Members of Congress Spike FDL’s Health Care Funding – Can You Help?
Thanks to everyone who leaped into action last night to spread the word that the Malkinites were targeting the health care event in Denver today with Nancy Pelosi, Jared Polis and Diane DeGette. We were all up until the wee hours of the morning trying to wrangle people for the event. Pronin2 at Daily Kos came through at 9:30 at night, as did Jeralyn Merritt at Talk Left, Zappatero at Square State and ColoradoPols.
I mentioned the other day in the comments that we’d been getting a bit of funding from an organization, and that they let us know last Friday night that we’d had our funding cut. We have been working crazy hours with an intense sense of commitment to put together the calendar of events for the month of August and suddenly had to scramble so people could still be employed come Monday morning. We would have had a list of searchable events and targeted events up earlier, but we were thrown for a loop at the last minute.
Members of Congress called the organization and told them not to renew our funding because they didn’t like Mike Stark asking them questions on the Hill. Which we knew. The organization told us, however, that it was because they had "run out of money," and then today we learned that they’re actually accepting proposals for things similar to what we were doing.
It’s crazy that we were the first organization to get an August events calendar up with a widget that anyone could embed on their site, and we did it in the midst of scant resources and tremendous pressure. It certainly says something about the way the health care battle is being fought — or not, as the case may be. But we’ve been the ones collecting information day in and day out, having asked readers here and at Daily Kos to crowd source the information and enter it into our event reporting tool. We’ve had a small, underpaid staff working late into the night doing rapid response on things like the Pelosi/Polis/DeGette event last night.
As I said the other day, we’ve raised a little over $66,000, both from contributions made by individuals and the funds that came from the organization. We need to raise $150,000 total to keep everything going through the end of October. We’ve got an amazing team working on this, including organizers and bloggers and programmers who have been doing a fantastic job. Mike Stark’s videos have been all over the cable news networks, and so far we’ve managed to get 15 members of Congress to publicly pledge to vote against any health care bill that has co-ops or triggers — something that organizations with $40 million budgets have failed to so.
It hit me right in my gut on Friday night when I was told that on Monday morning, there would be no more money to pay these people. We need your help.
