"Any chance the Big Dog has any sway with Ben Nelson?"

No, because Obama and Reid have made it totally clear that anyone can do / demand / say anything, and there will be no consequences, no party discipline.

The only people they think are worth attacking are the dirty f'ing hippies.

Any chance the Big Dog has any sway with Ben Nelson? -- Steve Benen

Only if he can -- credibly -- threaten to take Nelson's military base away...

Once again, Clinton is expressing wrong logic about perfect v. good. Some things are worse than nothing if compromised and half-built. There is a big difference between saying a car is better than a bicycle across the mountains, if you can't go by plane. But then what if you had a car with no radiator, it's better to say "no" and start over. People have explained over and over that a mandate without enough controls could make things worse, both in effect and electorally. You don't have to agree with their specific analyses to at least accept they are framing the issue in a plausible way.

The cachet of the Big Dawg is hardly inspiring...in these latter days.

If he and Obama had been playing a little piggy-in-the-middle with the chief Bozos in the Clown Car Senate, say, back in March or May or August, his grandstand at the moment wouldn't sniff the peculiar scent of his great triangulatin' third way...

Pass or fail, this thing is shit. dog shit. A shitty bill, passed or failed. A death of a thousand cuts to the Dims in 2010, and -- along with (un)employment and a river of blood in Afghanistan, for the whole shitpot in 2012 -- at least as it stand rite now...

What a bunch of fuck-ups.
Truly oscar-worthy vaudville...with tears and a wrenched gut...

Nelson maybe, me not! That sounds more like a DLC press release than Clinton any way.

Maybe Obama can punch some gays instead of hippies, too, like Clinton did.

Yeah. President Clinton. There's a man progressives trust!

People keep using this line about "is this exactly the way I would like the bill to read?" as if the bill was even vaguely like a bill I might like. It isn't. It is beyond compromise. It is, bascially, what the insurance industry wants, and that has to be a bad thing. (And no, I do not believe that any of the supposed "reform" on the industry will have any affect at all.) I am still waiting for someone to offer a meaningful justification that compensates for the awful mandate requirement. All I hear is that it will cover x or y more people, but will it really? Or is it just requiring those people to get coverage themselves, and some will also get assistance but will still be spending their own money (which they may or may not easily be able to afford). If the bill is this difficult to defend, I suspect that it is even worse than I imagine it to be. This is now all about claiming to have achieved something good when nothing really meritorious at all has been achieved. Do I hear "mission accomplished"?

Yeah. President Clinton. There's a man progressives trust!

Just another DINO to throw on the purity fire...

If only we had elected President Nader. Then we would have everything we ever wanted. If only we could have mustered another 55 million votes or so.

Military base
Ag subsidies
Illegal workers in meat processing plants
NelNet (student loan subsidies)

These are a few of his favorite things.

I am guessing, at this point in time, NelNet is the way to Ben Nelson's heart.

P.S. Notice all of the official and unofficial insider pressure to "compromise" is on the liberals... again.

It'd be a shame to lose Roe v. Wade, too. What next, are they gonna tie a revocation of the 19th Amendment to this? If only you liberals would see the greater good!!!!

Ben Nelson likes to treat women like animals. It is part of his character, raising and how he views women. Nothing changes that kind of hatred and disrespect.

neil b: Can your speech really be over a public option which was never going to cover more than a tiny percentage of the population? Was a mandate acceptable when that public option was in the bill? If so - given it's limitations - why?

In this case it's the mediocre that is, in fact, the enemy of the good.

Hey John S... you seem to be the only person in here with a special something for Ralph Nader... why don't you go hang on his website...tell him what a narcissist he is...we're busy dealing with a Corvair of a health care 'reform' bill here... aint got time for novelists...

So what was that process in the House about? Just an exercise while the real legislature decided what the final bill would look like?

Why bother even having a House of Representatives if it has no say?

just to add, guys, we're gonna get blamed. No matter how this turns out, they're all gearing up to blame the left for the failure (either of passage or what is actually passed).

Its all Howard Dean's fault! And those purity-seeking leftists!

(Don't look to your right, don't look to your right...)

Yeah, Bubba failed, but at least he fought the tide to get something rather than fighting the tide to put on the brakes.

The threat of the "colossal blunder", in the end, is the only thing that will push people over the precepace to pass this thing, and only when faced with the real possibility of getting no reform. It's an argument for making them chose between this and nothing rather than anything, though, I think.

The irony is, the more "stars" in the Democratic party come out in defense of this awful bill, and the more pressure they exert on the activists and true progressives to hold their noses and start supporting this awful bill, the more shitheads like Lieberman & Nelson & Snowe will feel comfortable making the bill even worse, assuming that we've been scolded by our betters and now we'll do what we're being told is in our best interests.

What's worse, is that they're not done yet. Lieberman hasn't said "at last, THIS is a bill I can get behind!" Nelson hasn't offered his support. Snowe's a snowball's chance in Hell & Collins is even worse. This bill is no longer watered down legislation, it's legislationed-up water, and we STILL don't definitively have 60 votes (which, I've heard tell, is 9 more than the "majority rule" that USED to be needed to pass legislation once upon a time).

The only hope (and this is a pipe dream of a conspiracy theory of an assumption) is that Dems in the Senate have been secretly planning all along to get any bill passed, by any means necessary, AND THEN "reconcile" the crap out of it with all the budget amendments that can be added on to the bill, but only after the bill has safely become a law. That is my deepest most fervent prayer, that is my "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," as the noose is tied around this bill and it's pushed off its footing, maybe it can survive and become stronger after it becomes a law, and this has been the top secret plan...

Of course, anyone who's ever read "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" or seen the short film/Twilight Zone adaptation, knows how THAT ends.

I begrudgingly agree with the lying-cheating-man-whore. . . except on one point. He says "this will cripple us economically" - and to that, I answer: where have you been for 20 years? Health costs have been crippling us economically for a long time. Our economy has been propped up by debt and speculation; but the 40 million+ uninsured haven't benefitted from that. They've been economically crippled by this, this is an indication and proof of it.

And we still are economically crippled, more of us are - and we will be until we get a sane single-payer system. Like the rest of the civilized world.

What a shame the Democratic leadership didn't put this kind of effort behind a much better bill, earlier the process. Who knows, it might have made a difference.

As it is, Uncle Bill really isn't an expert on quality health care reform--just on one method of getting it to fail. That's all.

But America can't afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

American especially can't afford let the awful be a proxy for the good.

"At last, we are close to making real health insurance reform a reality."

Notice he said "health insurance reform" not "health care reform."

So what was that process in the House about? Just an exercise while the real legislature decided what the final bill would look like?

Shh. People hate to be reminded that this is not, in fact, the bill that the president will sign because it will still have to be reconciled with the House bill that does include the public option. They don't want to know that if this bill passes, there are still weeks (if not a few months) of negotiation ahead and the final bill is hammered out and sent to both houses of Congress for final approval before the president can sign it. They also don't want to know that the provisions of this bill don't automatically override the House bill and everything in the House bill is still available to be included in the final bill.

Everyone's tired and it's so much easier to call the whole thing off and declare the whole project a failure before we actually complete the process.

"Everyone's tired and it's so much easier to call the whole thing off and declare the whole project a failure before we actually complete the process."

--Mnemosyne

I don't see people saying stop fighting the whole project is a failure, I see people saying stop fighting the Senate bill is the best we're going to get.

That's what I'm not getting. Why are progressives being told to shut up and not say they won't settle for the current Senate version?

We can still fight for something better. That's what Howard Dean is saying. Why are others throwing in the towel and saying the current Senate bill is the best we can get and we should sit down, shut up and stop fighting?

Mnemosyne
Why on Earth would we get a better bill in reconciliation if we don't start our bellyaching now? The question is whether, when the bill goes to reconciliation, they're more afraid of losing us or Lieberman. If their polls tank (as they have) when they sell us down the river, they're more apt to salvage something out of this trainwreck, and the Senators will be more willing to vote for the better bill that comes out.

We're sending a pretty clear message that the Senate bill goes too far, and if they want the base, the final bill better damn well be better than it is rather than worse.

They now know where our bottom line is, and that they can't make this bill any worse without serious consequences which is the first memomentum we've had in favor of a good HCR than we've had since the capitulations began.

Look, as long as you're trading the Individual Mandate, the only bargaining chip that will EVER have a chance of bringing these motherfuckers to the table, then we aren't interested in a bill.

Once you give that away, the games over. If you want to give that away and hope to keep left-wing support, you better go back and get a much better deal.

If not, strip the bill down and pass what you can. The Democrats should never have taken this up if they didn't plan on doing something real. They should have waited and tried to reform the political system to make it less corrupt first.

Yeah. President Clinton. There's a man progressives trust!

Just another DINO to throw on the purity fire...

If only we had elected President Nader. Then we would have everything we ever wanted. If only we could have mustered another 55 million votes or so.
Posted by: John S

exactly! the election of 2000 had so little effect on history. there was sooooo little difference between al gore and george bush that we just had to vote for ralph. just ask the families of those who died in iraq and those who were maimed fighting a war that never should have been instigated by a president who never should have held office. in the spirit of the naderites, let's kill reform and in the process kill thousands more americans who don't have health care because the reform bill isn't pure enough! after all politics is just a game played to win, not govern.

Wow, I'm starting to feel like the latest Senate health care bill will show up inside a burning bag of dog shit on my front porch.

Maybe Bill could concentrate his might powers of persuasion on some Senators to improve the bill rather than convincing the downtrodden to eat shit and like it.

You quote Bill Clinton: "Take it from someone who knows: these chances don't come around every day. Allowing this effort to fall short now would be a colossal blunder -- both politically for our party and, far more important, for the physical, fiscal, and economic health of our country."

And you write, "Any chance the Big Dog has any sway with Ben Nelson?

I would add that Keith, Howard, and Markos, etc., better be paying attention, as well.

Hey John S... you seem to be the only person in here with a special something for Ralph Nader

Snark. It's what's for dinner.

At least mudwall jackson got it.

I am amused by how the clintons went from persona-non-grata to revered statespeople as soon as they started saying what Obama wanted, at least with a certain crowd who seem to have no compunctions about consistency.

Without reflection upon his previous service, Mr. Clinton cannot be speaking honestly here. He saw what happened in 1993: the insurance industry was emboldened and embarked upon a wholesale campaign of breach of contract, to the vast detriment of individual and public health (and also to the vast detriment of American employers, whose attitudes are not sufficiently understood).

Above all, the insurance industry must not be emboldened again. They have made this bill their own and are banking upon its passage. If it fails, they will be shocked and bewildered, and that is how we want them to be, because when they are shocked and bewildered they adopt a pose of caution, thereby killing fewer people. If the bill passes, they will immediately stop all payouts, except to entities with which they have interlocking ownership, and there won't be a damn thing that any regulator or prosecutor or customer can do about it. There are still doctors who turn up their noses at Medicare: wait until their revenue dries up overnight. Wait until employers realize that they are paying huge (and hugely increasing) premiums for exactly nothing in return.

Grb, sorry to come back late: it isn't just about the PO per se, it's the entire cost-control issue. Is there enough, from whatever source, to keep the premiums down and the service adequate? Well?

Not sure Clinton is the best standard bearer here, given that he was probably the best Republican president since Ike. I mean, he did do more than any president since Reagan (and that includes Bush II, by the way), to advance the cause of the financial sector. He did do more to deregulate the financial sector than even Bush II did. On top of that, he also ended welfare as we knew it and declared that the era of big government was over.

Oh, yeah, and was so weak minded that he couldn't keep his dick in his pants long enough to accomplish even more.

So, let's by all means listen to what he has to say.

I've heard the arguments in favor of not blaming Obama, which are absurd. I've also heard the arguments in favor of holding our collective noses and getting this thing pass, which is much more persuasive, though I still come down against it.

The problem I'm having with even the latter is that, unlike the legislation it is being compared to (SS and Medicare) that is supposed to give us hope for future improvements, nothing in the Senate bill really lays a foundation for further enhancements. In fact, all of the supposed benefits seem to revolve around regulations. Nothing structurally has changed with this legislation, which is what either the public option or expansion of Medicare would have done.

Don't know if anyone was alive during the Bush II Administration or not, but there is quite a bit of discretion involved in actually, you know, enforcing regulations. Why does anyone who is defending this as some great jumping off point not addressing that? Bush II chose not to adhere to the letter of the law on a host of regulations and, well, got a way with it. So, why are we supposed to believe that these new, oh so very strict regulations, will be different? Obama has showed no spine in so many other arenas, why should we trust his administration to enforce these new regulations, much less any future Republican administration?

Any reform that doesn't phase out health insurance is a failure. The non-value added, price gouging segment of the economy wields far too much power with current and former members of the government. I am getting pretty tired of "centrists" who throw progressives under the bus. How about some real leadership that isn't invested in the insurance industry or centrist egotism?

It seems too many people are prepared to cut their noses to spite their faces here. If collectively you acknowledge that the Dems will lose a number of their seats come the next election, what are the chances that they will be replaced by more liberal members of congress? America is the most economically conservative country on planet earth and you must accept that. To suddenly expert that to CHANGE because an intelligent black man is in power is just plain stupid.
As much as progressives are responsible for Obama's victory moderate (and in some cases conservative) Americans voted for him too. His mandate was not to govern for the pleasure of liberals, rather the benefit of all americans.

Who among you believe Bush motives were corrupt in most of what he did during his presidency? Now who among you believe that Obama has similar motives for what he has done so far during his term?

I think the test for good and bad politicians must always be their motives for their governing actions because, let's face it, no one knows for sure what will be the real impact of the passage and non-passage of this bill or whatever other bill that will be passed by this government until at some future point in time when people looks back at it.

Most Americans (MOST) supported the war in Iraq until innocent lives were lost (mostly innocent Iraqi civilians at the hands of the american war-machine) and it was discovered that the Bush administration cooked the facts to make a case for war.

Now my question is whether anyone believes that when the history of time is reviewed people will say Obama misled Americans to pass HCR against the interests of ordinary Americans? I don't believe so.

I do not believe that an average Columbia and Harvard graduate does public interest work and teaches all his life in order to enter government and intentionally fuck up the lives of the poor or ordinary Americans (who I guess we are all concerned about here).
If we accept that Obama's motives are true reform then the next question we must ask ourselves is why have the most progressive reforms been dumped? Is it because the liberals in congress ignored them or have they been sacrificed on the negotiation table for the greater good. Any good lawyer will tell you that once you fight on principle you are almost inevitably wasting your money and the a compromise (settlement) is exactly like a draw, it's like kissing your sister.

My point is that you must accept that you voted for Obama not because he promised to be the most progressive president ever (hello, his role model was an 1800s Republican president - need I say more). He promised to do whatever was necessary for the good of the "middle class" americans - who btw are pretty moderate and hold the biggest sway in elections in america. Remember Lamont?

Plus you cannot blame Obama or any of the Dem leaders for Lieberman or Nelson or whoever else is causing shit in the Senate because they do not vote for them. Blame voters from the individual states for bringing these sh*t-as*es to washington in the first place!

exactly! the election of 2000 had so little effect on history. there was sooooo little difference between al gore and george bush that we just had to vote for ralph. just ask the families of those who died in iraq and those who were maimed fighting a war that never should have been instigated by a president who never should have held office. in the spirit of the naderites, let's kill reform and in the process kill thousands more americans who don't have health care because the reform bill isn't pure enough! after all politics is just a game played to win, not govern.

What do you say to the soldiers dying in Afghanistan and Iraq right now and families of soldiers?

Bullshit scare tactics. My plan will be taxed under this bill, which means my tax money is getting funneled to insurance executives and not a public option. Wake up.

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