Pelosi aide begs for our faxes on single payer -- send a fax for FREE right now

Sun, 04/26/2009 - 2:22pm — gob

[I'm going to leave this stickied for now. Let's make sure Pelosi's fax runs out of paper again first thing Monday morning. --lambert]

My local single payer activist passes along the following:

It appears that Congressional leaders are being deliberately dismissive of single-payer to the point of ludicrous statements. It's like they have put their fingers in their ears and are yelling "I can't hear you, I can't hear you." Here they are in all their Congressional member glory:

Baucus a few days ago: "Everything BUT single payer is on the table. Single payer is off the table."

Pelosi: "In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it's not going to be a single payer."

Pelosi's aide: "Where are the phone calls, e-mails and faxes in support of single-payer? Speaker Pelosi has been in favor of single-payer for a long time. Now make us do it."

OK. We are up to the challenge. He wants to see the faxes. Let's break their damn fax machines with the faxes.

You can send a fax right now to Pelosi, Baucus, the aide and the White House.

Send one now and send another in a few minutes. Give them enough faxes that they have to run get more paper (or electronic ink, as the case may be.) Then when they have received all of these, we will do it again. And again. And we will print them out and dump them on Pelosi's office desk.

So let them see what happens when they ask for faxes. Then maybe they will have to take their fingers out of their ears.

Thank You

Clark Newhall MD JD
Physician & Attorney
Law Office at
57 W. 200 South, Suite 101
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
http://www.cnewhall.com

I sent my first fax just now.

From the same source, I see PNHP's David Himmelstein managed to get heard by the House subcommittee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; his bottom line:

While reforms that maintain a major role for private insurers may seem politically expedient, they are economically and medically nonsensical.

Comments

Thanks, Mr. Ed.

By gob on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 2:35pm

I tend to worry too much about too-long headlines.

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The Democrats: a roach motel for progressive energies

- VastLeft

Thank YOU

By lambert on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 2:57pm

I just sent my fax.

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"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi

breaking the fax machines -- success!

By hipparchia on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 3:26pm

probably it only ran out of paper over the weekend, but the fax them into submission campaign is taking off.

Just emailed my fax with comments--Should go to Kennedy's office

By jawbone on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 4:08pm

as well, so sent suggestion to that effect.

Has anyone spread the word on this to other blogs? Lambert, think you could get it front paged at Agonist? You've been doing pretty well over there. If you've done so already, goes to show I should check first, eh?

I'm following up with phone calls tomorrow to Pelosi, Baucus, Kennedy. WH? hhhmmm, waste of time?

never a waste of time to call or fax

By hipparchia on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 5:18pm

the numbers add up, and they do notice those numbers.

i've posted on my blog [where all 2 of my readers will see it!], and have a draft saved at dkos [since they only let you post once every 24 hours there, grrrr].

I'm in

By Valhalla on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 4:54pm

Thanks for the info, gob.

—

Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men. -- George Bernard Shaw

thanks

By DCblogger on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 5:19pm

thanks thanks thanks

I sent my FAX with an added

By katiebird (not verified) on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 5:55pm

I sent my FAX with an added comment. THANK you for posting this story and the link. I've posted it to my Facebook profile with a note about how simple it was to do.

Thank you again!!

Sent two so far...

By wiggles on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 6:13pm

My goal is to send at least ten.

Thank you - I have sent my fax and

By Anne on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 7:58pm

am distributing this post to as many people as I know.

Together, we can do this.

WIPEOUT!! WE SUCCEEDED

By cnewhall on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 9:04pm

I am happy to tell you that as of 17.56.21 mst, the last remaining fax machine that was receiving gave up the ghost. It was the White House fax that lasted the longest and it was up again in an hour -- all set to receive the 514 more faxes that were queued for sending when it went down. CONGRATULATIONS. Celebrate with a little tune from the Surfaris in 1963
Then head on over to www.1payer.net and send some more faxes. Keep those card and letters comin' folks.

—

Clark Newhall MD JD
Physician & Attorney
Clark [dot] Newhall [at] Health-Justice [dot] org

More like this, please

By lambert on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 9:23pm

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"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi

woo hoo!

By hipparchia on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 9:36pm

let's hear it for the little guys!

cool

By DCblogger on Sun, 04/26/2009 - 11:59pm

our opposition is afraid.

Posted info at Eschaton, Confluence, Talk Left, Agonist --hope

By jawbone on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 12:38pm

some folks act on it! Oh, WNYC also, Brian Lehrer segment on swine flu and vaccines. But once a segment is ended, not many continue with the comments.

I was asked at Atrios' place how we know Pelosi would respond; I could only reply that her own aides' words said exactly that... Oh, well; once skepticism is deeply igrained it's hard to fight it. But, damn, it's minutes at most to send the damn fax!

Agonist post is in diaries, so may not get all that much attention. Google search showed this 1payer info at Democratic Underground, TruthDig, Daily Kos, Oxdown at FDL, and Hipparchia's Moonlighting. I had expected to see more!

I've just posted

By a little night ... on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 1:15pm

(copied, actually, with acknowledgement) to my own Z- blog.

I'll also post the videos of the ads with a link to donate later, when I have the chance.

(Trying to figure out how to make those posts get more random Google hits - It's all in the titles, I think...)

—

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We can't afford not to have single-payer!

Actual posts*, as opposed to comments, get the Google attention

By jawbone on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 1:23pm

Good move to post wherever you can. Where are some of the midsize lefy blogs on this??

*As I understand...could be wrong.

The Confluence

By katiebird (not verified) on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 1:34pm

It's front paged at The Confluence right now. It got some attention in comments from you and me yesterday. But, I wanted to wait for the mid-day slot today to front page it.

Thanks

By lambert on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 6:06pm

We need to propagate this any way that we can. I always felt it was 10,000 blogs, not the top 6 or 10, that made the difference in the Bush era. And the nice thing is, that even if everyone reads the top 6 or 10, everybody reads one or another of the 10,000. The only people who only read the 6 or 10, and nothing else, are insiders....

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"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi

Your welcome but I did it for me as much as anyone

By katiebird (not verified) on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 6:22pm

Our health insurance went up $100/mo for next year and we can't absorb that again. So this might be our last 12 months of coverage.

If we don't get something.

I'm VERY suspicious of Senator Baucus's idea to price the so-called "public plan" a bit higher than market for a while.... To protect the insurance companies. What is the point of that?

A public plan that costs more than what we're paying now? Fuck.

Thnx, Katiebird! Agonist also frontpaged--Your link on Baucus is

By jawbone on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 6:58pm

infuriating. Right, we need to protect the poor widdle Big Insurers! The sooner they devolve to niche marketing, the better.

I figured someone over there would do something about this issue. (Again, T/U.)

And, of course, we all have a personal interest in health care for all. I can't tell you how horrible it was read of people on my cancer board who had no insurance. Talk about living hell.

Plus, if folks with company paid health insurance feel "they've got theirs" they better think again, twice, three times, bcz those companies are going to be cutting costs sharply. And I bet health insurance will be one of those cuts.

We can't afford to not have single payer.

And thank you, gob

By lambert on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 7:22pm

In my experience

By a little night ... on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 1:34pm

which, admittedly, is very limited, getting random people to visit (apart from people searching for things that were actually in the content of my posts) was based on their having searched for a phrase which I had used as a title - since my posts are often titled after lines from songs, movie quotes, catchphrases, etc.

I'm hoping to leverage that to get some people to "stumble over" my single-payer posts.

[I can only imagine how disappointed all the people were who came to my blog having searched for "How's that working out for you? Being clever?" and got this. But as of now, if they search for that great Joe Jackson song "You can't get what you want if you don't know what you want", they'll hopefully get here and begin to realize how ubiquitous we are. ;>)]

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We can't afford not to have single-payer!

If you want to try to figure this out...

By lambert on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 7:12pm

... the starting points are "SEO friendly" (search engine optimization) and "page rank."

To the titles idea, add that stuff that's never linked to doesn't rise very high in ranking and may in fact never appear in search (stuff that links TO you, not stuff you link TO). For the medical people here, page rank is a lot like citation analysis.

I don't worry about how to game the system, but perhaps that's foolish of me. I do believe that Drupal is very SEO friendly, though damn if I remember why. I do know that our lovely English like URLs make us more likely to be clicked on if we appear in a search results page.

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"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi

the only dkos diaries on this are mine

By hipparchia on Mon, 04/27/2009 - 8:38pm

that i've found, at least. i haven't been back to check on it yet this evening.

there are some other small blogs that have been doing this too, but they're small enough that they don't show up on google's front pages. i mostly stumbled over them by following links at various healthcare blogs. like lambert says, 10,000 small blogs...

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"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt