Baucus a few days ago: 'Everything BUT single payer is on the table. Single payer if off the table'
Pelosi: "In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it's not going to be a single payer."
Pelosi's aide: "Where are the phone calls, e-mails and faxes in support of single-payer? Speaker Pelosi has been in favor of single-payer for a long time. Now make us do it."
In addition to gearing up for an ad campaign on TV, 1payer.net is also running a fax flood campaign. So far, nearly 1000 faxes have been sent as of this morning, and it would appear that Nancy Pelosi's fax machine has been overwhelmed already.
Update:
At 17:56:21 MST today, the last remaining fax machine gave up the ghost. The last one to go was the White House fax machine. You sent nearly 2800 faxes in 48 hours and you shut down the fax machines of Nancy Pelosi in Washington and San Francisco, the Washington fax of Max Baucus, the Conyers fax and the White House fax. WAY TO GO!! And best of all, as of right now, there are 514 faxes in the queue waiting to go when they load up their machines tomorrow.
This is a good start. The point of such campaigns is not to convince them with logic and data and reason. Most of these people already know that single payer is the best solution to our health care crisis, but they have reasons of their own for not pursuing our agenda. The point of such campaigns is to steer them off of their course and onto ours by the sheer weight of numbers.
So, let's start with the number of faxes they're getting.
- Send a fax to Nancy Pelosi, Dan Bernal (Legislative Aide to Representative Pelosi), Joel Segal (Aide to Representative Conyers), Senatory Max Baucus and The White Office of Health Reform, demanding that they put single payer on the table.
- Send a fax to Senator Grassley, Senator Baucus and the White House, demanding that the Republicans stop obstructing health reform.
- Send a fax to the White House Office of Health Reform, Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Max Baucus, Senator Chuck Grassley, Senator John D. Rockefeller, Representative Fortney H. "Pete" Stark telling them that you want expanded and improved Medicare NOW.
The first fax, the one to Nancy Pelosi, is signed Yours Truly, A Frustrated Angry American Taxpayer, Your Boss. This is the frame of mind we should be in. These people -- Representatives, Senators, the President -- all work for us, we don't work for them. It is our right to demand that they actually give us what we sent them to Washington for, and it is our right to remove them from office if they don't. They don't actually have any rights to decide among themselves what laws to pass that will get them more free dinners from lobbyists and more campaign dollars from well-heeled corporate interests.
We don't have the mega $$$$$$ that the corporations have, but we have pitchforks and torches faxes. Use them, they're a valid tool.