The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

We have one thing from each of those categories to talk about tonight on my Air America radio show.

Let's start with the good. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. She's definitely one of the good ones! Although I had already been aware of her, she made an indelible mark on my consciousness a couple of weeks ago with a one-two punch. First, she was one of the stars of Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. So much so that the movie theater audience cheered her!

The same weekend I saw the film, she appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, and again, everything she said made so much sense! Not my average response to a member of Congress.

In fact, it was those two appearances that influenced me to really go gung-ho on campaign finance reform.

We spoke earlier this evening, and we'll hear that interview in the second hour of tonight's show. We spoke quite a bit about campaign finance reform, and she references a bill that she has introduced.

After you hear the interview, you might want to read up on H. Con. Res. 13 "Expressing the sense of Congress that the Supreme Court misinterpreted the First Amendment to the Constitution in the case of Buckley v. Valeo" (which said that money = free speech), and H.J.Res. 13 "Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to limitations on the amounts of contributions and expenditures that may be made in connection with campaigns".

On to the bad. There's not much to talk about, as we don't have the facts yet. But Congressman Robert Wexler is apparently resigning his office to take a public policy job that deals with the Middle East. He'll meet with reporters tomorrow morning in Boca Raton, at which time I'm sure most of our questions will be answered.

I did reach out to someone who works closely with him with the simple question, "Is he OK?" The answer that came back was "He's fine. Don't worry. It's all good."

Except for the people in his district and those of us who aren't, but are proud to have him represent Florida nonetheless. I guess we'll know more tomorrow.

As for the ugly, well, that's Max Baucus's health care bill, which passed out of committee today. Let's face it. As far as a health care reform bill, it's a piece of shit. But it needed to clear this hurdle and make it out of the Senate Finance committee in order to move on.

Now it can be merged with the HELP committee bill; the three House bills can be merged into one; and those two can be put together... Hopefully some of the stink will be gone by then.

We'll discuss what happened today and try to predict the future of health care reform with David Dayen. You probably know him as D-Day, under which name he blogs at www.d-day.blogspot.com. He's also serving as a blog fellow for Robert Greenwald's Sick for Profit.

And perhaps you'll chime in too! You can call in at 866-303-2270, join in the live chat here, and listen live from 11pm-1am ET here!