A strategy for the DU to take it's own stand against misleading slander

[Demoin04]

This stems from the kerryvskerry page on the GOP website. After investigating I had a revelation of sorts, that if each topic could be shown like I do below how misleading it is, we could have our own political cannon fodder to work with. However the workload is large, but with enough help from DU'rs it might be a reasonable challenge. Anyone game?

We could get an even bigger response to the kerryvskerry ad if we had a few of us divy up the work and do some research. The other day I took some time and went to the senate's webpage after reading a letter to the editor how a person discovered the kerryvskerry page on the internet. The writer seems surprised by the details he is uncovering on the (wait for it) GOP website. He then decides to spread the ignorance to other's by inviting them to go see for themselves how illuminating the page is. There seems to be a disconnect with the old saying "your information is only good as the source".

While I had read the kerryvskerry page I noticed all the nicely labeled footnotes. Now being totally unfamiliar with the bill process I had to get a primer. I suggest ben franklins website for those who need that real simple version as I did. Now there's like 32 some odd topics. I chose the second one about marriage penalty to start with. I found that there's a roll call vote number, kerry's response of yea, and a date. Great I thought, this could be easy.

(S. 1415, CQ Vote #154: Rejected 48-50: R 5-49; D 43-1, 6/10/98, Kerry Voted Yea)

I figured out that you can find these records by using the congressional records search engine. Though if you were to try and find it from the senate.gov webpage the link you request ends up not working. Which is odd as it was working a week ago. I suggest using http://thomas.loc.gov/home/r105query.html which will get you the correct session for the period of 1998. After linking here you can then follow some preliminary instructions I was writing for a webpage to counter these misleading statements.


Type “marriage penalty” (without quotations) in the word/phrase search bar
Then select John Kerrey from the pull down menu of the Senate.
Then click search.

Click the first item you see titled NATIONAL TOBACCO POLICY AND YOUTH SMOKING REDUCTION ACT (Senate – June 10, 1998)

feel free to explore the other sections under the same date as they should have something to do with kerrey and teh marriage penalty somewhere.

Then click the first link under the same title and use the arrows at the bottom to navigate.

Start reading, Senator Gramm is crafty in his speech, and to understand what he was proposing I had to read it several times.


Pages S6012 through S6018 are filled with heated well spoken arguments. Kerrey actually was voting for an alternative proposal that would have cost the government 36 billion but would give MORE income tax relief to those under 50,000 a year then Senator Gramm’s amendment which would have cost the government 46 billion and resulted in less marriage penalty relief than the alternative 36 billion dollar proposal (for people under 50k a year). A flip flop? Hardly, the GOP’s assertion is technically correct but in the sense of actual tax relief of the Marriage Penalty it misleads you severely! The statement simply states he voted against that, but he actually isn't against the issue at all. They leave that second part out of course.

I present to you the GOP campaign policy, that most people will not search out for themselves and take it from the horse//err elephant’s mouth. To make an assertion like they do, the GOP is betting the voting public is too stupid or apathetic to see it for themselves.

My idea is if we can get some motivated DU people to split this task up.. reading through the dialogue is tough work and takes several hours to understand exactly what is going on. We could host a webpage (I have 10Gb/mo and don't use any), that counters each argument giving a simple to follow result and references to where we found the information. Pretty soon we'll see how effective that flip flow stuff is when we start spreading it across the internet/email/papers etc.

[Lauren2882]

1. Sounds good.

I think you've got a good idea here. I'd be game to help out however I could.