The Republicans of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce issued a satirical press release grossly misrepresenting the vetoed legislation that would have expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Based in the fictional Springfield from The Simpsons, the release featured the rich Montgomery Burns and Mayor Quimby jockeying for government funded health care.

The release quoted Burns saying, “The little darlings are needy? Me, too. I need somebody to pay ,” suggesting that well-off parents would be allowed access to free health care should SCHIP be expanded.

Such scenarios, however, have absolutely no basis in reality. Under the vetoed plan, parents would only be eligible for coverage if they work low-income, uninsured jobs and the poorest children be “first in line” for coverage. The release comes just a day after the Republican Leadership in the Senate was found by ThinkProgress to be propagating known fictions about 12-year-old SCHIP beneficiary Graeme Frost. As Paul Krugman recapped in the New York Times:

Right-wingers began “insisting that the Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister attend private schools (they’re on scholarship), because they have a house in a neighborhood where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood was rundown and considered dangerous) and because Mr. Frost owns a business (it was dissolved in 1999).”

Indeed, the “press release” and their previous smear campaign betrays the callous zeal with which House Republicans and some Senate Republicans have sought to prevent the needed expansion of SCHIP. While an astounding 91% of Americans want “Congress to help states cover more uninsured children”, a “vast majority [of Americans] also supported covering uninsured parents in low-income working families,” and “more than 600,000 children joined the ranks of the uninsured last year,” House Republicans are more concerned with scoring cheap brownie points with an out-of-touch Bush administration. (via Atrios, Wonkette)

*Seriously Joe, stop.

According to a new Washington Post - ABC News poll, “most Americans oppose fully funding President Bush’s $190 billion request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

- Bush’s approval rating stands at 33 percent, equal to his career low in Post-ABC polls. Congressional approval is even lower: Just 29 percent approve of the job the Congress is doing.

- 55 percent of Americans want congressional Democrats to do more to challenge the president’s Iraq war policies, while only a third think the Democrats have already gone too far.

- By a 2-1 margin, those who see little accomplishment in the Congress’s first nine months place more blame for the inaction on the president and the GOP rather than on the majority Democrats.

Despite the administration’s well-oiled pro-sure public relations campaign, the public isn’t biting. While Congress is busy condemning MoveOn.org and Rush Limbaugh, a sizable majority of Americans are demanding an end to the war. Rather than confronting Rush, the Democrats should be confronting Bush.

Please contact Congress and ask them to bring our troops home. You can find contact information for your Representatives HERE and for your Senators HERE.

While the Supreme Court delivered many 5-4 decisions last term that dealt blows to women’s rights, the environment, and minority rights, perhaps no decision was more stunningly illogical than that of Ledbetter v Goodyear. Lilly Ledbetter was a manager at a Goodyear Tire plant in Alabama who received smaller pay raises than her male co-workers. After 19 years of discriminatory pay practices, Lebetter was making 15-25% less than her male co-workers — even those with far less experience. In 1999, Ledbetter sued Goodyear for violating Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which allows employees to file suit within 180 days after their employer commits an act of racial or sexual discrimination.

In Ledbetter v Goodyear, the Supreme Court decided that employees may sue employers “within 180 days of the original discriminatory action — not within 180 days of their last paycheck.” However, employees may not even know about the pay discrimination until long after the first discriminatory paycheck is cut. The Supreme Court’s ruling means that if a woman learns 181 days after her first paycheck that she is being paid less than a male co-worker, she cannot sue her employer.

In order to remedy this situation, the House passed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which treats “each and every discriminatory paycheck as a new discrimination, thus re-starting the 180-day clock” after every paycheck. The Senate version of this bill, the Fair Pay Restoration Act, will be coming to a vote later this month.

Please contact your Senator and tell him or her that you support equal pay for women!

Equal pay for men and women still has a long way to go; women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid. The Fair Pay Restoration Act will give women the tools they need to get the money that they deserve.

Tomorrow, “tens of thousands of demonstrators, rallied by bloggers, newspapers and black radio hosts” including Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King III will descend on Jena, Louisiana to protest the town’s Jim Crow-like justice system ”

The trouble began last fall, when Justin Purvis, an African American high school student “asked if he could sit under the schoolyard tree, a privilege unofficially reserved for white students.” The next morning, nooses were found hanging on the tree.

African-American students protested and racial tensions mounted “in this 85 percent white town of 4,000.” The white students were assigned three days of suspension, the six black students were expelled and charged with second-degree attempted murder.

The Jena 6, as the six black teens are now known, sat in jail for months, while their parents collected bail money. One of the students, Mychal Bell, has had his conviction overturned, yet he remains in jail. “Charges for three others have been reduced to aggravated battery.”

The egregiously harsh and unwarranted charges against the Jena Six have lit a fire within students and social justice activists across the nation. Click here to “take action in your own community to support the Jena 6″ and sign this petition asking the District Attorney to enforce the law fairly and equally.

UPDATE I: The Washington Post is reporting that “Mychal Bell’s request to be freed while an appeal is being reviewed was rejected at a juvenile court hearing, effectively denying him any chance at immediate bail.”

UPDATE II: “FBI agents are looking into a neo-Nazi Web site, which has listed the home addresses and phone numbers of the six black teenagers charged in the beating of a white schoolmate in Jena, La., a bureau spokeswoman said last night. The Thursday posting on the site that lists the information also encourages readers to “get in touch, and let them know justice is coming.”

Over the summer, the administration mobilized conservative members of Congress, politically-motivated members of the military leadership, “and other right-wing allies to spin the facts on the ground and create a false impression of progress in Iraq.” The campaign culminates next week when the Bush administration will “use Gen David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress…to claim that escalation [Iraq] is working.”

BodyPolitik has compiled a list of indicators demonstrating that — contrary to the President’s overtures — escalation in Iraq has failed to produce the necessary conditions for reconciliation in Iraq:

SECTARIAN KILLINGS ARE RISING

“[T]he death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago.” [AP, 8/25/07]

ESCALATION IS BREAKING OUR MILITARY

After having dinner with Gen. David Patreus, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) reports that the general will express his concern that the “troops were being pushed to the limit.” [Chicago Tribune, 8/30/07]

Ret. Maj. Gen. John Batiste wrote in an op-ed last week, “The war in Iraq is breaking our fine Army and Marine Corps, and we are perilously close to doing damage that will take more than a decade to fix.” [ThinkProgress, 8/22/07]

NO POLITICAL RECONCILIATION

The Iraqi Government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months because of criticism by other members of the major Shia coalition, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and other Sunni and Kurdish parties. [NIE, 8/23/07]

Read the full list of indicators »

The American people must stand up against the administration’s attempts to “water down” intelligence assessments, and pressure Congress to reverse course in Iraq. Please contact Congress and ask them to bring our troops home. You can find contact information for your Representatives HERE and for your Senators HERE.