Hi, Jane. Another hold-her-breath-until-she-turns-red kinda woman. Is the 76% current number? Not sure where to look for this.

Note to self:

Tuesday, July 28, via Rasmussen Poll site:

Currently, 76% of Democrats favor the proposal and 76% of Republicans are opposed. Among the unaffiliated, 35% are in favor and 60% are opposed. Notably, just 16% of unaffiliateds Strongly Favor the legislative effort while 47% Strongly Oppose it.

List of priorities, in order of urgency:

1) Get self reelected
2) Get self on teevee
3) Collect money
4) Figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center
5) America

To the people of Louisiana; Sounds like you need to recall an idiot that is trying to kill you. Montana has to caucus on baucus, and get rid of the human scum willing to take bribes to kill you.
They are trying to kill you and make a profit, isn’t that enough to make you extremely angry?

Depressing news. Ugh. What does it take to get decent legislation passed in this country?

I would like to run my own poll of American citizens.

(1) Where do you get information about health care?
(2) Who is your most trusted, reliable source/resource?
(3) How much time a day/week do you spend thinking about health care?
(4) Do you ever research the issue(s)?
(5) Is health care a political issue or a moral issue?
(6) Do you trust HMOs to do the right thing(s)?
(7) Do you trust your Congressional reps/senators to do the right thing?
(8) What do you believe is “the right thing”?

etc.

I’m pissed! I just had a patient repeat the latest wingnut talking point about Obamacare leading to euthanasia. I don’t understand why the only TP’s out there are right & “centrist” – where are all the progressives and why can’t we get them on camera? BTW, props to Gov. Dean on Countdown, he did a great job last night.

What the hell is it going to take?

Maybe we need to have national interstate highway demonstrations for single payer. Drive to the nearest interstate highway and park on the side at a certain time of day for 5 minutes to start. Then add the right lane at the next demo, etc. should operate like the “spontaneous happenings ” we see done so effectively.

I admire you and your work on our behalf; Thank YOU!

karen

The Netroots needs to engage corporate america. The Insurance industry is out lobbying us. We can’t compete. But there are those that can, and it is worth their dollars to do so. My company’s premiums have been rising 14-18% per year. It is their biggest uncontrolled cost. We need to be engaging this ally on this issue.

what’s it gonna take?

jane, I don’t know. piles of bodies outside landrieu’s office? oh wait, we already got that with hurricane katrina and the stupid cow went around saying what great leadership Bush provided, until the outcry forced her to backtrack.

quite frankly, I don’t think there is anything that can be done short of a full scale revolution. And THAT is just not in the cards.

for a variety of reasons, our country is incapable of doing anything big (well, outside of wars, and we don’t really do so well at the big ones anymore, see Viet Nam and Iraq). And in those rare cases when we DO do something big, by the time all the palms have been greased and all the asses kissed, anything of substance has usually been eviscerated (see “stimulus”).

i mean let’s face it: our president knows the best way to go is single payer,and even HE took that off the table before the debate was even engaged.

But yes, i am still calling and whipping.

what do we DO? who should we call/write??
I’ve written my senators up the wazoo & the White House…

Jane, this is OT but relevant. I’ve been looking at Mike Michaud’s (my Congressman’s) web page. There are quite a few recent updates re health care. See especially the letter (of July 9, also signed, eg, by Rush Holt) supporting a robust public option. This seems to fulfill the three requirements. Also, his op-ed in the Bangor Daily News, reprinted on the link. He’s saying that he wants to get health care right, which of course are words that can be used to weasel out with. But my very strong sense is that he’s not doing that, and that he might indeed be willing to “take the pledge”, ie say he won’t vote for a bill without a public option (he can vote progressive, eg he voted against the last supplemental). I contacted his office in several ways re this, but haven’t gotten a reply so far.

Upshot: put him on the whip list. It can’t hurt!

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A Tennessee lawmaker resigned from the state Senate on Tuesday after his extramarital affair with a 22-year-old intern was revealed by an investigation into an extortion case.

“Due to recent events, I have decided to focus my full attention on my family and resign my Senate seat effective August 10,” Republican Sen. Paul Stanley wrote in his resignation letter.

76% of americans want this…. get ‘er done.

What the hell is it going to take?

Do you remember what happened to the Shah of Iran?

Seriously, it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s going to take chasing the likes of Sen. Landrieu down the street and standing on her front lawn for a few weeks before she and her friends understand we intend to change the direction we’re heading.

You cannot lie to all of the people all of the time, and God help those who try.

I’m not advocating, I’m observing.

we should also take this time to think about why healthcare in this country is so expensive. here’s one possible answer.

I wonder about the revolution thing. The only way to get the attention of the media and the congress is to have massive sit-ins or some sorts of protests in front of local congressional offices. Maybe the focus should be on demanding that the congressperson or senator give up his/her taxpayer-funded, you know, PUBLIC health insurance if he/she is going to continue to deny coverage to others. Or is there a way to use the health fairs at which hundreds of Americans stand in line the rain in order to receive free care. In cattle pens. This is immoral and obscene in a country with such wealth. It is shameful, and those who would force children to suffer should be publicly shamed and humiliated. It shouldn’t be tolerated. Somehow we need to light a fire under our neighbors and ourselves. This may call for some public disobedience.

Yer late. I posted the link yesterday evening.

What the hell is it going to take

Campaign finance reform.

I’m sorry: that’s the disease. We can try to pass things like health care reform despite the symptoms, sort of like trying to help someone with untreated emphysema survive the walk to the E/R, but the disease will remain untreated. And even if we pass public health care, corporatists will sabotage it in subsequent years to make it unworkable while driving people away from it with continued propaganda.

The only way we’re going to see populist policies survive Congress is if the first law we pass is to take back Congress from its corporate owners.

As we have seen, this is NOT a Democratic-versus-Republican issue. This is an issue of which representatives have been bought out by the corporations versus which ones are still answering to their constituents.

Without CFR we will never restore democracy in Congress.

Mike Michaud’s Facebook page

click on “become a fan” (you can un-fan later) and write on his wall

You are absolutely right. Not a damn dime from anyone except a taxpayer funded campaign chest. Same amount of free air time. Mandatory debates.

Here is the question that’s actually asked in the PDF to which HuffPo cites:

In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance––extremely important,
quite important, not that important, or not at all important?

Extremely important ……………………… 41
Quite important …………………………. 35

Now, the post is couched in terms of “a public plan”, as is the question. What I would like to know, and what the survey can’t say, is whether people are saying yes to the “progressive” public option bait (130 million covered in a Medicare-like proposal) or the public option switch (9 million covered in a bizarre Rube Goldberg-esque construct of means-tested Health Exchanges* in the legislation actually on offer)

The post implies that of course they’re for the legislation actually on offer, but the survey provides no evidence of that. There may be other reasons to believe it, but the poll is not one of them, because the “public option” branding has been so obfuscated by its advocates. (Unlike, I might add, single payer. What we want is quite clear and can be proven to save both lives and money.)

NOTE * The very name implying that for-profit health insurance is a positive good, where getting the profit out of health insurance is the moral crux of what we’re fighting for.

“The only way to get the attention of the media and the congress is to have massive sit-ins or some sorts of protests in front of local congressional offices. Maybe the focus should be on demanding that the congressperson or senator give up his/her taxpayer-funded, you know, PUBLIC health insurance if he/she is going to continue to deny coverage to others.”

neither of those things will happen.
to get that critical mass of people that make a sit-in big enough to take notice, you’d have to do it on a weekday. But most of us are way too busy makin’ the nut to take a day off from work (a lot of us don’t even have that kind of benefit as a piad day off).

demanding congresscritters give up their health insurance sounds good, but unless you have to power to make it happen, you might as well shout at clouds. how do you expect to make that happen?

For a real-life example of that, just look at the massive bipartisan support for Ron Paul’s bill to auditi the fed, which the Senate and House leadership refuse to bring to the floor.

i agree they should be shamed, but unless there’s an overarching strategy to do this all at once (the way mike stark is doing in DC) it won’t succeed.

not to be all negative.

Did these “centrists” do Anything to contain the cost of healthcare in the US from Jan 2001 to Jan 2009? I don’t think so!

Good to see the beginnings of this discussion. Let’s talk about what we can do using the internet. We may not need a revolution.

Here’s my suggestion. It takes lots of organization, technical knowhow which I lack and probably big bucks. We put every town’s checkbook on line (cities present problems of scale but nothing insurmountable) This permits citizens to compare their town’s expenditures with similar towns (ie per pupil costs and number of police and fire). We create a basic site template which we make available to any interested community. Check stubs are most likely digital and available through freedom of information if the town does not cooperate. As for servers and stuff, maybe Google will do it as a public service. I made this suggestion to George Soros’s open society but haven’t heard back.

We can use a wikipedia type arrangement to gather all information about something like single payer. We can have chat, and more importantly we can perhaps arrange painless nationwide demonstrations (I’m not sure what form they might take-blocking traffic is not what I have in mind). I have no idea how we can organize a national conversation amongst millions of people (computer moderated discussions?) but even that might be possible.

Primarying blue dogs etc is probably as pointless as a third party unless via the demonstrations the third party shows it has lots of adherents. We want to save representative democracy because we don’t want to do it ourselves, perhaps for the same reason the Tories opposed representative democracy in 1776-the people are stupid etc. Blogs are a bunch of like minded people commiserating with each other. We need something much larger. It doesn’t have to be COPE (Citizen Oversight of Public Expenditure) but it needs to be something that gets people visiting the site.

my bad

We’re in total agreement that CFR is an absolute necessity, however, Healthcare reform is the battle we find ourselves engaged in at the moment. Being defeated in this effort is the surest way to lose the CFR battle when that comes up again.

We have an opportunity here due only to the fact that most American voters have a firm grasp on the existential threat that the Health Insurance industry poses.

We can’t afford to lose our focus right now, yes, the war is about taking our government back from the corporations who own it. Yes, it will involve driving them out of campaign finance, but if we lose the healthcare reform battle, CFR will be that much harder and may take another generation.

We can’t wait that long.

DemocratIC Senator Landrieu is now so centrist right-wing that she mentioned the “Democrat program.” Anybody wonder want to hazard a guess as to who she’s been hanging with?

The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com

I’m glad the “PLAY” arrow is right in front of her face on this video because I cannot stand to look at her anymore. Of course, I didn’t click the PLAY button because, not only can’t I stand to look at her anymore, but I’m horrified by the sound of her voice.

Finally, I have only been able to skim this blog post and the comments because, as bad as it is to look at her, and as horrible as it is to hear her voice, both of those experiences, combined, don’t add up to the desperate MISERY of reading what she has to say about Healthcare “Reform.”

“not to be all negative”

No problem. I share your frustration. Remember the night Rachel debunked Pat Buchanan’s false statements one by one? Maybe we need a Presidential presser to flatly debunk the right wing lies about the public option. Point by point. At night, to get maximum coverage.

Well said!

Can Pelosi and Reid take away committee appointments? Virtually freeze out the blue dogs and the other obstructionists? What pressure can they apply? I want Obama to tell them to hurt these people. Bad.

laminatross:

The elephant in the room on that clip by TRWJ Foundation is: private insurers and providers make A LOT more money in the current system, and so they want to extend it. The healthcare service delivery model described here is “intermediate” or “preventive.”

How do you expect Aetna’s corporate executives to continue getting their seven-figure bonuses if they can’t wratchet up their stock prices by delivering an abundance of expensive, unnecessary treatments?

Amen!

What the hell is it going to take?

Abolition of the Senate.

what i will always, always remember about mary landrieu was watching her prostrate herself to president idiot son and thanking him for allllll the hard work he’d done on behalf of the drowning citizens of new orleans — and having anderson cooper call her out for her lying, ignorant bullshit.

iirc, president idiot son hadn’t even received his dvd of news reports his staff was forced to put together because he hadn’t been paying attention.

and mary was right there to bolster him up.

she’s beyond worthless to the citizens of this country; but she is a whore sellout to the corporate interests who pull her strings.

Most in congress have become whore sellouts to the corporate/lobby complex. We couldn’t have developed a worse method of electing our government if we had tried.

The Whore House on CapitAL Hill.

I used to live in New Orleans.

Her dad was mayor many years ago.

Her brother is Lt. Governor presently.

The only grace with this family is the disgrace they have continuoiusly perpetrated on the city of NOLA,and the state of Louisiana ever since their political dynasty began.

Wow, on Rasmussen that’s saying something.

Thanks
Sounds a bit complex & time consuming when raising a teenager & trying to keep afloat takes precedence. I dont know, I’ve been running down to demonstrations in CD since I was 12 & protesting Vietnam–it seems like we’re being ignored & I’m in a fury with no outlet against these Dogs at the trough.

No kidding!

I have an idea that might work. How about placing a large scoreboard with a high visibility electronic system so people can read it from far away — like the ones in pro football & baseball stadiums. We wouldn’t need all of those expensive bells & whistles, but we would want the ability to program and change the display depending on what our creative minds come up with.

Let’s display a count of people dying unnecessarily due to lack of or denial of health insurance, which is 22,000 per year, or approximately 60 people per day. For example, a graphic display that says, “While you were sleeping last night, 320 people died unnecessarily because they could not afford health insurance. They would be alive, if we had a single payer system.”

Imagine the possibilities, particularly if the message is personalized with photos & short bios of the victims of our broken system followed by a photo of Baucus and a message like, “As Senator Max Baucus collected $1.5 million from private health insurance companies last week supporting his effort to kill health reform, 420 people died . . .”

If we could only afford one scoreboard, I recommend placing it so that it’s visible to our elected officials in Congress and their staffs. Alongside freeways where Rush hour traffic tends to back up is another good location.

I love this. The problem is the location of the one sign. If the people can’t see it, Congress won’t care. That’s why I keep harping on finding a way to get this before the rabble (which includes me, of course). I don’t know what people know (or even care about, beyond themselves) any more. But your billboard idea is terrific. Money? Eh. No biggie. Oh, wait. We’re Democrats.

yes, i remember that too.
she is a truly disgusting person who deserves whatever misfortunes fate hands her.

Goosh! is there anyone in the Senate more disgustingly slimly than Landrieu,except for Lieberman.But you lie with fleas,you wakeup with fleas:On the one hand I am pleased to finally see people waking up to this scum,Landrieu,remember her vote for the bankruptcy bill ?That should have been enough but for whatever reason many people kept their mouths shut while she pretended to be a Dem,she ran for re-elcetion last year & no one had the guts to call on good dems to reject this woman as a Senator with Dem values.STOP SUPPORTING FOLKS WHO ARE MARGINAL ON “LIBRUL” VALUES.The same can be said of Dianne Fenstein,but you are not going to hear critisms of her too,see being a woman Senator has benefits too.

Mizz Landrieu is yet another pol who has been on the public dole literally for decades(her daddio was mayor of NOLA) and has no idea on what you have to go through to get private insurance. Another one – Liebertwit who has been on the public dole his whole adult post-college life except for 2 yrs. Oh, Landrieu was one who supported Liebertwit post-primary. And then he screwed her on NOLA and she still continues to support him. This is one woman who doesn’t even care about her own constituents. I really would rather she just reregister as a repub already.
BTW can Mike Stark ambush this woman and Conrad.

I completely agree that we can’t wait for some ideal time to pass CFR, or abandon current efforts in order to accomplish some other goal. But I’m also answering Jane’s question. We should continue to work to pass public health care, but I hope that we start to come to an understanding that CFR needs to be the Next Big Push. I mean, we can do other things first, but every other thing we do in addition to Health Care Reform will be much, much more difficult until we make it illegal to bribe Congress and call it “lobbying.”