In classic veal pen fashion Families USA is working against Vermont’s attempts to get the waivers,as soon as possible, it would need to move the state towards a single payer health care system. Families USA does claim to support Vermont’s reform effort, but just happens to opposes the very law needed to help make it happen in a timely manner.

Over at the Huffington Post, in an attempt to defend Jim Messina, Robert Creamer reaches for the absolute biggest brush he can find to totally whitewash the actual history of the health care reform battle. From his blog post: Messina is sometimes criticized by progressives for his management of the health care battle. Progressives like [...]

There was some lively response yesterday to my post on the Sierra Club and its reluctance to criticize the Obama administration for its handling of the oil spill. There is no shortage of targets: the Center for Biological Diversity exposed Ken Salazar for granting new drilling permits after he said there was a moratorium. Food [...]

Josh Gerstein has an article in Politico on the massive silence coming out of the enviros on the BP oil catastrophe, which has been notable ever since the rig collapsed. This weekend the groups took out an ad in the Washington Post, not to criticize the administration for their response, but to praise the President [...]

Hey, Sierra Club: There’s a giant flaming ball of oil being pushed straight for the coasts of Alabama and Mississippi. Might be the worst environmental event in decades. I know it makes the President’s recent decision to allow offshore drilling look. . . well, awkwardly timed, but this is, sort of, you know, your issue, [...]

Just before the House passed the health care bil, Nancy Pelosi sent out a letter.    In it, she said that “An op-ed by E.J. Dionne on Friday reveals that the current health reform legislation pending before Congress was “built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.”  She bolded Dionne’s headline: Why Democrats Are [...]

Matt Yglesias analyzes the “failure of the progressive block strategy,” and chalks it up to progressives not picking issues that “centrists” care about. He doesn’t note his own role in that failure, vilifying the leader of the progressive block Raul Grijalva as “the world’s greatest monster” unless he backs down. (Our own whip effort started [...]

Ben Smith writes that if the health care bill passes with “unified, if grumbly, support on the left, it would seem to vindicate the White House’s fundamental approach, which was to take the left for granted as much as possible and focus on courting marginal members of the Senate.”

He’s absolutely right. As I told Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal the other day (which he didn’t print), “f#%king r$%ards” worked.

The Urban Institute has been searving some extra good veal lately. They have a new report out endorsing the idea of a super-hard trigger for a robust Medicare-style public option. While it is theoretically possible to design a “useful” triggered public option, it is also theoretically possible to sway Republican senators to votes for a [...]

John Aravosis: What did President Obama say new tonight? Absolutely nothing. What did the Human Rights Campaign get in exchange for once again giving our president cover for all of his broken promises to our community? Absolutely nothing. I like HRC, I know a lot of people who work there, I’ve defended them when others [...]