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Bush plans to veto much of what they are sending his way. The Republicans are trying to spin the Dems as aggressive, cheating, uncooperative, unreasonable, extreme left...
The Dems are trying to spin the Republicans as obstructionist, doing all they can to prevent the will of the people from being accomplished.
The last two days of the first part of the 110th congressional session saw Republicans vociferously whining and complaining that the Dems stole a vote from them. Actually, the dems did a little payback to very much the same kind of thing the Republicans did when they were in power. If they're smart, they'll point out how the Republicans basically wasted another day. If they're really smart, they'll start tracking the amount of time the Republicans spend on bogus sandbagging time-- time spent killing time, preventing legislation from getting done.
There should be a huge amount of expansion of transparency in congress. We now have the ability to track times spent by each legislator. This data should be made available in the form of internet interfaces-- APIs, or programming interfaces-- so other websites can be created to compound and track what the legislators are doing.
We recently implemented a project with a small grant from the Sunlight Foundation, created our Congress Pages, so each member of congress has his or her own page where writers and bloggers can post articles, links and diaries, and comment on other's postings about each legislator. We're building out a mashup which pulls data from multiple sites, integrating the information on each legislator's page. There's more to come.
The Republicans plan to attack Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, characterizing them as extreme and unreasonable, unpatriotic and weak on defense, security and morals. They will call Pelosi and Hillary angry, over-emotional, irrational, hysterical.
The Dems need to fight back, characterizing Boehner and McConnell as sandbagging, obstructionist, more loyal to corporations, party, Bush the failure, neocon Iraq and Iran war chickenhawks and religious extremists. They need to characterize the right's rigid, failure to see through the bogus war claims as a different kind of weakness-- the need to look tough when thinking smart is the real solution. They need to characterize the right's need to spout off about threats of terrorism as fear mongering driven by cowardice and intent to manipulate the uninformed. They can do this by pointing to all the bogus yellow alerts.
The Dem congress has been a disappointment to many partly because of their spinelessness and partly because the bluedog Dems side way too often with right wingers. Those bluedog dems, particularly the ones who voted to give Bush his spy powers and the other dems who are afraid of the spin the right wingers will use against need to go. It is time for the blogosphere to start targeting these sellout losers and funding their opposition in the primaries.
It would be nice if the progressives on the left joined forces on this one.
