1. Joe Lieberman is not running for re-election. Good riddance.
2. Chris Murphy has announced that he will run for U.S. Senate in 2012.

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.”

Sometime after graduation.

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.

Katie Robbins, Healthcare-Now!

Congressman John Conyers, Author of HR 676

Donna Smith, California Nurses Association

Q&A Portion

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.

This is not the first interview that I’ve teamed up with CT Bob to shoot. There was also the great Ned Lamont interview of ‘07.

Click here to check the original ad.

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.