NETWORK tells me that H.R. 7110, the Job Creation and Unemployment Relief Act of 2008, would do all the things you asked your Congressfolk to do on Monday -- fund infrastructure repairs, increase aid to states, extend unemployment benefits, all the good stuff that doesn't cost all that much and gives good folks a hand up rather than a handout (handouts being what corporations get from the government). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that H.R. 7110 will cost a little over $58 billion in 2009. Congress just gave away well over ten times that amount to the financial services industry because ohmigod it was a crisis. What this government does to its owners, the American people, is a crisis. The House actually passed H.R. 7110 in September, but the Senate still has to vote on it. The American Friends Service Committee provides a toll-free number, 1.800.473.6711, with which you may call your Congressfolk, and NETWORK provides a handy email tool as well. Resist your Senator's inclination to attach a bailout for the auto industry to this legislation. The people have more pressing needs than corporate handouts.
In other news, the right-wing now instructs us as to why the gay struggle for civil rights is nothing like the black struggle for civil rights, and, as usual, you can tell they're wrong just from their bad arguments. Washington Times deputy editorial page editor Tara Wall says they're not the same because "[b]lacks were stoned, hung, and dragged for their constitutional right to 'sit at the table.' Whites — gay or not — already had a seat at that table." Like that bait-and-switch? You think you're getting an argument about blacks and gays, but instead you get one about blacks and whites. Mike Huckabee (who's sinking so, so low these days) commits a different error when confronted with the fact that, er, gays get beaten up, too -- he changes the subject. "And there is Christian bashing," he says, hoping you won't notice that he fails to say well, you're right, gays get beaten up, too, so using "blacks get beaten up" as a reason to deny gays their civil rights doesn't work, you know, like a damn grown-up would. Right-wingers must think we're all stupid. The "liberal" media must think we're stupid, too, if they think we'll think they're "fair" every time they give right-wing idiots more airtime than they deserve.
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