President Barack Obama accused Fox News as operating in a talk radio format. Fox News only strengthened that argument Sunday as they allowed only White House detractors to comment on the situation. Chris Wallace went so far as to suggest the White House was using mob tactics in it’s “war against Fox News.” Of course, Fox couldn’t find any White House defenders to appear on the Sunday talk show.
It’s “what some people are calling the administration’s Chicago way of doing business,” said Wallace referring to a scene from the classic mobster movie “The Untouchables.” Wallace’s comparison follows other commentary by the right wing echo chamber. The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel was one of the first:
A White House set on kneecapping its opponents isn’t, of course, entirely new. (See: Nixon) What is a little novel is the public and bare-knuckle way in which the Obama team is waging these campaigns against the other side.
That’s the Chicago way and now we have it in Washington with Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama.
What was it that Obama promised on the campaign trail? Oh yeah, a “new kind of politics.” America didn’t think the “new” politics would be even worse than the “old” politics.
Agree with the administration? Fantastic. Dare to stand in the way of “reform”? Uh-oh.
No longer is it a gentlemen’s disagreement that can be debated. No, you are going to play ball or get a beatdown.
Media Matters put together some examples of how Fox opinion bleeds into Fox “News.”
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Charles Grassley is starting to sound as incoherent during his television interviews as he does in his Tweets. Grassley doesn’t think we need more regulation. We just need more transparency. Yeah, that’s going to make the finace companies behave. And when asked if the banks are in any position to protest if they’re not going to make as much money, Grassley comes back with this:
Greed is human nature. We shouldn’t blame greed any more than you’d blame gravity when a plane has an accident and goes down.
I’m sorry Senator, but I think we can blame greed for the mess we’re in. Greed and the unwillingness of the government to put a check on it.
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Charles Grassley is starting to sound as incoherent during his television interviews as he does in his Tweets. Grassley doesn’t think we need more regulation. We just need more transparency. Yeah, that’s going to make the finace companies behave. And when asked if the banks are in any position to protest if they’re not going to make as much money, Grassley comes back with this:
Greed is human nature. We shouldn’t blame greed any more than you’d blame gravity when a plane has an accident and goes down.
I’m sorry Senator, but I think we can blame greed for the mess we’re in. Greed and the unwillingness of the government to put a check on it.
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Rachel Maddow talks to former State Department lawyer under Condoleeza Rice, Philip Zelikow who says that the Bush administration attempted to destroy all copies of an alternative memo on interrogation techniques he wrote in 2005.
At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn’t entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department’s archives.
Stated in a shorthand way, mainly for the benefit of other specialists who work these issues, my main concerns were:
the case law on the “shocks the conscience” standard for interrogations would proscribe the CIA’s methods;
the OLC memo basically ignored standard 8th Amendment “conditions of confinement” analysis (long incorporated into the 5th amendment as a matter of substantive due process and thus applicable to detentions like these). That case law would regard the conditions of confinement in the CIA facilities as unlawful.
the use of a balancing test to measure constitutional validity (national security gain vs. harm to individuals) is lawful for some techniques, but other kinds of cruel treatment should be barred categorically under U.S. law — whatever the alleged gain.
The underlying absurdity of the administration’s position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.
Part two below the fold.
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DOWNLOAD (108)
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Part 1
Rachel Maddow talks to former State Department lawyer under Condoleeza Rice, Philip Zelikow who says that the Bush administration attempted to destroy all copies of an alternative memo on interrogation techniques he wrote in 2005.
At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn’t entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department’s archives.
Stated in a shorthand way, mainly for the benefit of other specialists who work these issues, my main concerns were:
the case law on the “shocks the conscience” standard for interrogations would proscribe the CIA’s methods;
the OLC memo basically ignored standard 8th Amendment “conditions of confinement” analysis (long incorporated into the 5th amendment as a matter of substantive due process and thus applicable to detentions like these). That case law would regard the conditions of confinement in the CIA facilities as unlawful.
the use of a balancing test to measure constitutional validity (national security gain vs. harm to individuals) is lawful for some techniques, but other kinds of cruel treatment should be barred categorically under U.S. law — whatever the alleged gain.
The underlying absurdity of the administration’s position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.
Part two below the fold.
You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!
I mentioned in conjunction with yesterday’s Senate polling update that “house effects” — systematic differences in the the way that a particular pollster’s surveys tend to lean toward one or the other party’s candidates — have tended to be extremely strong thus far this cycle. Here, in fact, is a demonstration of the house effect that my model is identifying for each of the five most prolific pollsters so far this year — those that have produced at least 15 separate surveys for head-to-head Senate race matchups. (Our methodology for calculating these is described here.)
Rasmussen, thus far, has a Republican-leaning house effect of about 5 and 1/2 points. So if Rasmussen, for example, has a Republican leading by 7 points in a particular race, an average pollster would have the Republican ahead by only 1 or 2 points. Research 2000, on the other hand, has a Democratic-leaning house effect of about 4 1/2 points. If they show an R+7 in a particular race, it would be the equivalent of an R+11 or an R+12 from an average pollster. These are, obviously, very large differences: it implies that if Research 2000 and Rasmussen were to poll the same race, we’d expect about a 10 point difference between them.
It’s extremely important to emphasize that just because a pollster has a house effect doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. They may result from legitimate differences of opinion about how to conduct surveys. Rasmussen, for instance, is one of the few pollsters to already be employing a likely voter model at this point. It’s not uncommon for likely voter polls to have comparatively better results for Republicans, since Democrats rely on votes from groups like young voters and minorities who turn out less reliably in midterm elections. (And, indeed, Republicans appear to have an especially significant enthusiasm advantage in this cycle.)
What it does mean, though, is that when you’re evaluating the polls in a particular race, you need to take an especially long look at who’s conducting them. If you tell me that the latest poll has the Republican up by two points in Colorado, that’s going to mean one thing if it’s Research 2000 telling me that and quite another if it’s Rasmussen. Unfortunately, just a couple of pollsters have been very dominant this cycle. Rasmussen and Research 2000 alone collectively account for over half of the polls in my Senate database, and the fraction jumps to 67 percent if you include Public Policy Polling (which hasn’t had much of a house effect) as well.
By the way: when I publish something like this, my intent is not to chide the various pollsters into some kind of orthodoxy — I frankly like the difference of opinion! But it’s been a large difference of opinion so far this year, and if it carries forward to Election Day, the pollsters might have almost as much on the line in November as the candidates.
President Barack Obama is seen through the eyepiece of a video camera as he delivers remarks on health care reform at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., March 8, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton)
President Barack Obama is out and abroad stumping like mad for his embattled health insurance “reform” plan, claiming now that his administration will “crack down” on $100 billion in annual “waste and fraud” in the Medicare and Medicaid systems.
This new tough rhetoric is meant to win over some of the conservative opposition that sees all government programs as inherently wasteful, inefficient and corrupt.
But the claim itself is bogus.
The figure comes from a study done annually by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and that study makes it clear that it is not looking at fraud, but at errors. And there are two things that can be said about those errors, most of which appear to involve problems like illegible signatures on doctors’ orders, or lost paperwork needed to document that a treatment being billed for actually happened.
The first point to make here is that such errors are equally prevalent in the private sector, only the chances are that in the private sector, the errors more often lead to shortchanging or denying care to the patient, while in the public sector, they as often lead to somebody or some institution getting paid more than they deserve for treating a patient.
Second, the errors in the Medicare program (there has been no systematic study, according to a spokesman at CMS, of error and fraud in the Medicaid program, much of which is funded and managed by the various states), cut both ways, with some errors leading to an overpayment or a payment for a service that wasn’t actually provided, and some errors leading to an underpayment for a service that was provided. Also not reported at all are errors that led to a person’s being improperly denied care altogether. (The same is true for the Veteran’s Administration, by the way, which is notorious among veterans for improperly denying claims of service-connected disabilities.)
According to the latest CMS report, the error rate for Medicaid parts A and B–the hospital and physician part of the program, was 7.9 percent or approximately $24 billion. Of this, $23 billion was said to involve overpayments, and $1.1 billion was said to involve underpayments. The underpayment figure looks suspicious, because in prior years, when the overpayment figure was roughly $9-$10 billion annually, the underpayments came in at about $1 billion also. It seems unlikely that overpayment errors in 2009 would more than double, while underpayment errors would stay the same.
Nearly all the underpayment errors–$800 million worth in 2009–were for inpatient care. This compared to $6 billion in overpayment errors. In otherwords roughly two out of every 15 errors involved the patient or the patient’s physician or hospital being shorted by Medicare.
CMS claims that the estimated error rate for Medicaid in 2009 was 8.7% for the federal government and 10.5% for the states and counties that administer the program locally. That would be $39 billion of the $98 billion in errors and fraud found in both programs combined for the year by CMS, and cited by President Obama in his “$100 billion in waste and fraud” claim.
But bear in mind that unlike Medicare, Medicaid is a welfare program, which means that the bias is towards denying benefits to applicants, as anyone who has had experience with Medicaid can tell you. Furthermore it is a program administered by both state and federal bureaucrats.
Back in 1977, when I was county government bureau chief for the Los Angeles Daily News, I got an urgent call from my editor, telling me to hop on a story based upon a release by the L.A. County Department of Social Services claiming to have discovered that 5.83 percent of welfare recipients were being overpaid because off errors and fraud, and that a campaign was being implemented to attack the problem, which was costing the county millions of dollars a year. Naturally, the editor saw this as a page one piece, perhaps a banner headline, for the next day’s edition.
I called the head of the Department of Social Services and asked a simple question: What is the error rate in the other direction? What percent of welfare applicants and recipients were being undercompensated because of errors? After a little investigation, she returned and informed me that the underpayment error rate was exactly the same: 5.83%! When I reported this back to the City Desk, there was an audible groan on the phone. The story had lost all importance to the editor. And yet, I thought, wasn’t an underpayment of welfare benefits to a poor family of far greater consequence than an overpayment is to the taxpayers? Getting shorted $100, or even $20, for a family living on, or below, the edge, would be catastrophic.
My guess is that a good study of underpayments and overpayments in the Medicaid program of the federal government and the states would more than likely give the same kind of result: an error rate in terms of underprovision of benefits that is equal to in percent and dollar amount the overpayment of benefits. And in fact, with welfare type programs like Medicare, there is also an unmeasured or unmeasurable problem, which is people who are wrongly denied benefits at all. They aren’t underpaid because they are simply turned away from public assistance for health care when they are actually eligible.
The point here is that if there is an error rate of about 9.5% in Medicaid (I’m averaging the federal and state error rate estimates for 2009), then either half of that $39 billion is probably underpayment errors, or, if they are only counting overpayment errors, there is almost certainly another $39 billion that should have been paid out for care of poor families that was not paid out.
Either way, the president’s incendiary claim that there is $100 billion in waste and fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid program is way off the mark.
If the president were serious about the problem, he would call for an honest investigation to make certain that everyone potentially eligible for medical coverage and assistance in both programs gets the full benefits to which they are entitled, to minimize inadvertent overpayments to providers, and to prosecute to the full extent of the law those who defraud either program.
That would be fine and appropriate. But at the same time, the president is also disingenuous in the extreme when he just attacks fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid, as though there is not massive fraud and waste in the private insurance industry and the rest of the medical industry. Indeed, much of the fraud in the Medicare program is in that part of it that is contracted out to the private insurance firms that offer the so-called MediGap insurance policies.
Nearly all the rest of the actual fraud is perpetrated by private physicians, private hospitals and by other medical industry firms and pharmaceutical companies, which submit false invoices and charge for services and goods not delivered. And as CBS’s “60-Minutes” program and other news organizations have reported, there has been little or no effort devoted to prosecution of such fraud, though it totals in the tens of billions of dollars per year.
That’s not a problem with “government-run health care”–a bogeyman that the president regularly pulls out to pillory–but with private healthcare.
The president knows this, but since his whole “reform” proposal is built around the private insurance sector, he’s not going to say that.
Then again, what political strategist guru in the White House came up with the idea that attacking alleged “waste and fraud” in “government health care” would be a good way to win support for Obamacare?
Senator Bernie Sanders, in a brief interview in the Capitol just now, confirmed to me that he’s willing to commit to introducing an amendment that would add the public option to the Senate bill’s reconciliation fix.
This is important, because as far fetched as this seems, if this amendment is introduced, a vote on it would be very hard for the Senate Dem leadership to block. The only thing that could stop it from happening, according to Senate expert Robert Dove, is for the parliamentarian to rule that it’s not germane to the Senate bill somehow — something that seems unlikely…read on
As Adam Green is launching another initiative for the PCCC, we know the House doesn’t trust the Senate at all, but the process seems to finally be winding down.
The public option faces its last stand. With more than 40 senators publicly willing to vote for a health care reform reconciliation package that includes the option, the opportunity to reinsert it into the final bill has never been greater, though the battle is nearly over without having been fought.
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That balance of power gives House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) extraordinary leverage of a historical nature. Pelosi, however, has yet to concede in negotiations that it is the obligation of the House to go first. And the deal that is being reached is driven largely by the White House. But both the Senate and the White House need Pelosi. And the House, of course, has already passed a health care bill with a public option.
If the House does move first, the Senate would essentially face an up-or-down vote on whatever Pelosi sends over. Durbin was asked by HuffPost if he would whip a reconciliation package from the House that included a public option. An analysis of past statements and positions taken by members of the Democratic caucus indicates that there could plausibly be 53 votes for a public option and perhaps several more.
Durbin, in response to the question, said at first that it was hypothetical, but then answered, “I think there will come a time when we reach agreement on what the reconciliation package includes, with the understanding that any changes in the House or Senate could slow down or stop the process.”
So whatever comes from the House, that’s what you will whip?
“That’s basically it,” he said. “I hope that what comes from the House is what we agree on going into this debate.”
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UPDATE: The news that the Senate parliamentarian told Senate Republicans that the bill must become law before any amendments can be made through reconciliation alters the equation if true. The House, however, could still pass the Senate bill into law and then send the Senate a reconciliation fix with a public option. The Senate could torpedo that legislation without concern that no reform package at all would get passed, giving the Senate added leverage. The underlying dynamic, however, remains unchanged: In the next few days, as the White House and congressional leaders meet to hash out the way forward, the votes appear to exist to include a public option. It’s only a matter of will.
Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged Wednesday that liberals may be asked to oppose any amendment, including one creating a public option, to ensure a smooth ride for the bill. “We have to tell people, ‘You just have to swallow hard’ and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen,” Durbin, who supports a public option, told reporters. “We have to move this forward. We know the Republicans are likely to offer a lot of amendments, and some of them may be appealing to Democrats, but we have to urge them to stick with the bill.”
David DeGraw’s six-part series on the The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the USA can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.
When you are one of the 180 million Americans now living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you are working 12 – 14 hours a day, six days a week, you have to constantly ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing the most effective way to use my time?”
When it comes to my work here on AmpedStatus, I’m putting more money into it than I’m getting out of it. So, even with the impact and success I’ve been having with recent reports, my mind still questions if I would be better off working on other, more financially rewarding projects. As each month passes, and the bills keep coming, your will and resolve are tested with increased intensity.
When people take time out of their busy schedules to write emails and donate some of their hard-earned money, and when the bad news just keeps piling up with no substantial government actions to combat it, you realize that you must find it within yourself to keep fighting. In the long run, unfortunately, there is really no other option for us. We have been attacked, a war has been launched on us, even though most people are yet to realize this.
My frustration and cynicism is quickly overwhelmed by my survival instinct. As part of this, I must always try to figure out how to be most effective and question my methods. So when someone like Bill Moyers comes along, and quotes your work, you, for a moment, feel a sense of success. Maybe all the hard work is having an affect and paying off, maybe I am getting through to people.
Perhaps it is just my need for some kind of validation, in the face of such a difficult battle, but Bill Moyers has meant a great deal to me over the years. I remember being in middle school, in 1987, and coming across a PBS television show that shocked my young and naïve mind. It was called “The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis,” and a man named Bill Moyers gave me my first lesson in how power really works in this country and throughout the world.
I began to get very interested in these deeper political issues that Mr. Moyers revealed and closely followed his work on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Savings & Loan crisis.
At that time, Bill taught me things I could have never learned in my public schooling or through the network news programs that dominated public consciousness. (Keep in mind, the Internet wasn’t even around back then!) So there was much to learn from Mr. Moyers in the late 1980s, just as there is today.
The most important thing he taught me was to always be critical of those with power, to always question and probe below the surface of popular opinion. And I heeded his advice. While my friends and classmates dutifully read their history books and memorized names and dates, I spent my time at the local library looking for books that offered an alternative viewpoint to textbooks that seemed so black-and-white and lacked the depth and critical thoughts that Mr. Moyers made clear were necessary to be an informed citizen, to be a guardian of freedom and democracy.
I took these things very seriously as a kid. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, and the person for whom I am named, my grandfather’s brother, died during the war fighting for freedom and democracy. One of my most cherished possessions is the US flag that was folded into a triangle and presented to my family at my Uncle’s memorial service. I was instilled with a deep understanding that freedom was not free and you must stay vigilant if democracy is to be preserved. So I was very thankful that Mr. Moyers taught me how to look deeper into the power-addicted forces within human nature that are often behind the scenes conspiring against free people – always looking to gain power from us for their own greedy purposes.
Though it may sound like a dark view to some, this is the reality of the world, a reality my grandparent’s generation knew based on first-hand experience. A reality that has been obscured by an all-pervasive distraction-based, profit-seeking mainstream media system that has created two generations of dangerously naïve people. We have forgotten the lessons of our elders.
My grandparents were born into the Great Depression, an era of Robber Barons and massive income inequality. They had to fight through poverty and a World War. And when the war was over, the battle-tested American public joined together and created a prosperous middle class which blossomed into the greatest super-power this world has ever known.
But as the generations passed, we became complacent. We stopped paying attention to politics. Our free and open society was then easily corrupted by those same power and greed-addicted forces that we once fought off. We ignored politics, as the richest members of the world began to dominate both political parties and take over our country – economically and militarily.
As President Eisenhower warned, a grave danger to our future would become an unchecked military industrial complex, now represented in a private and covert military that in many ways is more powerful than our own citizen military. Along with this, the Robber Barons have returned, stronger than ever. The income inequality between the richest one percent and the remaining 99 percent of our country is the highest it has ever been. When you ignore the lessons of the past, they have a horrifying way of coming back to haunt you.
As Bill Moyers said in 1987, at the end of his report on the Secret Government:
“Can it happen again? You bet it can.… This is a system easily corrupted as the public grows indifferent again, and the press is seduced or distracted. So one day, sadly, we are likely to discover once again that while freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends.”
Unfortunately, Bill hit the nail on the head. In many ways, we are right back to where our grandparents started.
Fast forward to our current crisis, and Bill Moyers still, as always, remains ever so aware and present in our national consciousness. It was almost exactly one year ago when Bill Moyers invited William Black, a world renowned white-collar criminologist, to speak with him on his TV show about the outright fraud and theft of our money. As Bill so eloquently and boldly summed it up, “For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that ‘The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.’” Bill gave us a revealing and much needed look into the systemic criminal underpinnings of our economic structure.
On March 1st, Bill gave his first public speech in three years, as the final speaker in the Dowmel Lecture series. In the speech, Bill, who once served as President Lyndon Johnson’s chief-of-staff, press secretary and speechwriter, choose to address what he feels is “the greatest threat” to our country: the staggering inequality of wealth and the death of the middle class.
He spoke, as always, in clear and concise language:
“This is my fear… at the end of my long career in journalism.… The isolation of the poor, the plight of a failing middle class, the crumbling of our infrastructure. The reckless disregard for our fiscal affairs and the hijacking of our political process by big money. All tear at the social compact that forge the American consciousness.…
We have come to a critical moment in the long fashioning of a democratic people…. America’s wealth is becoming ever more concentrated… concentration of wealth goes hand-in-hand with concentration of power. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how its great wealth buys off Washington and turns our watchdogs into lapdogs. You just have to be a good journalist and connect the dots.… The freedoms and rights we cherish were not sent from heaven and do not grow on trees. They were born by centuries of struggle by millions who fought, bled and died… to protect ordinary people from being overrun by massive corporations, to win a safety-net against the sometimes cruel workings of the market… Here is the lesson we must never forget… Democracy only works when people claim it as their own….”
Once again, we owe Bill Moyers thanks for his immense contribution to the understanding, betterment and well-being of our nation. To have him cite my work is truly an honor and an inspiration that will help sustain me through the long days and nights spent researching, writing, communicating and fighting for our democracy, freedom and future.
Bill’s speech is an hour long and well worth your time. You can listen to it here.
David DeGraw is the founder and editor of AmpedStatus.com and director of MediaChannel.org. You can reach him at David@AmpedStatus.com.
The last time we heard from National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Andy Seré he was busy gay-baiting Democrats while attending rather homo-erotic weekends with rather buff half-naked boys. This time, Washington’s favorite hypocrite is needling a Democratic press secretary because her boss got endorsed by NARAL.
It’s funny that Seré would have a problem with “choice,” what with his reported sexual history. When pictures from Seré’s homo-erotic weekend came to light, a friend of his quickly informed the media that Seré “gets more tail than anyone I know in DC.” We assume the friend meant “female tail.” As I wrote the last time:
How does the NRCC reconcile the family values campaign it has launched in the Tennessee congressional elections with a reportedly non-family-values NRCC spokesman running that very campaign? Does the NRCC think that having promiscuous premarital sex with practically anything that walks is Tennessee family values? And does this mean the NRCC no longer believes in abstinence before marriage? Then there’s the condom discussion – another thing the family values right abhors. One hopes condoms were involved in getting all this supposed “tail.” Were they? And since the GOP has made clear that it believes condoms are not reliable, then this matter gets all the more serious. Putting aside the sin of knowingly having promiscuous premarital sex when you “know” condoms are “unreliable,” has anyone followed up with all of this “tail” to make sure that we’re also not talking about having children out of wedlock, or worse, abortion? If condoms are as unreliable as the Republicans claim them to be, and the GOP spokesman supposedly “gets more tail than anyone I know in DC,” then pregnancy is a very real danger of such reckless premarital promiscuity.
So, I for one hope that Andy does launch an attack on Boucher because of his record on choice. It would be far too fun to have a public discussion about the reported promiscuity of the press secretary of the NRCC, and his positions on condom use, premarital sex, rampant promiscuity, and abortion.
Here’s Andy’s email to the Democratic press secretary:
From: Andy Sere [mailto:asere@NRCC.org] Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 4:03 PM Subject: Do you need any help?
Courtney –
I understand you handle press for Congressman Boucher. If you’re swamped today, I’m happy to do anything I can to promote today’s big endorsement (see below). Let me know if I can be of any help.
Andy
P.S. Congratulations!
“NARAL Pro-Choice America on Thursday endorsed…Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.)…Boucher probably won’t be promoting his endorsement; he represents a heavily conservative southwest Virginia district and is facing his toughest challenge in many years.” (Aaron Blake, “NARAL backs Giannoulias, Feingold, three others,” The Hill “Ballot Box,” 3/11/10)
—— Andy Seré Regional Press Secretary National Republican Congressional Committee (202) 479-7070 – ofc (713) 806-7720 – cell asere@nrcc.org
