The last two days have been amazing.
Early Thursday afternoon, we broke the news that Senator John Kerry would lead a filibuster against Judge Sam Alito if he could get 41 Senators to sustain the filibuster. Three hours later, CNN confirmed our story.
Naturally, the White House freaked out and told Senator Bill Frist to schedule a cloture vote as quickly as possible – Monday at 4:30 p.m. – to prevent Democrats from uniting behind Kerry.
Then the White House called its media whores at the NY Times (David Kirkpatrick), AP (Jesse Holland), Pentagon Post (Charles Babington), CNN (Miles O’Brien), and MSNBC (Chris Matthews) and told them to trash John Kerry for daring to challenge the will of Emperor Bush, and to repeat over and over that Democrats did not have enough votes to stop Alito.
But even as Karl Rove was doing his dirty work, progressive activists like you were calling your Senators urging them to support John Kerry’s filibuster.
And one by one, Democratic Senators began to turn around.
At the start of the day, only Dick Durbin and Debbie Stabenow supported Kerry and Kennedy. Just before noon, Hillary Clinton’s office called to say she supported us. Then Harry Reid came on board, along with Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, Ron Wyden, Chris Dodd, and (I think) Chuck Schumer.
Most importantly, we even picked up Dianne Feinstein, who just yesterday said she opposed a filibuster.
That’s 12 votes for a filibuster – and exactly 12 more votes than we had two days ago!
I believe we really can stop Alito by Monday at 4:30 p.m. – but here’s what we must do.
1. Ignore the media whores. Karl Rove is feeding them lies as he always does, and they are swallowing those lies as they always do. The only media that matters is the media we are creating right here by calling each Senator and getting a YES or NO statement from them.
2. Keep calling the Senators who are undecided or opposed to a filibuster. You can call their DC office all weekend and leave polite but firm voicemails urging the Senators to support Kerry’s filibuster. When offices open on Monday 9 a.m. ET, make another round of calls. Let’s shut down the Capitol switchboard on Monday!
3. Call the DNC (202-863-8000) and the DSCC (202-224-2447) and tell them your 2006 contributions will depend on the success of the Alito filibuster. Tell them they need to get every Democratic Senator on board.
4. Wake up the sleeping bloggers. Where are the biggest blogs, including DailyKos.com, TalkingPointsMemo.com, CrooksandLiars.com, and AmericaBlog.com? (Complaining about how Democrats played last week won’t cut it -we’re in the Super Bowl and we can win this damn game if we get Democrats to play their best game on Monday – and hopefully the rest of this coming week.) Thanks to Agonist, BobGeiger, BradBlog, BuzzFlash, CultureKitchen, The Democratic Daily, DemocraticUnderground, Eschaton, Firedoglake, Mahablog, MakeThemAccountable, Mark Crispin Miller, NewsDissector, PoliticalWire, RudePundit, Vichy Democrats and everyone else who’s plugging this.
5. Lend a hand to real-world groups like NOW, People for the American Way, Feminist Majority, Backbone Campaign, Moveon, Planned Parenthood, Progressive Democrats of America, and Working Assets Long Distance, which have worked tirelessly for two months to Stop Alito.
6. Call talk shows like Air America, C-SPAN, etc. and talk about what we’re doing on this blog and how we’re killing ourselves to stop Alito – and how we can win if everyone who cares about the future of our Democracy joins us
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7. Keep hope alive – because American Democracy is worth it!!!
http://democrats.com/alito-48
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