Yeah, but they’ll modify that at the last minute to ask if folks are in favor of a “socialistic unamerican frenchified public option”…..

On a serious note, Dave Weigel just posted this – perhaps this is a good thing for us if it stops the stupid stuff about Co-ops instead of a public option: Smelling blood in the water as Democrats made contradictory statements about what a Senate health care reform bill might contain, Republicans are pushing back against a possible compromise.

Funny, not a peep anywhere, and I do mean ANYWHERE, about ISRAEL’S FREE PUBLIC HEALTH SYSTEM underwritten by, wait for it…

US TAX PAYERS via foreign aid.

Funny? NOT.

http://bigdanblogger.blogspot……-2009.html

Media ownership study ordered destroyed
Sept 14, 2006

‘Every last piece’ destroyed

Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that “every last piece” of the report be destroyed. “The whole project was just stopped – end of discussion,” he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14836500/

Good – stupid Chuck Todd got his ass handed to him because he allowed a right-wing hack pollster to write questions to get certain answers.

Big Media has been so busy misinforming the public from the outset, the damage they’ve done to the cause of reform is incalculable.

It’s ALMOST as if they serve the same corporate masters as the GOP and Conservadems. /s

NBC should stop pretending and just carry Fox Nooz polls. There’s not much cachet to the WSJ since it is owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation.

We should come up with a pithy saying for a t-shirt supporting the public option and get it printed up. I’d be thrilled to wear one.

Glad they will do a real repeat of the question. The results will be interesting.

But, the kind of unprofessional nonsense these guys pulled turns polling into a joke. If these people were serious they would keep the same wording, if they only had the resources to do one question (and they surely have more resources). If they were really serious, they would test the effect of wording for controversial topics by having at least two differently worded versions that were randomly rotated. That is survey research 101. But they don’t do that, do they? Seems like they should have the money.

PO or NO

Demint from S.C. is holding a town hall here in Myrtle Beach. Is there a site I can go to to find out if he’s on the take from the insurance corps?

Same thing with Lindsay Graham.

As always, a spot on installment of This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.

How about this for a T-shirt slogan:

“I support the public option to take back my country from the fascist coxuckers who stole it and control the Congress, The Media and the Central Bank.”

Might need to be an XL, eh?

That would have to be a t-shirt that’s longer than I am. How about “it’s our money – give it back.”

I just watched Jonathan Alter on The Ed Show throw the public option under the bus. He said that almost no one voted for Barack Obama because he was for a Public Option and that liberals were going over the cliff if it’s Public Option or bust.

He derided the notion that it isn’t reform without the Public Option and was quite the apologist for the point of view that says the Public Option is only a small part of reform.

He said that co-ops could be effective! Ed did his best to bat down the misinformation, he said co-ops have been tried and they didn’t bring down costs, Alter said that no one knows that co-ops won’t be effective because they haven’t been tried on a national level.

W. T. F.

Alter also kept saying that he didn’t want anyone to misunderstand, that he is for the Public Option, but other than saying it, he sure didn’t act like it.

In a nutshell, he basically called all of us that are fighting for a Public Option and demanding that our representatives vote against any bill that doesn’t contain one idiots.

F you too, Alter.

PO or BO must GO.

Well Elliott’s is fine but most people who see it won’t know what it means. Plunger’s is fun, but more likely to start a fight down here in the red state home of dumbya.

Any other ideas?

Don’t think I could support a slogan which needlessly maligns “coxuckers.”

No Pubic Option, Morans!

Sorry to hear that about Alter. I saw him make a short statement on some tv show about how expensive his cancer treatment was a few years ago even though he did have medical insurance. He does care about this issue. Perhaps he’s getting the Villager Virus and needs to leave the Beltway to get himself innoculated against the stupid and ugly.

PO’d if there’s no P.O.

LOL excellent !

You probably need a snark tag if the misspelling is intentional. I never know anymore…

Can you see MSNBC shows on the internet anymore? Of course it’s not included in our basic package.

As you may know, 60 members of the House made it clear they won’t vote for a bill without a public option.

Between yesterday and today, FDL and partners raised over $150,000 for progressive members of Congress who agree to draw a line in the sand over a public plan:

http://campaignsilo.firedoglak…..nd-rising/

You, too, can offer carrots to these progressive politicians at ACT Blue:

http://www.actblue.com/page/theytookthepledge

*sigh* I guess only bloggers would really get it.

The restored poll will probably not show the % for answers that progressives want. obama and his admin have not laid out a clear plan and then gone on the attack to present it. Most people will have the right wing attacks reverberating in their minds and think that most people are against the PO.

How about:

WWJD? He’d support a public option.

Down here in fundie land that would get some attention. AND I wouldn’t have to buy an XXL shirt….

In fundie land, does the version of J really support a public option?

oh trust me, most of the dallas christianists are of the prosperity version.

I’m fond of the Bugs Bunny “maroon,” personally.

I have basic too. You can see MSNBC here.

Scarecrow is upstairs!
Prospect’s Starr to Progressives: Thanks for Being Pawns; Now Chill on the PO

United Healthcare breaks guitars.

OK that one sucks.

The bigger story is why is our representative form of government no longer working. Our “representative” congress created the current healthcare system, funded the iraq war, created the economic crisis, created our tax system, created our energy dependence and more.

Alter said at one point that he supports Single Payer and Ed said “I know, you’re a good guy” as an aside in the middle of an argument over the Public Option. Alter kept saying that the Public Option was a means to an end, the end being controlling costs, and that there were other ways to do that. Ed asked how, and Alter mentioned all kinds of things that haven’t even been proposed, like imposing Draconian regulation on the “evil insurance companies.”

What he fails to understand – and I can’t believe that Alter is this tone-deaf – is that the reason Republicans oppose the Public Option is because it controls costs, i.e., keeps their benefactors, the insurance companies, from squeezing every nickel out of us that they can so they can keep dumping gravy into legislators’ coffers.

Any other measure that would have the same effect that wasn’t a Public Option would meet just as much opposition from the same conflicted crowd. That’s why co-ops were proposed, because, contrary to Alter’s belief that “no one knows,” they don’t control costs, we have empirical proof, and if they did, they wouldn’t have been proposed. Co-ops against insurance companies would be like mom and pop stores against Wal-Mart, and we all know what happens to mom and pop stores when Wal-Mart comes to town.

Let’s say that someone figures out how to make a co-op that can compete and control costs. It would be opposed, just like the Public Option. Because it isn’t the Public Option part that conservatives oppose, it is the controlling costs part, i.e., anything that would significantly impose on insurance company profits.

Loves it!

Everyone here must understand, that everyone on TV has fantastic (probably FREE) health care.

The 85% of the public that wants the public option, is NOT on TV.

TV does not speak for them. TV speaks for: the wealthy, corporations, the military industrial complex…PERIOD!!!

We’re then told by these same people, different sections of them like rightwing media, that it’s “liberal media”.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT FOR THEM TO TELL YOU THEY ARE LIBERAL! Understand this!!!

Ratfood @ 10:

“The insurance companies will greet us as liberators.”

MAJOR keyboard spew! :o) :o) :o)

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow… :o)

Try OpenSecrets.org – Health industry donors are right up there with Retired! You can select from a menu of cycles, whatever suits your interests. For Graham, just enter his name in the search box at the top.

Sigh…..I guess it won’t work for me b/c I am not a corp or a millionaire.

I hold no brief for MSNBC, but give me a break — question 2 is MORE misleading than question 1. How many respondents are going to understand that, when the pollster asks “how important do you feel it is to give people a choice,” that (based on HR 3200, the more putatively “robust” legislation) “people” means only a small fraction of Americans under 65, and/or their employers; that the “choice” doesn’t kick in until 2013; and that the decision as to whether to greatly expand that definition of “people” will reside with some future HHS secretary who, for all we know, might be a Republican?

Question 2 may be worth asking, but to say that it is a truer representation of the “real bill,” as the title of this post indicates, is to perpetuate the lie promulgated by Howard Dean that the public option can best be explained as “Medicare for all who want it.” That may be true of the public option implied by question 2 — ie, the public option of our fondest (incrementalist) dreams — but not of the public option in HR 3200.

I don’t think so. I think he’s just really concerned about getting everyone on some kind of funding as quickly as possible, and he thinks the the PO needs 60 votes to pass and cant pass under reconciliation. OTOH, an expansion of eligibility for Medicare under Medicare could be passed as part of reconciliation, and the regulatory aspects such as no denial of access and no rescissions could be handled in a second bill brought up in this session. If things were done this way the financial issues and expansion of Medicare coverage could be handled in a process needing only 51 votes, whereas the regulatory, which have greater moral clarity to them could be handled in the regular process where Blue Dogs and some Republicans would have a harder time voting against changes. See here and here.

I very much agree with this analysis, but I think it doesn’t go far enough. That is, one has to consider the history of the PO up to this point. The Republicans have managed to spread all kind sof myths about it and have mobilized against it. Also, it’s not an explicit attack on the insurance companies. Yes, it would control them to a degree; but it’s basically a compromise measure that doesn’t shout out to people, “this will protect you from the insurance companies.” It will absolutely prevent them from screwing you and it will definitely reduce costs and the rate of cost increases. Instead, it says “the market will keep them honest,” (like it keeps the bankers and other big businesses honest?) and “oh, btw, your buying insurance from them will now be mandatory since HR 3200 prevents you from getting the PO, unless you are an uninsured individual, and also btw, this great solution is going to cost $1.5 trillion.”

So perhaps Jonathan Alter is wondering whether this kind of approach is really better at getting public support than more direct measures, such as extending Medicare to more people, prohibiting increases in insurance prices greater than the general rate of inflation outside of the health insurance industry, or regulating salaries and profits in the industry? I can’t say whether this is the case because I don’t know Jonathan. But I wonder about this myself.

The PO is something that was forced on progressives by the President and those around him including private organizations that mistakenly thought they would have less opposition from industry than Bill Clinton got previously. It is not something that we ought to have an ideological attachment to. We all think that Medicare for All is a better insurance solution. Let’s return to that and spend our time and resources on something we really believe in, and leave the PO as a last resort compromise that we will have to dragged kicking and screaming to accept.

That’s right. the real liberal media is here. It’s not the cable networks or the other MSM. They’re all so cool and “objective” about health insurance reform issues because they believe they don’t have any.

Exactly.