Let's accept what the Wall Street Journal says:
"[T]he reality is that no one wants a public option except the political left."

A strong majority of people therefore belong to the political left.

Works for me.

But, but, how dare those pollsters ask questions that accurately describe reality?!! Talk about biased! ;-)

Confusion and discord are the only weapons they have available.

Conservatives are having a hard time attacking health insurance reform on substantive grounds because the bill was crafted to avoid conflicting with conservatives' stated goals. They have to talk themselves in circles when confronted with the actual bill (example: undocumented immigrants are explicitly not covered by the bill, so when the "liberals want to cover illegals" meme was promoted, it was an easy refutation to simply quote the bill).

Look for these clowns to start getting crazy again (example: death panels). It's their only hope.

Beck is just towing the Fox party line..make shit up and sound sincere. If you can't disprove a patently obvious lie, then you must have done it.

The questions are slanted. The most obvious evidence of this is the absence of descriptive adjectives like "communist," "Kenyan" and "Hitlerish."

The sad thing is that many people who support the public option are unaware that the "option" under debate is available only to those who don't receive insurance through their employer. They are only vaguely aware of the contours of some angry debate between what they see as partisans on both sides; that's more or less the way the media is covering it. When they realize how limited the "public option" is, and how irrelevant it is to their lives, they'll just be confirmed in their idea that government is useless.

To comment further, I believe this situation is the result of the fact that liberal media sources, from tv to the blogosphere, acquiesed with the Democratic Party's decision to take single-payer off the table. Maybe this was corruption on their part, or as they claim a political calculation about what was possible. Either way it was a terrible negotiating tactic.
If a single-payer medicare for all type system been part of the public debate, then we would now be "settling" for something like the Wyden/Bennett proposal.

All of Benen's examples are loaded questions because they don't alert those being polled to the socialist nature of a government plan.

It's amazing how much power the Republicans wield. With only 40 senators (outnumbered 3 to 2), they have managed to get the Democrats to compromise as follows:

(1) Public option for all (Single payer).
(2) Choice of private or public options.
(3) Public option only for the uninsured on the exchange (maximum 15% of Americans)
(4) Public option for the uninsured on the exchange, but privately run and only in blue-ish states.

and possibly...

(5) F^%k it, no public option.

For a party that compromised away zero votes, that is remarkable achivement.

To comment further, I believe this situation is the result of the fact that liberal media sources, from tv to the blogosphere, acquiesed with the Democratic Party's decision to take single-payer off the table.

I agree with most of what you said, but it wasn't "liberal media sources" who aided in removing single-payer from the debate. The fact that single-payer has barely been mentioned only helps to disprove the myth of a "liberal" media. Or I guess prove that it's a myth.

It seems the corporate media really wants to not only distort the truth, but outright LIE and distort the facts. Why do they consistently claim that truth and facts have a liberal bias? Yes, disagreement over those facts can be argued, but to blatantly lie about those facts is propaganda and not based in reality. It clearly shows their agenda is not to get the facts correct but manipulate and misrepresent their facts as truth. Are Beck and even the Wall Street Journal editorial columns EVER fact checked for reality-based truth and held accountable for their lies?

Do you agree with Barack Hussein Obama’s facist goal to create a health care plan similar to the Hurricane Katrina response?

the wall street journal's editorial page has lifted intellectual dishonesty to an art form.

by the way elsie, fox and the wall street journal are hardly representative of 'the media.' in fact fox and the journal share something in common. rupert murdoch

Re: the WSJ comment: "[T]he reality is that no one wants a public option except the political left."

This is a problem the rightward leaning Democratic Party (pushed by Clinton, for purely personal, political advantage) has given us and itself. Mainline, unapologetic Democratic Party principles, once widely embraced, are now "progressive," and from there right wing thugs who know how to spell at the WSJ leap to "political left" so that their ignorant followers start screaming everything from socialism to fascism with little Hitler mustaches pasted on pix of Obama just in case we didn't get the drift.

The truth is obvious: when, as now, most people want something, they are not left, or right, but a majority and mainstream. A recent poll reports that 80% -- a clear mainstream majority -- of registered Democrats, and there are more Dems in the country than Republicans by a large margin, want the public option.

Media has to stop falling into this trap of phony labels. And MSM won't, and now can't pretty much, help because corporations who think like Murdoch, and Murdoch himself, own them.

So hats off to Steve and Glenn Greenwald and kos and all the others; when the history is written, the Internet and the blogs will have saved the day. If the good guys win....

FOX News poll: "Do you agree or disagree with the government setting up an insurance option that will bankrupt the government, be run by the DMV, and kill your grandmother?"

What is it about total victory the White House doesn't like? With the opt-out concept, it's been handed to them on a silver platter, and yet it seems to be signaling. With the possibility of the state to reflect the wishes of the majority of its citizens and choose not to make the public plan available in a state -- perhaps with a state or regional public option in its stead -- what possible objection could there be? How can there be any legitimacy to preventing Americans who are being forced by law to cover themselves with health insurance from having the choice of a Federally-chartered non-profit plan operating solely on premiums and investments as for-profit companies do, instead of commanding that they buy insurance from a for-profit private enterprise?

The profit concept is dicey in the health insurance field in the first place, because it introduces a potential conflict-of-interest in life-or-death situations. Perhaps it can work acceptably with a different business model that religiously separates claims adjusting from finance, with predictability of relatively modest profits displacing continuous growth as the attraction for the investor. But people should be entitled not to trust that and choose insurance that is not subject to conflict with profit objectives. Denying that choice of the most affordable possible plan (subject to requiring that plan to compete without benefit of general tax revenues in order to preserve competition) is simply indefensible.

The White House should be bending heaven and earth over Lieberman and Snowe. Denying a vote on a public option that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe it's a choice they should have should be an irreversible political death sentence for anyone claiming to be a Democrat or a moderate. Why is the White House so passive or even borderline hostile about this promising development?

Hi all. By learning to discover and value our ordinariness, we nurture a friendliness toward ourselves and the world that is the essence of a healthy soul. Help me! I can not find sites on the: Computer programming job description. I found only this - job in computer repair. Other characters have the contractual disease of regarding intelligence for moments and experiencing and trusting the local grafting that was made in series, hair replacement. She is down the tissue of species and wide citizens by frazz and caulfield, hair replacement. THX :rolleyes:, Leba from South.