Rahm unleashed a tirade on them all, telling them that they were going to fuck up the Democrats if we “failed” to pass any old health care bill (which appears now to be the health insurance industry approved co-ops). But I doubt you’ll hear any of them confirming that the White House hasn’t pressured them to stop their attacks on Democrats any time soon, because it came in the form of a flying shit fit at top volume with four-letter verbiage liberally applied.

Per Brian Beutler, we see in Bloomberg that Obama would "sign off" on co-ops after yesterday’s Gang of 6 meeting:  President Barack Obama may accept nonprofit health-insurance cooperatives in place of a new government-run plan as long as consumers are guaranteed more choice and competition in buying insurance, a top aide said. “We would be [...]

One of the key thing the astroturfing teabaggers and their Republican fellow travelers have learned to do is to strongly disavow the very idea that the teabaggers’ efforts to shut down Democratic legislators’ town hall forums are anything but wholesome spontaneous grass-roots affairs, with no corporate or Republican backing whatsoever. As Jason Rosenbaum points out over at The Seminal, that just got a little bit harder to say with a straight face.

Mike Ross brags that the Blue Dogs held the bill “hostage” explicitly to kill any hope of single payer. For 10 days. Maybe someone would enlighten me about how the math works such that Single Payer, when it comes to floor later this year, could possibly pass?

Because Mike Ross thinks they just fought hard and won something that could realistically lead to single payer. Which Jan Schakowsky traded away for a vote that has no hope of passing, at least according to my second grade math skills.

Help me out here. How does this happen? How is Jan Schakowsky not playing everyone for a fool?

At an event on the "Patients First" bus tour of David H. Koch’s Americans for Prosperity held in Pueblo, Colorado, speaker Mark Harrison says that the House health care bill — H.R. 3200 — is like Hitler’s "final solution": Part of this process is called end of life counseling and part of the end of [...]

Mike Ross:

We insured that if there is a government option, it will be just that — an option — and it won’t be mandated on anybody.  If it had been based on Medicare rates, I can assure you that it would have eventually ended up resulting in a single payer-type system, because Medicare has really good rates, because they’re negotiating for every senior in America. Private insurance companies could not have competed with that.  And so we would have at the end of the day ended up with single payer.  Now we’ve leveled the playing field, if there is a government option they’ll have to go out again and negotiate with providers just like private insurance companies do.  That was important to me to insure that we don’t end up with some type of single payer system.

CTblogger has been a good friend since the Lieberman battle. He’s "from" Danbury Connecticut. He’s also well over 6ft tall (which is why the camera angle is frequently "down" in his videos), and African American. As the teabagger tells him in this disturbing video: You and your asinine friends say that we’re paid by big [...]

Jane Hamsher has tirelessly reported on the political kabuki within the White House in forcing the progressives in the House to swallow crap sandwiches in form of the stimulus, the ACES bill, and the war supplemental funding, and how Rahm was behind a great deal of the "negotiations" with the Blue Dogs and the Democratic [...]

Ellen E. reports from the Kathy Castor event in Florida that turned ugly: The best sign I saw was held by an elderly gentleman.  It read "If I had Obama’s healthcare, I’d be dead by now".  Do these people even know what Medicare is or are they just beyond facts and reason?   Sorry I [...]

Last night we had a rapid response effort after hearing reports that the Malkinites were going to swarm a health care event in Denver where Nancy Pelosi was showing up in support of Jared Polis and Diane DeGette. Square State, ColoradoPol and Pronin2 at DailyKos spread the word and we signed up volunteers to attend [...]