Today, it’s my honor to turn this space to Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) General President Mike Sullivan, leader of one of the first unions to publicly state the union is pulling all support from the Blue Dogs because of their efforts to kill real health care reform.

Remember last November? I still do.

I remember the pride I felt watching President-elect Obama and his family standing on that stage in Chicago, bolstered by the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans and the promise of change finally coming to our nation.

ProPublica has done a comparison of the House and Senate stimulus packages which shows in stark fashion the degree to which the Senate bill steals from the poor to give to the affluent. The Senate bill gives more in tax cuts to the upper middle class–in the form of the AMT patch and the house flipping subsidy–than they give in all the programs targeted to the poor.

We really shouldn’t be calling the Senate stimulus bill the Collins-Nelson compromise bill. We ought to be calling it the Grassley-Isakson-Coburn-Collins-Bad Nelson bill, to memorialize where all the stupid comes from in the bill.