At the end of July, Blue America and our pals at the Americans For America PAC launched the first in a series of videos that highlights what kind of people now lead the Republican Party. We featured Sarah Palin, Rand Paul and John Boehner. And we asked the readers here at C&L, at DWT and at Digby's Hullabaloo to tell us who to do the next ad for. Lots of votes for Ken Calvert and Michele Bachmann but it was that reactionary harridan from North Carolina, Virginia Foxx, who got the most votes.
As you can see in the ad above, there are a lot of things that the voters in western North Carolina need to think about when they consider returning Virginia Foxx for another term in Congress. But there's also an outstanding alternative. Populist champion Billy Kennedy would make a far better Representative for ordinary working families, a part of the population Foxx is dismissive of. Foxx already has $1,270,733 on hand. Her biggest donors are the sugar lobby, banks, the Medical Industrial Compex, alcoholic beverage companies, gambling interests and foreign powers with their own agendas. Meanwhile, Billy Kennedy has $70,406 on hand. He addressed the problem on the cascade of corrupt corporate cash flooding into congressional campaigns:
"The case of Citizens United v FEC was heard by the Supreme Court back in January. When all was said and done, the Court ended up changing the law so that corporations can now spend as much as they like on political campaigns without even identifying themselves. That’s right-- average working people get the short end of the stick. Again.
So the US House has now just passed the “Disclose Act,” a law which will at least require that these corporations tell us who they are when they put their fancy, high-dollar commercials on TV that attack anyone who would dare come up against them. The “Disclose Act” could most certainly be better than it is. If we didn’t have so many politicians in Washington beholden to corporate interests, we’d surely have gotten a better bill in the end, but the bill is at least a start.
Even so, I wasn’t surprised to hear Rep. Virginia Foxx rail against the “Disclose Act” on WPTF radio Thursday. I wasn’t surprised because Rep. Foxx’s record is pretty clear on this kind of thing. Her take is that working people need to get in line and work longer hours for less money and be thankful they’ve got any job at all. Corporations and rich people, on the other hand, deserve better because they’re the ones providing jobs for longer hours and less money. It sounds like code for "we can't do it because it's too complicated."
It’s worth noting that Rep. Foxx never said a word on any radio stations when the Supreme Court made sure individual Americans’ rights came up short against corporate rights. She wasn’t on talk radio, outraged, when Americans woke up one morning to find out they’d been sold out by corporate interests again. Not at all. The only thing on this whole issue that got Rep. Foxx in a tizzy and made her want to “sit down and cry” (as she said on the radio) was that someone in Washington was actually trying to do something about it. Rep. Foxx didn’t show up at any radio stations the morning after corporations stole the peoples’ power in the dead of night. But she showed up pretty quick to be outraged when some brave folks in Washington tried to reclaim it.
Rep. Foxx has been in Washington too long. She’s forgotten what she’s supposed to be doing up there, and she will say anything to be re-elected. It’s time to send her home."
If you'd like to help us put the ad on TV in the Piedmont and the suburbs of Winston-Salem, just click on Foxx's face-- and no, that photo is not photoshopped.
