Alan Grayson

Matt Cartwright: "I did not come to Congress to kick the most vulnerable Americans off of food assistance."After all Obama's talk about equality of opportunity in the State of the Union last night, at 11 this morning House conservatives rammed through a horrendous $100 billion farm bill taking another $800 million a year from the food stamps program and preserving subsidies for wealthy farmers.

After Obama's speech defending the incompetent and corrupt U.S. spy agencies, Democrats who disapprove of the way he has continued the Cheney NSA agenda that completely guts the Constitution, were in an awkward position. How to disagree with his bullshit authoritarian stand without completely trashing him. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley gave it a try:

Yesterday the Senate postponed voting on extending unemployment insurance for the 1.3 million Americans whose benefits expired last week and for even more people whose benefits will expire between now and July. Reid sensed he could get 5 Republicans to cross the aisle and back the American people, instead of their own party's determination to make Obama fail by making America fail. It worked.

There are now 117 congressmembers cosponsoring H.R. 3361, the John Sensenbrenner and John Conyers-penned USA Freedom Act introduced at the end of October.

You may have read today that Queen Elizabeth II granted Alan Turing a formal pardon "on Monday for his conviction in 1952 on charges of homosexuality, at the time a criminal offense in Britain." This isn't the first time we've looked into Turning here at DWT. Several years ago, Blue America invited Alan Grayson to speak at the Brave New Films studio in Culver City.

Blue America doesn't do many live events. But on November 12, 2011 we were very excited to offer all of our Southern California members an opportunity to meet Orlando Congressman Alan Grayson at the Brave New Films studios in Culver City. John Amato, Digby and I had worked with Robert Greenwald to host the free event featuring Grayson.

There are a lot of reasons I've grown to admire Alan Grayson over the years.

The Friday morning tweet from Alan Grayson (above) was anything but gratuitous. Grayson worked his way through Harvard as a janitor. He graduated, summa cum laude, with a degree in economics. Before going back to Harvard Law, he worked as an economist. He graduated from Harvard Law magna cum laude.

Becerra, Grayson, Ellison-- actual leaders, not money-grubbersI'm never really comfortable with a corrupt out-of-touch Beltway committee parachuting into an American congressional district and telling the Democrats there who their candidate for Congress should be. In the old days, even the worst DCCC chairmen-- think Rahm Emanuel-- used to tip-toe, at least publicy, around interfering in primaries.

By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | October 31, 2013

For the first time since the United States began using drones to attack foreign enemies, members of Congress had the chance this week to hear directly from civilian survivors of such attacks at a special hearing.
But only five lawmakers bothered to show up.