Well, here's some awful news!

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization. [...]

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on. [...]

Still unclear is what criminal investigation U.S. Attorney Morrison was pursuing. Last Friday, a spokeswoman initially promised a response, but Morrison sent e-mail on Monday evening saying: "We have no comment." The Justice Department in Washington, D.C. also declined to respond.

If indeed you can't get enough of Randchat, I'll be chatting about my December Reason magazine cover story on Ayn Rand on the Internet at 3 pm pacific for the rest of the hour on Ernest Hancock's "Declare Your Indepence" show. Listen live here....if you dare!! (Wait, is Hallowe'en over?)

On November 9, 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Reason senior editor Michael C. Moynihan discussed his article "The Cold War Never Ended" on the Kremlin-backed television station Russia Today and who—if anyone—deserves credit for killing off the evil empire.

Radicals for Capitalism is a 10-part series that analyzes the continuing relevance of Ayn Rand's writing and ideas to contemporary America.

The series runs through the end of the week, with exclusive new interviews featuring Rand's one-time confidantes Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden, and a video of the December 2 panel discussion held at Reason's DC HQ featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Veronique de Rugy, and Patrick Reasonover.

Today's installment (above) was "Life, Liberty, & Viticulture: Bryan Babcock on winemaking, Patrick Henry, & Ayn Rand."

Previous episodes have included

Rand-O-Rama: The Long Shelf Life of Ayn Rand's Legacy

Reason Foundation Co-Founder Bob Poole on Ayn Rand

Reason Foundation Co-Founder Manny Klausner on Ayn Rand

Reason Foundation Co-Founder Tibor Machan on Ayn Rand

Goddess of The Market Author Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand

Dating in the Atlasphere: Joshua Zader Brings Love to Ayn Rand's Fans

All episodes are available in downloadable formats at Reason.tv and at Reason.tv's YouTube channel (subscribe today!).

But not for Cubans. The Miami Herald reports that Cuban blogger Yaoni Sanchez, one of Time's "heroes and pioneers" of 2008, was beaten and detained by the secret police, though fails to mention that her free health care will cover all injures sustained. Sanchez and a fellow dissident were to attend a protest march in Havana when they were intercepted by defenders of the revolution:

"No blood, but black and blues, punches, pulled hairs, blows to the head, kidneys, knee and chest," Sánchez told El Nuevo Herald shortly after she and Orlando Luis Pardo were freed. "In sum, professional violence."

"I, being a person of verbal pacifism, am shaken by this violence, because violence silences anyone," the blogger declared in a telephone interview.

Sánchez, the best-known Cuban blogger on the island and off, said she and bloggers Pardo and Claudia Cadelo and a woman friend were walking to join a ``march against violence'' organized by several young musicians when they were intercepted by three men in civilian clothes. Cuba's state security service agents frequently operate out of uniform.

"We were almost there when we were intercepted by three men in a car with civilian license plates who ordered us to get in," she said. "We refused. I didn't know if they were kidnappers. And the level of their violence went up."

Mentally challenged actor Sean Penn, who is in Cuba now to interview whichever doddering Castro brother is wheeled out to croak "patria o muerte," will doubtless intervene on Sanchez's behalf. And if you haven't seen it yet, make sure to watch Reason.tv's interview with bad-ass Cuban punk rocker and hero of freedom Gorki Aguila:

A couple of months ago I put up a post about federal prosecutors' pursuit of Dr. Roger Weiner, an outspoken Mississippi cardiologist who was charged with Mann Act violations for using a Memphis-based website while in Mississippi to meet and date adult women. FBI agents posting as prostitutes repeatedly tried to get Weiner to agree to for money for sex. Each time, he explcitly turned them down, at one point writing to one in a chat room, "I'm not interested in a hooker." They arrested him and charged him anyway.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers Jr. dismissed all charges against Weiner, ruling that the federal courts didn't have jurisdiction in the case. Biggers' opinion strongly suggested the case against Weiner was politically motivated, and came down hard on federal prosecutors, concluding:

The agents repeatedly played the roles of inducers in the present case. Their actions were nothing less than blatant, though unsuccessful, attempts to manufacture federal jurisdiction and are reminiscent of the behavior of the agents in one of the seminal cases on manufactured jurisdiction.

Biggers then goes on to compare Weiner's case to the facts in United States v. Archer, in which, as indicated, federal agents blatantly manufactured a federal crime.

Of course, Weiner won't be compensated for the time, money, and personal stress he spent defending himself from these phony charges. And if you think there's a chance in hell the federal agents who set Weiner up or the prosecutors who brought this bogus case against him will be sanctioned or disciplined in any significant way, well, I've got a judge in Mississippi I'd be willing to sell you.

(Hat tip: NMissCommentor.)

Writing in the DC Examiner, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy argues that President Barack Obama could learn a thing or two from President Calvin Coolidge:

Calvin Coolidge, a genuinely humble man and a fine president, wrote in his autobiography that it was "a major source of safety to the country" for the president "to know that he is not a great man." Few of our recent presidents display Coolidge's self-awareness....

Obama's supporters...fancy themselves members of the "reality-based community." Yet they doggedly defend a president for whom the word "hubris" might have been invented — one who thinks that the government, under his direction, can rationally reshape the one-sixth of the U.S. economy devoted to health care.

Our president describes his budget as a "blueprint" for America's future, and believes that, with the proper mix of social workers and soldiers, we can bring orderly governance to Afghanistan, which has never enjoyed it.

We'd do far better if our presidents had Coolidge's sense of his own limitations and of government's as well.

Read the rest here. Healy on the cult of the presidency here.

Gloria Brame's great vintage sex blog turns up news that controversy-courting ironists and tireless Tanzmetalmusikers Rammstein are having their long-awaited album Liebe ist Für Alle Da pulled from store shelves for its graphic cover image.

The album ... currently at No. 2 on Billboard's European Albums Chart - has been banned from public display in German stores with effect from Nov. 11 on account of its depictions of sadism/masochism, which have been deemed to be harmful to children and young people.

Announcing this ruling, Petra Meier, the deputy president of the Federal Office for the Examination of Media Harmful to Young People, cited the track "Ich tue Dir Weh" ("I Want to Hurt You") as well as the artwork showing guitarist Richard Kruspe with a masked, naked woman on his knees. The Federal Office objected to the fact that the track includes lines such as "Bites, kicks, heavy blows, nails, pincers, blunt saws - Tell me what you want."

Many reports, such as the BBC's here, repeat the claim that the packaging shows "scenes of sadism," but it's actually a scene of ideated dismemberment. Fans of low-impact, safeword-protected BDSM should be offended by the association with amputee fetishists -- who in turn consider themselves a distinct group united by their love of the Star Wars films. But so far nobody has spoken up.

Question for music fans: What is your economic loss when Germany's Federal Office for the Examination of Media Harmful to Young People forbids you to display a record in stores? I thought I read somewhere that the last person who remembers hanging out in a store looking at album covers became eligible for Social Security recently. 

On Amazon, you've already got your choice between the dark, edgy cover and a safe-for-work replacement. The edgy version gets lower customer ratings.

Rammstein has been named as a person of interest in every major massacre of the last ten years (though I suspect Maj. Hasan will turn out to be more of an Abba man). But the band members showed their pro-American feelings by naming themselves after a U.S. Air Force base, and here they sing our country's praises in a song so catchy it makes me want to be German just so I can rhyme "Santa Klaus" with "Mickëy Maus."

The role that nuclear power might play in addressing the problem of man-made global warming is being fiercely disputed among environmentalists. Two new books by big names in the movement stake out the boundaries of that debate. On the pro-nuclear side stands Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand. And parked in the (more or less) anti-nuclear corner is Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey notes that both are energy socialists, but declares Brand the winner.

The role that nuclear power might play in addressing the problem of man-made global warming is fiercely disputed among environmentalists. Two new books by big names in the movement stake out the boundaries of that debate. On the pro-nuclear side stands Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, by Stewart Brand. And parked in the (more or less) anti-nuclear corner is Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, by Al Gore. A self-described “green,” Stewart Brand founded and edited the counterculture Whole Earth Catalog back in 1968. In his first book, Earth in the Balance (1992), then-Sen. Al Gore argued, “We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.”

Once an opponent of nuclear power, Stewart Brand is now a big backer. With regard to the safety, cost, waste handling, and weapons potential of nuclear power, Brand writes, “I’ve learned to disbelieve much of what I’ve been told by my fellow environmentalists.” On safety, Brand notes, “year after year, the industry has had no significant accidents” in the operation of the world’s 443 civilian nuclear plants. “Radiation from nuclear energy has not killed a single American,” asserts Brand. He does look at the after-effects of the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant which released a lot of radiation over swathes of northern Europe. He finds that the dire predictions that hundreds of thousands would die of radiation induced cancers turned out to be false. Weighing the safety tradeoffs between nuclear power and man-made global warming, Brand cites this observation from environmentalist Bill McKibben: “Nuclear power is a potential safety threat, if something goes wrong. Coal-fired power is guaranteed destruction, filling the atmosphere with planet-heating carbon when it operates the way it’s supposed to.”

Brand is also fairly sanguine about how to handle the radioactive wastes produced by nuclear power plants. He regards efforts to somehow isolate nuclear wastes for thousands of years as not just absurdly costly, but also wrongheaded, arguing instead that we should figure out how to store it for a couple of hundred years and leave to future generations the choice of what to do with the used fuel. “If we and our technology prosper, humanity by then will be unimaginably capable compared to now, with far more interesting things to worry about than some easily detected and treated stray radioactivity somewhere in the landscape,” writes Brand. “If we crash back to the stone age, odd doses of radioactivity will be the least of our problems. Extrapolate to two thousand years, ten thousand years. The problem doesn’t get worse over time, it vanishes over time.”

But what about the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation? Brand points out that Israel, India, South Africa, and North Korea secretly developed their bombs using research reactors, not power reactors. To reduce the chance of fuel being diverted to produce weapons, he suggests developing an international fuel bank from which nations would basically rent their fuel and to which it would be returned for reprocessing once it was exhausted. President Barack Obama endorsed such a proposal in a speech in Prague in April 2009.

Brand bases his support for nuclear power on four considerations: baseload, footprint, portfolio, and government-scale. Brand enthusiastically hails the fact that in the 21st century most of humanity will dwell in cities and cities need a steady supply of lots of electricity. Baseload power is the minimum amount of consistent power that utilities must supply to their customers. Brand points out that there are currently only three sources for baseload power: fossil fuels, hydro, and nuclear. Brand dismisses solar and wind as baseload power sources because of their intermittency—the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.

Footprint? Nuclear power is compact and renewables occupy a lot of land. Brand quotes nuke booster Gwyneth Craven who notes, "A nuclear power plant producing 1,000 megawatts takes up a third of a square mile. A wind farm would have to cover over 200 square miles to obtain the same result, and a solar array over 50 square miles." Craven, a former opponent of the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island, describes her change of mind in her book, The Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy (2007).

By "portfolio" Brand means that the problem of man-made global warming may be so bad, that humanity must simultaneously pursue all types of projects to cut its greenhouse gas emissions. Ruling nuclear out of that portfolio makes the task of reducing emissions that much harder to achieve. What Brand means by "government-scale" is that he thinks big energy infrastructure requires big government funding and regulatory intervention. Given the array of subsidies currently on offer, the Feds apparently agree.

But what about the costs? Brand breezily waves them aside. “We Greens are not economists,” writes Brand. “We don’t really care about money. Our agenda is to protect the natural environment, not taxpayers or ratepayers."

In the anti-nuke corner we have Al Gore, who pointedly cites "the grossly unacceptable economics of the present generation of reactors." He begins his chapter on the nuclear option: "In the world’s debate over how to produce electricity without generating massive quantities of greenhouse gas pollution, there is a radioactive white elephant in the middle of the room: nuclear power." A white elephant is generally an object that costs more to maintain than it is worth. And it turns out that nuclear energy’s excessive cost is one of two the chief arguments that Gore deploys against it. The second is the risk that nuclear fuel might be diverted to produce nuclear weapons. Gore quite rightly acknowledges that nuclear power is safe and that the issue of how to store nuclear waste could be solved.

Gore notes that in the 1960s, the old Atomic Energy Commission predicted that the United States would have 1,000 nuclear power plants operating by the year 2000. That didn’t happen. Instead only 104 plants are currently operating and they generate about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. Construction costs for building a nuclear power plant have increased from $400 million in the 1970s to $4 billion by the 1990s and building times doubled. Gore highlights bottlenecks that could choke any nuclear renaissance, including the fact that critical components such as containment facilities to house reactors are currently being produced by only one Japanese company.

Somehow Gore’s cost consciousness gets lost when he considers solar power, however. In his solar power chapter, Gore does a lot of hand-waving about future photovoltaic cell breakthroughs and declining cost curves. Gore also decries lavish subsidies to nuclear power, but approvingly cites "the recent establishment by the U.S. government of new incentives for solar electricity," and state government requirements that utilities obtain a percentage of their power from high-cost renewable sources. As an example of the future of photovoltaic power, Gore points to a new solar plant opened by Florida Power and Light. President Obama dedicated the new 25-megawatt $150 million facility in October. Scaling that plant up to generate the amount of power equal to that a 1,000 megawatt nuclear plant would produce would now cost $18 billion. According the Electric Power Research Institute, constructing a comparable nuclear plant would cost $4 billion.

Gore declares, "Once the world chooses to set ambitious goals for scaling up solar electricity development and commits to the investments necessary to further improve the technologies involved, there is no question that solar energy will provide a major percentage of the world’s electricity." Brand would certainly argue that exactly the same thing can be said of nuclear energy. 

Gore’s second big issue with nuclear power is the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. Reactor-grade fissionable material cannot be used to make bombs; it must be further enriched. If the world went on a nuclear power plant building binge, Gore and others fear that some unsavory governments would covertly divert nuclear fuel to enrichment facilities where it could be turned into nuclear weapons. Gore believes that the international nuclear fuel bank idea is a non-starter. However, Brand notes that since 2006, 18 nations have signed up for something similar, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. GNEP has also been endorsed by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The federal government is now offering a host of new subsidies and guarantees to utilities to build new nuclear power plants. For example, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, supported by the majority of Republicans in Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, authorizes a production tax credit of 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour from the first 6,000 megawatts of new nuclear generation capacity; $2 billion to cover the costs of any regulatory delays; federal loan guarantees for advanced reactors up to 80 percent of the project cost; and a 20 year extension of law that limits the nuclear industry liability to $10 billion dollars. In 2008, the Department of Energy (DOE) invited applications for up $18.5 billion in nuclear construction loan guarantees. The DOE was flooded with applications seeking a total of $122 billion in loan guarantees. If the private sector is unwilling to put money into nuclear projects without an extensive federal safety net, perhaps nuclear is not the way to go?

Recently Center for American Progress blogger Matt Yglesias properly accused generally pro-nuclear power American conservatives of favoring "nuclear socialism." For example, Senate Republicans proposed legislation earlier this year aimed at building 100 nuclear power plants over the next two decades. It’s pretty clear that Brand falls into that camp. On the other hand, Gore can fairly be accused of solar socialism.In this debate among environmentalists, ecopragmatist Brand wins. If man-made climate change is a big problem, then it doesn’t make sense to rule out in advance energy technologies that could contribute to substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, costs matter. The best way to figure out which technologies are cheapest is to set a price on greenhouse gas emissions and let various energy sources compete among themselves. No subsidies needed.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is available from Prometheus Books.

I for one always miss Bill Clinton, even though I never voted for him and mostly disliked him in office. (This happens to me with every U.S. president, and may even happen some day with George W. Flightsuit.) Anyway, Bubba went to Capitol Hill today to rally support for Obamacare, and said these things:

Clinton argued that even "the most cold-hearted person" ought to support health care reform simply from an economic standpoint. He reminded Democrats of the political momentum their failure to pass reform in 1993 delivered the House of Representatives to the Republicans the following year.

"The point I want to make is: just pass the bill, even if it's not exactly what you want," Clinton told Democrats. "When you try and fail the other guys write history."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said Clinton described the ongoing tea party protests against the Democratic agenda as a sign his party was making progress.

Whitehouse quoted Clinton arguing: "The reason the tea-baggers are so inflamed is because we are winning."

Clinton's overall message was one the Obama administration has tried to make: not passing a bill is the worst thing Democrats could do.

"So it's not important to be perfect here, it's important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling, to claim the evident advantages that all these plans agree with and whatever they can get the votes for I'm gonna support," Clinton said he told the senators. "I think it is good politics to pass this and to pass this as soon as they can. But I think the most important thing is it is the right thing for America. The worst thing to do is nothing."

Link via Drudge. I wrote about the always-underestimated costs of doing something back in July.

Daniel Patterson is the chef and co-owner of Coi, a restaurant that San Franscisco foodies love to love. He's opening a new place in Oakland. In an otherwise non-political interview about his new joint, he hashes out what it's like to run a restaurant in the ultra-regulated city by the bay and explains how S.F. city supervisors are ruining the upscale neighborhood restaurant.

SFoodie: Would you ever open a restaurant like Coi in Oakland?
Patterson: It would be hard to open a restaurant like Coi in San Francisco today. When Coi's gone I would be really surprised to see another one like it.

Because the economics of fine dining don't make sense anymore?
I'm sure Thomas Keller could always make it work here. I have 10 people in the kitchen, about a one-to-two ratio of staff to diners. San Francisco has become a very difficult place to have any restaurant, because of the policies that the Board of Supervisors put in place. They didn't anticipate what would happen with things like the minimum wage increases, with no tip credit. What happens when the minimum wage is $12? Or $15? Product costs keep rising, especially for things like pastured meats and organic vegetables. Rents are still pretty steep. The restaurant model that we all knew no longer exists—the Supervisors took it and crumpled it into a little ball.

For us [at Coi], we're a little bit more protected. I can't complain -- we've done fine all through the downturn. I've been so grateful and a little bit surprised at how strong the local support has been. But I'm more concerned about neighborhood places, which are the heart and soul of our dining scene. What happens when they all have to charge $30 for a chicken dish? Can they all afford to keep using the best ingredients? Or to have enough staff? There's going to have to be a fundamental rethinking of how restaurants in San Francisco are run. In the meantime, we're operating in a no-man's-land, and I don't see a clear path out of it.

Via Jason Gollan.

Reason's Nick Gillespie will appear on Ed Morrissey's web radio show at HotAir.com in about 45 minutes. He'll discuss Reason.tv's Radicals for Capitalism: Celebrating the Enduring Legacy of Ayn Rand and the site's latest video, UPS vs. FEDEX—Ultimate Whiteboard Remix, which looks at how Big Brown is hoping to get its competitor reclassified under federal labor rules. Check the vid out here.

And tune in to The Ed Morrissey show by clicking here (show starts at 3PM with guest Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times).

Over at The American, Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy takes a look at whether the Obama administration's claims about stimulus spending and job creation/retention hold water.

The solid green line estimates what the number of jobs created or saved should look like if the administration were allocating relatively more money to the states with higher unemployment rates and if that money, in turn, created more jobs.

However, the data show that this is not the case. The chart shows that many higher-unemployment states (the states on the right) saw similar numbers of jobs created as lower-unemployment states (the states on the left), or even worse, saw relatively fewer jobs created....

So what does it all mean? At least three things, none of them good:

First, the data show that much of the money has been allocated randomly among states without regard for the level of unemployment in those states.

Second, much of the money has been spent to close budget gaps in the states, which often means keeping union-protected school teachers in their jobs and paying for public-sector jobs rather than creating jobs in the private sector. For instance, according to Recovery.gov data, so far a little over 13,000 contracts went to independent contractors and over 116,000 grants went to public agencies. Also, reports have shown that the stimulus funds have been used to pay for employees whose jobs were never in danger (see California for instance).

Finally, the data on Recovery.gov reveals that many private-sector jobs were created at very high cost to taxpayers. For instance, $437,675,000 was awarded to CH2M WG IDAHO, LLC, in Washington to create 496 jobs. That’s $882,409 per job. That’s not as bad as the $257,613,800 awarded to the Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC, in New York to create 25 jobs. That’s over $10.3 million per job.

Whole thing here.

Back on November 3, de Rugy decoded "The Secret Message of Stimulus Spending" for Reason.com. (Note to surly commenters: That article looked stimulus funds spent per person and unemployment, which generates a chart similar in shape but different in detail. Which also affirms a basic point: This stimulis spending ain't what it's cracked up to be.)

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Jake Tapper reports that Anita Dunn, tongue-chewing White House communications director, acolyte of Mao Zedong and Mother Theresa, and a frequent surprise guest in the Hit & Run comment threads, has been ousted by counterrevolutionary enemies of the people.

Tapper, a running dog of the American Imperialist Broadcasting Company, says that Dunn was not made a non-person by capitalist stooges, but rather is leaving voluntarily:

Dunn’s departure was expected; she came on board temporarily earlier this year when communications director Ellen Moran left for a more family-friendly position at the Department of Commerce. Dunn, who advised then-Sen. Obama during the campaign, always said she was here temporarily because she wants to spend more time with her teenage son.

[Dunn replacement Dan] Pfeiffer, a Georgetown alumnus from Delaware, originally worked for the presidential campaign of Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind, but became the Obama campaign communications director after Bayh dropped out. He has worked for former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, and Sen. Tim Johnson, D-SD, and is married to Sarah Feinberg, senior advisor to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and a special assistant to the president.

Oo, what a giveaway!, as pointed out in this Wall Street Journal editorial:

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind."

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run....

As Mr. Cassidy concludes, "Putting on my amateur historian's cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted."

Cassidy's full piece for The New Yorker which the Journal is quoting, which has many more details on the fantasy of "cost-savings" in the health care bill as it stands.

Hat tip on the link: Dan Gifford.

Jake Tapper reports:

President Obama's message to supporters on the "Organizing for America" email list may have been positive (if financially solicitous), but the director of his political arm was under no such apparent guidance.‬‪ ‬‪

Today OFA supporters in congressional districts represented by Republican Members of Congress who voted "No" last night received an email from OFA director Mitch Stewart lauding the "220 courageous representatives voted in favor of reform, moving it forward."‬‪ ‬‪

"Unfortunately, your representative," Stewart says in the email, which names the Member of Congress, "caved to intense pressure from insurance industry lobbyists and voted against health reform."‬‪ ‬‪

A Democratic official says the email is not being sent to constituents of the 39 Democratic Members of Congress who voted against the measure Saturday night.

Democrats, on the other hand, are steadfastly refusing to cave to the insurance industry, at least if by "refusing to cave" you mean "supporting legislation designed to force every American to purchase the insurance industry's product."