(Rep. Cathy) McMorris Rogers spoke at All Saints Lutheran Church to about 50 people representing the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association and the AARP, the national advocacy group for people 50 and older.
Although the media were not allowed to attend, a few people who did said afterward that health care was the primary topic of discussion and that a woman in the audience who spoke in favor of the public option received the loudest applause.
Which personally I think is fine. Members of Congress should have meetings with members of appropriate groups in their districts. How interesting that the loudest applause was for the public option, too. I guess when you actually put folks who are likely to be most immediately interested in a room, they get real.
It wouldn’t even really be worthy of note, except for the deliberate insurance industry-GOP strategy of fostering anger and deception at other member’s town halls. To her credit, McMorris Rodgers has decried some of the worst of the nuttiness.
Sure, it would have been nice for McMorris Rodgers to have a public town hall in Spokane, since some tradmed outlets have declared them mandatory for Democrats. But hey, we’re pretty used to the double standard by now. I’m sure the howls of outrage from right wing talkers about facing constituents will echo across Eastern Washington tomorrow.
The AARP is fully in Obama’s pocket on healthcare, that’s why they’ve had 60,000 people quit recently.
It would be nice if Jimmy McDivot would have an open town hall meeting in Seattle.
Don’t you hate it Jon, when the double standard argument snaps back and whacks you right upside your little pea brain?
McMorris-Rodgers should quit Congress and stay home with her kid. She’s a bad mom.*
* Hey, that’s exactly what the trolls said about Darcy Burner, so why isn’t turnabout fair play? They have a double standard about this, too.
@1 How many people have joined AARP recently? They must be getting at least 60,000 new members a week, because otherwise their membership of 35 million would be shrinking instead of growing. 60,000 is only 1/17th of 1 percent of their membership!
As CBS News reports that AARP has lost “up to” 60,000 members over health care reform (note: roughly 70,000 to 80,000 quit because of AARP’s support for Bush’s Medicare Rx program), we can assume the other 99.85% of AARP’s members like Obamacare just fine.
I wonder what the baseline is for # of people quitting AARP a month?
Sounds like McMorris Rodgers was one of the few people to do the right thing on this one: speak out against the haters, refuse to give them a soapbox (by having private meetings) and get on with the the peoples business.
CBS apparently extrapolated its estimate of how many seniors quit AARP from the membership numbers for the American Seniors Association (ASA), a conservative alternative to AARP. However, ASA doesn’t limit its membership to seniors; according to their website, people of any age can join, so they can pad their membership rolls by signing up their kids and grandkids if they want to.
Here’s ASA’s political agenda:
“Medicare reform” (no further information found)
Social Security privatization
They don’t like illegal immigrants
They do like guns and replacing the federal income tax with a 30% federal sales tax.
Any of this sound familiar?
@5 They have 40 million members, and if you figure their average longevity after joining is about 18 years, then about 185,000 of their members drop dead every month.
Maybe we should use the healthcare townhalls as a model for our protests the next time Republicans want to do something we don’t like. After all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander!
@8 So they’d need about a 30% jump in people quitting to come up with the 60K number. A nice note from everyone in that additional 30% saying that they’re quitting because of AARP’s support of Obama and that they understood what that support meant wouldn’t suck either.
I’m not saying it didn’t happen. But, in a country where 39% of the people think the government needs to say out of Medicare, I think you’re pretty hard pressed to say that 60K people with accurate information quit do to AARP’s support for Obama’s reforms.
McMorris went to an ELCA church, to her credit. Lutherans have consolidated, for the most part, and most of us are now ELCA–get this, that means Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. We are the liberal wing of Lutherans, those that are ready to ordain gays. The liberal wing that produces people like me. McMorris went to an ELCA church knowing that, even if we might disagree with her, Lutherans from a Scandinavian background are unlikely to shout her down.
@11
She was also meeting with AARP folks and retired federal employees, two groups more likely to be supportive of health care reform.
I’m not a fan of McMorris, but you’ve got to give credit where credits due and she’s handled this very well.
Hmmm, I wonder how many seniors really want to replace the federal income tax with a 30% sales tax? Presumably seniors have their highest earned-income years behind them, and are enjoying lower tax rates as a result. After all, if they are retired they aren’t paying Social Security and Medicare taxes on their earnings, in addition to the income tax.
But they still need to buy things. Why in the world would they replace an income tax in favor of a sales tax which has a rate higher than any income tax they would pay? Heck, only the very wealthiest Americans pay 30% income tax rates.
(Answering own question).
In asking why any senior would want to substitute a 30% sales tax for an income tax, I missed the obvious answer. I had mistakenly assumed that the seniors would be spending most of their income, earned or as investment returns, on – you know – personal expenses. I had assumed that food, clothing, shelter, prescription drugs, other medical expenses, and an occassional trip to Wal-mart (or to visit their grandchildren) would consume most of that income.
But I forgot about the the less obvious seniors who don’t spend all of their income. In fact, there are those who, even in retirement, make more money off their investments than they could possibly spend in their old age. Most of them inherited their wealth to start with, and have spent most of their lives watching it continue to grow at the most favorable tax rates provided by the federal government. If they can avoid having to pay even the marginal long-term capital gains taxes (which is what – 15% now?), they can have even more money to pass off to their children and grandchildren, who also can continue their lifestyles of not doing very much but funding Republican candidates and complaining about the small percentage of their income they have to pay in taxes anyway.
For them, the sales tax they pay is negligible, compared with their total income.
I’m not a fan of McMorris, but you’ve got to give credit where credits due and she’s handled this very well.
Then you have been sucked in by her machine, as have so many others (she was trained by Hastert, Foley, Pombo, DeLay, and Boehner). She is incapable of being forthright and honest about anything, preferring to send out enewsletters after enewsletters filled with opinion chunks from various extreme conservative commentators (the WSJ editorials are a favorite). She is trying to maneuver herself into a WA US Senate seat, and will do anything necessary to make herself look credible and competent. She is neither, and will never be. Her alleged condemnation of the use of WW2 German dysphemic epithets is mere smoke as she continues to lead the GOP in its campaigns to quash all things that may benefit a majority of the people. The Hill piece was just another carefully crafted gem by a GOP hack, and it obviously made some people blink. McMorris-Rogers indeed needs to go home to her family and stay out of all of our lives. Instead she has refused to hold any open meetings of any kind (local TV interview with pre-screened questions??) in Spokane itself, preferring to run to her base out in the rest of the palouse and not having to answer substantive inquiries by citizens in public.