Lieberman is about the only one that won by his losing in y2k. Unfortunately for the rest of us.

Thanks Gregg!

He’s just like Bush omg!

So, do people here think Obama would refuse to pass single payer if it crossed his desk?

Would he refuse to sign off on a robust public option available to all if Congress could get it to him?

There’s not a damn thing an administration can do to convince people as corrupt as Lieberman. Maybe the whole having to govern an entire country of people with different agendas and beliefs is a hard pill to swallow for some, but it’s a reality.

Joe missed out on his chance to be vice president in 2001; how cool is it that he now gets to be co-president in 2009?

Can you say Impeachment?

I am so sick of that guy I could scream.

How convenient to have a Lieberman around to attract all the frustration and anger from the WH.

You might have a point if it wern’t for Rahm (our Rove) Emmanuel sending in the plays.

Lieberman catching anger “from the Whitehouse.”

Did you mean “for the White house”?

I think I hear screaming

Yes, I do think Obama would refuse to sign single-payer legislation.

When Joe Lieberman says something, I reflexively tend to believe the opposite. In this case, though, there’s other evidence to suggest that he’s probably telling the truth.

So we a conservative Dem as president, who speaks in purposely vague language which hides his real concern: that of maintaining the status quo.

If Pres. Obama was in favor of the Public Option he certainly managed to obscure his passion for it in the months and months of shilly-shalling, shucking and jiving, yes and noing, up and downing. To me, candidate Obama was filled with soaring progressive rhetoric and once he took power and became President, he became imperialistic and corporate to the core.

O/T: Nest order of business: force President Obama to come to Congress before he starts new murderous wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Oh, in Yemen, some folks have been organizing against the right-wing dictatorial government; guess that the USofA cruise missile/drone murder machine will have to start killing them…

Saying Obama and Lieberman are on the same team is like saying Wall Street, Congress and the White House are on the same team.

The sheer absurdity of supposing Obama and Emanuel and Reid would pressure Lieberman into supporting something they did not even support themselves!!!

Just as Obama assured the Canadians not to take seriously his campaign promises to make Nafta more worker and environmental friendly, it has now been exposed that in over 500 White House meetings with top health care industry executives, the Obama administration made it crystal clear that his campaign promises on health care were equally bogus.

Between them, Obama, Reid, Emanuel, and Lieberman have raked in literally hundreds of millions of dollars from Wall Street, and tens of millions of dollars from the health care industry.

THAT is what Jane was exposing in her confrontation with Lanny Davis. And when you probe deeper into why Davis refused to answer her, you probe deeper into questions the sadsack, lapdog mainstream media almost never ask: How does Washington really work?

Not very cool for the rest of us.

Wow — Lieberman’s actually boasting that he was handled with kid gloves and not made to concede anything, even as Rahm spent the last seven months beating up on progressives in the veal pen and out of it.

And just as Rahm didn’t pressure Lieberman, he didn’t pressure any of the other ConservaDems — or any of the Blue Dogs in the House, either.

Max Baucus is determined to set up a sweetheart deal for his insurance industry contributors. If the free-market is always best for everything, what fear do they have of competing with a supposedly inefficient federal insurance option? — saw a cool site; Balkingpoints ; incredible satellite view of earth

If you think our anger at Obama is over results, then you’re misunderstanding us.

The result of the health care debate, the stimulus, whatever, were always unknowns. There’s enough treachury in both houses to throw plenty of wrenches in the works when it comes to bold, progressive change.

No, the anger is in the process. We thought we eleced a fighter for those bold progressive changes. Instead, he has not only NOT fought for progressive views (such as single payer), he has used his office (Rahm E.) to fight AGAINST progressive values.

Anyone not seeing his complete lack of support for fighting for progressive values while vigorously fighting for “centrist” or “bi-partisan” values is not being honest, because THAT is the reality.

I have been saying this for a while. Obama and Rahm had been trying for months to come up with a way to kill off the public option. Enter Joseph Lieberman, shill for the healthcare industry, whose megalomania, sanctimony, and thirst for attention made him the perfect candidate to eliminate the PO and do it in a way that put distance between the White House and the deed. You have only to look at the silence of the White House at the time. If Obama had disagreed with Lieberman there would have been criticism, even threats. There weren’t.

We simply should not believe anything, and I mean anything, out of Obama and the Democrats, unless we can confirm it independently. What we are seeing is not just kabuki but a matryoshka doll of kabuki.

Lieberman was Obama’s sentor mentor. Just a reminder.

It is time to stop thinking of Obama as a friend of progressives. He will fight against us to get something he wants but he will not fight for us for something that we, and a majority of Americans want. This is a lesson that should be burned in our conciousness as climate change, financial reform, gay rights, civil liberties, immigration reform, workers rights and other legislation of interest to progressives comes up.

Au contraire, we can believe O’s PP speech: War is Peace.

Obama is a sham, a phony, a corporatist, an empty suit, devoid of principles and any meaningful ideology. I’m waiting for him to announce his plans for Social Security “reform”. Who better to destroy the last vestiges of FDR’s safety net than a “Democrat.” There’s even more money to be made off the people and who’s to doubt that his Wall Street kitchen cabinet has been whispering sweet nothings into the ear of Obama. With his ego he probably figures it will be his greatest con ever. He’s a grifter.

I’m sure organized labor is going to have a very rude awakening when EFCA is on the table.

I’m sorry, but I find it hard to believe Obama has been out to kill the public option for his own purposes or Rahm for that matter.

Does anyone here have any proof or are we basing things of gut instincts now?

You may find it hard to believe but can you point to one single thing that Obama actually did to make a public option happen?

Everyone who’s talking sez there was no pressure from O on the PO. And he never said a word about it in public. The simplist hypothesis explaining that behavior is that he didn’t want it.

Yours was much more succinct than mine.

Incredible. In eleven months from Day One, Barack Obama has Jimmy Earl Cratered Jr. his administration, the Democratic Party and the 2010 election. We knew he was fast, but who could have imagined this fast.

mack that was the plan all a long.Rahm was right progressives you don’t have to worry about ‘em.
Now even HDean has buckled along with Krugman.

I keep saying all those people in congress calling ‘mselves progressives are just that calling “emselves progressives.
Now how much more scamming are real progressives going to take ?

Why in the world would Lieberman want to be a part of the Obama team? There is much more money to be made with his Homeland Security gig. Players can make more money than card dealers.

The people that didn’t notice when both Obama and Clinton swooped in to help save the Lieberman attack on a Democrat running for Senate really should have paid a bit more attention. Helping Lieberman was a means to an end.

[And to lindaj @ 7]

Indeed. I think the term of art here is Joe Lieberman as “stalking horse.”

Excellent reporting by Ryan Grim at HuffingtonPost.

[mikefromArlington @ 24, a question: Just suppose, for argument's sake, that Obama (and Emanuel) have "been out to kill the public option for [their] own purposes.” Do you think Obama would want that publicly known – or would he instead have done, and be doing, everything in his power to conceal “proof” of that effort (misleading, in the process, not just the public, but most Members of Congress)?]

Grim’s important reporting about this one particular closed-door meeting is an ominous prelude to the “process” that awaits passage of a Senate bill, as I posted in fflambeau’s Seminal diary earlier today:

That means hapless Harry Reid and people close to him (likely Max Baucus and Ben Nelson, among others) will sit down with Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer with Rahm Emanuel coordinating everything. [...] Recall that instead [of public meetings covered by C-SPAN], Obama met behind closed doors in secret meetings (and denied this had happened until the New York Times broke the story) with insurance company moguls.

So the process of final passage will see Obama and Rahm meeting behind closed doors in secret with Harry Reid and Max Baucus and Ben Nelson and Nancy and Steny and some people are excited about this? Hopeful that somehow the “true” Obama will emerge and bring with him “real health care reform”? – fflambeau

Exactly, fflambeau.

The insiders know this stuff, but count on the rest of us rubes crediting their BS about “keeping the bill alive” to improve it in conference (see Roland Burris Thursday), and naively giving them a pass for pretending to believe that open, democratic process will somehow reappear and prevail in conference, when one-sided Democratic Party backroom deals have been driving this process from the get-go.

The stark truth is that, at least in the Senate, Congress didn’t write a health reform bill, the Democratic Party did.

[Yes, there's a difference - a vital difference, if you believe in representative democracy. Congress has rules for "regular order" and democratic process to provide all legislators (you know, the "representatives" of the American people) a more-or-less equal place at the table. Those rules don't, for example, provide for one powerful committee Chairman to voluntarily invite a few select colleagues from both Parties to join him in months of secret, backroom, off-the-record drafting and discussion of legislation that the other members of the committee are not privy to. The rules of Congress, as opposed to the Party machine's abuse of power that has replaced them, provide that regularly-constituted Congressional committees meet in public to do the public's business and give equal voice - and an equal vote, if not an equal ability to change outcomes to those in the minority - to every legislator, regardless of Party affiliation.]

Thus, due to the dismantling of the Constitutional wall separating the power of the Legislative Branch from the Executive facilitated by both Parties and the media, the White House dictated the design and construction of the beams and the foundation and the roof constituting the health reform deal, using the Senate as a mere proxy during the few occasions when the drafting was allowed, for appearances’ sake, to emerge into the light of day [for markup along rigid Party-line votes, on all significant amendments, in the HELP and Finance committees, and, finally, for a meaningless show debate - sales pitch, actually - on the Senate floor, while the bill was being rewritten and finalized by a handful of Party members, in and out of the Senate, behind closed doors].

To get a flavor and a preview of what the upcoming health reform conference, if one actually takes place, will look like (never mind the institutional prerogatives of the House or the Constitutionally-designed independence of our Legislative Branch of government), here’s a refresher from reporting about the unseen backroom machinations that took place during the stimulus bill conference earlier this year, presciently titled “Taking the Hill”:

Here again, the stimulus process is illustrative, specifically at the point when negotiators for the two chambers met to reconcile the differences in their bills. A bipartisan group of senators led by Nelson and Collins had secured enough votes to hold up final approval of the bill, and they wanted it scaled back to under $800 billion — a symbolic threshold, really, but one that would slash billions in school construction and other programs from the final package. It was at this point that the White House, in the person of Emanuel and Orszag, inserted itself as arbitrator and effectively took charge of the process. For several contentious days and late nights [but wholly out of public view], a frenetic Emanuel personally shuttled between the offices of Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, bargaining and cajoling and bullying his way toward a compromise. At a typically chaotic point late one evening, as one participant described it to me, Emanuel was standing in Reid’s office shouting at Pelosi over the speakerphone, then dismissed her to take a call from the president on his cellphone. Ultimately, the marathon process yielded a deal more to the centrist senators’ liking than it was to Pelosi’s; the bill Obama signed came in at about $787 billion.

Virtually the same routine was repeated in internecine struggles over Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget and the federal government’s $410 billion omnibus spending bill. In each case, once the two chambers passed their versions of the bills, the White House stepped in to referee a compromise. With each succeeding negotiation, tempers seemed closer to the surface. During the back and forth over the budget resolution, Emanuel grew so furious at one of Pelosi’s policy aides, Wendell Primus, that he refused to stand in the same room with him, letting loose a string of expletives long enough to reach the Washington Monument. “You can’t keep doing this,” Reid told Emanuel one night, and by this he meant the round-the-clock brawling that seemed to accompany every conference report.

[...]

On health care, Daschle said, “I’ve told the president there will come a time when I think it’s going to be very important for him to take control of the process or at least to insert himself and be a major player.” - Matt Bai, June 2, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/magazine/07congress-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

See also this timeline in two parts that I put together in March from real-time reporting about the outward manifestations of that secret stimulus bill “conference”:

http://letters.mobile.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/17/dodd/permalink/68cf40fc53a0da957a23ef2e2a321a7a.html

http://letters.mobile.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/17/dodd/permalink/197ec4c0ca8ea0744c30cf93377cb27b.html

A timeline excerpt:

Harry Reid arranged for just one vaunted “public” meeting of the on-call-to-rubberstamp formal [stimulus bill] conference committee, basically for show:

“It’s ruffled feathers, big time,” said a House Democrat speaking on condition of anonymity. “The speaker went through the roof.”

Added one House Democratic aide: “He tried to roll her and she knew it.”

A few minutes after Reid announced the deal [on Wednesday, 2/11], Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) convened a public meeting of the House-Senate conference committee.

It was supposed to be a glorified photo op. But there were no House Democrats in the room – and Inouye hastily announced the meeting would be scrapped pending a Pelosi “briefing” of members on the details.

The problem, according to people familiar with the situation, was that Pelosi hadn’t completely signed off on the Senate’s approach to restoring some of the $21 billion in school construction funding. House Democrats are pushing to have school-repair funding listed as a recurring expense; Senate Republicans want such an allocation to be a one-time-only deal.

The approach adopted by the Senate still infuriates many members of her caucus, and Pelosi had yet to fully make her case to dissenters, a source told Politico.

The result: Pelosi summoned Reid to her office – her turf – to hash out unspecified modifications to the package prior to a 5:15 re-convening of the conference committee. – Politico

An hour or so after Pelosi met with Reid supposedly to “hash out modifications”:

By Elana Schor [TPM] – February 11, 2009, 6:16PM

Congressional Democrats [the actual conferees, that is] have just begun a public meeting to bless the already-agreed-upon details of their $789 billion stimulus bill [as delivered to them by Party leadership], pushing past an awkward first step that saw House negotiators fail to show up for an earlier sitdown on the economic recovery plan.

Suggested Holiday Readings:

The Invisible President Man

The Audacity of Invisibility

Dreams of My Corporate Sponsors

And how convenient to have Lieberman around to kick the PO down the road. Face it, the Senate Finance bill was what the white house wanted all along. I’m not saying Obama wouldn’t have signed a bill with a PO, just sayin that having Joe around meant he didn’t have too.

If he did, it would seal his fate in 2012, even in the Democratic Primaries he’d get beat.

When did Obama make a public address saying that the PO was necessary for reform and that he would veto any bill without it?

Only someone extremely gullible with an anti Obama agenda would believe anything Joe Lieberman has to say.

He would lie to save his dead-man walking skin.He only have a couple years before we get to vote his a$$ outa there. This is the person that is on the insurance payroll and you want us to believe him because he said it…….really?

In eleven months from Day One, Barack Obama has Jimmy Earl Cratered Jr. his administration, the Democratic Party and the 2010 election.

I didn’t know THAT was the “change” we were going to get to “believe” in!!

Telling us that Obama put no pressure on him to support the public option was Joe’s way of letting us know that O is a little btch. He cldve kept that btwn him and O but his contempt for O is too great. Lieberman is a master and O is a youngn. Progressives need our own Joe Lieberman.

Hell of a headline, it’s about time someone challenged Eric Erickson for the crown.
Why would Obama lean on Lieberman? He doesn’t deal in good faith and his word is worthless. Gregg might have taken a moment to game out the likely outcome of Obama pressuring Lieberschmuck. The passive aggressive puke would haave looked pained as he explained having to resist the President’s repeated and increasingly desperate pleas, but in all good conscience… etc. But hey, it’s easier to fix the story around the headline, and who wouldn’t jump at the chance to give Joe some well-deserved ink?

The picture of Obama and the public option is disturbingly similar to the picture of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld after the invasion of Iraq went to hell and no WMDs turned up. If those guys had made an honest mistake, it was one of horrendous dimensions, something that would engender shock, horror and profound regret on the part of any honest human being … but they didn’t look or act like people who thought they’d made an honest mistake. Instead, Rumsfeld shrugged and said, “Freedom is untidy.”

Obama isn’t looking or acting like someone who is disappointed the PO lost, just as, during the weeks and months leading up to this, he didn’t look or act like someone who really, really wanted the PO.

The evidence is indirect and circumstantial, but it’s pretty clear and pretty damning.

No, although I think the instinct that the first response to Lieberman should be distrust is a healthy one. But in this case, sad to say, I think he’s telling the truth.

(Heavy Sigh…)