Department of You Get What You Pay For (except, we do pay)

Yubanet ran an announcement for a free Public Health Department-sponsored H1N1 vaccination clinic in GV yesterday afternoon. The word "free" sounded appealing, as did not being laid up with the flu, so I went, signed in, & got my arm disinfected and then jabbed.

The "disinfecting" was just one gentle dab ("we don't want to spread the bacteria around" was the explanation I recall hearing, when I asked) and from the way the arm looked afterward ("weepy", with vaccine-colored tears) and feels today (zero soreness), the vaccine all ended up on the outside.

I hope she managed to put the vaccine on the inside of everyone else - its highest and best use probably isn't as moisturizer.

McClintock Sept 4 GV meeting, 2

I'm snipping this post -- I was raising its central question based on evidence that'd be too easy to gin up (or misinterpret.)

  I have lingering questions and curiosity about the degree to which the Sept 4 McClintock healthcare town hall meeting was fiction. It's a distraction from what I need to be working on, so if anyone else wants to pick any of this up & run with it, feel free...
[Also see Wednesday's Qs for Tom McClintock post, about what appeared to be a phantom website, a phantom foundation, and a brother that former Calif. controller Steve Westly didn't know he had. (Westly remains unconvinced.)]

Some interesting assertions were made about the Sept. 4 McClintock/TeaParty health care townhall meeting (campaign video here, Keachie photos here) in The Union's letters section last month; I've been trying to fact-check them but have come up short.

On Oct. 14, in Were anti-reformers bused in to skew local public opinion? Donna Carlisi of Nevada City said she had observed the redshirted contingent's performance being stage-managed, and said "It's clear to me that that these folks were bused in...".

(Re the "stage management" allegation, at the end of this (~80 second) YouTube clip you can see what I think she's talking about -

watch the fellow in red, at the lower left, as the clip ends.)



The following week, in Oct 20's Seeing red over claims that town hallers were bused in, Nevada County Tea Party Patriot President Stan Meckler vehemently denied that "these folks" had been bused in: "I know every single person who was in red at that event and they are all Nevada County Tea Party Patriots and local residents, a fact that is easily substantiated with very little effort."
(He did not address the "stage managed" allegation.)

So, where does the truth lie? The Union seemed to be taking the "let's you and he fight" approach and sitting it out, not entirely unwisely.

But I'd like to know.

I'd like to know if Donna Carlisi is a real person; she's not in the phone book, I can't find her in the county records, I haven't found anyone who knows her, and while I contacted The Union and asked them to ask her to get in touch, I never heard from her.

I also want to know whether, as NCTPPP's Stan Meckler alleged, [virtually] every single person who was in red at that event was a Nevada County Tea Party Patriot and local resident, "a fact that is easily substantiated with very little effort". I tried to find out by sending Mr. Meckler a montage of red-shirted-attendee photos and asking him to ID them, but he wasn't willing to do so, understandably citing privacy concerns. But in his letter he had stated that their local provenance "can be easily substantiated with very little effort"; perhaps I was going about it the wrong way? So I asked Mr. Meckler how I could substantiate it with very little effort, and, alas, got a clearly uncooperative reply - it seems that this claim was just rhetoric, not meant literally.

I want to know whether the non-red people who spoke up against the health care legislation (some with some pretty wild storylines) were local residents, or interlopers - which is something Mr. Meckler would likely know, or at least be able to help narrow down. So I asked him if he recognized three such speakers as locals or knew them for non-locals, but he wasn't willing to cooperate even to that extent.


Do you know?

I'm particularly interested in "David Collins", the fellow in the white shirt, who'd railed against Medicare. While speaking he'd identified himself as a "health care worker" who'd worked in San Diego, in Chico and now up here; but when I went up to him afterwards, he refused to repeat his name or to say where he worked or what kind of health work he did. Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital hadn't heard of him, and while there is a Chico surgeon named David Collins, the ages don't match.
I'd had a hunch he was actually Steve Westly's brother David (who McClintock mentions by name in the above video clip), but now that Steve Westly turns out not to have a brother David, that possibility seems rather less likely.

Qs for Tom McClintock, re our GV Sept 4 healthcare townhall meeting

Update: as explained in comments below, McClintock actually meant to say coverageforall.org and Dean Westly, not healthcoverageforall.org and David Westly. Carry on...
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(Pelline wrote a McClintock post yesterday, & in comments there I asked how to contact McClintock to get Qs answered; fellow commenters suggested calling his office, so I did so, but got a machine; and rather than try to verbalize my Qs to the machine, I decided to compose them here instead.)

At the 9/4 GV health care town hall meeting, Congressman McClintock spoke about a health-insurance-comparison website called healthcoverageforall.org; he said he'd gone to the site and found that a X-year old man in good health could get individual health insurance for $Y per month. And he said this website was the work of a private nonprofit foundation, among whose officers was David Westly, brother of (Democratic) former California state Controller Steve Westly.

I tried to verify this information, but came up short.

* Did McClintock misspeak when he said it was "healthcoverageforall.org", and that he'd visited it? There is a healthcoverageforall.org domain - it's registered to the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard - but as far as I can tell, there was never a website at that URL, so it's not clear how Congressman McClintock would have used it.

* What is the name of the private foundation, that's behind the website? When I tried to google up an answer, I didn't find any private foundation that David Westly was an officer of.

Also,
* Was David Westly present at our Grass Valley town hall meeting?

Quick Qs about last night's Town Hall meeting

Did anyone get a recording (audio or video), esp. of the last 20 minutes or so of the "second seating"?

Do you have questions for Congressman McClintock that you'd like to see addressed?

Do you have information bearing on the assertions made (by McClintock and by the audience) last night?

Please let me know - by email or by comment below. I think we should keep a dialogue going.

(and my videocam filled up before the end, so I didn't record Dr. Newsom's statement or those before and after her, and I'm sorely regretting this)