Simone Faas and Andy Schmookler
Simone Faas, President of the Sweet Briar Young Democrats, arranged and hosted the best and most exciting Convention Party seen in this area in many a year. Slightly less than 100 Amherst Democrats gathered to watch the convention and cheer and applaud the speakers who appeared on two giant screens. It was surreal. You could not tell where the North Carolina audience ended and the local audience began. Both crowds were cheering and laughing and applauding the speakers and even engaging in standing ovations along with the live convention crowd.
To top off the evening Andy Schmookler, Democratic Candidate for the 6th District Congressional seat, delivered a highly entertaining speech tracing the degradation of political ethics and honesty over the last half century. Andy's motive for seeking office is to elevate the political discourse and return our broken system
to serving the interest and needs of the people. What Andy is offering is sorely needed in today's cut throat, power hungry world of modern politics. Should the opportunity arise for you to meet and hear Andy in person I urge you to "Be There". Your thoughts about good representation in Congress will be uplifted and you will leave knowing that your future is in your hands and more importantly in your vote.
Mr. And Mrs. Leon Parrish
Lets look at Amherst County heavyweights in politics. Mr and Mrs. Leon Parrish were in attendance. Leon has seen more political action than any two men you can name and he's always stood proud and tall and proclaimed himself a Democrat. If you want to name an office in Amherst County government Leon has not held you will have to invent a new office. My hat's off to Leon but as you can see in the picture Leon's hat is on.
Rosemary split her time between the Convention and working the phones. PS, at the bottom of this article you will find some original photos of President Obama taken in Charlottesville. Photographer, Rosemary Witcombe.
The smell of freshly popped corn filled the air and happy Democrats in brightly colored convention hats were everywhere. Bumper stickers and lapel stickers and yard signs and snacks and drinks and on and on, too much to describe, sensory overload and finally President Barack Obama spoke and brought the house down.
President Obama and Ned Kable
An exciting and fun evening and now its on to the real challenges, re-electing the President, sending Andy Schmookler to Washington, keeping the Senate and re taking the House and representing the needs of the people before any other interest. To re-create a government of the people, by the people and for the people. To be as good as our fore-fathers knew we could be, To Form That More Perfect Union.
Thanks to Simone Faas, Dave Burford, The Sweet Briar Young Democrats, Skipper Fitts and all the other people who worked so hard to make this party happen. You guys did a terrific job. A special thanks to our very special guest and speaker, Andy Schmookler. Lastly, thanks to everyone who showed up, it wouldn't have been the same without you, and from the bottom of my heart you guys looked great in those hats.
Rosemary Witcombe attended President Obama's recent speech in Charlottesville and snapped some excellent photographs of the President and also Senate candidate Tim Kaine.
by Rosemary Witcombe
Rosemary is an Amherst County Democrat and a talented photographer. Here's what she said about the speech in
Charlottesville. "So great to see Obama in person and hear him speak, and a wonderful experience to be with a great crowd of supporters. — with President Barack Obama at Charlottesville nTelos Wireless Pavilion."
Tim Kaine
ACV Democratic News to Rosemary: Please take your camera with you everywhere you go, your photos are wonderful.
Speaking of Opportunity:
Andy Speaking To Press Conference in Lynchburg, Ned Kable against wall
Come Talk With Congressional Candidate
ANDY SCHMOOKLER
Andy will speak on "What One of America's Favorite Movies Reveals about the Moral Crisis in America Today".
After his talk Andy will address any questions you care to bring. Please be prepared to hear the truth as Andy is not your standard cookie cutter politician and he actually answers the questions. Occasionally, and it is quite rare, if he is not informed enough about an issue to give a specific answer he will so inform you. How refreshing to have a Candidate for Office give a straight answer to a voter.
Saturday, September 22, 3:00 p.m.
Lynchburg Public Library
2315 Memorial Avenue, Lynchburg
Bring a Friend
Andy and Democratic friends in conference room of Lynchburg Democrats downtown Lynchburg office.
Visit Andy at his facebook site.
TRUTH. FOR A CHANGE.
facebook.com/AndySchmookler
Sara and Ned at downtown Lynchburg Democratic Offices
AFL-CIO Endorses Andy Schmookler
Andy Schmookler, Democratic nominee for Virginia’s 6th District, has announced that he has earned the endorsement of the Virginia chapter of the AFL-CIO.
“I am proud to stand as an ally to organized labor,” says Schmookler, “the America I believe in is not one where the middle class is being hollowed out in order to give still more to those who have the most.”
Schmookler is running against incumbent Bob Goodlatte on a platform of bringing the power of government back to the people through transparency, and opening up opportunity to all Americans. Andy stands for the working men and women of America, and is honored to have the endorsement of an important organization in the labor community.
Job Creation
by Andy Schmookler
It is urgent that we put people back to work in America.
This high unemployment hurts the people who want jobs but can’t find them. It hurts their families, trying to make ends meet, trying to hold onto their homes. It hurts our communities. It is holding our economy back from the strong recovery we need. It is a major cause of our federal deficit.
Wise government policy CAN get us out of this ditch.
American corporations have hired lots of people since the recession bottomed out. Unfortunately, they’ve done their hiring overseas. With the right policies, the government can change the incentives for these corporations so that American companies provide jobs to American workers.
Our infrastructure is in bad shape. A few years ago, our engineers gave it a grade of D. Now is the perfect time for governments to spend the money to give us an infrastructure suitable for a great country in the 21st century. The private sector is sitting on its capital and won’t be squeezed out of the credit markets by this
investment in our infrastructure. And this investment will put people back to work and help revive the larger economy.
America will pay a high cost, over the long term, for allowing this high unemployment to damage the life-prospects of our youth, who should now be finding their place in the American workplace.
Three generations ago, during the Great Depression, the government stepped in with jobs programs that helped the youth of that era
develop good work habits and feel part of the larger American enterprise while also contributing to the nation.
We can do that again, until the private sector is ready to hire them.
These are but some of the available solutions. But with our current politics, good ideas cannot get enacted.
The Republicans took over Congress in 2010 promising job creation. But since they’ve been in power, they have blocked every measure that would put people to work. Their ideology insists on the nonsensical notion that government cannot create jobs (though that’s who issues THEIR paychecks).
The American people have told pollsters that getting people back to work is their top priority, not the cuts that actually kill off more jobs.
America needs Democrats in Congress who will fight harder so that all Americans have the opportunity to fulfill their God-given potential and contribute their best to a prosperous American community.
I am running for Congress in Virginia’s 6th District to be one of those Democrats.
It’s time that the needs of the American people came first in the halls of Congress, not the wants of those who have the most.
-By Andy Schmookler
Republicans have been trying to kill Social Security and Medicare off since they were originally created. During good economic times they want to give your social security money to their wall street friends to manage claiming that wall street can do a better job and make you more money. They want to create a voucher system to replace your medicare and have you purchase insurance on the private market. These wall street firms and the insurance companies stand to make a windfall fortune off the fees they will charge and they donate heavily to the Republican to try and get the system changed. Any security that seniors have will disappear if the Republicans get their way. This is the ACVDN opinion on these two issues. Andy Schmookler has an issue paper on Health and Medicare which we are pleased to present below.
Health and Medicare
By Andy Schmookler
The politics surrounding the American healthcare system are a mess. The process by which health care reform passed was unappealing, and the result was not anyone’s ideal solution. Polls show that voters in the 2010 election had some important misconceptions about the new law. The Republicans elected to the new Congress have sought to repeal that law and have voted to gut Medicare in the years to come. Perhaps it would be best to step away from this mess and begin with well-established facts.
1) Americans pay about twice as much for their health care as the citizens of other advanced societies.
2) The health care received by the American people is, overall, worse than in most other nations like ours. We rank first in the world in health costs but 37th in health outcomes.
3) A Harvard Medical School study estimated that 45,000 Americans die every year for lack of health insurance—no other industrial democracy has that problem.
Those facts by themselves should make us conclude that the American healthcare system needs to be changed.
1) When a Democratic President tried to reform our healthcare system in 1993-4, the Republicans blocked any change
2) When the Republicans controlled the American government during the past decade, they made no effort to institute any solutions to our massive costs-vs.-benefits problem in healthcare.
3) When another Democratic president tried to reform the system in 2009-2010, the Republicans again did everything they could to stop change..
Whatever one’s evaluation of 2010’s Affordable Care Act, one political party has made an effort to address this major problem while the other party seeks to maintain a status quo that is enriching some companies in the healthcare industry but is bankrupting the country.
And that brings us back to Medicare, a popular and, by most accounts, highly successful program that takes care of the healthcare needs of America’s older citizens, and that the Republicans have now shown they want to eliminate.
The reason given for this assault on Medicare rests on another fact: Medicare is a major part of the dangers facing the finances of the federal government. The projected increases in the costs of operating Medicare seem unsupportable. This is not a Republican scare tactic; this is reality. To see what has to be done, we need to look at these additional facts:
1) Medicare is better than the private American healthcare system in delivering good care for less money.
2) The rising costs of Medicare are just a part of the larger problem – for decades in the U.S., healthcare costs have been rising faster than other costs.
3) Rising healthcare costs hurt not only the federal government but also families, and businesses that provide their employees with private insurance.
4) If the costs of healthcare in America were like those of other advanced societies, our budget deficit problems would disappear. We would even be running a surplus.
So we can conclude that this country does not need to gut Medicare (as in the Republicans’ Ryan plan). Just the opposite: We need Medicare Plus. The first stage might be instituting that “public option” that was suggested earlier: specifically, allowing everyone to enter the Medicare system, if they choose, but without government subsidy.
If government really can’t do anything well then private health insurance companies should be able to beat the public option in fair head-to-head competition. But if the private companies cannot deliver good care as cheaply as the government then gradually the public option would become a single-payer system.
A single-payer insurance system should be able to achieve universal coverage, saving thousands of American lives. It should also be able to achieve that additional and essential goal: bringing health care costs under control. It can reduce costs in these ways:
1) using the weight of a huge single-payer to negotiate lower prices from private providers
2) using an expanded version of the Medicare administrative system, which adds only about 2% for administrative costs, compared with almost
3) changing the system of incentives for providers from “procedures performed” to “care given”
4) providing empirically based guidance on medical efficacy to eliminate medically unnecessary forms of care.
The United States has run an experiment for several generations. While the rest of the world was treating medical care the way that we treat education for our children-–as a right of citizens, and as something to be provided or regulated by government—the United States alone tried out the private-industry approach.
The results are in. Our approach delivers less bang for more bucks. And by the criteria of the market, and of America’s famous pragmatic approach to problem-solving, it’s time to move to the next stage, which I would propose to be: private providers, public administration.
By Andy Schmookler
Andy also has a paper on Social Security which is re-printed below. We cannot allow the Republicans to sell off these programs (social security and medicare) to big business and place our seniors in peril.
Social Security
The enemies of Social Security like to say the baby-boomers beginning to collect Social Security are a terrible drain on the program because there are so darned many of them.
But the arrival of the baby-boomers comes as no surprise. It has been predictable forever that people, like me, who were born in 1946 at the beginning of the baby-boom would be turning 65 this year. But the arrival of the baby-boomers to retirement age comes as no surprise, and it was planned for. Nearly thirty years ago,
President Ronald Reagan appointed a commission, headed by Alan Greenspan, to make recommendations for adjustments to the program so that when we got to the present time Social Security would be in good shape for this large group entering retirement years. That commission made recommendations, they were enacted, and as a result the payroll tax increased, the retirement ages gradually have increased, and the program was secured.
The only thing unexpected is that a greater proportion of the national income has been going to the richest Americans, with less to average Americans, causing a slight decrease in the proportion of national income subject to the FICA tax.
It’s true that if NOTHING were done, the program would not be able to pay out 100% of the promised amount some 25 years from now! But only minor tweaks are required to take care of that problem. There’s no emergency.
Meanwhile, of course, we have many very urgent problems: joblessness, fast-rising health-care costs, crumbling infrastructure, and especially a toxic political dynamic.
The Social Security “issue,” as it is generally presented by the Republicans, is another manifestation of that toxic dynamic in which there is continuous attack on the government programs that take care of people and make our society healthier and whole, and a continuous effort to transfer wealth to those who already have the most.
To persuade the American people to support cuts in a basically healthy Social Security system, the enemies of Social Security raise the alarm: “We’ve already reached the point,” they cry, “where Social Security is paying out more than it’s taking in.” They want people to think that the system is unsound.
But there’s a good –and temporary—reason why lately more is going out than coming in. It’s the same reason that the deficit has swelled, and that families are having trouble making ends meet. The economy is in the greatest downturn since the Great Depression.
If we’ve got 10 million more people unemployed than in good economic times, that’s 10 million people who are not paying the payroll tax into the Social Security Trust Fund who normally would be. Less revenue in– temporarily.
Meanwhile, with millions of older workers getting laid off in this deep recession, and finding the job market virtually hopeless, a lot of people collecting Social Security earlier than they otherwise would be. That makes for a greater drawdown on the Trust Fund for these immediate years, though in the long run this early
retirement will probably save the Social Security system money because benefits are reduced for people who start receiving them earlier.
Unfortunately, the enemies of Social Security have succeeded in advancing the idea of adjusting the way the Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) is calculated. This is to reduce the costs of the program.
But even this new way of calculating would be more accurate, making such a change for budgetary reasons seems unworthy of a great nation. The many hundreds of billions of dollars the government would save, the seniors would lose. And I, for one, see no evidence that people who are living predominantly on Social Security are living high on the hog. If we have excesses in our society, that’s not where they’re to be found. This is not where America should be looking to find savings.
But the idea is suspect for another reason, too. Even if this new way of calculating it would be more accurate for the general population, that is not true for those living on Social Security. For senior citizens, health care costs represent a larger portion of their total expenses than for younger people. And since health care
costs have been skyrocketing above the general rise in prices, the present COLA calculations most likely understate rather than overstate the actual rise in the costs of living for older Americans.
I oppose a change in the way the benefits for Social Security recipients are calculated—until or unless there’s a new way of calculating it that accurately takes into account the actual “market basket” of goods and services used by older people, and not just for the population generally.
Social Security is under assault. The program and those who depend upon it should be protected.
By Andy Schmookler
Local News
Virginia's sixth congressional district covers all or part of Shenandoah, Rockingham, Highland, Augusta, Alleghany, Bath, Bedford, Rockbridge, Botetourt, Roanoke and Amherst Counties and Lynchburg City.
Amherst Virginia Headlines
Lynchburg Headlines
Monroe Virginia
Madison Heights
Ouch. Morning Joe Slams Romney
"Romney will lose if he doesn't dramatically change his strategy," he said. "Negative ads won't substitute for conservative ideas."
The 'Morning Joe' host continued: "The Romney campaign is not conservative. It is just as cynical and risk-averse as Team Obama. A real conservative would be winning now."
Scarborough also on Saturday criticized Romney for his vague policies.
"Romney has been clear he will avoid specifics on balancing the budget and shrinking government. Not the Reagan and Thatcher way," he said. "The truth is that Thatcher would have lost in 1979 and Reagan would have lost in 1980 if they had run as timid a campaign as Mitt Romney."
Joe Scarborough: ‘Romney Is Not Going To Win Wisconsin, Even With Paul Ryan’
Will the addition of the Badger State’s native son, Paul Ryan, to his ticket win Wisconsin for Mitt Romney? Joe Scarborough thinks not.
According to a recent poll, the selection of Ryan has helped Romney close the gap with Obama, placing him at 45 percent versus the President’s 49. As Mika Brzezinski pointed out, a Republican has not won the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Scarborough added his two cents on the matter, telling the panel that, while he likes Ryan, “the only thing he does, as far as Wisconsin goes, is he puts it in the Pennsylvania category, which I’ve always called ‘fool’s gold’ for Republicans.”
“Mitt Romney is not going to win Wisconsin,” he continued. “Even with Paul Ryan.”
It’s a more “gettable” state than, say, Michigan, Scarborough conceded… if you’re someone who has personality other than Romney’s.
Panelist Brian Sullivan brought up the interesting point that Ryan happens to be from Janesville, Wisconsin — home to a quiet GM assembly plant. Ryan was also for the auto bailout, which might help Romney with pro-labor, socially conservative voters in the state.
Who does Scarborough think might have been more helpful for Romney? None other than New Jersey’s Chris Christie.
Joe Scarborough: Nobody Thinks Romney Is Going To Win
Mika Brzezinski <> Joe Scarborough
During the Wednesday edition of Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough observed that “nobody” was expecting Republican hopeful Mitt Romney to beat President Obama in 2012.
“Nobody thinks Romney’s going to win,” Scarborough said candidly. “Let’s just be honest. Can we just say this for everybody at home? Let me just say this for everybody at home.”
“The Republican establishment — I’ve yet to meet a single person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year,” Scarborough continued. “They won’t say it on TV because they’ve got to go on TV and they don’t want people writing them nasty emails. I obviously don’t care.
But I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election.”
“I don’t totally agree with that,” Time editor-at-large Mark Halperin interjected. “But even if you think Romney’s going to lose, there’s still, look ’16. If Romney loses, there’s so many strong candidates out there.”
“Who?” Scarborough asked.
“Who? Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour — uh, not Haley Barbour, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush…”
“Are you serious?” Mika Brzezinski asked.
“There’s a bunch of them!” argued Halperin
“A lot of their times have passed,” Scarborough noted.
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