Centennial, CO -- Michael Bennet engaged in a wide-ranging conversation with the Arapahoe County Young Democrats and the ArapaHope Community Team on Saturday, June 27. A large number of the crowd's questions for Michael concerned fixing our dysfunctional health care system.
Bennet told the crowd that changes must be made to our health care system because too many people aren't getting the care they need. He stressed the urgent need for health care reform that provides affordable access to quality health care for all Coloradans. Bennet said he is open to any fiscally responsible solution, including a public option, that will put an end to soaring health care costs while preserving patient choice.
Photo courtesy of Gena Ozols, President, Arapahoe County Young Democrats.
Washington, DC -- Michael Bennet pushed the case for reforming our broken health care system during a floor speech on June 25. Bennet cited skyrocketing health care costs as a barrier that prevents increasing numbers of Coloradans from receiving the medical services they need.
During his speech Bennet called for responsible solutions to our health care problems that won't "pass on the cost to the next generation in the form of increased deficits and debt." Bennet said the usual political gamesmanship -- on both sides of the aisle -- will need to be set-aside for meaningful, positive reforms to be enacted.
Bennet singled out the story of a woman in Pueblo as an example of what is wrong with our current health care system. The Pueblo Chieftain has more on her story:
Bennet, a freshman Democrat, said the real median income of American families has declined over the past decade while the cost of health insurance nearly doubled.He cited as examples the cases of Theresa Trujillo of Pueblo and the small town of Blanca, in Costilla County.In Trujillo's case, Bennet noted the young woman was forced to take out a loan to pay for breast cancer chemotherapy when her company-paid health coverage ran out.
Bennet, a freshman Democrat, said the real median income of American families has declined over the past decade while the cost of health insurance nearly doubled.
He cited as examples the cases of Theresa Trujillo of Pueblo and the small town of Blanca, in Costilla County.
In Trujillo's case, Bennet noted the young woman was forced to take out a loan to pay for breast cancer chemotherapy when her company-paid health coverage ran out.
Thornton, CO -- Sen. Mark Udall provided a key endorsement for Michael Bennet on Saturday, June 20. Udall says Bennet is, "The right person at the right time." He went on to say he looks forward to working with Michael to get things done in Washington. Click here for video of Udall's comments.
Twenty people came to the Organizing for America Healthcare Reform Kickoff house meeting I hosted yesterday. I only regret I forgot to take photos. What an amazing group! Nobody seemed to mind the tight fit of my small condo. We were too busy sharing stories about the need for reform.
One woman shared the full time job it was getting her mother into long term care. "As a single woman, who will do that for me when it's my turn? We need an easier system." A young 25-year-old said "I have had Type I Diabetes my whole life. Yet, I've never worried about my health - only my healthcare coverage." One college graduate, in spite of a full-time job, spends $500 a month on private insurance.
Clara, 80-years-old discussed the donut hole in medicare...the gap between what is covered and what is not covered. "I thankfully have a pharmacist who helps me know which drugs to ask the doctor to prescribe to save me money. I thank her with lottery tickets...but why can't my doctor be prescribing the least expensive options? What would I do if I didn't have a good relationship with pharmacist?"
What amazed me is that so many people attended this meeting. Different ages; different stories; one goal: pass healthcare reform NOW. I can't remember the last time a newly elected president called on supporters to continue their involvement through service and civic engagement. We are honored to answer that call and work for the best policy possible.
We will keep meeting and keep working until Obama's healthcare reform is passed. All agree this is the year - we can no longer afford to sit back and let congress do its work. WE must be our own best lobbyists and stay as active as we were during the campaign.
We will meet again June 14. See events. We are planning a video library project of healthcare stories. Please contact me if you have experience with video editing. We want to capture stories from around Denver. michelle.joy@comcast.net
Thank you all!
“Sonia Sotomayor is a tremendous choice for the U.S. Supreme Court. She is a thoughtful and balanced judge with a keen intellect and a broad academic and legal background. Her skill and fair-mindedness on the federal bench has won the praise and support of Republicans and Democrats alike.“Judge Sotomayor’s nomination is historic. If confirmed, she will be only the third woman and the first Hispanic to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. She brings with her a compelling life story and personal experience that will add to the Court’s diversity and its shared understanding of how its decisions affect the daily lives of hardworking Americans.“Today, President Obama has showed us how he can bring this country together. By selecting Judge Sotomayor, he has chosen a nominee who has previously been nominated for judicial appointments by President George H.W. Bush and by President Bill Clinton. Judge Sotomayor has been confirmed twice before by the full Senate and her nomination to the Supreme Court should be considered swiftly.”
“Sonia Sotomayor is a tremendous choice for the U.S. Supreme Court. She is a thoughtful and balanced judge with a keen intellect and a broad academic and legal background. Her skill and fair-mindedness on the federal bench has won the praise and support of Republicans and Democrats alike.
“Judge Sotomayor’s nomination is historic. If confirmed, she will be only the third woman and the first Hispanic to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. She brings with her a compelling life story and personal experience that will add to the Court’s diversity and its shared understanding of how its decisions affect the daily lives of hardworking Americans.
“Today, President Obama has showed us how he can bring this country together. By selecting Judge Sotomayor, he has chosen a nominee who has previously been nominated for judicial appointments by President George H.W. Bush and by President Bill Clinton. Judge Sotomayor has been confirmed twice before by the full Senate and her nomination to the Supreme Court should be considered swiftly.”
Denver, CO -- Vice President Joe Biden hosted a town hall meeting at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science on Tuesday, May 26. Sen. Michael Bennet joined Biden in a discussion about strengthening the middle class through building a green energy economy in Colorado and across the entire United States.
Programs to retrain workers for green jobs and retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient were highlighted as ways to jump-start the push for a green energy economy. Significantly, Biden announced that $500 million in federal funds will be used to get these programs off of the ground. For more information visit the White House’s website.
Bennet and Biden were joined on-stage by Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman, and United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Also in attendance were Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, state House Speaker Terrance Carroll, state Senate President Brandon Shaffer, former Sen. Gary Hart and former Denver Mayor Federico Peña.
Following the town hall meeting Biden and Bennet paid a surprise visit to M&D’s Cafe on 28th Avenue. The pair found time to order fried green tomatoes between shaking hands and posing for photos. At one point Biden even took a patron’s cell phone to talk to her very surprised husband on the other end.
For more photos of the visit to M&D’s Cafe visit our flickr page or Michael's Facebook profile. Photos of the town hall meeting at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science are also available on flickr and Facebook. For video of the town hall meeting visit the Denver Post.
Colorado homeowners need real help right now. That’s why I am proud to have voted for the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009, which will help middle class families stay in their homes. This Act takes real action to stem the tide of foreclosures, assist homeowners and strengthen our housing sector. This legislation will also help homeowners by making it easier for lenders to modify mortgages. Earlier, I voted against one amendment to the overall bill, the Durbin amendment, also known as “cramdown.” I voted against this amendment for three simple reasons -- it was not tailored narrowly enough to those who need it most, it would have raised interest rates, and it would have slowed down the housing recovery. The last thing working families and our fragile economy needs to face is higher interest rates.
Thousands of Colorado families continue to be at risk of losing their homes and financial ruin as a result of unscrupulous lending practices over the past few years. They need our help now to protect their futures. That’s why I voted against this specific amendment that would have given debt relief to people with million dollar homes, and would likely cause a spike in interest rates that could cripple the housing recovery.And that is why I have taken on the credit card industry and in March, I placed the deciding vote for passage of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act out of committee. Endorsed by virtually every consumer protection organization, the legislation will protect consumers from confusing, misleading and predatory practices by credit card companies. I am now working with Senator Udall to ensure that the legislation passes the Senate.
Ms. ESHOO introduced the following bill;
To establish a program to deploy and integrate plug-in electric drive vehicles in multiple regions.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives
of the United States of America in Congress assembled;
SECTION 1. LARGE-SCALE VEHICLE ELECTRIFICATION 4 PROGRAM.
Read the entire article here
One American at a time - we are making America GREEN!
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Hello, President Obama.
The events of my life over the past six months have shown me the incredible parallels between my personal world and that of your journey to the White House and the path the United States is on today. I have moved through a personal crisis where life as I once knew it was utterly destroyed and I have had to rebuild my life from the ground up. There were days when I didn't see how I would be able to cope and didn't see how my life could possibly recover from such a devastating loss and blow. But day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute I have picked myself and my children up out of this mud and we've moved on, inch by inch toward the light of a new dawn. Today I can see the hope of better and brighter future. But getting to this moment has taken an inner strength and faith that I truly didn't know existed within me.
Over the past year, I have had to relearn everything I thought I knew about life and people, most importantly myself. When days became more frightening than I could bear, I thought about you, your campaign, and the work my children and I did with this great community to see the day when you would become our President. Working on your campaign during the summer of 2008 kept me alive while a part of my personal life was collapsing. The energy and hope that you brought into my world kept the embers of who I am going long enough to see me through the darkest moments of my life. And for this, I am eternally grateful to you.
God bless you, President Obama and your family. Thank you for the work and sacrifices you have made and continue to make on behalf of this country and people like me. You have changed my life in more ways than you will ever know.
Dianne PereaColorado Springs, Colorado
Even though it will increase my taxes, I'm ready to support Obama's budget and work to overcome the pressure from the powerful interests against it. Health care, energy and education reform are worth the sacrifices required from all Americans. But I'm concerned about the way the administration is handling the banking crisis. The slow drip drip of taxpayer money into Citibank and AIG looks to me like we are just postponing the inevitable pain required to solve the bank and credit crisis. Many economists and blogs I respect suggest that until the banks are cleaned up we will follow the painful example of Japan. See for example blog written by Simon Johnson of MIT at http://baselinescenario.com.
Obama's economic team may have excellent reasons for choosing a different strategy, but in my opinion they have not done a good job of explaining their reasoning or their plan. I urge President Obama to join Simon Johnson, Planet Money and others who are doing an excellent job of educating those of us who until recently had little knowledge and less interest in economic theory. Once Obama supporters have confidence in the way the banking crisis is being handled we will be much better able to face those who oppose the budget or cry "socialism".l
Saturday, 14th February 2009
Washington, D.C.
www.whitehouse.gov
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will sign the $787 billion economic stimulus bill on Tuesday in Denver, a White House official said on Saturday.
Obama on Saturday hailed congressional approval of the stimulus bill as a "major milestone on our road to recovery" and vowed to move swiftly to set the plan in motion.
"I will sign this legislation into law shortly, and we'll begin making the immediate investments necessary to put people back to work," Obama said in his weekly radio address from Chicago after his biggest legislative victory since taking office on January 20.
The Senate cast the final vote, 60-38, late on Friday, hours after the House of Representatives passed an identical bill, 246-183, capping weeks of arguing over how to best jolt the economy out of deep recession.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18861.html
Public still sky-high on Obama 'brand'By: Ben Smith February 14, 2009 07:31 AM EST
With Barack Obama’s victory in passing a massive stimulus package marred by days of bad press — as not a single House Republican backed the bill, his health czar went down in flames and his second pick for commerce secretary walked away — the administration has been cut down to size, and lost some of its bipartisan sheen. Such, at least, has been the beltway chatter, but so far the numbers don’t back it up. Obama’s approval rating remains well above 60 percent in tracking polls. A range of state pollsters said they’d seen no diminution in the president’s sky-high approval ratings, and no improvement in congressional Republicans’ dismal numbers. And that’s before the stimulus creates billions of dollars in spending on popular programs, which could, at least temporarily, further boost Obama’s popularity. “It’s eerie — I read the news from the Beltway, and there’s this disconnect with the polls from the Midwest that I see all around me,” said Ann Seltzer, the authoritative Iowa pollster who works throughout the Midwest. That’s a perception treasured by Obama’s aides, who spent a two-year presidential campaign safeguarding “the brand,” as they called it, of a new, post-partisan sort of political figure.
With the stimulus safely passed, they say they’re relying on the steady support of a populace that, after a closely watched election, is tuning out the Washington cut and thrust, and views Obama as a high-minded reformer and his Republican rivals as bitter partisans. “You shouldn’t judge his success in reaching out by the vote count in either chamber of Congress — you’ve really got to judge it based more on what people in the country are thinking and saying,” said John Del Cecato, a media adviser to Obama’s campaign and former partner of Obama aide David Axelrod. “If you look at any number of public polls, and private polls support this, it’s not just Democrats and independents who support the way he’s gone about advancing the stimulus plan — it’s a certain amount of Republicans too.” A CBS News poll released February 5, for instance, found 81 percent of Americans said Obama is reaching out to congressional Republicans, while just 41 percent said the congressional Republicans were looking for bipartisanship. “There have been a number of different surveys that have shown that Americans perceive that Obama is extending a hand of cooperation, a hand that the Republican leadership is not reciprocating — that’s very striking in the data,” said Mark Blumenthal, the editor of Pollster.com, who also noted that Obama has managed to remain popular even with some Republicans.
“Everyone’s talking about spending, spending ,spending and — 20 to 30 percent of Republicans approve of his performance,” said Blumenthal. “How is that bad?” Republican leaders make the case that the reassertion of partisan reality will, in time, take the sheen off the new president. “What’s regrettable is that Republicans are being cast as the partisans as a way to deflect attention away from Congressional Democrats’ failure to craft an effective — and bipartisan — economic stimulus bill,” said a spokeswoman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner. “But we don’t control anything in Washington, so using us as a political whipping boy is laughable. At some point, the American people will expect the results and action rather than blame and deflection. Only time will tell when their patience will run thin.” There’s another possibility, however: That In opposing en masse a stimulus bill that means instant, massive national spending, the GOP is cast as the Grinch to Obama’s Santa Claus. And outside Washington, Obama’s aides anticipate, the spending will drown out the chatter about recent White House stumbles. “Let’s be honest: Will the economic recovery or Judd Gregg be a bigger discussion point a week from now?” Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, asked reporters Thursday. Pollsters almost universally agreed with Emanuel. “I don’t think he’s lost anything in terms of overall job approval or favorability,” said Andy Smith, a pollster at the University of New Hampshire. “That’s just the a perception inside the Beltway that everybody outside Washington pays attention to politics and eats and lives politics the way you guys do down there.” As he builds up a record in office, pollsters agree that the value of Obama’s brand will have more to do with his results, and less with his atmospherics. “Over time, the kind of disputes showed themselves in the final vote on the stimulus package — that kind of partisanship will become apparent to voters around the country,” said Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown. “But whether that will be good or bad for Obama will mostly be a factor of whether people think their lives are getting better.”
I think we need to make it clear that we want the stimulus, and that in fact we are pissed that the senate has added in private enrichment tax breaks and taken out the investments we need in schools, health and engergy that will get us moving in the right direction. How hypocritical to talk about the interest and inflation burden on our children after the mess they created with the war deficit and the give away to the financial barons with their billion dollar incomes. I am sick of their double dealing and slimy two faced lies they tell to fool people into supporting federal policies that keep the middle class folks in line and poor. We need investment is schools. We need preventative health care and care for everyone. We need investment in green energy to stop using the naturla resources that are under their sands. If we demand it we can have it. We have to demonstrate in the streets as decisively as we voted in November. Don't let them take the election away from us now. Please! Don't let them do it!
Tell Barack Obama to stand up for the things he got elected to do. Tell him to not be afraid to call their bluff. Them him we will demonstrate in the streets to support him. We need CHANGE. WE NEED REAL CAHNGE.
YES WE DID! YES WE MUST:
Þ Protect him from harm both verbal & phyiscal
Þ Stay "FIRED UP" by staying active
Þ Work Bi-Partisan to bring "Change" together
Þ Don't just bitch, get active and stay engaged
Þ Start and join a local "Change" group
Þ Be philanthropic, serve your community, state and nation
Þ Stick by Obama, STOP smears on the Right & the Left!!!! Hold yourself responsible as you hold Barack!
Join the future of this movement!!
http://change.gov/joinus
http://www.communityorganize.com
http://www.ourpresidency.com
http://www.usaservice.org
http://www.whitehouse.gov
Barack's DNC 2004 Speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWynt87PaJ0&feature=PlayList&p=B1939005B8A4D4ED&index=188
Barack's DNC 2008 Speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ato7BtisXzE&feature=channel
Barack’s Election Acceptance Speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wJ-2Zu_Iic&feature=channel
Barack’s Inauguration Speech
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjnygQ02aW4
Tuesday, 20th January 2009
Swearing-In Ceremony Streamed Live
The Inaugural Swearing-In Ceremony will be streamed live on the World Wide web at http://inaugural.senate.gov/ beginning at 9:30 a.m. EST.
Sunday, 18th January 2009
Text SERVE to 56333 for alerts about Renewing America Together – National Day of Service.
Text EVENTS to 56333 to receive the latest info on events & updates on free Inaugural events in the area.
Text SCHDL to 56333 for latest updates and breaking announcements and any schedule changes.
Text TIPS to 56333 for information on how to prepare for Inauguration
Text WEATHER to 56333 for basic weather updates in the DC area and planning
Text METRO to 56333 for alerts about the buses and trains in DC.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/stateupdates/gGxFlr
www.change.gov
In a few hours here in Adams County we will have our 'Change is Coming' house meeting. It looks more as if it will be as much a community gathering as anything, with 60 attendees signed up.
While making coffee and watching the sun come up it occurs to me just how much the sunrise looks just as it did on election day November 4th. Full of excitement, full of hope and full of possibilities for the future.
There can be no doubt that indeed we are standing on the threshold of a new era for our nation and for the world.
It would be a violation of the Constitution to appoint Hillary Clinton to Secretary of State because the executive order raising the salary of Secretary of State was made while she was in office as a Senator.
The salary amount can be recinded ("fixed" as in "Saxbe fix"), but it doesn't change the historical fact that she was in office when the SoS salary was increased.
Therefore, she cannot be appointed to SoS without violating the Constitution.
