I live in the deep red 2nd congressional district of Northern California.  It's a great place to live, but one of the bad points has been the feeling of virtual certainty that I would never have a representative in either the California Legislature or the US House who represented me.
Now, for the first time in over 30 years, I feel a real glimmer of hope that might change.  And I want to call your attention to a race that is not yet on the national radar, but that I hope will soon be.

As a long term veteran of the fight for single payer healthcare - for a real solution that will meet the care needs of all Americans, I was pretty excited at first when I saw the splashy new rollout for "Healthcare for America Now"
You can see their web ads on this site and on many others.

You can see their splashy website
I took a look at it and at first, things looked pretty good.  They say lots of bad things about the health insurers, which is a good start.  My first clue that something was wrong was when I followed a link to a survey.  Follow me below the fold for that first clue.

One of the things readers here have become familiar with is the way the Traditional Media limit the terms of political discussion in our country.  One oft-cited example is the war and continued occupation in Iraq.  If we had only the TM for a news source, we would be exposed only to two sides: Those who favored the war in the beginning and now think it was a mistake, and those who still support it.  Those who thought it was a terrible idea from the beginning rarely make the talk shows.
My purpose here today is to discuss the way the same narrowing of the spectrum of discussion has happened in the healthcare debate, with particular focus on a recently pulished online article from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting).  I highly recommend you read the original article and follow some of it's references to original sources.  It's worth the effort.  

I'm just home after a long day and a long drive home, but can't wait to get up at least a bit of information on a truly inspiring event.
This week, at San Francisco's Moscone Center, AHIP - America's Health Insurance Plans - are having their annual meeting.  Today, a coalition led by the California Nurses Association gave them an appropriate greeting.
It was an event that made me proud to be a nurse, proud to be a member of my union and hopeful for the future.
No doubt others will do a better job of telling the story and add some visuals I don't have immediate access to.  But until they do, I wanted to get this up.

Over the last several weeks, since the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) came into conflict with my union, CNA/NNOC (California Nurses Assn./National Nurses Organizing Committee), we have been treated to a steady parade of statements from SEIU attacking CNA for what they chose to call "union busting".
In retaliation, they have attempted to violently disrupt a labor conference, sent mass mailings to our members and are currently here in California making home visits to our members trying to undermine our union.  
But it appears that their abhorrence of raiding is subject to a double standard.  It's OK when they do it.

Much has been made of two recent events - CNA/NNOC intervening in a Ohio representation election arranged by SEIU and a chain of hospitals called Catholic Healthcare Partners and the retaliatory attack by certain SEIU staff on a labor conference where the executive director of CNA was scheduled to speak.

Many observers not directly involved have tended to write this off as a simple turf war between two unions competing for members.  While there is history behind these events, the real roots are in deep-seated philosophical differences.  Because these differences have real implications for the labor movement, I think it is worth the effort to try to step back from the immediate heat and look at fundamental nature of the differences.

(Note: the Labor Notes Conference is a biennial gathering of activists seeking to build a more democratic and more effective labor movement.  It takes place in Detroit Mich.)
In the aftermath of the disruption and violence by SEIU at last weekend’s Labor Notes conference, there have been a flurry of analyses, finger-pointing, hindsight, and criticisms.  This issue is too important to drop...in recent days SEIU’s campaign against CNA/NNOC (California Nurses Assn/National Nurses Organizing Committee) has veered from harassment into violence—which has absolutely no place in the labor movement. I think it’s important to listen to a few of the voices coming out of this melee with first-hand experience of the incident.  I'll warn you that this has grown rather long, as I have found more voices it seemed important to include.  Note that two of the folks whose words I include are connected to CNA/NNOC.  The others are not.  

Along with a group of my friends and fellow board members of CNA/NNOC, I have been spending the weekend in Detroit Michigan for a conference –"Rebuilding Labor’s Power".   The conference is put on by Labor Notes magazine, a magazine devoted to building a better, more democratic and more effective labor movement.
Last night, the conference attendees experienced an example of the kind of thuggery that illustrates the worst of the American labor movement.  The kind of thing that the Right has used to give unions a bad name with much of the American public.

In the last few days we've seen an escalation of the war carried out by the current leadership of SEIU International against my union, California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee and against dissident factions within SEIU.  With the enormous resources that come with size, the Liebermans of the labor movement have been able to plaster the blogs with deceptive ads.  As a proud member and volunteer board member of CNA/NNOC I feel some compulsion to do what I can to combat a misleading impression and to set the record straight  

By now, if you are a regular on this site or any other in the liberal blogosphere, you have noticed a series of blogads that involve battle between unions or combat within a union (the theme color is often purple) and you may well be wondering what the hell is going on.  Starting today, you will notice an add featuring a stern looking older woman attacking the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
If you have lifted your head up at all, from your obsession with the latest polls in the Deocratic primary, you are surely a little bewildered by all of this.
Follow me to learn more - at least from one point of view.

I am posting this fast with relatively little detail yet available, but I wanted to get this word out.
CNA/NNOC just moments ago, won the first ever representation election for private sector registered nurses in the state of Texas.  This is a stunning victory, won in a very difficult organizing environment - a right to work state with essentially no other unionised nurses other than, I believe, a few who are federal employees.  This is just stunning.

Disclosure: I am a  27 year Registered Nurse, working in Cardiac Rehabilitation in Northern California and proud board member of the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association—America’s RN union, 80,000 members strong in all 50 states.

Many of you know that there is a major debate breaking out in the labor movement, pitting SEIU on one side against some of its own locals and much of the rest of the labor movement on the other side.  At its heart is the philosophy of "partnerships"—SEIU believes in "partnering" with employers, HMOs, the insurance industry, the drug companies, etc., in a short-term strategy to gain new members.  NNOC/CNA believes we will only achieve healthcare reform by standing up to healthcare corporations—and will only achieve worker power by organizing workers, not organizing employers.

I'm going to make a conscientious effort to keep this candidate-neutral, for all of us who have had it with candidate promotion diaries.

As it becomes increasingly likely that neither of our candidates will win enough pledged delegates to lock up the nomination, we need to look ahead to how that may play out and how our party will be affected.

I'm in the camp that is not afraid of a long selection process.  The longer it goes on, the longer the attention is focused on our candidates and the more an already pale and gray McCain fades into the background.  But I do have a different worry.

Disclaimer - this is NOT an anti-Clinton diary.  We have too many of those as it is.  But I'm fairly involved in nursing politics and y'all need the straight story on what this endorsement is worth. Which in my mind is nothing.  The relationshops among the various nursing organizations - the ANA, the UAN and the various state associations - are too convoluted for almost anyone to care about.  But here's the essential information:
The ANA is an organization with a once proud history of building the nursing profession.  Unfortunately, for at least as long as I have been a nurse - 26 years - it has been an organization led entirely be academic nurses and management nurses.  I would bet plenty there is no working bedside nurse - no nurse who actually cares for patients - in its top leadership.

Many of you will have noticed the Chaneycare ad running on the front page today.
It makes me so darn proud to see it there because this is my union at work: the California Nurses Assn./National Nurses Organizing Committee.
It's one of the few unions in the country acting like a real union should.

What are those ads about?  They're about advancing the cause of real healthcare reform and pushing the Democratic candidates to show the backbone to support real reform - based on our belief that the private insurers have no place in a real solution.

I know that all the candidates' partisans will try to spin the debate as a win for their favorite.  In actuality, I thought that all the Democrats "won" today, by sounding so much smarter and more rational than their Repub. counterparts and by generally giving responsive answers to questions and minimizing the personal attacks.
Hillary however got one thing right that raised her in my esteem
What was it?

At a stage when not a single vote has been cast, Senator Clinton is already being seen as the nearly inevitable nominee.  She's sitting in the frontrunner position and the natural thing for anyone in that position to do is to be careful not to hurt herself and play defense.  Strategically, that's reasonable.  Edwards and Obama, on the other hand, seem to be falling behind and are responding by turning up the intensity of their attacks on the leader.  I suppose that's standard in the consultant driven political playbook.  But there's a better way.

There has lately been a flame war going on here, which seems to boil down to something like the following two points of view:

1. We must remain true to the goal of equal rights for all regardless of its political consequences.

VS.

2. We must accept homophobic bigotry in the black churches because they are such an important part of the Democratic coalition.

It is not my intention to take sides in this fight, since I can see some validity and some narrow minded intolerance on both sides.  But it has moved me to tell an old story that was told to me more than once as a child.  Because of this story in my family's history, I've always tended to see bigotry cloaked in religion as all the same thing regardless of what group is the target.  Follow me for the story.