If you would like to see how your legislators voted on some important issues in this year's session you can go to http://www.electionvolunteers.org and click on "Committee Vote Tallies 2009"
At this time the votes included are:
- Judiciary Committee - Abolish the Death Penalty
- Government Administration and Elections Committee - Election Day (Voter)Registration
- Labor and Public Employees Committee - (Prohibiting) Captive Audience Meetings
- Labor and Public Employees Committee - Paid Sick Leave for Employees
- Public Health Committee - Sustinet Health Plan (proposed by the Universal Health Care Foundation)
More vote tallies will be added later. Comments suggesting others would be welcome.
[cross posted at yourct.com] Stamford Mayor and Democratic Gubernatorial front-runner Dan Malloy was invited to the White House along with about 80 municipal executives from across the country to discuss with the President implementation of the stimulus moneys just passed and signed into law.
Excerpt:
"We have urban areas -- Stamford, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven -- that are job-producing centers," Malloy said. "We need to get the money quickly."
Malloy said Obama has delivered on his pledge to work with mayors by including them in the economic recovery bill. Money is available for weatherization, community policing, schools and road repairs. But much of it will have to pass through the state first -- and that worries Malloy. "A lot depends on whether Connecticut state government can do its job and get the money in our hands. My fear is they won't," he said. Malloy ... sees a potential conflict between the governor's office and state legislature over how to disburse the stimulus funds.
"The last eight years was roughly the equivalent of 40 years in the desert," Malloy said. "This is the first time I've been back to the White House since Clinton was president." Malloy said the Bush administration would turn to the governor to see their input, but Clinton and Obama see mayors as their allies.
The endorsements for the Senate from the website http://www.electionvolunteers.org were posted on MLN on Friday. Here are the candidates for the House of Representatives.
Again, they are in order by district. Entries with "***" in front are expected to be hard-fought races. In those cases a special effort was made to provide campaign contact information so that volunteers might easily sign up to work.
Please help by providing corrections, additions, disagreements...Thank you.
The website http://www.electionvolunteers.org tracks incumbents in the Connecticut General Assembly (Senate and House). It includes speeches by legislators, vote tallies, and ratings on key issues relevant to "Democracy and Humanity". Today the full list of endorsements for the November general elections was published on the home page of that website.
The endorsements for the Senate appear below the fold, in order by district. The ones for the House of Representatives will be posted on MLN within a short time.
The listings in bold and italics are the districts where a hard-fought contest is predicted, and for most of those candidates there is information on how to contact their campaigns so that people can easily choose to volunteer where their work might make a big difference.
For incumbents, endorsements are based on the Democracy/Humanity Rating - a percentage of "Good" votes on 8 key issues. For challengers the selection of candidates is based on a mixture of conversations with friends who are active in politics and discussions with the candidates themselves.
There is still time to revise this endorsement list and to add further information before the election. Comments posted by MLN contributors or sent to the email address on the website will help in this process. Thank you.
In this year's session, the legislature disappointed us on healthcare. Rather than pursuing real, substantive reform, they settled on a band-aid that doesn't really address the healthcare crisis.
As a result, insurance costs will continue to grow, and hundreds of thousands of people will be left uncovered.
The only thing we can guess is that our legislators don't really understand the urgency of our healthcare crisis.
And no one lays out that crisis more clearly than Michael Moore in his new film Sicko. Thus, the goal behind the new website, haveyouseensicko.org: to get every legislator in the state to see the movie, so when they come back next session, we can know that ignorance won't be an excuse for avoiding healthcare.
So far, 3 have seen the movie, and 184 are left to go. So check out the site, see which legislators are the first three to see the movie, send your legislators an email, sign the petition, and send the website along to your friends.
Also, you can download that nifty little counter which will change automatically, every time a new legislator sees the movie.
(While it is early in the process, this is promising. The current language of S.B. 5034 would mandate a special election in the case of a Senator vacating office. - promoted by tparty)
I was driving to work this morning and I heard on the radio that Democrats in the State Legislature have introduced a bill that would take away the governor's ability to appoint a replacement if there is a vacancy in the US Senate seat.
My smile was HUGE, but when I got to work I found no information about it online and I e-mailed the radio station.
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