I guess that business about “I’ll never say what’s going to happen down the road” is some kind of new personal rule that he’s adopted in the past 2 months. Just as Rep. Ellison and Grijalva are trying to whip the 40 votes necessary among those who are “adamant” that a final bill “must retain a strong and robust health insurance option.”

p://campaignsilo.firedoglake.com/2009/08/17/60-members-of-congress-say-no-public-plan-no-conference/”>one of the courageous members who said “no public option, no conference.”  Too bad he’s scurrying behind the door while Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison lead the charge to defend the public option this week.

With 60 votes needed for cloture in the Senate, any Democrat could’ve said they would block a bill without a public option, but it was Roland Burris: This could further complicate the Democrats’ attempts to get to 60 votes. Lame duck Sen. Roland Burris just put out a statement saying he won’t vote for a [...]

Senator Baucus finally released his long awaited health care reform bill with zero bipartisan support. I’ve been looking through the bill and discovered something very interesting. Baucus has purposely written his bill to make sure adding a robust public option would not dramatically reduce the CBO score of his legislation (it would still save average [...]

A close look at the CBO report on Baucus’ health care bill.

Yesterday, Rockefeller was indignant about the colossal policy failure that Baucus’s bill is, and said that he wouldn’t vote for the Baucus Finance bill in its present form: I have sat besides Max Baucus for 22 years on the Finance Committee. … I’m probably one of his best friend among Democrats. But I cannot agree with him [...]

Ever since the Democrats took over Congress, it’s been one excuse after another as to why nothing but corporate-friendly, anti-progressive legislation gets passed.

We couldn’t end the war because we didn’t have “60 votes” (which they knew was bullshit, as Paul Kanjorski admits in the video).

We had to add $200 billion in tax cuts to the supplemental to make Chuck Grassley happy even though he wouldn’t vote for

I wrote a few days ago about how the legislative trigger on the public option was nothing more than a con job pulled on us by insurance lobbyists through politicians like Senator Baucus, Conrad, Nelson, and "moderate" Democrats in the House, including White House administration officials like Rahm Emmanuel who suggested the "trigger" on the [...]

I’ve heard that they have installed some software that counts how quickly the OFA list is depleting due to the public plan. This should really goose things.

That bold new campaign to tell everyone how bad the insurance companies are will probably still put it over the top. Now that they’ve been tasked with writing the bill and all.

Rick Klein: It’s the fifth and final committee version, probably the one closest to the president’s guidelines, and the product of all those "productive" meetings, produced at last. Yet, other than Baucus, nobody seems to like it very much. Baucus won’t have the support of the Republicans he’s been meeting with, or,  for that matter, [...]