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According to the Arkansas State AFL-CIO, members are reporting that they’ve received phone calls from Blanche Lincoln’s Senate campaign that smear Bill Halter for receiving support from labor unions. A source with the Arkansas AFL-CIO reports:
The Senators phone survey first asks how the constitutient feels about Lt. Gov. Halter. The survey then goes on to ask the constitutient if they are aware that the Lt. Governor has accepted money from unions.
Career Donations from Labor PACs: $576,900
Arkansas AFL-CIO President Alan Hughes fired back at Lincoln:
“Only someone who has become a career politician in Washington DC could spend ten years asking for our support, take hundreds of thousands of dollars from blue collar workers, then turn around and attack us as ‘outsiders’ because we wouldn’t help her this time around. That’s not the values people in Arkansas believe in.”
Zing!
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Thanks Michael!
Arakansas AFL-CIO President Alan Hughes should know all about being a hypocrite, you know like putting pressure on elected officials to support a public option only to threaten them a couple months later if they actually insert a public option.
And, naturally, the WH is backing Lincoln.
Friggin’ typical.
These days you can’t be a good politician unless you can change your opinion (or vote) in an instant. Keeps the voters on their toes, you know.
you are correct
Alan Hughes and Blanche Lincoln should be married, because they are both hyprocrites
AND THE KILLIN’ GOEZ ON AND ON AND…
Citizen Michael Whitney and the Firepup Freedom Fighters:
Of course none of Blanched Lincoln’s union bashing or demonizing of labor comes as a surprise to anyone, particularly orgaized labor. What IS important and somewhat surprising, however, is that it doesn’t seem to be workin’ and labor is pushin it back down her throat. More importantly, is what this entire campaign to this point might instruct us as to how a real “progressive” movement can breakup the old corporatist hold on a state Democratic Party like that in Arkansas. Just as importantly is that this effort is in a “Southern” state and is bein’ lead on behalf of the working folks of the state by labor and progressives usin’ issues like jobs and healthcare that can’t be triangulated or attached to racial or ideological wedges.
Now, I ain’t sayin that Halter is the second coming of FDR or Adlai Stevenson, but if he is able to beat Lincoln in the primary it goes a long way toward throwin a rope around Senator Prior’s neck and destablizes the Democratic Party leadership in a state that has thrived on corporate largesse and triangulating the working people of the state right out of politics. Even if Halter were to win the seat and turn into another “centerist”, what’s to say that he couldn’t be removed by the same forces that put him in office in the first place. The way to get “better Democrats” or better Democratic behavior is to do what has been done to Lincoln…gettin rid of her in a primary may finally cleanse the state of the last remenants of the Clinton machine.
If labor and progressives work together here and succeed in dumpin’ Lincoln, it portends good things for the immediate future of a progressive movement inside the Democratic Party.
So let Lincoln go to that old, dry well of anti-labor fear mongerin’…she and her campaign will die of thirst ‘cuz that well is dry. I predict that the racism card and “the communists are comin’” are the next tactics we’ll see out of this pathetic corporate whore.
KEEP THE FAITH AND PASS THE AMMUNITION, THE STRUGGLE IS ALL THERE IS!!
Jane has a fresh cross-post already in progress: We Need a New Language of Politics
Dear Blanche.
Abe called. He wants you to stop using his last name and start using your maiden name, ok?
of course wal-mart based in Ark. wants all the cash she can get, don’t care about the U.S. Wal-mart says jump she says how high