I was pleased by the first thing, and so thrilled by the second that when I saw @ChrisMurphyCT’s announcement tweet [image below], I re-tweeted it to my loyal followers in the Twitterverse and then tweeted about it myself.
To my surprise and delight, I received a video response to that tweet from our future junior Senator:
Thank you Chris Murphy, for the kind words. And thanks also to anyone reading this who still has a bookmark to spazeboy.net or subscribes to the RSS feed. I haven’t forgotten about this blog, I’ve just been focusing most of my free time on graduate school lately. As the saying goes though, since Chris Murphy’s entry in the U.S. Senate race has re-energized my will to blog, “I’ll be back.”
Last night I attended an Open Health Care Forum organized by my friends (and fellow Cardinals) Emily Langner and Deb Hall. The esteemed panelists–Katie Robbins from Healthcare-Now!, Donna Smith from the California Nurses Association (also featured in Sicko!), and U.S. Congressman John Conyers, author of HR 676–spoke for the majority of the program before it was opened up to questions.
U.S. Congressman John Conyers and Katie Robbins at the Open Health Care Forum at Wesleyan University, May 28, 2009
All of the panelists spoke about the need for a national single-payer health care system. I can’t recall ever having been to a health care event specifically geared toward the single-payer argument, though it is an end that I believe we should strive for myself. However, I also believe that there is more than one path between what we have now (which can hardly be called a health care system) and a single-payer health care system, and it was my impression that the panelists have chosen the direct path.
Wherever you stand, if you want to learn more about single-payer or HR 676, you can’t do much better than to hear about it straight from Congressman John Conyers, who authored the bill. You can see his remarks and those of others in the videos from the panel are below, which are arranged in chronological order. I ran out of tape after about 93 minutes, so the second part of the Q&A video was recorded to my digital still camera in two video clips, with a dramatic difference in quality.
Full Disclosure:I am the Online Organizer for the Connecticut Citizen Action Group. However, this being my personal blog, it is maintained on my own time using my own resources. The content of this blog post should be attributed to me, and not my employer. All that said, take my opinions on health care reform with as much salt as you like.
Connecticut Bob calls “Bullshit!” on an ad being run by the conservative organization Defense of Democracies. The ads are being run in congressional districts represented by Democrats, and and CT Bob cuts through the scare-mongering in his latest video:
Back in April I attended a conference on “The New Humanism” at Harvard and the big buzz at the time was that California Congressman Pete Stark was coming to speak at Harvard in five months. Congressman Stark is the highest ranking elected official in the U.S. to publicly identify himself as a nontheist, which requires more guts to do than it ought to — after all, there is still a clause in Article VI Section 3 of our U.S. Constitution which states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Yet the religious beliefs of candidates and elected officials matter to voters. And for the most part, voters are least likely to vote for atheists or nontheists.
Which tells me that Congressman Stark may not be the highest-ranking nontheist in government, but rather the only one whose seat is safe enough that he can admit it.
One of my all-time favorite blogs is the Consumerist. It’s not political, but it’s very pro-little guy and it calls attention to unfairness in the marketplace with good humor (and advice). A Consumerist posting from yesterday will be of particular interest to readers of this site — Your Government: How to Write to Congress.
Though all of the tips in the article are useful, the reason I like it is because it emphasizes the impact of a personal letter. We’re all on the mailing lists for candidates, PACs, and interest groups that encourage us to “click here to send a letter to your representative about xyz issue” — but do those maximize our impact on the issue, or merely show how well-organized a particular interest group happens to be?
In many ways, the internet has increased participation in politics by making it so easy to contact our congressional representatives. It requires no more than 2 minutes to send an internet form letter to your Senator asking them to consider your position on an issue, and your letter will be counted in aggregate with the deluge of similar if not identical electronic missives from your fellow district residents. Consider that if you took 10 minutes to draft a personalized letter (built from the ground up) it would stand out considerably.
We in the blogosphere are the people who are often the most politically engaged in our social circles (unless one only associates with other bloggers), so imagine the impact we might have if instead of forwarding the latest e-mails asking for us to have our friends send a form letter to their representatives, we occasionally asked our friends to take 10 minutes to write a personalized letter on an issue that we know will be important to them?
Why Personal Letters Beat Form Letters
Don’t get suckered in by the quick and easy “Write to Congress!” form letters littering the internet. Form letters are not an expression of values; they are a show of organizational strength. If the NRA convinces five million people to send letters opposing gun control, it shows that the NRA can muster five million people to action, not that five million people necessarily care about gun laws. Congressional offices know this and generally disregard form letters.
So what happens when you send a letter?
Every office has its own procedures for tabulating constituent correspondence, but most will produce a report at the end of week breaking down how many letters were received by issue area, separating out form letters from letters sent by individual constituents.
Members treat each type of letter differently, but most look for individual letters as a barometer of their district’s concerns. These are the letters that have the most influence, the ones we will show you how to write.
What Should Your Letter Say?
We adhere to the three paragraph rule: introduce yourself, introduce your issue, request action. Congressional offices have staffers whose days are spent solely on the mail, so make their lives easier by keeping letter succinct and to the point.
The post is full of great advice for writing your letter, and it’s a quick read. Check it out.
You are currently browsing the spazeboy weblog archives for the Congress category.
