july 20

Supporter,

A quick reminder: You have about 24 hours left to cast your vote for which Senate Democrats to target with our hard-hitting TV ads supporting a public health insurance option.

On the right are the results so far. But the results have been constantly shifting, and the votes cast between now and tomorrow will be critical in determining the final outcome.

Can you cast your vote today on who we should target? Click here to see the ad and vote.

Then, please forward this email to your politically-active friends.

Feel free to encourage them to vote a certain way. That’s the point. This is an experiment in people-powered strategy, and the more people who vote and tell their friends to vote, the better. So far, over 45,000 votes have been cast!

Senators on the ballot have either opposed President Obama’s public option or threatened to water it down. And this coming week is very important. A key Senate committee will vote on health care reform, and the Wall Street Journal reports, “Centrists Seek to Slow Health Bill.” That’s why we’re applying pressure.

After the vote, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Howard Dean’s Democracy for America will air ads in the states of multiple senators who got the most votes. You and your friends will determine who we target, so please vote today and encourage others to join you in voting.

Thanks for being a bold progressive.

–Stephanie Taylor and the PCCC team

P.S. If you have not signed your name to appear in our ad yet, you can do that here.

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If you’re having trouble understanding the depth of conservative commitment to Sarah Palin’s ridiculous assumption of martyrdom, John Derbyshire offers an instructive sidelight at The Corner. He starts with a typical “The Fuhrer was sweet, the Fuhrer was kind” defense of Pinochet, but gets to his bigger fish: a new film by “Chilean commie film director Pablo Larrain” called Tony Manero, which sounds like an American Psycho-style knock on the Pinochet years (I haven’t seen it, and evidently neither has Derbyshire).

That’s bad and silly enough. What lifts Larraín’s feeble bit of ComSympery to the level of outrage is the particular cultural icon he picked on as the target for his venom. It is none other than Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Larraín’s wretched, filthy movie is in fact titled Tony Manero.

Is there no decency any more? No restraint? No respect for our cultural heritage?

Chile had a narrow escape from Marxist-Leninist tyranny. We should never cease to remind the Left of that, if only because it annoys the hell out of them. Pinochet, with all his many faults, was a patriot who saved his country. We should keep saying that, too; and Pablo Larraín’s absurd movie gives us the opportunity. It might all have gone unmentioned for another year or so if not for Larraín; but, as Tony Manero says to the customer in the paint store: “You brung it up.”

I charitably assumed at first that Derbyshire was making a subtle joke, but as the screed wore on I realized that he was genuinely enraged that an art film few Americans will see trifles with the sacred images of Tony Manero and Augusto Pinochet. Even stranger, he found this cultural offense a suitable launching pad for new and louder defenses of themurderous dictator, to which most Americans are likely to respond, “Who are Pinoshay and Ayendi?”

It was unavoidable and understandable that, with conservatives largely out of power, they would spend more time complaining. But so much of their time these days is spent raging at irrelevancies. It’s as if they believe their rage itself is incandescent and, if allowed to burn brightly enough, will attract voters like moths. The Palin eruption, in which her abandonment of the responsibilities of office is portrayed as victimhood, is only their biggest such bonfire of vanities at the moment.

This compares badly even with the conservative culture-warring of olden times, for which I find myself growing almost nostalgic. They make Pat Buchanan look like Isaiah Berlin.