At best Wasserman Schultz was ignorant about the validity of the Public Option passage through Reconciliation. More likely she was disingenuous in waving off O’Donnell’s questions and deliberately and not mentioning the 122 of her colleagues who signed on to the Polis/Pingree letter asking Harry Reid the same thing that Senate is now asking, i.e. to pass the Public Option through reconciliation. The only plausible explanation of her behavior I find is that she has been carrying water for Rahm – without regard to her own colleagues. Indirectly the water she carries quenches the thirst of the Corporate patrons.

The deal was done. It’s over.

Right now right away, a warning should be brought home to Pelosi and Reid that it will cost them dearly in the 8010 elections if the disaffected base stays home.

Some of the falsehoods or half truths in the Whitehouse Health Care Reform sales pitch.

There is a real danger that Progressive Caucus and “San Francisco Liberal” Speaker Pelosi, will disappoint their base enough that the protection of the Blue Strays would come at the expense of their own seats.

There is a real danger that Progressive Caucus and “San Francisco Liberal” Speaker Pelosi, would disappoint their base enough that their appeasement of Blue Dogs would come at the expense of their own seats.

The solid front of Democratic Party progressives supporting the Senate’s health care form bill, has now cracked wide open with Howard Dean’s call to kill the Senate bill and start over in the House with reconciliation. Dean’s call hasn’t cracked open the floodgates among the Senate and House Democrats and in recent days people like Bernie Sanders and Anthony Weiner have indicated that even though they’re sympathetic, they’re not with Howard yet, while others like Ben Cardin, Jay Rockefeller, and a veritable hallelujah chorus of other Democratic Senators have registered strong disagreement with him, insisting that the bill should still be supported. Meanwhile, Harry Reid continues to oppose using reconciliation to pass a bill. Why?

Polling organizations such as WaPo/ABC have accepted a misleading frame for the public option story by focusing mainly on asking the public what its opinion is of an idea very similar to the original PO. It has not asked everyone in any of its samples about restricted eligibility PO plans, or about State-run plans. It has not asked anyone about single-payer, Medicare for All since June, playing into the Administration’s view that it should be taken off the table even though millions of people favor it, even though there are two current single-payer bills in Congress, and even though it would have required only an extra question in any of these surveys to ask about. What a miserable failure in serving the public this record of polling is. What accounts for it? Are the people at these polling organizations so politically biased that they deliberately slanted their supposedly scientific activities to create a frame that would be favorable to Administration proclivities? Or are they simply so immersed in the Washington insider world that they are no longer competent to create reasonably objective polling efforts that represent shades of opinion across the political spectrum on health insurance reform. I’m sure the answer is more like a combination of both bias and incompetence. But based on WaPo’s errors in adding general PO to support to restricted eligibility PO support in its surveys, I’m starting to incline a bit toward the incompetence explanation.

Nationalization is the only smart way to solve all the Health Insurance problems in one fell swoop.

What we need to do now is to get morally outraged at the whole legislative process up till now, and work to defeat everything “on the table” in Congress, and go back to square 1. And square 1 is enhanced Medicare for All. And the first thing we ought to do in the context of pushing that, is to seek a vote on S703, Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill, and, along the way, force a showdown on the filibuster and use the “nuclear option” to get the 60 vote nonsense off the table for good, so we can pass health care reform with a simple majority, and without the need for any deficit-neutral nonsense.

Again, I’m all for outrage, and even fury; but it needs to be directed toward the right things, and they are all the earlier outrages committed in this health care reform legislative process starting with taking Medicare for All, single-payer off the table.

”Everybody In, Nobody Out!