Merry Fucking Christmas

It's Xmas Eve Day and we're still in BTV, which is sad but okay.  We've got an opportunity to have dinner with @ntoddspa and then we'll get to PDX in time for Xmas dinner tomorrow.

The Senate's done until 1/5/10 having passed the abomination posing as #hcr.  Bernie voted for it--guess that massive FDL petition effort didn't have the desired effect.  The tactic to somehow magically "push him from the left" with a last minute online petition threatening his seat was pretty fucking laughable.  I disagree with Bernie there, but hell if I won't vote for him in 2012 because he made a pragmatic, strategic decision.

As I've said, there are some decent things in the bill, though they are essentially bribes to various interest groups and I wanted to kill the thing outright.  Certainly we in Vermont will benefit from the $10B our junior Senator got included for FQHCs nationwide (we have 8, will be able to create 2 more).  I still wouldn't call this shit sandwich "reform."

I'm still not sure what the "fix it later" crowd thinks we will be able to do after entrenching the insurance companies further with mandates.  What kinds of pressure will we bring to bear to make that happen?

I see a lot of weird shit in the netroots world: Ezra is so tired of this debate he can't wait until its over (fuck the poor uncovered so I can get back to watching cable); Jane goes after the Socialist in the Senate after he decides to vote for the bill (when he offered S703 and his single-payer amendment, where was the massive, tangible support?); people say on blogs and Twitter that we have to do something (historically successful methods of resistance like boycotts and strikes are a non-starter because they never work).

It's nice that there's experimentation with different tactics. I would submit that if they'd study how this stuff works, they'd see that pretty much all that's been done is low-level and fairly passive. 

It's nice that after several years of Code Pink's examples, people are trying to implement similar things. Learn from their successes and failures, rather than reinventing the wheel.

It's nice that folks are trying to pressure Congress into doing the right thing.  Target selection needs to improve and we need a cohesive strategy rather than playing tactical magnet ball.

We have until maybe February to step things up.  It's great to talk about primary challenges, donating to "better" Dems, etc--we should think about longer term approaches--but that's still reactive and won't create any pressure right now because we haven't shown we can actually do anything with real impact collectively.  Without a down payment, putting some real skin in the game, the Dems can be fairly confident of their electoral positions.

23 girls made a corporation change a sexist policy.  In recent memory in the United States there have been many successful boycotts.  Over the holiday I'm going to be considering how we can extrapolate from these examples, and hope people will brainstorm on making this work instead of declaring it can't and refusing to try.

ntodd