Yesterday, PA senator Arlen Specter and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius spoke at a town hall held at Philadelphia's Constitution Center.
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It was not pretty. About 400 people showed up. About 70-100 of them were teabaggers-- right wingers, some of them Anne-Coulter-Ugly lookalikes-- who went there with the intention of disrupting the conversation. They were somewhat successful.
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That didn't stop Sebelius and Specter from accomplishing their goals. Sebelius wanted to get the message out that the reform would make things better. Specter wanted to boost his campaign as a democrat running in PA.
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The town hall started late, with the speakers showing up about 10 after 3:00. After precursory introductions by the head of the constitution center, we were informed that the Q and A session would last until 4:00. That gave us 42 minutes of "conversation."
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The problem was, the teabagger right wingers, wearing bumper-stickers stating "Tell Washington No" were screaming and bellowing so loudly, it was hard to hear anything.
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Before the townhall started, I circulated among some of these bumper-sticker wearers and displayers. Knowing they were right wingers, I chose a different tack. I asked them, "Do you believe Obama is a citizen." About nine out of the ten people I asked said "No," emphatically. The tenth said she thought he was a citizen but not an American, because he was raised outside the US.
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
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He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
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first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
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more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)