Good morning Jane!

Blueball Bastards and New Democrats. The Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

Good morning.

“If Obama does the same on healthcare, there can be little doubt that the Blue Dogs will respond likewise. . . and we will have a public plan.”

the question is WILL he do the same. And given that sebelius is signaling they may be backing away from a public option, I don’t know if that’s a good bet.

I think progressives got punked the same way we did with Carney, who lied about everything to get our support. And i am livid.

Great post, Jane. Now let’s hope that the President feels as strongly about the need for a public option (and not just a co-op) as we do. Then let’s also hope he isn’t willing to trade the public option off for something else he wants more. As near as I can tell, with this Prez, everything is up for sale or trade. They only haggle about price.

goopers on msnbc now “unveiling” the gooper healthcare plan outline

“I do believe my president warlord-in-chief is a peacemaker,” Schakowsky said. “I’m going to give him what all the weapons he wants to blast our way to peace.”

Fixed it for you.

If the US public does NOT get a health care option, then the ‘insurance terrorists win’…simple as that!

Well, I support your optimism, but Pharma wasn’t lobbying on the supplemental. And it’s always easier to get Blue Dogs to vote for a bad bill than it is to get them to actually do the right thing.

I really wish I shared your optimism.

“Please keep your arms and legs inside the handbasket at all times, and enjoy your ride.”

Of course, just having a public plan available would be considered a compromise by the left,
if single payer had ever been on the table. But, just like impeachment, it wasn’t.

what public plan?

a crappy, underfunded, mandated policy of underinsurance that doesn’t address issues like adverse selection and insurance business model that depends on denying claims? or something possibly semi-reasonable like stark’s bill (which even this single payer extremist might support)?

if obama twists arms for a faux-bound-to-fail ”public option” that’s not something i’m going to support.

Old School extortion “If you don’t pay us, we’ll break your legs and send you to the hospital.”

New and improved extortion “If you don’t pay us, we’ll wait till, sooner or later, you’ll break your legs and then you can’t go to the hospital.”

“Gentlemen, you can’t fight for healthcare in here, this is the war room.”

let’s work to put single payer on the table.

I congratulate Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel for the passage of the supplemental. I am grateful that in the end Democrats realized the catastrophic harm that would have come from a vote perceived as not supporting the troops and throwing Barack Obama under the bus.

I know this will fall on deaf ears here, but extreme left bombast will never be received well by the American voter. Barack Obama was never a far-left candidate. Dennis Kucinich was and he fell off the radar years ago.

A Gallup Poll this week found that in 2009, 40% of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004.

This is the reality, it always has been and always will be. Supporting Barack Obama will get us liberal Supreme Court Justices, a far better policy in the Middle East and around the world, intenational respect, health care reform, immigration reform, gay rights advances (as was shown by the Obama administration today) . . . we will generally do much better advancing a myriad of other liberal causes.

Pragmatism and supporting Barack Obama will get us eight years of the best we can ever hope for. The alternative is too horrific to think about. Imagine Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney in the White House.

But now we know what it looks like when the administration truly brings pressure to bear on an issue they care about. If Obama does the same on healthcare, there can be little doubt that the Blue Dogs will respond likewise. . . and we will have a public plan.

Erm…that does not compute.

Does anyone really think Obama, Rahm et all are going to get out there and whip votes for a public option like they did with this war bill?

Call me a cynic but I doubt it. What I don’t get is without a public option, how is anything going to be “reformed”? The insurance companies will still be running-ruining-healthcare.

Build the strength of the Progressive Caucus to balance the Blue Dogs! I’m so tired of hearing about the damn BD’s working with rethugs on everything. Gah!

Jane, what are you saying? Do you expect Obama to go for the public option-with Medicare in place it seems like a no brainer. If he doesn’t will the result be the same-no public option because alleged progressives follow him? Close (because of the Repubs) but no cigar? Any alternatives?

Blue dogs are more dog than blue. And they bite your backside when you are not looking. President Obamakerry turns out to be a flip-flop artist with a very short memory. If this supplemental passes, then hope is out the window, and you can kiss viable health care good bye in favor of the AMA, the health insurance companies and Big Pharma.

Cash for clunkers and the billions for bailout of European banks is all vaudeville.

Btw, His Master’s Voice is RCA which was NBC.

Pavlov’s dogs when it comes to the tasty treat of WAR. Mmmmmmmmmmm…now that’s good carnage! *slobber* *slobber* *slobber*

On my way out the door but I wanted to thank Jane and every active firedog for our recent action.

Let’s do it again and again, shall we?

On healthcare i wish we would seriously consider a battle of terminology. There is nothing public about any plan I have heard of yet. I know it’s a bit long for a quick slogan… but at best most of this crap resembles an S-chip off the old block or something. We really need to stop repeating the term public plan,unless it’s an assault on the Rovian deceptive nature, imvho.

agree or not, imo this is a must read from nick skala – his remarks to the progressive caucus on june 4:

Hold out for single payer

And now the CBO is saying healthcare will cost 1 TRILLION.

So that’s that. And that’s the exact excuse the’ll use. No money because,naturally, we have to keep funding the military industrial complex.

So- uninsured and unemployed-go suck it and die.

From AP 6/16/09 interview with Sibelius: …Sebelius [sic] stressed that Obama is open to compromise on the shape of the public plan, which doesn’t have to be run by the government. She spoke positively of a compromise idea that envisions consumer-owned nonprofit cooperatives, like rural electricity or agriculture co-ops. They would get started with seed money from taxpayers but then compete without government control. The plan by Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., may end up in a health overhaul bill to be unveiled by the Senate Finance Committee this week….

So it depends on what the definition of public plan is. Anyway it’s cut, it seems Obama just wants a movement on this, good bad or indifferent and like his action on the Wall St mess, is closeted with many of the crowd that caused the problem. I look to a watered down and ineffective patch on a broken system. Change you can believe in, but not get.

Revolution, anyone?

We HAVE a progressive caucus?

Who knew?????

Unfortunately, The Obama King and the rest of his “war criminal minions” will NEVER support single payer health care. It seems that everyone keeps hoping Obama will somehow do the right thing for this country, even though the evidence suggests overwhelming that he is just another pathetic, lying, back-stabbing thug, who will sell the American people out just as enthusiastically as his incompetent, war criminal predecessor…

I think there is a rally on June 25th in DC on healthcare for all.

I seem to be sensing more than a bit of buyers remorse here and you can include me amoungst that number. On the other hand I keep hoping that it can be a FDR kind of thing. It’s a good idea, now make me do it.

Yea, where the fuck is Che when you need him?

I DO have a Twitter account…

Well let’s see- he’s pissed off the gay community big time, he’s pissed off the progressives big time, now I guess he’s working on the base. Pretty soon he’ll just be a republican.

Funny how all those big campaign promises just went away quietly into the night with no apologies.

The thing that really bugs me about what I’m hearing so far is the whole mandate thing.

It’s kind of like car insurance, with the tiny little exception that you can choose to not have a car (as inconvenient as that can be in much of the country).

Iran maybe?

Of course, we don’t have all the “lying, backstabbing thugs” right here now do we?

the cost numbers that get thrown around are confusing because the real issue is total health care cost – that’s the number we have to stop from growing so fast (even before the current economic crisis it was growing much faster than gdp – unsustainable).

we also have to figure out how we’re going to pay that total cost – government spending via taxes (state, fed), employers, households (via insurance premiums, copays, co-insurance, deductibles, out of pocket, etc).

fights to decrease one element of the total spending – say, for example, the federal spending — without addressing the total cost, means the cost gets transferred somewhere else. or we get less healthcare.

so far this has been a debate mostly by sound bite and talking point. very frustrating.

Yeh right. I’ll sure run out and buy healthcare on my huge income of unemployment and then when that runs out I’ll pull the money out of my butt.

I mean, what are they going to do? Come find me in the homeless shelter and take me to jail? There has to be another type plan for the unemployed.

I’m thinking the lesson was not learned by Jane et al., that the establishment will prevail as long as you play by the rules they make up.

imo, at some point it’s not up to just obama. it’s also up to us to advocate for the policies we think the country needs.

like jane did on the war supplemental (which btw i though was awesome).

You ‘re right. But as this heats up, the rethugs and dogs will be on every TV station bloviating.

of course, no one is bloviating much about war money.

frustrating indeed.

what is health care costing America if there isn’t a health plan that covers the millions who are uninsured, the crap number of 47 million just cracks me up….. it has been the same stupid number for the last 8 years… if we are having over 1/2 million layoffs weekly, I suspect that number is over 100 million with another 100 million who are under insured.

Overheard in hospital ER…. social worker told ER patient “you have no insurance and if you do not go home, it will cost you a boat load of money”…. So is it paying for the funeral or waiting until they are so sick that they really cost 2 boat loads.

I want a beefed up Medicare for All, increase provider payments, rewrite Medicare D and throw out that donut hole, make it part of standard Medicare.

Jane, my hope remains that, as a result of your heroic efforts, Rahm, BO, and the blue dogs understand the political cost of bailouts and failed nation building in the Middle East.

OT, if we had had just a little cash for radio spots in for example, Milwaukee, we could have put huge pressure on Gwen Moore and Obama. African Americans in Milwaukee would not want to learn that Gwen was voting with her President to give $150 billion to European banks and for more funding of the Afghan war. From this morning’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

89% of help calls still unanswered at county center

Nearly 90% of all calls made to the Milwaukee County public assistance call center still result in a busy signal, despite efforts to improve the system.

Many of the millions of calls to the center over the past few years were repeat efforts from poor families hoping to obtain or extend food, health or child care benefits.

The call volume was “inordinately high” in 2007 and 2008, but has dropped significantly this year, a county audit says.

The report found that just 1 million out of 27.5 million calls over those two years, or 3.4%, actually led to some type of help.

Both the county and the state share blame for the problem, the audit says. […]

Excellent points.

Yep, usually a touted decrease in cost is merely illusion. You and I inevitably end up paying more whether in taxes at the state and local level, or costs through the private market.

That’s what always grinds my gears when Republicans talk about tax cuts. When the rich get tax cuts, and the federal budget keeps increasing then where do you think the money needs to come from to make up the difference?

I don’t know why such simple math eludes most people.

i seriously recommend my link @24 to everyone. it’s a quick read.

You need a calendar.

We don’t get a chance to vote directly on Obama until the Presidential primaries in 2011.

if you do not go home, it will cost you a boat load of money”….

What ever happened to financial aid hospitals used to give to the indigent? Luckily I haven’t gotten sick yet so i haven’t had to go to the ER hell.

Hospitals have to treat you and they eat the cost on a LOT of their patients, which they make up by charging more to others. Universal coverage would eliminate the need for that particular shell game.

Re Schakowsky’s bilge about Obama being a peacemaker, etc, etc., I think the real story here is that she is positioning herself for a run for Obama’s Senate seat, once the fumbling embarrassment Burris implodes.

In a hearing yesterday before the house subcomittee on oversight and investigations three major insurance company vultures CEOs refused to limit recission of coverage. So if their policy holders get sick their policies get canceled.
http://www.latimes.com/busines…..0586.story
This should go virol.

yes, god forbid we have a mandate and make people buy something they don’t think they need.

at least when it comes to health care. When it’s digital TV, well that’s a different story.

There are levels of “want”. There’s idle wishing: I wish I had a million dollars. There are more serious desires that I might act on, like wanting to go to Japan (we have friends who live there and are trying to get our act together to go next year). And then there are things I’m absolutely committed to, meaning I’ll bust my butt to make sure they happen, like the health and safety of my family.

To take an example: Bill Clinton “wanted” to repeal the ban on gays in the military, but he wasn’t committed to it, so Sam Nunn easily rolled him. But he was committed to getting NAFTA passed: he twisted arms, got Al Gore to debate Ross Perot, spent days and nights getting more votes, not caring who he pissed off (labor, mostly).

So, is Obama committed to a public option, or does he merely want it? Signs don’t look good; his own language isn’t encouraging.

Thanks for the link.
An amazing and sickening story.

Likewise, on 6/16, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that a single-payer option is not on the table.

“This is not a trick. This is not single-payer, that’s not what anyone is talking about — mostly because the president feels strongly, as I do, that dismantling private health coverage for the 180 million Americans that have it, discouraging more employers from coming into the marketplace, is really the bad, you know, is a bad direction to go.”

Asked if the administration’s program will be drafted specifically to prevent it from evolving into a single-payer plan, Sebelius says:

“I think that’s very much the case, and again, if you want anybody to convince people of that, talk to the single-payer proponents who are furious that the single-payer idea is not part of the discussion.”

I have no idea what you are talking about I never said anything about the date.

Selise, Bravo had the episode with debate between the Presidential candidates from West Wing on this morning! I wish you had heard it. Liberal Dem candidate, Matt Santos, said that he idealized a healthcare program wherein you simply remove the age limit on Medicare. This is also my ideal program, except that Medicare really does have to renegotiate some of their rates. My understanding is that they are currently using rates from the year 2000. However, the way I see it, if all were enrolled in Medicare, and everybody pays something, it fixes Medicare (because everyone on it is no longer old and sick!) and the young and healthy are also insured.

The way I see it, the government already pays for all those who end up in the hospital or the emergency room through one program or another. Except, of course, for those people who do not complete the proper paperwork for the government to compensate the hospital room or ER, in which case the entity providing the service eats their bill. Ultimately, we all pay anyway, so the only difference is, under one scenario, all contribute; under the other scenario, only those that have been willing to submit to the system pay. Frequently, the young and healthy are unwilling or at least wary about submitting to the system until/unless they need it. Then they, like everyone else, is there with their hands out saying that common decency and just by virtue of the fact that they’re human they are “entitled” to medical assistance when they need it, just as they may need a safety net with food and perhaps shelter in it. So they avail themselves of those safety net measures which our society has decided are right and good, like social security, like unemployment compensation, like food stamps, aid to dependent children, medicaid, public schools, even the interstate road system. Then they go out and rail against a society that is “socialized,” like that’s a bad thing. Too bad people don’t realize that “socialized” means more highly civilized. Too bad people today don’t seem to have time to ponder what it means to be civilized. Some of us don’t seem to care to evolve!

OT there is a fairly amazing chart at Calculated Risk which shows how much money ($6.788 trillion) the government has extended to the financial industry and how much it has pledged (nearly $14 trillion) to date.

http://www.calculatedriskblog……nment.html

The eye opener for me was that nearly half of the credit so far extended ($3.2 trillion) has been to money markets. Even stranger is that this is an estimate because, apparently, the people at Treasury don’t even know how much they have lent out. This raises the question though of what the government and the money markets have been doing with this money. I have kept hearing that money markets have something like $4 trillion on the sidelines that the government was hoping to use to re-inflate the economy. Is all of this money simply money the government itself gave to the MMs? I don’t know what the story is but there certainly seems to be a story there.

If Obama does the same on healthcare,

that’s a regular knee-slapper. of course he won’t whip for a public option. in fact, i’ll lay odds that whatever bill gets passed and signed into law will be worse than if no law had been passed to begin with.

All this “mandated buy” shit is just making the insurance corpocrats salivate in anticipation.

What they see is a way to force everyone to buy the crap pseudo-coverage that you get from infomercials… or make the government buy it for you if you are unemployed etc.

THEY HAVE DETERMINED THAT THIS IS ALL THAT THEY WILL OFFER UNDER ANY VERSION OF A “PUBLIC PLAN”

The corporate Dems will promise that “Of course we won’t allow that! There will be, like, controls and regulations and stuff!” … and they will be lying. And they will know they are lying.

And the rest of the Dems will acquiesce.

So no. Obama will not do health care reform.

And we’ll still be in Iraq and Afghanistan come 2011 “But this time we’ll be out real soon now!”

And the self-admitted war criminals will still be walking free.

And the behemoth banking clusterfucks will be gleefully trying to inflate the next bubble even as Obama’s foolish pre-election anti-stimulus “compromise” bills on behalf of Rethugs Inc. send the country deeper into depression.

And the corporations will still be throttling effective climate control change after the Arctic ice cap disappears for the summer.

And then 2011 with Daily Kos triumphantly blasting “Hey! It’s the corporate Dems or crazed Rethug wingnuts salivating for another go!… Choose!”

The prospects are not hopeless, but they are not good.

Emergency venting complete.

BTW… sure, [s]Rahm’s clerk[/s] -er- redfish is stupid enough to wave around a badly flawed Gallup poll… and Emanuel as well… but Obama? That ignorant?

she’s already stated that she isn’t running for that seat (although, i guess, she could change her mind)

Read Jane’s latest. She quotes Obama quoting FDR: “make me do it.”

Thank you.

Not a clue where you are going – never mind.

Ma’am, please explain how everything you have said could NOT have been written in the bowels of the White House communications office, particularly the lashing of “extremists” and “castrators” and ”fringe minority” and “disgraceful” and “intellectually humiliated” and those with “a blood lust and insatiable thirst for revenge among Bush-Cheney haters” you seem so compelled to reform here. There is nothing democratic, or Democratic about any of these slurs.

You have no point, except to be a mouthpiece. Flat out – how much does it pay? I mean it – How much?

Any real Liberal, any real Progressive, any real citizen would not resort to such gross name-calling as a defense of their political stance – they could let the ideas carry their arguments, carry their position, without resorting to slurs and slanderous charges of anti-Americanism, as you have.

You are a flack for Rahm Emanuel, likely not worth anyone’s time. There is no dialog to be had with a brick wall.