534. Yarmuth's Town Hall - My Non-Report

I didn't go. I'm claustrophobic. I figured the crowd would be more anti- than pro- and I wasn't going to be stuffed into Jefferson County's largest public school auditorium which holds about 1400 people just to hear John tell me what I already know amongst a majority of whom both he and I disagree. He gets paid to do that, I don't.

Here's the deal. Our system is broke. Our system needs fixing. And we won the presidency, we control the House, and we control the Senate, so we should be able to fix what we think is wrong.

I've read the Courier's take on the meeting along with their pictures. The best one shows John holding up the bill and pointing to the page and paragraph where illegal undocumented workers (those damned foreigners I think is who he was talking about) won't be convered by the bill. Will not be covered. Just the other night my friend Paul Hosse insisted on his blog that they would, referring to some kind of loophole. I would ask him to do what Yarmuth did - find the cite in the bill, mark it with a yellow stickie, and get the C-J to take a picture. Don't refer me to some talking point memo; refer to what is actually in the bill.

The best take I've read this morning came from a correspondent for The Ville Voice blog. I will not quote from it here because they are very sensitive to copyright issues and things like that, so instead I've copied below a link to that page. It is pretty good coverage, fair and balanced, and all that.

Two bottom lines. I don't really care how the minority of Americans feel about the way Obama is leading the country right now, just as most of them didn't give a damn about me when the at-first unelected Geroge Bush was in charge. We, the Democrats, won the presidency, won the House (John Yarmuth by 19 points), and we won the Senate. We won, get it.

The other point is this. My congressman, about whom I've written so much in this blog, has done something that Mitch McConnell, Jim Bunning, Ed Whitfield, Bret Guthrie, Geof Davis, Hal Rogers, and Ben Chandler didn't - and, for the record, that's six Republicans and one Democrat. Congressman John Yarmuth faced his constituents in a Town Hall meeting in his district's largest public school auditorium and told them what it is he has been doing as their representative in Congress. Even for those who disagree with him, he should get credit for being real. (And for the record, for those who are concerned about the congressional leadership across the river along the Ohio's right bank, Congressman Baron Hill, Democrat of the 9th District, also had a Town Hall meeting, his a few days ago. Good for Baron Hill too).

The link to The Ville Voice is below.

http://thevillevoice.com/2009/09/03/health-care-crowd-gets-some-answers/#more-3102