And now, Fess Parker has passed away at the age of 85 in Santa Barbara, California, owner of a resort and a winery. Here’s the info from his own page:

Beloved American Icon
Fess Parker, Passes Away
March 18, 2010

Santa Barbara County, CA  – Actor, developer and vintner Fess E. Parker, Jr passed away today, March 18th, 2010, at his home in the Santa Ynez Valley. Mr. Parker was 85 years old.

Born in Fort Worth, TX and raised in San Angelo,  Fess served in the United States Navy during WWII and then returned home to Texas to graduate from the University of Texas-Austin in 1950. He was honored as a distinguished alum of the university in 1969.

A desire to act took Fess to California in the early 50’s where hard work and great good fortune led him to be cast in Walt Disney’s “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” co-starring the late Buddy Ebsen. While under personal contract to Walt Disney, Fess made numerous pictures for the studio including the prequel “Davy Crockett and the River Boat Pirates” as well as The Great Locomotive Chase” and “Smoky.”

A successful television career in the 1960’s followed with NBC’s long running “Daniel Boone” show co-starring his friend and neighbor Ed Ames.

The early 70’s found Fess eager to explore the business world as a real estate developer in Santa Barbara, CA. [MORE]

You may not recognize him without his trademark coonskin cap, which every boy of my generation owned at one time or another:

Parker as Disney’s Crockett with rifle “Betsy.”
This inspired many NRA members to purchase
flintlocks and believe themselves to be rugged
American outdoorsmen of the 1820s.

i. Kilt Him a Boor, When He Was Only Three …

The craze for Crockettiana grew so fierce in those Hula Hoopy daze that Sen. Estes Kefauver was seen wearing one, his kind of “Michael Dukakis in the tank” moment.

Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (D)

Wikipedia takes up the tale, so you can see how far we’ve progressed from those halcyon days of McCarthyism [Emphasis added]:

In the 1952 presidential election, Kefauver decided to offer himself as a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Campaigning in his coonskin cap, often by dogsled, Kefauver made history when, in an electrifying victory in the New Hampshire primary, he defeated President Harry S. Truman, the sitting President of the United States. Although Kefauver would go on to win twelve of the fifteen primaries that were held that year, losing three to “favorite son” candidates, primaries were not, at that time, the main method of delegate selection for the national convention. Kefauver, therefore, entered the convention a few hundred votes shy of the needed majority. In the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Kefauver received 3.1 million votes, while the eventual 1952 Democratic presidential nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, received only 78,000 votes. Yet “the Kefauver campaign for the nomination in 1952 became the classic example of how presidential primary victories do not automatically lead to the nomination itself.“

Whether Disney influenced Kefauver or vice versa, Kefauver sought to cash in on the 1955  Disney Davy Crockett craze when he ran again in 1956, losing again to Adlai Stevenson and leaving the lasting legacy of the shameful censorship of American comic books by virtue of his committee’s giving credence to a twisted little psychopath named J. Frederic Wertham.

These were the Ugly Americanisms coiling under the waters of the 1950s Heroic Mythologies of the Davy Crocketts and Daniel Boones. How the West was “Won” and the raft of cowboys (good) against indians (bad) movies that so obsessed us, even as the Joe McCarthys and John Birchers were tolerated and even celebrated.

None of which Fess Parker had anything to do with, but can never be disentangled from. He was a moment in the zeitgeist, thrown together with some of the worst characters that America has ever produced, in one of the worst lies ever sold to the American people. (Which I’ll get to in a moment.)

Which I bring us because it’s important to understand that Fess Parker was just kid born in Fort Worth who became a big TV star, and that one of the characters he played was seen as archetypal by American politicians wishing to spread the fantasy version of American History even while we grappled with the ugly realities of America. When Daniel Boone went off the air in 1969, the homespun frontiersman-as-Knight narrative had utterly been abandoned by Americans of that generation. Daniel Boone and his faithful Indian Sidekick (Ed Ames, playing Tonto) killing those awful Redcoats and other, ungrateful* Indians who were upset about White settlers expropriating their land seemed naive, childish and absurd. Or even (shudder) racist.

[* Or, in the anachronistic words of another 1950s American narrative-spinner:

I don’t care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country. I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man.

[...]

But let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages – which they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence; for their ‘right’ to keep a part of the earth untouched – to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen?

Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it’s great that some of them did…

[Ayn Rand at West Point, on March 6, 1974: See "Ayn and the Indians" for more.]

In the 1950s of Davy Crockett and Estes Kefauver and Joe McCarthy, that might have been accepted without question. By the 1970s, it was not, nor is it an acceptable form of racism to this very day.

Yes, I’m wandering a bit, but it has taken a lifetime to separate myself from these well-meaning but wrong and ultimately toxic myths drilled into me from earliest childhood. There is a point to this, and to questioning the good White settler and his faithful Indian sidekick caricature.

ii. Live by the Crockett, Die by the Crockett

It was not Daniel Boone’s fault. Nor was it Fess Parker’s fault. But, having lived by the Crockett, he died by the Boone. (A much less nuanced character, by the by. Disney’s Davy Crockett served, as did the historical Crockett, in the U.S. Congress, albeit in Disney’s case, a showcase for Disney’s increasingly right wing view of the “Magic Kingdom” that would eventually enforce its “family fun” with a virtual police state in Disneyland opened in 1955.)

So, in 1970 — possibly because having been stereotyped as a figure that was no longer in demand in the antihero Hollywood of the ‘Seventies — Fess Parker moved to Santa Barbara, where he spent the remainder of his life building and running hotels and a winery.

Davy Crockett moved into the waiting room for mythological characters and most of what anybody remembers is Crockett at the Alamo, the last man to go down, swingingh his beloved “Betsy’s” rifle butt at the short little faceless Mexican armymen who were storming the old Mission.

Disney: Davy the last to Die at the Alamo

To a generation of boys, that image is iconic in the same way that the death of Achilles, or the hanging of Nathan Hale, or the assassination of President Lincoln was to earlier generations. It is deeply burnt into the soul, as Scooby Doo seems to be to a current generation. We hear about an “impressionable age” and to boys of a certain age, Davy’s death at the Alamo left an indelible impression. Myself included.

It was so powerful, in fact, that John Wayne’s attempt to cash in on its cachet with his self-produced “Alamo” was a big money loser for Wayne. Parker starred in the 1955 King of the Wild Frontier, and Wayne’s movie came out in 1960. While, for some mysterious reason, it garnered a nomination for “Best Picture” it remains a hideous bit of preachy political nonsense, and John Wayne as Davy Crockett replaying the “swinging the rifle” scene seems and seemed an obscene parody of the “pure” Davy Crockett of five years earlier.

As do most of the “Alamo” movies made since.

Because, whether we realize it or not, the story of the “Alamo” that is remembered for the cry “Remember the Alamo!” is a story carefully UNremembered.

The Texans had revolted against the Mexican government because the Mexican government had outlawed slavery. Pure and simple.

Now, generations of Texas historians and “Lost Cause” revisionists have managed to successfully plant the hideous lie that Santa Anna was a tyrant on the level of King George III, and that the story of Texas independence is a grand and glorious tale, with Davy Crockett as the maraschino cherry on top of this horsefeathers sundae. (Sprinkled with Texas Nuts).

Because this is a very American story, where myth and fact, fantasy and historical distortion are all mixed up in a toxic brew where the truth finally becomes meaningless and only the myth remains.

iii. Not to praise Fess Parker, but to Bury Him …

Fess Parker was a likeable actor who spoke words he did not write in movie fantasies he had no hand in, wearing clothes provided by a studio whose purpose was to make money by selling tickets. He didn’t write the songs that were wildly popular, like “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” and is remembered, in that warp of our celebrity culture, as somehow an amalgamation of Davy and Daniel, of Boone and Crockett.

He is not responsible for that. He was at the center of a 1950s cultural fad, and when that time had passed, he wisely moved on to another, more lucrative career.

I salute the man, but not the myth. I celebrate those early childhood memories, but now with the understanding that they were bunk, and yet, strangely, in perfect keeping with the historical Davy Crockett himself, who may well have actively encouraged his own myth, which has overshadowed the reality:

One tale tells how Crockett greeted a crowd on his way to Congress. He bragged, “I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust [tree].”

Davy Crockett’s Almanac, of Wild Sports in the West, Life in the Backwoods, & Sketches of Texas, a jest book, printed the text of a speech Crockett supposedly made to Congress. While there is no evidence whatever that the speech is authentic, it suggests the image of Crockett promoted by the “Crockett Almanacs,” published annually for years after his death …

In point of fact, Davy Crockett was a sort of intolerant old-time teabagger:

By December, 1834, Crockett was writing to friends about moving to Texas if Van Buren were elected President. The next year he discussed with his friend Benjamin McCulloch raising a company of volunteers to take to Texas in the expectation that a revolution was imminent.

Big mistake, that.

And Daniel Boone was, again, more myth mixed with reality:

Boone remains an iconic, if imperfectly remembered, figure in American history. He was a legend in his own lifetime, especially after an account of his adventures was published in 1784, making him famous in America and Europe. After his death, he was frequently the subject of tall tales and works of fiction. His adventures—real and legendary—were influential in creating the archetypal Western hero of American folklore.

Even after his death:

Boone died on September 26, 1820, at Nathan Boone’s home on Femme Osage Creek [Missouri]. His last words were, “I’m going now. My time has come.” He was buried next to Rebecca [Boone], who had died on March 18, 1813. The graves, which were unmarked until the mid-1830s, were near Jemima (Boone) Callaway’s home on Tuque Creek, about two miles (3 km) from present day Marthasville, Missouri. In 1845, the Boones’ remains were disinterred and reburied in a new cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky. Resentment in Missouri about the disinterment grew over the years, and a legend arose that Boone’s remains never left Missouri.

According to this story, Boone’s tombstone in Missouri had been inadvertently placed over the wrong grave, but no one had corrected the error. Boone’s Missouri relatives, displeased with the Kentuckians who came to exhume Boone, kept quiet about the mistake and allowed the Kentuckians to dig up the wrong remains. There is no contemporary evidence that this actually happened, but in 1983, a forensic anthropologist examined a crude plaster cast of Boone’s skull made before the Kentucky reburial and announced that it might be the skull of an African American. Black slaves were also buried at Tuque Creek, so it is possible that the wrong remains were mistakenly removed from the crowded graveyard. Both the Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky and the Old Bryan Farm graveyard in Missouri claim to have Boone’s remains ….

As usual, the reality is much more interesting than the cartoonish stereotype that emerged in popular imagination. Fess Parker played the cartoon version, it ought to be added, although that’s not his fault, at all. He was an actor, not a legendary frontiersman, although I doubt that anyone can tell the difference between an actor and his role anymore.

So, let us celebrate the facts, and mourn the passing of a former actor and, seemingly, a nice guy. Who proved that playing a legend makes one a sort of legend himself, assuming that Walt Disney makes enough money on the proposition.

But let’s get back to that coonskin cap craze for just a moment; Davy Crockett might be remembered for it, but it was a particularly popular form of American headgear long before the Declaration. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin, that old P.R. man, made a point of wearing his coonskin cap in the Court of Versailles, while he procured an alliance with France that ultimately led to victory in the War of Independence (or, if you like, the Revolutionary War.)

Now, note that Franklin NEVER would have worn such a country bumpkin cap in Philadelphia, but he recognized how to exploit the popular prejudices of the French imagination and exploited them as skillfully as Disney would in the 1950s with Fess Parker: vox populi, vox dumb.

I myself once owned a coonskin cap, but I never quite got the hang of wearing them:

Still can’t

RIP Daniel Boone. RIP Davy Crockett (even if he died fighting for a malignant and ignoble cause). And RIP Fess Parker, hotelier and vintner.

It took me living in Hollywood for a decade and a half to be able to differentiate them.

Courage.

=================

UPDATE: Just saw this. The ever-loony Andrew Malcolm in D.C. blogging for the LA Times inadvertently manages to validate everything I’ve said above:

The problem for many of us is that we cannot separate Davy and Fess or vice versa. Nor, frankly, do we want to.

And then launches into a political snark about Davy Crockett versus Andrew Jackson. I think we all know who won that one. If not, take a look at a $20 bill. Crockett doesn’t seem to be there.

UPDATE #2: Another lost soul can’t differentiate between the actor and the screenwriter. If you can’t separate reality from fictional fantasy, what chance do you have at political analysis? Or, perhaps: “I’m hypnotized and damn proud of it.” Next, I suppose, it will be “Life Lessons Learned from Trigger.”

]]> http://thedemocraticdaily.com/2010/03/20/davy-crockett-r-i-p/feed/ 0 http://thedemocraticdaily.com/2010/03/19/immigration-opponents-hispanic-support-for-healthcare-reform-part-of-quid-pro-quo/ http://thedemocraticdaily.com/2010/03/19/immigration-opponents-hispanic-support-for-healthcare-reform-part-of-quid-pro-quo/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:42:38 +0000 Scott Nance http://thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=9674 In a sign that it seems to want to capture the same anger that has threatened healthcare reform, a prominent group of anti-immigration activists are charging that congressional Hispanics are supporting healthcare reform because President Obama promised also to push immigration reform this year.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) Thursday called for passage of Obama’s healthcare proposals, saying that it would expand coverage to 8.8 million Latinos, or 60 percent of the currently uninsured Hispanic community, according to Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the CHC.

Congressional leaders and the White House are rounding up votes in the House needed to put the final reform legislation over the 216 needed for approval, with a vote on the measure expected Saturday.

“This bill is important for all Americans, but it is particularly critical to our Latino communities which have the highest uninsured rate of any racial or ethnic group in the country. The bill provides access to affordable health care to the millions of uninsured Latinos in this country through Medicaid expansion, access to health insurance exchanges, and subsidies to help low and moderate income families,” says Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.), chair of the CHC Task Force on health. “The final health Reform legislation represents a milestone in our nation’s history as we take a historic step toward acknowledging health care as a universal right for everyone.”

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), however, alleges a quid-pro-quo for CHC votes in favor of healthcare reform in exchange for immigration reform, which they term as “amnesty” for the estimated 11 million undocumented aliens in the United States.

FAIR says the deal with the CHC coincides with talks between Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) over the shape of a potential immigration reform bill.

“The Schumer-Graham plan appears to be a near carbon copy of the McCain-Kennedy-Bush amnesty legislation that was resoundingly rejected by the American people in 2007,” says FAIR President Dan Stein, referring to an earlier attempt at immigration reform put together then by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), which ultimately collapsed due to intense conservative pressure. “The public believed amnesty was fundamentally unfair, harmful to the interests of law-abiding citizens and legal immigrants, and prohibitively expensive to American taxpayers. Since the last attempt to pass amnesty, U.S. unemployment has more than doubled, the size of the federal deficit has grown tenfold, and nearly every state government is facing a fiscal crisis.”

Obama this week endorsed the Schumer-Graham approach, which the president says “thoughtfully addresses the need to shore up our borders, and demands accountability from both workers who are here illegally and employers who game the system.”

Obama and CHC have made no secret of wanting also to enact immigration reform, without directly linking support for healthcare reform as reliant on immigration.

“I’ve spent the past week speaking at length with the president and his staff,” says Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), chair of the CHC Task Force on Immigration. “I shared with him that I believed that we could have a victory for every American who deserves affordable, high-quality health care and for the immigrants of our nation. I also told President Obama I would not sacrifice either goal. I believe we have a health care bill I can vote ‘yes’ for, and I believe we have a commitment to move forward on a comprehensive immigration reform package as soon as possible.”

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

The phenomena fueling the disunity now has manifested within each party, wearing away at the internal cohesion of each. For proof, just listen how often the word “primary” is used as a verb. It means: to attempt to oust an official of one’s own party in favor of another of the same party who is seen as more acceptable. As in, “We’re going to primary Sen. So-and-so over her vote on immigration reform.”

Once an obscure term used only by operatives inside the Beltway, it’s now part of the regular lexicon of political activists everywhere. (As this afflicts Democrats and Republicans alike, the better angels of my nature would suggest that my GOP friends also take heed of the problem. On the other hand, my partisan impulses tell me that if the Right wants to engage in cannibalism, who am I not to pass some barbeque sauce?)

The phenomenon of “primarying” – is that even a word?? – lawmakers traditionally has been undertaken among Democrats to elect folks more to the Left, and among Republicans, those further to the Right than whoever presently is in office.

To be clear: there can be good and rational reasons for partisans to replace one lawmaker with another through a primary.

But the extent that even the threat of it has become overused in absurd ways can be illustrated by liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas’ promise to primary Rep. Dennis Kucinich. Now, no one could ever accuse Kucinich of not being liberal enough. So, try to follow this: you have one liberal vowing to defeat another.

That’s what makes Moulitsas’ threat truly bizarre in the Machiavellian thought process that led to it. He wanted to defeat Kucinich for being too liberal — specifically, because single-payer advocate Kucinich opposed President Obama’s healthcare reform plan. Moulitsas wanted Kucinich to support it.

Of course, Kucinich this week went on to do just that –- he reversed himself Wednesday and pledged to vote for the current reform plan despite nagging reservations.

Kucinich’s change of heart had nothing to do with a half-baked, empty threat by a blogger and everything to do with the sit-down the Ohio Democrat had with the leader of the free world.

And it was what Kucinich said Wednesday in announcing his decision. Not so much his vows to keep fighting for single-payer, or anything having to do with healthcare itself for that matter.

Kucinich hit the real crux of the problem, which takes us not to policy reform of any kind but rather to those malignant forces that are splintering us into ever-more-isolated islands politically.

“The fear that this legislation has engendered has deep roots, not in foreign ideology but in a lack of confidence, a timidity, mistrust and fear which post 911 America has been unable to shake,” Kucinich says.

“This fear has so infected our politics, our economics and our international relations that as a nation we are losing sight of the expanded vision, the electrifying potential we caught a glimpse of with the election of Barack Obama,” he adds. “The transformational potential of his presidency, and of ourselves, can still be courageously summoned in ways that will reconnect America to our hopes for expanded opportunities for jobs, housing, education, peace, and yes, health care.”

That Kucinich’s progressive credentials are unassailable and his single-payer bona fides are beyond dispute give his words their weight. This is no politician spewing so much double-talk to hide a flip-flop.

To the contrary, Kucinich speaks the truth.

The publisher of On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered government and Washington for more than a decade. Capitol Idea is his regular column from Washington.

Refuting one of the key charges Republicans have leveled against healthcare reform — that Senate Democrats have crafted a highly partisan bill devoid of GOP ideas – spokesman Jim Manley says the package more than 145 GOP amendments.

The 147 Republican amendments included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as passed by the Senate, is in addition to all of the GOP ideas that were incorporated into the bills in committee, according to the spokesman for the Nevada Democrat.

Further, Manley says, Senate healthcare reform contains nine out of 10 GOP “Key Elements” for reform. Senate Republicans don’t have a comprehensive health care plan, but their House counterparts do, and that House plan contains 10 “key elements” of their health care plan. The Senate bill contains nine of those, Manley says.

Despite that GOP content, no Republicans supported the healthcare reform bill when the Senate approved it on Christmas Eve. At the time, Reid had to muster all 60 of the members of his caucus that he had then to get the reform bill over the hurdle of a Republican filibuster.

Reid since lost his 60th member in the Jan. 19 special election in Massachusetts, when Republican Scott Brown stunned Democrats by taking the Senate seat once held by the late Ted Kennedy. Brown’s election means Democrats no longer can avoid filibusters, which is why the healthcare endgame is relying in part on a filibuster-proof procedure called “reconciliation.”

Manley used the occasion of a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored by the two Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, to pick apart a number of common arguments that Republicans regularly assert about healthcare reform and which appear in the WSJ piece.

“Republicans have been playing fast and loose with the truth on health reform since day one, but saying the same thing over and over again doesn’t make it true. By now it’s clear whose side they are on – they want to preserve the current system in which health insurers get rich, patients lose their coverage when they need it most, and families and small businesses go broke because of skyrocketing costs.”

Among other GOP talking points that he takes on, Manley also says the Senate bill would not cut Medicare benefits.

Reform would actually increase benefits for seniors, Manley says. He quotes the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) which has cited research findings that “nearly 30 percent of Medicare’s costs could be saved without negatively affecting health outcomes…and those estimates could probably be extrapolated to the health care system as whole.”

Manley also cites a New York Times editorial published Sept. 27, 2009, which says the Senate bill would improve the drug coverage for seniors under Medicare.

The Boehner/McConnell piece also recycles the Republican charge that the Senate bill increases the federal budget deficit, but that, too, is false, Manley says. He again cites the CBO which says the Senate bill would reduce federal deficits by $118 billion over the next 10 years. Healthcare reform would continue to reduce federal deficits in the decades following 2019, Manley adds.

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

We reported Tuesday that, although a variety of financial reform advocates believe the new Senate reform package lacks needed teeth, they stopped short of declaring outright opposition to the bill. There appeared to be a sense that provisions — particularly those placing a new consumer-protection agency within the Federal Reserve – could be changed.

On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont stepped up and announced that he would do just that. A left-leaning independent, Sanders indicated that he wasn’t entirely pleased with the reform plan unveiled this week by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) – but the outspoken Sanders did not say he was against it, either.

Rather, in a statement the outspoken Sanders calls the regulatory overhaul a “a step forward,” but adds in the same breath that “much more needs to be done to regulate Wall Street to prevent another severe financial crisis from happening again.”

The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Dodd took the wraps off his financial reform proposal after talks broke down with Republicans over a bipartisan bill.

The overhaul of financial regulation, including the creation of a CFPA, is designed to avert another economic meltdown as that occurred in 2008 and required a massive taxpayer-funded bailout. The proposed reform of the rules that govern the nation’s financial industry would be the most sweeping seen since those enacted after the Great Depression.

Sanders says he would propose amendments to the financial overhaul legislation to limit credit card interest rates and discourage Fed secrecy. He also says that he will work with colleagues to strengthen consumer protections, curb unbridled market speculation and break up “too big to fail” banks.

“We have got to make it crystal clear to Wall Street that the era of wild speculation and greed is over. We need a Wall Street which invests in the job creating productive economy, and not one that continues the unregulated gambling activities which have been so devastating to the middle class of our country,” he says. “Unfortunately, the financial reform bill, as currently written, does not go far enough in making the kinds of changes we desperately need.”

The Dodd legislation would, as President Obama wants, create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). But unlike financial reform legislation approved by the House in December that would make the CFPA an independent entity, Dodd would submerge the agency within the Federal Reserve.

Like most other financial reform advocates, Sanders finds that unacceptable. He has been a tough critic of the Fed, particularly under current Chairman Ben Bernanke. Sanders led an unsuccessful attempt in the Senate to deny Bernanke a second term at the top of the Fed.

Financial WMD

Sanders says he would insist on an independent agency to protect financial consumers. “Putting such an agency at the Federal Reserve is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house,” he says. “Congress already has given the Fed the chance to enforce consumer financial protection. It failed miserably.”

The senator also calls for greater transparency at the Federal Reserve. The legislation as proposed by the Senate Banking Committee chairman would allow the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit the Fed’s emergency lending programs, but bar GAO from naming loan recipients and detailing the terms.

“As long as the Federal Reserve is allowed to keep secrets about its loans, we will never know the true financial condition of the banking system. The lack of transparency could lead to an even bigger crisis in the future,” Sanders says.

Sanders says that any meaningful financial reform bill must stop big banks from charging credit card interest rates as high as 35 percent. He proposes legislation to impose a 15-percent cap on what lenders may charge credit card customers.

Finally, Sanders says the financial reform bill does not do enough to reform credit default swaps and other arcane financial products that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, resulted in a $182-billion bailout of American International Group, and precipitated the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. “Many of these financial weapons of mass destruction don’t just need to be regulated, they should be banned,” he says.

Financial reform is high on the White House to-do list, but as the Senate currently is embroiled in the endgame for healthcare reform, it is not immediately clear when the lawmakers would begin to consider Dodd’s bill.

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

In fact, the veteran Wisconsin Democrat opened a hearing on the federal budget and broader economic outlook for fiscal year 2011 offering not only full-throated support for Obama’s stimulus and job-creation programs, but dispensing a wider broadside against earlier conservative economic programs that have given Americans “the shaft for most of the last decade.”

Obey, by wielding the gavel of one of the committees that hold the government’s purse-strings is one of the most powerful officials in Washington, notes that the U.S. economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since December 2007. Almost one-tenth of the labor force is unemployed and one-sixth is either unemployed or underemployed.

Congress last year addressed the crisis by approving Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Obey challenged critics who complain that the Recovery Act hasn’t created jobs, but only has added to the nation’s budget soaring budget deficits.

“Some people say that the Recovery Act has not saved a single job. If they cannot see that that assertion is not true it is simply because they don’t want to see,” he says.

Obey acknowledges that the stimulus took several months to take hold after it became law in February 2009. From October, 2009 to January of this year, job losses declined from a high of 753,000 to 35,000, or a 95-percent reduction, he says.

“While none of us will be satisfied until the economy is once again adding jobs, we have come a long way in the last year in turning this picture around,” Obey says. “In each of the last couple of months, full time employment has actually grown by hundreds of thousands. However, the hole is deep and it will take time and constant effort to fill it.”

In terms of the mountain of federal budget deficits the government is expected to run in the decade between 2009 and 2019, the cost of the Recovery Act, including interest, is less than 10 percent of the total deficit.

The bulk is due to “four major cost drivers” that Obama inherited coming into the Oval Office – the cost of two wars, the cost of the 2008 financial bailout, revenue loss due to the economic downturn, and revenue loss due to two tax cuts enacted under Republicans that largely benefited the wealthy, according to Obey. “These circumstances didn’t happen overnight, and they can’t be fixed overnight either,” he says.

Indeed, railing against decades of economic policy in which the wealthy have experienced fabulous benefit, while working Americans have received “getting table scraps,” Obey says that he understands the seething anger in the country.

“You know, every week someone asks me why Americans are so angry. I would ask it another way – why on earth wouldn’t they be angry? They have been given the shaft for most of the last decade,” he says. “The fact is most Americans are suffering from a different kind of deficit, an income deficit.

“From the New Deal until a generation ago, incomes were growing at about the same rate for everyone – from working families to the richest among us. Since the 1970s, however, almost all income gains have gone to the top,” he adds.

Income for the middle fifth of American families rose only 15 percent from 1979 to 2006, and most of that growth came about because women are working much longer hours each year than three decades ago, Obey says. By contrast, those with incomes in the top 10 percent saw their income grow 133 percent.

“Those in the top ten percent now receive half of all income in America,” Obey says. “Those even higher on the income ladder have had mindboggling income gains. In 2007, the average income of the top one-hundredth of 1 percent reached $35 million, up almost 10-fold over the last three decades. Meanwhile the rest of society was getting table scraps. We have seen the largest transfer of income up the income ladder in recorded economic history. Why shouldn’t middle income taxpayers be angry?”

Obey offers, as solutions, two verses from the Democratic hymn book.

“What can we do to restore balance and budget discipline? Enacting healthcare reforms would create an important safety net for working families. Allowing tax cuts for the top 2 percent of income to expire as scheduled would also make sense,” he says.

Obey also touts greater access to education.

“Many studies have shown that family income is a greater determinant of college graduation than the aptitude of the student,” he says. “Among students who scored in the top quarter on 8th grade math tests, the child of a wealthy family graduated from college 74 percent of the time, while the child who came from a poor family graduated only 29 percent of the time even though they demonstrate the same ability. As a matter of justice, we must provide these low and middle income kids the better educational opportunities they need and deserve.”

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

But there also seems to be a sense that that can be changed before the bill becomes law.

The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Dodd unveiled his reform legislation Monday, after talks with Republicans broke down.

The Connecticut Democrat, who is retiring from Congress this year, included a provision as called for by President Obama and other Democrats, to create a new federal agency to protect consumers from abusive practices by the financial industry.

But unlike the reform package approved by the House in December, the agency would not be independent, but rather housed within the Federal Reserve.

“In particular, placing the CFPA at the Federal Reserve and giving existing financial regulators veto power undermines the goal of protecting consumers. This proposal gives the appearance of providing consumer protection, while leaving the real power in the hands of the bank regulatory agencies that failed to protect American consumers because they were too busy listening to Wall Street,” says John Taylor, president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

No less than Dodd’s counterpart on the other side of the Capitol, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), made it clear that making the CFPA part of the Federal Reserve will not suffice.

“I do not support housing the Consumer Financial Protection Agency in the Federal Reserve,” Frank says. “I continue to vigorously support the House-passed bill that establishes an independent agency with strong rule-writing authority and enforcement powers to implement consumer protections.”

Frank, however, stopped short of opposing the Senate bill outright after Dodd unveiled it, saying instead that the Dodd legislation would “form a very solid basis for a House-Senate conference, to produce the tough regulatory reform that President Obama has rightly asked for.”

“There are some differences between the House-passed bill and Senator Dodd’s version, but they are more alike than they are different,” Frank says. “I believe that we will be able to work constructively together to meet the public need for a tough, comprehensive bill.”

Dodd’s Senate colleague, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), also made it clear he thinks it is wrong to put the CFPA within the Federal Reserve. But, like Frank, Brown draws no lines in the sand – in what seems to be another tacit acknowledgment that arrangement is not a sticking point.

“It is clear we need an independent consumer protection agency with robust authority to prevent shady practices,” the freshman Brown says. “We need to prevent future taxpayer bailouts by ensuring one bank cannot trigger the collapse of our financial system. We need to fix our credit rating agencies — which fell asleep on the job and let Wall Street peddle junk investments. And we need to get tough on banks that use risky financial instruments that jeopardize our financial system. These financial ‘weapons of mass destruction’ should be treated as such.

“Special interests will fight tooth and nail against real financial reform. If they win, middle class taxpayers lose,” he adds.

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Top Senate Democrats last week began to lay groundwork to change the way the filibuster works after Senate Republicans turned what was once a rarely used maneuver into a routine tool to block Democrats at nearly every turn. GOP senators have used a threat of filibuster to obstruct lawmaking, and also hold up President Obama’s nominees both for his administration and the federal bench. It has created a situation where a simple majority no longer rules – but rather a supermajority of 60 senators is required to take most action.

For instance, Senate Democrats this week are preparing to give final approval to comprehensive healthcare reform under a set of rules known as “reconciliation” specifically because it prevents a GOP filibuster. Not surprisingly, Republicans complain loudly about the use of reconciliation in this manner.

“The filibuster has been abused. I believe that the Senate should be different than the House and will continue to be different than the House,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is quoted as saying last week. “But we’re going to take a look at the filibuster. Next Congress, we’re going to take a look at it. We are likely to have to make some changes in it, because the Republicans have abused that just like the spitball was abused in baseball and the four-corner offense was abused in basketball.”

The report, From Deliberation to Dysfunction, could prove to be a valuable asset in filibuster reform, as it adds intellectual heft to an exercise that could have been dismissed as a power-grab, or score-settling on the part of Democrats.

“Increasingly, the Senate has been forced to rely on legislative shortcuts that severely undermine the philosophy of full and careful consideration of all matters before the body,” says the report, authored by Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Even so, the chamber fails to complete much of the work for which it is responsible and falls so far behind schedule in completing the work it does do as to seriously undermine the capacity of the entire federal government to respond in an effective and efficient way to the problems facing our country.”

Indeed, a former top congressional staffer with 31 years of service for Democrats, Lilly lays out a case of how aggressive use of the filibuster has crippled the federal government.

Congress has not enacted all appropriation bills on time in 15 years. Frequently, federal agencies do not know how much they have to spend in a given fiscal year until nearly half of that year has expired. In most instances this is problem is tied to the Senate schedule, the report says. Further, much of the funds the government does spend lack a needed legal basis, it adds. Lilly’s report cites the Congressional Budget Office as saying that in the current fiscal year about half of the money provided for the nondefense activities of the government ($290 billion out of $584 billion) had to be appropriated without legal authority. That is because a total of 250 laws authorizing various pieces of the federal bureaucracy had expired, and Congress had failed to take the necessary steps through the authorizing process to enact replacement legislation, the report says. Senators, too, have become prolific in their use of the filibuster, or “holds,” to block a variety of Obama administration personnel from taking office, the report finds.

Most of the growth in the business of filibustering is quite recent, Lilly notes. From 1971 through 1993, an average of just 19.1 motions to end filibusters were filed annually. Between 1993 and 2007, that figure rose to 36 motions a year. That has nearly doubled just since 2007, to 68.7.

“To borrow a term from ‘Star Wars,’ filibustering has gone from overdrive to ‘hyperspace,’” Lilly says in his report. “Filibusters are now commonly used to block not only legislation the minority opposes, but to block legislation the minority does not necessarily have strong feelings on but will use to place a stick in the spokes of the legislative wheel anytime an opportunity presents itself.”

The situation would require just “modest changes” to implement reform, Lilly says.

Specifically, he says, to ensure deliberate and timely consideration of all appropriation measures, debate on each measure could be limited to no more than 16 hours—except that each senator who chose to offer an amendment could do so even if the 16-hour time limit had been exceeded. Debate on a single amendment could be limited to one hour, Lilly adds.

“The logjam created by extended debate on appropriation bills in the Senate often makes it nearly impossible for chairmen of authorizing committees to get important legislation on the Senate calendar. Authorizing legislation dealing with philosophical issues that have proven historically to be more difficult to resolve would still be subject to current rules of debate, but authorizing committees would have greater opportunity to take their legislation to the Senate floor by virtue of the restraints placed on the consideration of appropriation bills,” he says in the report. “More frequent authorizations would in turn help reduce the number of contentious issues in appropriation measures.”

Similar steps need to be taken with respect to the confirmation process, Lilly contends.

“There is no question that Congress needs to hold the executive branch more accountable, but this is not the way to do it,” he says. “No senator should be allowed to hold up the confirmation of a nominee for more than a matter of weeks. Committees should be discharged of further consideration of a nominee after a period of two months unless the committee formally votes for further delay based on the fact that it has received insufficient information to reach a conclusion. After 30 days, consideration of confirmation should be in order without unanimous consent, and debate on the confirmation should be limited to a reasonable period—for example, four hours.”

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) asked Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) to add an emergency mortgage assistance program to the financial reform plan that Dodd unveiled Monday. Fattah’s program passed as part of the House version of financial reform approved in December.

Fattah says his program is based on a successful Pennsylvania program that he helped create as a young state legislator. The plan proposes to use unspent TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) funds to provide Relief for distressed homeowners who are unable to meet their mortgage obligations due to financial hardship, as well as providing assistance to renters seeking affordable housing.

Fattah’s mortgage program comes as signs of trouble mount with President Obama’s own foreclosure-prevention initiative. Mortgage servicers reportedly have delivered relatively few permanent modifications, and hundreds of thousands of borrowers in trial modifications have yet to receive a final answer after many months of waiting.

“Congress must implement measures to ensure the conditions that led to the [financial] crisis will not occur again,” Fattah writes in his letter to Dodd. “Regulatory reform, however, must begin with correcting the damaged housing market by providing people the tools necessary to keep their homes and prevent foreclosure.”

The Homeowners’ Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program (HEMAP), the Pennsylvania model upon which the new legislation is based, has distributed more than $236 million in emergency mortgage assistance since 1983, Fattah says in a statement. Most of that money has since been repaid. That success is a microcosm of what can happen on the national level, Fattah adds.

Fattah notes that foreclosures caused by unemployment are increasingly becoming a greater portion of the foreclosure problem. An estimated 5.5 million homes were in the process of foreclosure in 2009 and 2010, the congressman adds.

Under Fattah’s proposal, a lender would be required to inform a homeowner in mortgage default about the program before the lender can begin foreclosure proceedings.

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

DA John T. Adams of Berks County accepted $500 campaign contributions from the Flyers Victory Fund in August 2008 and August 2009, according to campaign finance reports issued by both the Pennsylvania Department of State and the Berks County Registrar of Voters.

Johnna Seeton, a certified humane society police officer for the Pennsylvania Legislative Animal Network (PLAN), says she documented what she believed were acts of animal cruelty at a pigeon shoot on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009, sponsored by the Pike Township Sportsman’s Association near Oley, about 55 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Seeton had gone to the shoot, but had to watch the killings from public roads and driveways of nearby residents who had given her permission.

Typically, at a pigeon shoot, one bird is confined to a small box about 25–30 yards in front of the firing line. The birds are released from the spring-loaded boxes known as “traps,” and the shooter fires at five separately released birds in five separate rounds, as if firing at clay pigeons in a trap or skeet shoot. Each shooter tries to kill a total of 25 birds, each falling within a designated circle, for a perfect score. The birds, when first released from the boxes, are often dazed and confused, sometimes by lack of adequate nutrition or confinement in small cages before the shoot and within the closed box during the shoot. As many as three-fourths of all birds, according to investigators from the Humane Society of the United States, are not killed instantly, but are wounded, usually to die slow and painful deaths. At the Pikeville shoot were two separate fields, each with nine boxes that were refilled during the day. About 1,000–1,500 birds became targets. At the “state shoot” on Feb. 20 and 21, about 75–90 persons fired shotgun pellets at about 5,000 birds that were released from 27 boxes on three separate shooting fields.

The wounded or dead birds are picked up by trapper boys and girls, usually 12–16 years old, put into nets and taken to a shed, where their heads are cut off with shears. Sometimes, the trappers just wring their necks, sometimes hours after the bird is wounded. Even then, many live long enough to suffocate from being thrown into barrels. The carcasses are usually thrown into the garbage. Although most pigeon shooters claim they are ridding the state of “vermin,” calling them “winged rats,” the reality is that most of the birds are raised to be shot, captured, or brought in from out of state specifically for the shoots. The largest broker for pigeon shoots lives in Strausstown, Pa., about 30 miles northwest of Oley.

The shooters, who must be at least 12 years old, pay entry fees; many of them place illegal side bets. Drinking is common at pigeon shoots.

Pennsylvania is the only state where live pigeon shoots are still openly practiced. “Live pigeon shoots are similar to cockfighting or dog fighting, where it is largely an underground circuit of the same people who follow it around,” says Heidi Prescott, senior vice-president of the 11.6 million member Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The Pennsylvania Council of Churches, in opposing pigeon shoots, declared, “[T]he use of live animals for target practice in a contest does not honor the integrity of God’s good creation.”

Johnna Seeton says she returned to the Pike Township site two days after the pigeon shoot, and found live wounded birds, which she took to a veterinarian for treatment. “Some had to be euthanized because of extensive injuries,” she says. Necropsies showed that pellets had hit vital organs, but the birds lived, often in extreme pain, for as many as two days. Birds that fall outside club property typically die from the pellets hitting vital organs, broken bones, internal hemorrhaging, nerve damage, or from infection, starvation, dehydration, or external parasite attacks. Seeton says she was able to rescue some because they fell onto public property. She had no legal authority to rescue the dying birds on the club’s private property.

Seeton had filed three separate animal cruelty citations with District Judge Victor Frederick IV on Dec. 10, 2009, against the Pike Township Sportsmen’s Association, charging it with animal cruelty. Four days later, she says Adams called her, said that he reviewed the charges, and said he would not allow her to prosecute the case, nor would he allow anyone else to prosecute the case.

In a 20 minute conversation, the DA demanded Seeton withdraw charges, citing what he believed were court precedents that would prohibit the filing of charges against organizers of pigeon shoots. Gordon Einhorn, Harrisburg, attorney, for the Pennsylvania Legislative Animal Network, then contacted Adams to try to understand why the DA wouldn’t allow the complaint, and to explain Pennsylvania law and relevant precedent. “It was somewhat of a heated discussion,” says Einhorn.

Adams says the law “is quite specific that pigeon shoots do not constitute cruelty to animals and that organizers of pigeon shoots do not have to have a veterinarian to care for wounded birds.”  Adams, who is not a hunter, says he has no position about pigeon shoots, but that, “Although I sympathize with [those who oppose the pigeon shoots], their anger is misplaced; they must contact the Legislature” for recourse. Adams says his office can “only enforce the law; we cannot make it.” Adams, says Seeton, said that his decision not to allow prosecution and allow the court or a jury to determine the merits of the case, was final. “I wasn’t challenging the legality of pigeon shoots,” says Seeton, “only the animal cruelty for allowing wounded birds to die slow painful deaths.” On Jan. 13, 2010, in response to Adams’ demands, DJ Victor Frederick refused to allow Seeton to proceed with her charges. He withdrew the charges in front of an assistant district attorney.

To support his refusal to allow prosecution of the animal cruelty complaint, Adams cites a decision in the Berks County Court of Common Pleas in April 2002 [Seeton v. Pike Township Sportsmen's Association], which he says established that pigeon shoots are legal, and that recourse is through legislation. However, the ruling by Common Pleas Court Judge Scott E. Lash wasn’t a decision, but only a judicial memorandum to a motion for a preliminary injunction, and was not based upon evidence presented in trial. The Memorandum was the result of an appeal of a decision two months earlier. The opinion by Judge Lash was rendered before the Plaintiff had the opportunity to conduct discovery, present evidence, and examine witnesses. Because the case is still pending, and never received a final judgment, it cannot be used as legal precedent, says Einhorn. In that Memorandum, Judge Lash, who several times referred to any individual shooting at birds in a pigeon shoot as a “sportsman,” determined that there was no intent to wound birds and, thus, not a violation of the state law. He cited an 1891 case [Commonwealth v. Lewis] in which the appellant judge ruled that “the defendant has merely been punished for want of skill” by only wounding, not killing, pigeons at a shoot at the Philadelphia Gun Club in Eddington, Bucks County. That appeal had reversed a trial court case four years earlier, in which Judge Harman Yerkes had called pigeon shooting “cruel and barbarous” and a violation of animal abuse statute. However, in that reversal, the presiding judge ruled that there was no animal cruelty because the wounded bird was immediately killed.

An 1860 state law declared that animal cruelty is an “offense against public morals and decency.” However, Adams claims that pigeon shoots do not constitute a violation of Title 18, section 5511(c), the Cruelty to Animals statute. That statute, within the Pennsylvania Crimes Code, states that a person  is guilty of animal cruelty if he or she “wantonly or cruelly ill treats, overloads, beats, otherwise abuses any animal, or neglects any animal as to which he has a duty of care, whether belonging to himself or otherwise, or abandons any animal, or deprives any animal of necessary sustenance, drink, shelter or veterinary care, or access to clean and sanitary shelter which will protect the animal against inclement weather and preserve the animal’s body heat and keep it dry.” Seeton says the Pike Township Sportsmen’s Association violated several provisions of that statute. The penalty for animal cruelty, a summary offense, is a fine of $50–$750 and/or up to 90 days in jail.

In 1980, the Court of Common Pleas for Monroe County ruled that persons are in violation of the animal cruelty statute if they fail to assist an animal when they “know or reasonably should know that [they have] conceivably injured [the animal." [Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Fabian]. In 1995, the Pennsylvania Superior Court determined that the manner in which injured pigeons are treated  could constitute a violation of the Animal Abuse law [Mohler v. Labor Day Committee]. A Pennsylvania Superior Court decision in 2003 established that persons violate the animal cruelty statute when they commit “acts or conduct which cause pain and suffering [including] acts of omission, neglect, and the like, whereby the same kind of suffering is caused or permitted [and are] done recklessly and without regard to the consequences.” [Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Simpson].

Seeton’s charges are that the birds are usually neglected and left wounded for long periods of time. Under existing animal cruelty law, says Einhorn, “it is clear that pigeons are covered.” Nevertheless, Judge Lash in his Memorandum had determined, possibly against existing state law, that the presence of a veterinarian to treat wounded birds or to humanely euthanize those who had no hope of recovery was “impractical,” “unworkable,” and its cost was “prohibitive.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in Hulsizer v. Labor Day Committee (1999), specifically noted that at the pigeon shoot in Hegins in Schuylkill County, at that time the largest in the nation, pigeons suffered slow and painful deaths and that severely wounded birds were not given veterinary care nor were euthanized in a humane method. The Court stated the Plaintiff’s view that pigeon shoots are “cruel and moronic.” The Court did not specifically rule that pigeon shoots were illegal. However, the Court set precedent by deciding that humane society officers had authority to pursue abuse charges against all state pigeon shoots.

Although the district attorney of Berks County refused to allow prosecution of animal cruelty charges, Dauphin County District Attorney Ed Marsico, whose jurisdiction includes the state capital of Harrisburg, had no similar problem with the intent of the state’s animal cruelty laws. On March 11, in the court of District Justice Rebecca Margarum of Elizabethville, Seeton filed 23 separate charges against the Erdman Sportsmen’s Association for a pigeon shoot on June 7, 2009. She cited violation of section 5511(c), the same section she used in her complaint against the Pikeville club. Marsico, says Seeton, “not only allowed the filing but also supported it.”

Over the past two decades, several bills to ban pigeon shoots have been written by state legislators; none have passed. The House of Representatives in 1994 voted 99–93 to ban the shoot, but needed 102 votes for passage. Several other attempts to ban pigeon shoots have been blocked by House or Senate leadership or were allowed to die in committees. Forty-seven current state senators and representatives, between 2004 and the end of 2009, received $45,685 in campaign funds from the Flyers Victory Fund and the NRA Political Victory Fund, according to records of the Pennsylvania Department of State. During those years, the Flyers and the NRA campaign committees donated a total of $62,394 to 64 candidates or legislators. Rep. John M. Perzel (R-Philadelphia), House speaker from April 2003 to January 2007, received $3,500 from the NRA Political Victory Fund in 2005 and 2006. The 14 current House and Senate leaders received $14,500. H. William DeWeese (D-Greene, and parts of Fayette and Washington counties) received $9,000 from the NRA Political Victory Fund; DeWeese was House speaker 1993–1994, Democratic leader 1995–2006 and majority leader, 2007–2008. Both Perzel and DeWeese have been instrumental in blocking legislation to prohibit live pigeon shoots.

The current bills [H.R. 1411 and S.B. 843] are stalled in committee. Despite strong co-sponsor support, bills to ban live pigeon shoots have not received a vote in more than a decade, although leaders in both the House and the Senate have repeatedly promised to bring it to the floor. “This bill is an imaginary boogieman in the minds of a few legislators,” says Heidi Prescott of the HSUS. She believes “no legislator is going to lose their job for voting to end a very cruel practice with only a handful of supporters.” The cost to the Commonwealth, says Prescott “is probably a lot more to block the bill than to finally get rid of this very cruel, pitiless practice.” Prescott has been personally active for more than 20 years in her opposition to what she calls “barbaric and cruel,” but which crowds who attend pigeon shoots believe is “entertainment,” and the shooters call a “sport.”

Killing trapped pigeons isn’t a sport, according to the International Olympic Committee, which banned pigeon shooting after its only appearance in the 1900 Olympics. The reason why pigeon shooting isn’t recognized as a sport was best explained by the IOC. “It’s cruelty,” it said after thinking about the Olympics’ only bloody “sport.” Great Britain banned live pigeon shoots it in 1921, and most countries now ban the practice. Jerry Feaser, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, agrees that pigeon shooting isn’t sport. Pigeon shoots, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in December 2007, “are not what we would classify as fair-chase hunting,” nor are pigeons considered to be wild animals. In the Seeton v. Pike Township Sportsmen’s Association case, the Court had thrown out the Defendant’s argument that the “hunting exception” to the animal cruelty statute was an acceptable defense against animal cruelty. Four years later, in Covington Township v. Moscow Sportsmen’s Club, the Court of Common Pleas for Lackawanna County granted a preliminary injunction requested by township officials, and reaffirmed the belief that pigeons are not “game birds,” and did not fall within the hunting exception to the statute. Former State Sen. Roy Afflerbach, a lifelong sportsman who began hunting as a child, and who introduced the first Senate bill to prohibit live pigeon shoots, says “launching birds or animals from traps in front of awaiting shooters, who wound more animals than they kill, is not hunting; the hunters I know think it is nothing more than a slob blood-fest and a black eye to the image of hunting.”

There were about two dozen shoots since Sept. 5, 2009, at the Pikeville and Wing Pointe gun clubs in Berks County, and one at Erdman in Dauphin County, with one more scheduled for June 6. The Philadelphia Gun Club in Eddington (Bucks County) began hosting pigeon shoots again last year after township officials had issued a cease and desist order in May 2002, citing violations of both a township ordinance and the state law against cruelty to animals. However, in 2008, in violation of the cease and desist order, the Gun Club held another shoot. Wounded birds landed on neighbors’ property or in the Delaware River. Charges were filed against Leo A. Holt, club president, but were withdrawn in March 2009 under a “gentleman’s agreement” that the club would no long conduct pigeon shoots. The club has routinely violated that agreement. Holt, his brothers Thomas Jr. and Michael, their father, Thomas Sr., and Thomas Jr’s wife, Angela, contributed $53,300 in campaign funds to members and candidates of the Legislature between 2004 and the end of 2009, including $16,500 to House Speaker John M. Perzel between 2005 and 2008, according to records of the Pennsylvania Department of State.

There may be absolutely no cause-and-effect relationship between donations to Adams’ campaign and his stand on permitting live pigeon shoots. However, animal cruelty will probably continue to be a part of the culture of Berks County, at least as long as John T. Adams is the DA.

[Walter M. Brasch, Ph.D., is professor of mass communications and journalism at Bloomsburg University. He is an award-winning social issues columnist and the author of 17 books. He first began covering Pennsylvania's pigeon shoots in 1993. You may contact him through his website, www.walterbrasch.com]

The progressive advocacy organization is rallying supporters to push House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to include a provision for a healthcare public option in the final bill lawmakers approve and send on to the Senate.

Pelosi had been one of the strongest advocates for inclusion of a public option but last week indicated that a federally run coverage plan would not be the final legislation, which will be brought up under rules known as reconciliation. Bills brought up under reconciliation are not subject to a Senate filibuster, which is a key point because Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown’s Jan. 19 election gives Senate Republicans a 41st vote that would uphold such a filibuster.

“I’m quite sad that a public option isn’t in there.” Pelosi is quoted as saying. “But it isn’t a case of it’s not in there because the Senate is whipping against it. It’s not in there because they don’t have the votes to have it in there.”

Democrats hope that they are in the home stretch to enact healthcare reform, which has been making its way through Congress, on and off, for the last year. The White House hopes to have healthcare wrapped up this week; President Obama has postponed an overseas trip in anticipation of helping the reform endgame.

Public option supporters, who have included Obama, say such a federal health plan would help lower costs and provide needed competition to private insurers. Opponents have railed against it as a “government takeover” of healthcare.

DFA, which has strongly pushed inclusion of a public option throughout the process, is not giving up.

The organization sent an email to supporters Sunday.

“It’s up to us to make sure Speaker Pelosi doesn’t kill the public option because she’s afraid to act. She needs to know that we’ll be there to have her back,” says the email, from DFA’s political director, Charles Chamberlain. “We’ll whip Congress to pass the bill and help every step of the way to get the majority votes we’ll need to win.”

Chamberlain’s email asks supporters to sign an online petition in favor of a public option.

“We’ll deliver the new signatures every day until she gets the job done,” it says. “The fate of the public option is in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hands. It’s up to us to make sure she doesn’t kill the most popular piece of reform.”

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Amnesty International’s report, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, urges action to tackle a crisis that sees between two and three women die every day during pregnancy and childbirth in the United States. A total of 1.7 million women a year, one-third of all pregnant women in the country, suffer from pregnancy-related complications, the organization says.

With a lifetime risk of maternal deaths that is greater than in 40 other countries, including virtually all of the industrialized countries, the United States has failed to reverse the two-decade upward trend in preventable maternal deaths, despite pledges to do so, according to Amnesty International. Most recently, the federal government has failed to meet the goals set forth in the 2010 Healthy People initiative, which called for reducing the number of maternal deaths to one-third of current rates, the organization adds.

The report analysis, however, finds that health care reform before Congress does not address the crisis of maternal health care. The White House put off an overseas trip Obama had planned because of hopes to have the reform legislation signed into law this week.

“Reform is primarily focused on health care coverage and reducing health care costs, and even optimistic estimates predict that any proposal on the table will still leave millions without access to affordable care,” says Rachel Ward, one of the authors of Deadly Delivery. “Furthermore, it does not address discrimination, systemic failures and the lack of government accountability documented in Amnesty International’s report.”

Ward adds: “The barriers preventing women from getting the care that they need go far beyond simply lacking health insurance. Health care reform does not address obstacles to maternal care, recommend nationally standardized protocols for preventing and treating the most common causes of death, eliminate health disparities or ensure that the government takes responsibility for reducing levels of maternal mortality.”

In response to its findings of widespread maternal risk, Amnesty International calls on Obama to quickly establish an Office of Maternal Health to lead government action to reduce soaring pregnancy-related complications and maternal deaths nationwide.

Amnesty International says that rapid and comprehensive federal leadership is required, as the report found numerous systemic failures, including the following:

• Obstacles to care are widespread, even though the United States spends more on health care than any other country and more on pregnancy and childbirth-related hospital costs, $86 billion, than any other type of hospital care.
• Nearly 13 million women of reproductive age (15 to 44), or one in five, have no health insurance. Women of color account for just under one-third of all women in the United States (32 percent) but over half (51 percent) of uninsured women.
• One in four women do not receive adequate prenatal care, starting in the first trimester. The number rises to about one in three for African American and Native American women.
• Burdensome bureaucratic procedures in Medicaid enrollment substantially delay access to vital prenatal care for pregnant women seeking government-funded care. Twenty-one states do not offer “presumptive eligibility” which allows pregnant women to temporarily access medical care while their permanent application for Medicaid is pending. Women who do not receive any prenatal care are three to four times more likely to die than women who do.
• A shortage of health care professionals is a serious obstacle to timely and adequate care, especially in rural areas and inner cities. In 2008, 64 million people were living in “shortage areas” for primary care (which includes maternal care), but federally-supported community health centers — a critical safety net — are available in only 20 percent of these areas.
• The lack of nationally standardized protocols addressing the leading causes of death — or the inconsistent use of them — may lead to preventable deaths or injuries. Measures used widely in the United Kingdom to prevent blood clots after caesarian sections are not consistently taken in the United States, for example.
• Many women are not given a say in decisions about their care and do not get enough information about the signs of complications and the risks of interventions such as inducing labor or cesarean sections. Cesarean sections make up nearly one-third of all deliveries in the United States – twice as high as recommended by the World Health Organization. The risk of death following c-sections is more than three times higher than for vaginal births.
• The number of deaths is significantly understated because there are no federal requirements to report maternal deaths or complications and data collection at the state level is insufficient.
• Oversight and accountability is lacking. Some 29 states and the District of Columbia have no maternal death review process at all.

The publisher of the news site On The Hill, Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.