I hope this bodes well (as it would seem) for EFCA.

Hilda was great here at her Blue America chat, and she truly has been a champion on so many issues through the years dealing with workplace safety, women’s pay parity and other labor concerns. She gets it because her family is working class, too. Just what we need right now as so many folks are struggling, I think.

Do you have the link for the vote breakdown?

Hilda should give Rahm a big hug at her first cabinet meeting. Maybe she could pass along greetings from a mutual friend . . . “Rahm, good to see you. By the way, Howie Klein asked me to say ‘hello’ to you from him.”

*g*

Haven’t found the full vote online yet. When I find it, I’ll add in the link…

Hi Christy, here’s another beer for ya, commercial that is.

Cheers!

i think the line at the end is fitting for this post!

wooT!1!

I’m so happy!!!

Until the official tally goes online, Kagro got it all down as it happened.

Fantasitic news! Slightly OT, have been listening to a bit of Ed Schultz and it’s stunning to hear the number of callers decrying the “threat of socialism.” France is a quasi socialist country and they have better roads, certainly better trains, the best health care in the world for all citizens, a better educational system (aside from U.S. higher ed.) and they certainly eat better than Americans. If that’s socialism give me a piece of that here.

The 80-17 vote comes after more than a month of delays. Some GOP lawmakers were concerned over her work for a pro-union group that supports legislation easing the process for workers to organize unions.

via Raw Story. No names…shall we guess who voted NO?!!

MeteorBlades:

The nays were Bond, Bunning, Burr, Coburn, Cornyn, Crapo, DeMint, Ensign, Inhofe, Kyl, Risch, Roberts, Sessions, Shelby, Thune, Vitter and Wicker.

Glad that it done and out of the way so now she can get to work and kick some butt.

Thank you much!! And congrats to Hilda!!!

The “let them eat cake crowd.”

The nays: Bond, Bunning, Burr, Coburn, Cornyn, Crapo, DeMint, Ensign, Inhofe, Kyl, Risch, Roberts, Sessions, Shelby, Thune, Vitter and Wicker

Burr really is looking to get trashed in ‘10!!

I just borrowed that from Kos. 8P

I’ve noticed some Francophobia from wingnut land as well. Stuff about rioting and crap. must be rushstuff.

Solis…yea, whatever. SUMMERS!!1! GEITHNER11!!1! OH NOES!11!!11

The problem with all the ‘yellers’ about socialism is that they really don’t know what socialism is.

They think socialism = communism. While those two philosophies have existed side-by-side somewhat in some circumstances, they are not the same.

Thence, all the hue and cry. We are back to the ‘red scare’ and that’s why they keep calling Hugo Chavez a communist. He IS a socialist. But there is a really big difference.

Every non-dictatorship-type government has socialist features, that is, the government gets money (taxes) and ‘redistributes’ it in the form of services for its citizens. That takes the form of national defense, as well as infrastructure, and yes, social programs. We already have a ton of this kind of stuff.

The VA system for our veterans is a completely socialist program. I don’t hear them yelling about that…

This refreshing and splendid news indeed!

Oh hell yeah!!!!!

So is this:
http://www.boston.com/news/edu…..agon_post/

And apparently Obama is going to have most troops out of Iraq in a year and half. Lots of good stuff happening….

o/t reminder that Jane will be on msnbc/shuster’s show. just starting here in calif. social security will be her topic.

I hope the Solis confirmation helps to blow out some wingnut gaskets.

And speaking of wingnuts, Bobby Jagoff Jindal has already released a snapshot of the self-serving diatribe remarks he will make this evening. Profiles in Dipshitery…

http://www.google.com/hostedne…..gD96I7HJ00

France has had mass demonstrations about the current global financial meltdown of over a million including students, unions, minorities, you know the usual subjects. In France the government fears the people in the U.S. the people fear the government.

voters, citizens, what’re you gonna do?

I believe the emerald isle is letting their Irish show as well over the same issues. I say that with all affection for the celtic people.

as they screw us vets again

“…they have better roads, certainly better trains, the best health care in the world for all citizens, a better educational system (aside from U.S. higher ed.) and they certainly eat better than Americans…”

There’s your Communist-Inspired Domino Theory, right there. Next thing you know it’s going to be fluoridation of water…

“Mandrake! Get over here and feed me this belt, boy…”

I sure hope not, because if our local VA is any indication, they are absolutely swamped these days.

Jane is up

I’m sure your local VA is representative of most offices. At least they gave the remaining Filipino WWII vets something.

I just had a mssive surgery courtesy of the VA. My surgeon is a nationally recognized specialist in this type of surgery who gave up his practice in NYC to get out from under all the red tape and bureaucracy imposed by insurance companies. He’s working for the VA. Thank goodness for me and others like me who need this help.

I also have some serious eye problems – my eye doctor is recognized as one of the best in this area west of the Mississippi (I’m in Montana). He has a similar story.

The nursing staff at the VA hospital here is wonderful – and believe me – I was around during the ‘bad old days’ before Nicholson overhauled it.

The clinic here is expanding and at least here we have plenty of mental health services available for vets who need it.

I’m not complaining.

Schuster is being a dick about this “the recession will be absolutley over in a year”.

Bless you bro (or sis), I have understood that they are getting better. When I tried to register here they lost my paperwork in less than 6 days>

woohoo…. super great news……

I had very good experiences with the VA. Their records have been electronic for some time. At first the docs and nurses mumbled a lot but then got used to it. And they are allowed to negotiate for their meds.

With remarks like that he might just end up at the NBC Siberia affiliate doing the weather report with Rick Santelli…

I generally like him but he and tweety might as well be here on FDL “holding his feet to the fire”!

He was quoting one of Obamas secretaries I thought.

If it was a quote, I’ll cut him some slack. No slack for whomever said it, however. That’s fantasyland shit. A few upticks, maybe. Over? No way.

Well, sort of. The he asked him if he thought the recession would be over in a year. The dude said “absolutely, it will start to turn around” then Schuster hammered him over and over “are you saying you and the president believe the recession will ABSOLUTLEY over in a year”? Shit, we could all be dead before sunrise, who knows?

this guy on shuster saying what I’ve been thinking: we’re at war in the economic sense.

that’s for sure. why is it that public safety, environmental protections, and other pro-life and life respecting measures are not profitable and therefore “bad” and “anti American”? argh.

The HUD secretary said it on the air with Shuster right before Jane came on the air with Cenk. While talking to Shuster.

And Shuster gave him an opportunity to walk it back — twice — which he didn’t really do very well.

I am wholeheartedly behind EFCA and am glad Solis got 80 votes(I thought the vote was to be by ‘voice only’) but let’s not elevate SEIU to ‘godfather’ status; see here

OK, I take it back Schuster isn’t a dick,

Solis, puedes!

I wouldn’t go that far…

Shuster really did try to get the guy to walk it back, too — even fed him economist quotes.

Just think, if Al had been there, it would have been 81. Coleman people claiming this week, they are done, per one of his spokespeeps, “done, done.”

And he also said “a lot of people are watching and will say I heard it on Schuster”. Like that is important.

Socialists all!

I cannot speak for the beaurocratic/paperwork side. I have been through the mill on that in years past. Luckily I got ’signed up’ before all the new restrictions went into place under Bush.

The medical part is super. There have been three peer-reviewed studies of quality of care published in JAMA and others that put the VA at or near the top of the heap along with Mayo Clinic, Sloan-Kettering, and others like that.

Paperwork – if you listen to the complaints about the VA – They are mostly about paperwork. Not all, but most. And all of that has to do with the ‘rationing’ and access that has been so curtailed under Bushco.

When the stim package came up for a vote in the house, I called my asshat congressman’s office and said in no uncertain terms that the country was facing an economic emergency, similar in scope and threat to what the country faced going into WWII. That being the premise, I then stated that any life form in congress who deliberately obstructed the process was (therefore) being – essentially and fundamentally – un-American.

This fight needs to be framed in these terms in the MSM. Principled debate? OK. Deliberate obstructionism? Unacceptable. Un-American.

A good place to begin would be with Bobby Jindal, right after he completes his diatribe this evening. No more free passes for these self-serving clowns.

So hey, Shuster, KO, Maddow (maybe even Tweety). You willing to rise to the occasion? You up for a fight? CNN? No? Who’s Real and who’s a little bitch? Takers?

Yeah, I think that was a joke — he’s snarky in that nerdy way that often falls flat in real life, too. Truly. Having spent many hours with him at the Libby courthouse, you realize it’s a bug, not a feature.

Ooops – hit return too quickly — meant to say that I got the impression he was trying to laugh it off a little with the guy in case it was nerves on his part. Teevee interviews make people really freaked out sometimes, myself included — my nerves go through the roof before something like that. But that didn’t seem to sink in…

Actually, as I said, I like him. I recall defending his “pimp” deal and getting hammered.

He said during the campaign that his wife was a newspaper reporter that had accompanied Obama throughout the campaign. (May have been Bloomberg)

Solis will need a lot of help from the White House and from the electorate to turn the Dept. of Labor around and make it an effective advocate for working people. Bush/Chao did a lot of damage, but the truth is the Department has been marginalized since the Reagan era (Clinton did little to reverse the damage). Good luck to her – and to us.

One thing will be easy – under Chao, almost a quarter of the people who worked there left. So she will be able to fill all those positions with people she wants and trusts to do the right thing.

There are of course, the burrowers (in all departments). But I think the old hands will readily identify those people and help marginalize them.

But you are right – she will need a lot of help.

Actually every single new department head needs the same kind of help since the same destruction has taken place in all of them.

Interesting that TX Hutchison is not on that list. I heard today that she is polling well ahead of our current Gov GoodHair in the upcoming Gov race. He must hate that!

Here is the link:

http://senate.gov/legislative/…..vote=00066

All Democrats FOR…two absent including Kennedy (for good reason). I thought it might be interesting to list the Republicans who voted FOR confirmation though.

YEAS: Alexander (R-TN), Barrasso (R-WY), Bennett (R-UT), Brownback (R-KS), Chambliss (R-GA), Cochran (R-MS), Collins (R-ME), Corker (R-TN), Enzi (R-WY), Graham (R-SC), Grassley (R-IA), Gregg (R-NH), Hatch (R-UT), Hutchison (R-TX), Isakson (R-GA), Johanns (R-NE), Lugar (R-IN), Martinez (R-FL), Yea McCain (R-AZ), McConnell (R-KY), Murkowski (R-AK), Snowe (R-ME), Specter (R-PA), Voinovich (R-OH),

NAYS: Bond (R-MO), Bunning (R-KY), Burr (R-NC), Coburn (R-OK), Cornyn (R-TX), Crapo (R-ID), DeMint (R-SC), Ensign (R-NV), Inhofe (R-OK), Kyl (R-AZ), Risch (R-ID), Roberts (R-KS), Sessions (R-AL), Shelby (R-AL), Thune (R-SD), Vitter (R-LA), Wicker (R-MS)

Some interesting splits showing up here. Esp. by State (AZ, KS, KY, MS, SC, TX). I wonder if any of this is patterned on upcoming elections? I notice that even McConnell voted with the Ayes, here, though. Is this a sign of disunity in the Caucus?