycott I remember was Coors Beer, and that worked. They agreed to allow a union. After the boycott, I saw my brother drinking a Coors and made a face. He said, in effect, you have to buy the product after a boycott ends, or else they think boycotts don’t work. I am [...]

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who turns 90 in April, has hired only one law clerk for the 2010-2011 term (which begins in October 2010).  Supreme Court Justices are entitled to four.  Retired Justices are entitled to one.  And, importantly, Stevens has tended to be among the first of the Justices to hire law clerks. This isn’t a slam-dunk, of course, but it certainly suggests that Stevens is thinking about retiring from the Court in June of 2010 when the current term ends.  It makes perfect sense — he would presumably prefer that a Democratic president name his replacement (even though he was appointed by Republican Gerald Ford), and he shares deep Chicago roots with President Obama. So we don’t know for sure that Stevens is retiring, but it seems likely, so let’s start another round of Name That Supreme Court Nominee!! My guess: Solicitor General and former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan.  She obviously is close to Obama; she will get a lot of conservative (as well as liberal) law professors to back her appointment; she has a lot of interesting government as well as academic experience; she is very smart.  And Obama, having taken the “seasoned [...]

AP: “Ohio-based ATM maker Diebold Inc. has sold its much-criticized U.S. voting-machine business to a competitor, Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb.” More here from Wikipedia on Election Systems & Software Inc. Columbus Free Press has this on the origins of ES&S: In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family’s ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles. The newspaper continued: “The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. … In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by [...]