Why Re-Elect Anna Eshoo?

"is a vote for business as usual in Washington."

And a vote for republicans brings back Bush era policies:
- tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% in a time of deficit
- trillion dollar wars
- repeal of health care reform just to benefit the insurance companies
- ultra conservative supreme court nominees (what happened to Harriet Meyers?)
- outing CIA agents to Bob Novak
- drive the economy back into the ditch, even worse this time because we haven't had long enough to repair the Bush disaster
- profligate spending on defense contractors, ballooning size of government under Bush

And with the tea-baggers behind them, look what they want:
- four GOP senate candidates want to repeal minimum wage and overtime rules
- Rand Paul thinks it's okay to discriminate at lunch counters against blacks
- Sharon Angle and the other tea baggers want to privatize social security, providing a windfall for Wall Street
- O'Donnell and others want to take away a woman's right to choose, even in the case of rape and incest. Wow.

Gee, Rick, tough choice. Like you, I'm for better progressives than Anna, but this is the general.

Vote, folks. Never let a guy like Rick throw sand in your eyes.

Your vote counts!

Hold the phone there anonymous. The banking crisis and subsequent meltdown were not brought on by the Bush administration. They got a lot of things wrong, but this wasn't one of them. It was brought on by the loosening of the banking laws and the regualtions surrounding home loans. And who did that? Go ahead you can say it......the Democrats. The dems authored the bill and President Clinton signed it into law.

"The dems authored the bill and President Clinton signed it into law."

Look again as to who authored it. If you insist, please link the authors. Cuz, unless we're looking at two different things, I see it authored by 3 republicans.

Glast Steigal was repealed by (the then later) McCain economic advisor, Phil Gramm, under Gramm–Leach–Bliley in 1999.

As in, Phil "Americans are whiners, this is a mental recession" Gramm. The guy who passed legislation benefiting his wife, who sat on a successful little company called Enron.

Heckuva guy, ol' Phil.

Yeah, Clinton signed it. Clinton was the best Republican president ever: balanced budgets, handed over a surplus, etc.. But he was brutal on the working class: Nafta, etc..

Oh, my bad, I forgot - republican presidents can't balance a budget.

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The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, is an act of the 106th United States Congress (1999–2001) signed into law by President Bill Clinton which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, opening up the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company.

I stand corrected as to authorship.

I believe that Anna Eshoo should hold her seat as long as she wants. She has served the Peninusla admirably.

When she decides to step down there are two conscientious and very qualified candidates to fill her shoes: Joe Simitian and Gail Slocum.

Mr. Simitian knows the California landscape very well; but Ms. Slocum is the most savvy when it comes to politics. I believe that she could represent our CD very well and bargain very hard to bring stimulus money into our District to make it an even better place to live.

Besides we don't want to lose women in Congress. We fought very hard to get those seats and we should be allowed to keep what we have.

Did you really say "We fought very hard to get those seats and we should be allowed to keep what we have"??? Are you kidding?

That's why we have elections in America. You get more votes, you get the seat. There are no allowances, set-asides or quotas.

No group or sector is "allowed to keep" anything.

"No group or sector is "allowed to keep" anything."

Unless, of course, you've "earned" it through gerrymandering. In which case, it's a lifetime appointment.

Sigh.

Well, the Democrats in Sacramento should know...

Agreed.

As would Republicans in other states.

Of course, we can take this back to Gerry himself and blame HIS party:

"In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican party."

[Post removed; stick to the topic and refrain from personal attacks and innuendo.]

Know any good statesmen or stateswomen instead of politicians who want to run for office?

Public trust in Congress has reached a new low dropping below 50% for the first time since Gallup started polling on this question in 1972. To better understand this disturbing fact, one simply has to look in our backyard. Congresswoman Anna Eshoo’s crude manipulation of her “Town Hall” meeting on High Speed Rail is a perfect example of why the majority of Americans distrust Congress. Billed as an informational meeting, Eshoo’s Town Hall more resembled a time-share sales session where gullible potential buyers get the hard sell.

Eshoo ensured that facts would remain obscured by not allowing citizens to interact with her panel. Citizens had to submit questions in writing and could not follow-up when panelists responded with evasion, half-truths and outright misrepresentations. Her staff selected the questions to be asked and many never were asked.

Equally disturbing was Eshoo’s attempt to stifle public participation by holding the meeting in an inappropriately small venue. Hundreds of people were forced to sit outside the meeting room and could barely hear the proceedings. Others simply left when it was apparent that there was no room to sit and no ability to see the material presented. Eshoo’s explanation that it would have cost $10,000 to rent the Fox Theatre was disingenuous at best. There are numerous public auditoriums in local schools that would have been honored to host the Town Hall. Indeed, Stanford alone has 10 auditoriums that could comfortably accommodate 500 people and, given Eshoo’s great success in delivering large amounts of Federal earmark money to Stanford, would have been happy to help out.

Perhaps a bigger failure is Eshoo’s tenure on an important intelligence committee. President Obama said it well. Failing to identify the underwear bomber was a systemic failure of our intelligence community. So who oversees the intelligence community? Anna Eshoo was appointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in January 2003 and chairs the Subcommittee on Intelligence Community Management. Her subcommittee focuses on policies and management challenges affecting all 16 agencies that comprise the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Unfortunately Eshoo was too busy playing political grandstanding games to focus on the intelligence policies and management challenges that might have prevented the system failure that nearly killed hundreds of Americans. So what was she doing back there in Washington? She spent her time drafting and then passing a bill in Congress to regulate the audio volume of TV commercials. The increase in volume when commercials air is certainly an irritant but, in fact, it is exactly the type of issue that is supposed to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission.

In spite of this I will vote for Anna because I want her to join Kim il Sung in becoming one of the few politicians ever to get 100% of the vote.

What a lot of people fail to understand is that both political parties are equally culpable in this mess. EQUALLY.

It wasn't Phil Gramm's support of the repeal of Glass Steagall or Barney Frank's insistence that people who can't afford homes get government backed mortgages.

IT WAS BOTH.

And the incredible spending by the Obama Administration isn't any more defensible than the incredible spending by the Bush Administration.

IT WAS BOTH.

It's about time that the electorate stopped supporting the status quo just because we have traditionally and mindlessly voted for the D's or the R's.

We get what we deserve.

"Know any good statesmen or stateswomen instead of politicians who want to run for office?"

I can think of a few off the top of my head, let's start with the top 3 names of the last cycle:

McCain - but only the pre-2004 McCain. Was a little shocked when he didn't full-throat attack the character assassination of a fellow Viet vet by the swift boaters. And his sell out in 2008, and since, in his run to the extreme against Haywood, have tarnished everything he created prior to 2004, but still the pre-2004 McCain had the right air for most folks.

Hillary - Okay, load up on this one if you like. Rather surprised she didn't take a nomination to the Court, where she would have made a good center-left associate. (not by Roberts court standards, everyone is a flaming liberal compared to Johnscalitothomas. Citizens United? Oiy.)

Statesman? How about the guy they lost to? Take away the tea party screaming and the recession and compare his world view to the last guy who had the job. We'll see what history has to say in a decade.

I think if we go a little lower than the top three names, we can find some more. Okay, a lot lower, the fourth big name of the last cycle is still out there making a fool of herself.

I guess I should have prefaced more clearly: a statesman in a statesman's job, removed from the vanities of running for a politician's job.

All right, load up on that and have some fun, boys...

I'm not sure any of your suggestions would interested in Anna Eshoo's job... which is the subject of the thread.

Pogo:

Agreed. Was responding to Bob's post. Would you want a statesman representing the district?

Relative to the statesman comment, what did you think of the gentleman previously representing the district just to the north, the late Tom Lantos?

I liked Representative Lantos. He was honest, honorable and worked hard.

I sat next to Tom and his wife on a flight from Dulles to SFO a couple of months before he died.

If you want to know my political leanings, they are probably closest to the late Pat Moynihan who held the New York Senate seat before Ms. Clinton. Unpredictable.

She didn't do squat to help her constituents in EPA w/the criminals at Page Mill Properties, because she has too many interests in contractors & developers. She no longer has my support.

"She didn't do squat to help her constituents in EPA w/the criminals at Page Mill Properties"

What would you expect a United States Senator to do, other than posture about something like that?

She's not a Senator.

...and apparently, I'm braindead.

Duh.

After reading a post about Gail Slocum being better qualified to be the next represenatative from the 14th Congressional District I laughed so hard that tears streamed down my eyes.

Simitian is a rare breed of democrat who puts the people's interests before politics in most instances. Gail Slocum [portion deleted - avoid attacks] about proposition L in the voters handbook by deliberately mistating that if Prop L passes that Ciy employees would no longer be able to participate in the CALPERS retirement system.

Time, and again, Ms. Slocum has put the interests of the employee unions above the people of Menlo Park. [Portion deleted. Please avoid personal attacks.]