STAND WITH THE PRESIDENT
Sign your name in support of President Obama's health care principles.

Now we have to show Congress where the American people stand: 

"I support President Obama's three principles for real health care reform, and I call on Congress to enact a plan upholding them in 2009."

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/organizingforhealthcarevid?source=20090720_dnc

Tell Congress: Don't Go Until You Vote on Health Care

The Senate just announced they'll take a month-long vacation before voting on health care reform.

But Americans can't afford to wait: while the Senate is on vacation, over 400,000 people could lose their health coverage.

Every member of Congress needs to hear--quickly--that voters want them focused on health care now, not running off on vacation. Sign the petition today.

A compiled petition with your individual comment will be presented to your Senators and Representative.

http://pol.moveon.org/dontgo/?id=16660-3949571-nq7B8Xx&t=3

Full petition text:

"Don't go on vacation without acting on health care. Americans don't get a break from the health care crisis, and Congress shouldn't get a break until they vote on the bill."

The lies of August

BY Robert Shrum
Tuesday, August 4, 2009

The stakes are high and Republicans are stooping low. But if health reform falters as a result of GOP demagoguery, Democrats may face a reconstituted Gingrich coalition in 2010.

August will be a liar's month, breeding conspiracy theories and falsehoods out of the cynical opposition to health-insurance reform. President Obama's invitation to bipartisanship has been answered by Republicans with expedient delay and a rising cacophony of fear-mongering. South Carolina's retrograde Sen. Jim DeMint explained their purposes perhaps more plainly than his like-minded colleagues would have wished: "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo," DeMint said. "It will break him."

With the political stakes so high, Republicans are willing to stoop very low. The problem is that reform is inevitably complex—and the opposition can opportunistically cherry-pick and distort its individual provisions. The fear-mongering ranges from the false claim that tax increases on the wealthy, included in the House bill, will devastate small businesses—in fact, 96 percent would pay nothing more—to the simplistic fraud that Medicare reforms equal cuts in Medicare benefits. Meantime, the lies multiply about government "bureaucrats" stifling individual choice or rationing care.

The ugliest smear of all is that Obama's proposed reform, in the words of the reliably demagogic House Republican leader John Boehner, "may start us down a treacherous path to government-sponsored euthanasia." The charge has been taken up by a rogues' chorus of intentionally misleading critics. One of them is Betsy McCaughey, who gained fame penning an error-riddled attack on ClintonCare before moving up to become lieutenant governor of New York—a position she handled with such flaky abandon that Republican Gov. George Pataki dropped her from the ticket. Among Republican health-care critics, however, she passes for credible.

McCaughey contends that the bill "would make it mandatory that ... every five years, people in Medicare have a required session that will tell them how to end their lives sooner." The counseling is not mandatory; the legislation simply provides an option for seniors or the terminally ill to consult on their choices, enabling them to decide which medical interventions they do or don't want at the end of their lives. It gives them a right that millions of Americans already exercise—to refuse treatments that prolong their pain and degrade their autonomy.

The effort to use this provision to terrify the elderly has predictably been taken up by Randall Terry, the extremist foe of a woman's right to choose, who now crassly traduces the President's health reform as an attempt to "kill Granny." Not for the first time, one has to wonder whether Terry is less interested in the right to life than in the Republican right to rule.

continues:

http://www.theweek.com/bullpen/column/99201/The_lies_of_August