Obama Touches 3rd Rail - Poll shocker: Scott Brown surges ahead in Senate race

Stockholm wrote:

I'm not sure why any "wealthy" Americans care at all whether health care reform passes or not. If you're rich you'll always be able to fly a lear jet to the Mayo clinic and get the best health care money can buy and that won't change one iota.

You don't need to be "wealthy" to have healtch care coverage.  The number of uninsured in America is something like 30 million, which means that about 270 million people do have health care coverage.

What needs to be done is create a system which helps those who don't have any coverage.  But, most of those 270 million people are satisified with their healthcare coverage and they simply want the government to leave it alone.

Actually, about 50 million have no coverage and another 100 million or so have inadequate coverage and then another huge chunk of seniors and welfare recipients already have government coverage (amusingly some of them scream that they want "government" to leave their "medicare" alone!).

I've known a number of people from Canada who have lived in the US and its a joke. First of all, more and more companies are scrapping health care as a benefit because its too expensive to provide. Second of all, so many more people work part time or on contract and have no benefits. Third of all if you do have health care coverage, its usually has features that would be anathema to anyone accustomed to health care in Canada - you often have to pay deductibles of up to $1,000, you get routinely have your insurance carrier refuse to cover procedures because some bean-counter decides that the mastectomy your doctor ordered is not "medically necessary", you have to pay out of your own pocket for anything that is a "pre-existing condition" (i.e. almost everything).

If you actually knew anything about the health care reform being proposed in the US you would know that all it really does it bar insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and make it easier for the uninsured to get health insurance. If you have health care coverage through your work - nothing will change. There isn't even a public opition anymore in the bill. I really don't understand why these rightwing ideologues are getting so worked about a bill is is a relatively minor bit of tinkering woith the status quo. For all the talk about how the US might (God forbid) end up with a health care system like Canada's - most experts say that if the current bill passes the US will have a system that would most closely resemble that of Switzerland (you know that free market capitalist haven in the middle of Europe thsat has low low taxes and numbered bank accounts).

Its funny to see some Canadian neocons suddenly attacking the relatively meager health care reforms being proposed in the US - but threy would never have the courage to openly advocate for the elimination of Medicare in canada and for Canada to shift to a US style system! I wonder why not?

BTW: as far as health care is concerned in the US. I think that the Republican have almost succeeded in talking it to death. Its easy to raise a million doubts about something and to spread ridiculous rumours about "death panels" etc...I think that the problem is that the bill is so ridiculously complicated that no one really understands what its all about anymore and they are reacting to almost an entire year of gridlock and debate etc...I can hardly blame them. But I think that the GOP knows that the moment that the health care bill actually passes - the guns of august will fall silent, it will be a done deal and once the provisions come into effect it will almost certainly end up becoming an untouchable social program.

We sometimes forget how much opposition there was to Medicare in Canada. Remember the Saskatchewan doctors strike etc...? But once it was implemented it became an insanely popular government program. The same will happen in the US and that's why the GOP is so determined to destroy it.

wage zombie wrote:

How come Bush was never forced to work with Congress that way?  His majorities weren't any bigged than Bush's.

And again, this is a special election.  Turnout will be really low.  That's why this race is competitive.

The thing is that there are all these socalled "blue dog democrats" who are essentially Republicans who just run under the Democratic label - so its actually illusory to say that the Democrats have such a rock solid majority. Look at all the massive watering down and concessions that the Democrats had to make to keep pigs like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson onside. There is nothing equivalent on the Republican side. About 30 years ago there actually were some real live "liberal Republicans" those people have all gone the way of the dodo bird. The Republican caucus is now 100% made up of far right ideologues whose only policy is one of total intransigence. Arlen Spector - who switched parties has said that it was made very clear in the GOP caucus that any compromise with the Dems would unacceptable and that everyone had to oppose, oppose, oppose no matter what. When you have a Republican in the White House, you NEVER see the Democrats forming such a united front of total intransigence. The Democrats typically get bogged down playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules and fret that if they oppose the agenda of e Republican pfresident too vociferously, they will get punished for not being "bi-partisan enough" - the GOP has no just worries.

So in a nutshell, any Republican President can count of getting a bunch of blue dog so-called Democrats to support him on key legislation. In contrast when a Democrat is in the White House, the Republican are 100% intransigent and there is no corresponding block of moderate Republican to work with. Those people simply don't exist.

You oversimplify Sven, sliding over the blackmail involved.

Its not Senate votes in general we are talking about.

When the Republicans do not have a majority they use the filibuster as blackmail- "whatever we don't want, you'll have to get 60 votes to shove it down our throats." So our 41 votes have equal power in negotiations to your 59 votes. Eat it.

The Democrats have never been able to pull off that blackmail move- though that is not relevant now.

Bush holding out bi-partisan olive branches to pass legislation... like fun.

Bush never had to compromise as much as Obama has. The Republicans know how to play the politics of division, from both sides of governing/opposition now. Its got nothing to do with the Democrats "overplaying their hand".

"he (Obama) hasn't been able to convince even one moderate Republican Senator (such as Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins) to support his healthcare legislation."

Do you SERIOUSLY think that there was ever the slightest chance that ANY Republican senator  was ever going to support ANY bill on health care??? Obama already caved into to every single solitary one of Olympia Snowe's demands and she still voted NO. The Republicans don't care what's in the bill - they just want to make sure that they deprive Obama of the political victory of being able to say that he managed to pass a health care bill.

Just getting those blue dog senators like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman to vote for the bill already meant watering the bill down to nothing. I'm not sure what else could have been done to get Olympia Snowe on board. She said at first she was against a single payer system - so the bill proposed just a public option. Then she said no no no, she was against the public option too, but she was in favour of a trigger. Then the Dems proposed her trigger, then she decided that she was now against her own idea there as well, then they withdrew the trigger and then her goal posts shifted again. It was clear that Snowe was never going to support ANYTHING no matter what and her only goal was to force the Democtrats to waste as much time as possible making her the centre of attention.

Stuff your rolly eyes Sven.

I didn't say the Dems never used filibuster.

I said they have never been able to use it as the total war on every measure blackmail that the Republicans have.

And do you really want to argue that Bush compromised to get legislation passed as much as Obama does?

You don't think the heealth care reform is legitimate, therefore the Dems "overplayed their hand". Hardly an innocent observer.

Yet Bush and mad dog Rove, who elevated the politics of division to an art form, you award the label of 'compromiser'.

Stockholm wrote:

The Republicans don't care what's in the bill - they just want to make sure that they deprive Obama of the political victory of being able to say that he managed to pass a health care bill.

There are certainly many Republicans who do take that position -- perhaps most.  Snowe and Collins, however, are not among them.

Stockholm wrote:

I'm not sure what else could have been done to get Olympia Snowe on board. She said at first she was against a single payer system - so the bill proposed just a public option.

A "public option" would have the effect of destroying private health insurance -- and ultimately lead to a single payer system (or something akin to it).

And, that's just it.  Most Americans don't want their private insurance messed with.  Hence, the backlash the Democracts are seeing in Massachusetts (and not among Republicans but among independents) and will see this coming November.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/24/budget-reconciliation/

Quote:

Today, Politico reported that Republican senators are prepared to go “nuclear” — essentially shutting down the Senate through the use of parliamentary maneuvers — if President Obama attempts to use budget reconciliation to pass key parts of his legislative agenda, such as health care reform and cap-and-trade. Reconciliation allows some legislation to be protected from filibusters and passed by a simple majority. On NPR this morning, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) repeated a now familiar attack on budget reconciliation:

BOND: “In this post-partisan time of Barack Obama, we’re seeing a little Chicago politics. They steamroller those who disagree with them, then, I guess in Chicago, they coat them in cement and drop them in the river.” [NPR, 3/24/09]

Bond appears to be parroting his colleague Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who said any use of budget reconciliation by President Obama would be “regarded as an act of violence” against Republicans, and likened it to “running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River.” Other GOP senators have chimed in against reconciliation, with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) calling it a “purely partisan exercise” and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) saying it “would be a mess.”

Despite their howls against Obama, Republicans employed the same procedure to pass major Bush agenda items (which were supported by all four aforementioned Senators):

– The 2001 Bush Tax Cuts [HR 1836, 3/26/01]
– The 2003 Bush Tax Cuts [HR 2, 3/23/03]
– Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 [HR 4297, 5/11/06]
– The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 [H. Con Res. 95, 12/21/05]

As ThinkProgress has noted, Gregg defended using the reconciliation procedure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for domestic drilling in 2005, arguing, “The president asked for it, and we’re trying to do what the president asked for.” Evidently, Gregg has lost the same sense of patriotic duty.

The 2003 tax cuts needed Cheney to come in and break a 50-50 tie in the Senate.

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm...

Too bad the Dems are afraid to pass anything through reconciliation.

Sven wrote:

 

A "public option" would have the effect of destroying private health insurance -- and ultimately lead to a single payer system (or something akin to it).

 

Not necessarily.  All the private insurance industry would have to do to survive would be to stop price gouging, negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription costs, and change the "fee-for-service" system to encourage physicians to only perform the tests and procedures that are actually needed.

And if the insurance industry WON'T do that...it's not serving its current customers well anyway, so why SHOULD it survive?

And why should people be FORCED to buy private insurance just to get healthcare?

It's not like the current structure is the only possible method.  Insurers don't HAVE to bleed their customers dry.

Joe Bageant describes the process at work over the past year:

"It's effective the tea-bagging). How many people now remember that real health care reform had seventy percent support when it began? After a few weeks of orchestrated slap-downs of its proponents at Town Hall meetings, and staged citizen revolts, public opinion of health care reform went down the toilet. Ordinary people, quiet folks who never much discuss politics, started to have doubts when they saw folks like themselves on television rising up in what was touted by blonde meat puppet anchorpersons and jowly self-important male pundits as "a nationwide protest by the common man." The Tea Party is the latest version of a tried and proven neocon tactic.


"After the Town Hall Meeting, Boucher could go back to Washington and show Congress proof that working class voters in his district like things the way they are. That they like being screwed by the insurance rackets and prefer medical bankruptcy to affordable health care. Once again my people, the great unwashed and unlettered, were sicced like dogs on challengers to the status quo. A cheer went up from American news consumers out there dining on the spectacle and hyperbole of it all. "By god Helen! The common citizen, the working guy, the little guy is standing up to Big Gubbyment about taxes. Says he ain't gonna take it anymore!"

Sven lives in Minnesota, so I doubt he feels any loyalty to the Canadian healthcare model. 

Can't imagine his being loyal to anything that cannot be conspicuously consumed by himself.

The duped majority, as Bageant shows us. (see #73)

""Senator Blanche Lincoln was already a nervous wreck.  If a Kennedy-endorsed candidate can lose in Massachusetts over health care, what could the voters of Arkansas do to her?"

The best thing that can happen for her is to just pass the bloody thing and be done with it. There worst possible to scenario if you are a Democrat running for congress is to say - "we spent an entire year trying to pass a health care bill and we failed and now we have absolutely NOTHING to show for our efforts". That was what happened in 1994 and it led to a total Democratic meltdown - and that is what the GOP is counting on this time.

Senator Lincoln is damned no matter what. Even if she suddenly changed her mind about supporting health care now and decided to join a filibuster - what good would it do? The teabaggers in Arkansas would still hate her for having a (D) after her name and everyone else would ridicule her for flip-flopping since she voted for the bill and then voted against the same bill bill she voted for - what's that all about? and what is left of the Democratic base in Arkansas which is mostly African-American would abandon her for jettisoning any health care reform. She would probably face a primary challenge from a Democreat to the left of her and go down in flames before she even got to the general election.

"So, I generally like a split government (one party with the presidency and one party with control of the Congress) -- it has the effect of moderating the extremes of both parties."

Right now, in order to pass anything, Obama has to kow-tow to all these reactionary "blue dogs" like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. There is no "extreme" in the Democratic party. The handful of people who could be considered to be on the left of the party like Dennis Kucinich or Bernie Sanders are totally marginalized and ignored and have no influence at all. The Democratic party is a very centrst party to begin with. Its a different story when Republicans control all levels of government since virtually everyone in the GOP is a rightwing extremist.

I'd still like to know in what way the health care reform bill could be watered down anymore in order to be a "bipartisan" bill. It already has no public option and it already gives insurance companies everything they want. As I've said before, the only reason that no Republicans voted for it is because they are trying to make sure that a big initiative of Obama's fails. That's all they care about. We saw this before with the GOP with their crazy $100 million dead end investigation of Whitewater or the lunacy with Ken Starr pushing for Clinton to be impeached over Monica Lewinsky etc...This is the way these people operate. The Democrats on the other hand are always eating their m & ms with a knife and fork and playing by marquess of Queensberry rules. A lot of people thought that Obama should have launched a criminal investigation into all of Bush's war crimes and lies that got the US into the war in Iraq etc... but he refused and wanted to turn the page. You can be 100% certain that if a Republican was in power they would eagerly start phony inquiries and trump up charges against any Democrat they could get their hands on.  They are a party of hateful bullies that refuse to work with anyone and their approach to politics is a scorched earth Napolean retreating from Moscow - if they can't be in power then they want to make sure that everything goes down in flames.

If Democrats in the US were even 1% as singlemindedly obstructionist and partisan as virtually all Republicans are - we would never hear the end of it.

...and nothing will change for those people either - unless their employer decides to scale back the health insurance they offer - which is certain to happen regardless of whether the HCR bill passes or not.

It serves the Blue Dogs right for acting like they were ABOVE the party and owed nothing to it.

There's nothing wrong with being an independent thinker and voting against a bill that they or their constitutents disagree with.  The problem is refusing to allow the question to come to a vote.  If you don't want to vote for it fine, but filibustering is just preventing movement at all.

The problem isn't independent thinkers, it's senators who are owned by the insurance companies, who keep switching their goalposts after every compromise.  And the problem is also the Dem leadership that allows it to happen.

And still no word from Sven after he's been presented with polls showing that a majority of Americans favour single payer.

wage zombie wrote:

There's nothing wrong with being an independent thinker and voting against a bill that they or their constitutents disagree with.  The problem is refusing to allow the question to come to a vote.  If you don't want to vote for it fine, but filibustering is just preventing movement at all.

The filibuster has been used by both parties routinely as a means of stopping a vote.  This isn't unique to this healthcare bill.

wage zombie wrote:

And still no word from Sven after he's been presented with polls showing that a majority of Americans favour single payer.

On the contrary, I said, "Thank you" for the link (see above). I just need to find some time to review the links within the link...

Sven wrote:

wage zombie wrote:

There's nothing wrong with being an independent thinker and voting against a bill that they or their constitutents disagree with.  The problem is refusing to allow the question to come to a vote.  If you don't want to vote for it fine, but filibustering is just preventing movement at all.

The filibuster has been used by both parties routinely as a means of stopping a vote.  This isn't unique to this healthcare bill.

No problem with parties using the filibuster as a means of stopping a vote.  That's part of the process.  The issue is senators filibustering their own party.  Vote against the bill, but if your party is putting forth the legislation, at least allow it to go to an up or down vote.

ETA: Just saw this, no doubt a big reason for the nail biter today:

Quote:

A telling statistic: Brown has made 66 campaign stops since the primary, while Coakley has made only 19, as of Sunday.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31632.html#ixzz0d6VX3P8n

I suspect that we'll know the results out of Massachusetts within about three or four hours, although it will be, as wage zombie noted, a real "nail biter".

Don't take this the wrong way, but... who cares? None of these petty dramas will have any effect on the lives of real U.S. people - not as long as progressive people don't stand up and make simple demands, e.g., that the U.S. should try to catch up with where civilized countries were at 50 years ago. Radical, yeah, I know, but what the hey.

"One of my favorite Senators from Minnesota (a Republican from the 1970s and 1980s) was a very independent thinker and was a constant thorn in the Reagan administration's side. I respect that independent thinking.  He wasn't a Republican sheep."

In case you didn't notice the days of there being "independent thinking Republicans" is long gone. Now they all vote 100% in lockstep with their leadership and are allowed no independence whatsoever.  Look at how even the totally watered down health care bill with no public option still had every single Republican vote against it. The Republicans are a party that only stands for one thing - NO to everything! The closest thing to an independent minded Republican is Olympia Snowe and even she voted NO to the healthr care reform even after the bill addressed every single one of her demands. She knows that unless she voted with the Republican leadership on everything she would probably get assassinated by some crazed tea-bagger in her home state. YOu never see Democrats  being so uniformly obstructionist towards a Republican President - they are all busy trying to be cooperative and "bipartisan". (I've come to the conclusion that "bipartisan" is just a euphemism for Democrats in name only eating a pile of Republiacn shit in exchange for NOTHING. It means Democrats caving in to Republicans - never the reverse.

I thought we'd have recounts, "hanging chads," litigation, etc. before this thing was over.

Hell...that race wasn't even close. 

Ken Burch wrote:

I'd expect the Senator from a state with a lot of poor people who don't have insurance to defend the people she represents and NOT to put the profits of Big Forma first.  And Arkansas has elected populist progressives like the antiwar senator J. William Fulbright and Dale Bumpers in the past, BOTH of whom would back universal health care, and probably even single-payer, in a heartbeat.

Senator Lincoln is a representative mainly for the enemies of the people who elected her.

This is sooo true. Some of the dead beat blue dog so-called democrats are from these dirt poor states like Arkansas and Louisiana that have some of the highest proportions of people with no health insurance etc...The people who actually have the most to gain from health care reform are people in places like Arkansas - not in relatively rich states like Massachusetts where a form of universal health care already exists (and which the new senator elect from that state supported - for some inexplicable reason he seems to think that universal health care is a good idea for Massachusetts but for no other part of the country - I assume its because he was told to filibuster ANYTHING proposed by Democrats or be lynched).

The Democrats don't actually control congress at all. Congress is controlled by a coalition of the Blue Dog Party and the GOP.