Look, no one can blame Snowe for trying to extend her period in the spotlight and influence...but I can certainly blame Obama, Reid and the Democrats if they capitulate to it.

"Look, no one can blame Snowe for trying to extend her period in the spotlight and influence"

Really? Because it seems to me that national health care is more important than a Senator for a state that doesnt mean shit.

OKAY, here is the plan...NO MATTER what gets passed and called HEALTH CARE REFORM Dems need to learn to spin the meme as WE WON and for the American people! You remember, like BUSHCO did every damn time! Say it over and over and eventually our braindead (what are the other guys saying?) media will pick it up and run with it...also do the old (like Br'er Rabbit) spin saying WE REALLY REALLY WANTED YOU TO spend all this time arguing and talking abut SOME public option so you'd be distracted by the rest of the bill and just be glad you "won" your little defeat the PO battle!

Delay is another word for obstruct. If they can't vote it down, they will chip away at it. If they can't chip away at it, they will delay it. If they can't delay it, they will distract from it...and they can distract forever.

If the Dems don't do something soon, they will fail.

Can someone please explain how 1 Republican vote can make a bill bipartisan? It's absurd!

For Snowe, delay is not "counter-productive": what she wants to produce is no bill, no reform, and delay is just the way to do it.

whatever snowe represents to the obama administration, it aint maine and it aint bipartisanship. it's corporate power.

we get the puppet show while they play health care reform poker.

Dear President Obama:
Fuck Olympia Snowe (I don't mean that literally). She's no different than Kyl or McConnell, she just talks nicer.

I can understand why Senator Snowe would want to delay this new-fangled thing called "health care reform." Why, until July of this year, most people had never even heard of health care before, and now here we are in October, and those damn Democrats are tring to reform it?!

Shorter Snowe: because Republicans have chosen to ignore the issues with health care for the last couple of decades, we need time to get up to speed on the issues so that we don't upset our corporate sponsors.

Just Grassley from a blue state.

Ask Sen. Snowe how she will know when we have given reform the thought it needs and requires. And keep asking until she can give an answer with an objective measure, which she never will. She'll just hem and haw until Maine freezes over.

No mystery here. Delay until November 2010 and the party mix in congress might tilt in favor of the corporatists. That buys them another two years.

My guess is Senator Snowe is beginning to regret her time in the spot light.

What does she want to be remembered for? Being the ONE PERSON that held up health care reform? If that's the case, in ten years her name could become a substitute for a whole bunch of four letter words.

December is too soon the same way the stimulus bill was too big. She has a vague feeling that it shouldn't be done any earlier, just like the stimulus should have been a nice round (smaller) number.

Apparently evidence doesn't enter into her decision-making process.

You can get your thumb in the waist band of her panties but you just can't pull them down. Ain't it a bitch.

Why delay? Short answer - Senator Byrd.

You can get your thumb in the waist band of her panties but you just can't pull them down. Ain't it a bitch.

You and Blue Girl are on the same page where Snowe is concerned. She thinks that she was a tease in high school and hasn't changed a damned bit.

I hope no one is buying her crap. Stalling gives the opposition more time to try to turn public opinion against reform...to allow Health ins industry lobbyists to bribe and blackmail more senators.

Baucus' 1500page nonsense was just an attempt to make sure private ins were not hit any harder than necessary and the bill still be called reform.

A bad reform bill is just as bad as no bill at all politically as the president and the dems will come off as ineffectual...letting a handful of senators ruin a long awaited, history making HC bill.

The senate has stalled long enough on this issue. Safe to say the public is extremely frustrated by all the delays. Obama seems willing to sign any bill just to save face politically but that will backfire with a bad bill and a public option with a trigger makes it a bad bill.

Triggers don't work...it would just be a gift to the private ins industry because they would make sure it would never get pulled.

So Health care reform with a trigger is no reform at all and it will doom the dems. Snowe will be renowned for bringing all the dems down by getting an ins trigger into the reform bill because then all we will have is a bill forcing everyone to carry Health ins with huge government subsidies to cover those who can't afford it all going to private ins.

With Snowes "trigger" might as well make United Health care president as far as Health care reform is concerned.

How much support does Snowe get from the Health Care Insurance Industry? There's your answer.

Snowe is just trying to position herself on whichever side comes out on top. If she could kill this thing, she would. Right now, she doesn't think she can, so she's trying to increase her prominence in its eventual success. And if it doesn't succeed, boy you bet she will make sure everyone knows it was because of her say-so. She is an egomaniac, pure and simple.

More than one hundred people die evey day because of our broken healthcare system but Snowe thinks were going to fast. Perhaps 2 soldiers die per week in Afghanistan, but if Obama wants to give escalation some further thought, that's dithering. You can't have it both ways.

A) i must have missed it: when was the election in which it was decided a pseudo-centrist from Maine got to decide the future of health care in this country?

B) there are some things Bush did that are worth repeating: start every bill as far off to the right as humanly possible, that way the watering down process isn't nearly as damaging. think about it, if obama had started off with a single-payer bill, do you even THINK we'd be arguing about opt-out clauses and triggers? we'd have olympia snow, "champion moderate", inserting the "public option" and voila, we'd have a bill.

THEN, we people saw that even a public option couldn't get the job done, the next battle -- for single-payer -- would be that much easier to win.

Run the clock down till election nonsense kicks in.
Score:
Corporatists 1
Electorate 0
Congress -1 (again)

No progress for sixty years, and she wants us to slow down? Any slower and we'd be going backwards.

Later the same morning, Benen would accuse conservative bloggers of failing to recognize satire.

Dragging this out for the sake of dragging this out seems wildly unnecessary, and more than a little counter-productive.

It depends on your perspective. Remember that Olympia Snowe is a Republican. For the Republicans, delaying this into 2010 gets all the moderate Democrats in House and Senate nervous about their re-election, since the American people's politicalmemory is only about six months long - if they delay it to February or March, they can keep the drooler base fired up for November and scare some of our less-informed fellow citizens sufficiently to see if they can't get their momentum back.

Snowe is no less the enemy than Mitch McConnell or any of the rest of these scum.