democrats kill the public option in health care reform- Page 3

[strummergirl]

Posted: 12/16/09 at 7:31pm

Sen. Rockefeller does respond to Dean:

Andrea Mitchell asked about Dean's belief that the Senate health care bill was so compromised it should be put to death.

"It's nonsense. And it's irresponsible. And coming from him as a physician, it's stunning. And he's wrong. Does that answer your question?" Rockefeller responded. He ticked off the good things that were still in the health care legislation. "This'll be good for people. Am I angry that the public option appears to have been dropped? Of course I'm angry about that," he said. "I proposed the original bill on the floor that was the tough one. ... Was I for the Medicare buy-in? Of course I was. ... So what do I do? Do I take my football and run home and sulk and complain?"

Mitchell cut in, but Rockefeller wasn't done. "I'm a grownup, you're a grownup," he added. "We've been around this business for a long time. And you never get everything you want. You don't sulk about it. You try to keep improving the bill."

The last sentence would mean a passage then be built upon but nobody will see that last sentence and think since this bill on the Senate floor has improved anything.

[javero]

Posted: 12/17/09 at 3:57am

"I dread the inevitable epidemic of cynicism."

The floodgates are open. Early in the primaries, I suggested on this very board that Obama was not as liberal as many here believed. I'm delighted that he's both pragmatic and a top-notch politico because there's nothing worse than having a tone-deaf ideologue in the White House. My special interests are not your pressing concerns and vice versa; it's all relative to the observer. Some have argued that the art of politics is always about compromise.

Obama needs to both order a public flogging of Lieberman and take Pelosi/Reid to the wood shed so that they learn to fall into formation. Otherwise, he's a one-termer. The Dems in power are not clever enough to pull off the good cop/bad cop routine. With mid-term elections looming, the two chambers of Congress and the White House are at variance too often now to bring about the change Obama peddled on the campaign trail. Obama has to appeal to his (and Hillary's) base quickly at the expense to losing some fence-straddling indies.

Obama vs The True Left

[Roscoe]

Posted: 12/17/09 at 9:33am

"...the two chambers of Congress and the White House are at variance too often now to bring about the change Obama peddled on the campaign trail."

That's assuming of course that Obama ever actually intended to bring about the change he peddled on the campaign trail.

Remember his slogan -- CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. He never once said a word about CHANGE THAT YOU CAN DEPEND ON, or CHANGE THAT WILL ACTUALLY HAPPEN, or even CHANGE FOR THE BETTER.