Keep the special interests out!

The fight for Health Care Reform has been won. The battle for its implementation has begun. In the closing hours of the national debate, reports arose alleging that opposition protestors hurled racial and homophobic epithets at various members of Congress. Opposition elected officials, desperate to delay or derail health care reform, did their best to ensure that the insurance industry maintained its dominance in the lives of working families. Their resistance was strong, it was focused, and it was determined. Moving forward, we must be stronger and we must be more focused. We must meet and defeat every challenger, every doubter, every obstacle, and every distraction.

The fight for Michigan’s 2^nd District Congressional seat won’t be easy, but it can be won. And it must be won for a simple reason: there are those who would rather fight for the profits of powerful special interests instead of the needs and concerns of working families. I have been, and I will continue, fighting to ensure that working families don’t have their voices shouted down and their concerns shoved aside by the moneyed special interests.

Finish Health Care

It's time for the Congress to finally finish health care. Both houses have passed the bill. Democratic leadership needs to write up the few amendments needed to reconcile the budgetary aspects of the bill, and get on with it. Budget reconciliation is a fairly common procedure in the Senate (see COBRA, welfare reform, Medicare prescription drug benefit, S-CHIP, and the Bush tax cuts, to name a few) and it is high time they used this procedure to reconcile the two health insurance bills. Here is a video of Warren Buffett calling the current health care system a tape worm in the economy.

Clean Energy Now!

Given the fact that my four (or five, or six?) Republican opponents all engage in some level of climate change denial, I thought this column by former Vice President Gore is particularly timely. If we want to protect our national security by reducing our dependence on foreign oil, stop transferring billions of dollars in national wealth to parts of the world that don't particularly like us, remain internationally competitive in the most productive jobs creation sector of the next few decades and, yes, protect the planet so that future generations can enjoy the quality of life we'd like to see for them, then we must take action on clean energy now.