That could very well be another seldomly considered problem with our government; not only are we hyper-polarized along party lines making governing very difficult, we have the added problem of a distinctly less formidable brain trust than in previous generations when it comes to our elected officials.

And they just so happen to come from certain states... hmmm...

Simple solution - as a compromise, offer to have the bill changed to read exactly what it already does to address his concerns.

In other words, he's dumb.

So the esteemed Senator Nelson is either dishonest, dumb, incompetent, lazy, or all of the above?

Empowering Mr. Ugly Face

Well you can say this about the super-majority requirement: It sure has empowered a handful of old scabs from small states to throw hissy fits and receive hospitality service with a smile...

In other words, his understanding of the contents of the bill comes from Fox News or some other equally dubious outlet. I guess he doesn't have a paid staff, or if he does, they are all dolts who fell off the Nebraska turnip truck just yesterday.

What's that? Nelson is threatening to kill a bill that will SAVE PEOPLE'S LIVES and his stated reasons are factually erroneous -- nay, moronic -- on their face?

Cue the outrage and derision from Joe Klein, Ron Brownstein, and Chris Mattews!

When does a sergeant laugh at a joke?
Right away.
The captain laughs the next day -- when he understands it.
The major laughs a couple of days later -- when someone explains it to him.
The colonel never laughs, because he neither understands it, nor allows anyone to explain it to him.

You're positing that Nelson is either a major or a colonel, when it comes to health insurance reform. Me, I'd go for a simpler solution: it pays him better to oppose it, with an added incentive of basking in the limelight.

Incidentally, one of the reasons that I have so little patience with the "liberals are scuttling the bill!" hysteria is that it is SO OBVIOUS that this bill is going to pass. The corporations have gotten an absurdly favorable deal already. There is no reason to concede anything.

From Nelson: "Hopefully we're making progress. As I said, there's always a lot of room which you have to have between the bid and the ask, and we're seeing if we can close the gap."

Good God, people, does Nelson have to hit you over the head? At the end of the day, he's voting for the God damned bill (or not filibustering it anyway). He just wants to extract as much blood as possible.

But progressives should still signal that they support whatever bill comes out of this "process" no matter how bad, right?

Steve, as long as progressives keep rolling over we'll keep getting rolled. It's time for our side to make noise. That's the only way to get the White House's attention. They desperately need to pass a bill, which they can do with 60 votes as long as progressives keep bending over and saying "Thank you (Joe, Ben, Blanche, etc.), may I have another?" The moment a single progressive stands up and says they're willing to use the same tactics as Holy Joe and his ilk to block the bill, the ONLY choice will be reconciliation, a process where we need only 50 votes (+ Biden) and can get a really good bill that will be easy to reconcile with the House.

Why do you and other "reasonable" liberals keep acting like Joe and Ben's game is the only game in town. If we get off the sidelines, we can dictate the rules of the game instead of them.

The bill as it currently stands is bad policy and horrible politics. The Republicans must be licking their chops waiting to run against this huge giveaway to insurance companies at taxpayer and customer expense!

Remember Nelson's appearance on Rachel Maddow during the stimulus fight (I give him credit for showing up)? He was incoherent. Remember, Nelson the originator of "war bonds for Afghanistan so we don't add to the budget deficit?"
I don't think he's dumb exactly, I bet his SATs were OK, but he's just like GW Bush. He went into politics because it's easy, and the voters don't give a damn if you're what you're talking about if you use the right buzzwords.
Stop using your brain for a decade or two, it gets rusty.

The stuff about Nelson is hardly surprising; the stuff about Medicaid, I think, gets to the heart of why this reform bill is problematic: it does very little to solve the basic problem with Medicaid, which is 50 state programs with widely varying degrees of coverage and generally not great results. Both the House and the Senate used their respective increases in coverage, such as they are, to basically mask raising costs in the bill. It's effectively cheaper to shunt poor people into Medicaid rather than subsidize, say their ability to purchase other insurance, but that's because other insurance would provide more coverage, and better reimbursement to docs.

And the other mechanism for hiding the cost of the bill is, as noted, that sliding scale of federal funding - when most states are struggling to meet their current side of Medicaid funding, this new plan would add more to their budgets. That money will have to come from somewhere, which means problematic attempts, in many states to raise state and local taxes to rearrange funds. California, as the big example, is in its financial mess partly because of this very problem.

The real solution here has always been to federalize Medicaid, end the highly flawed "block grant" programs (a Reagan era move, one might recall, to reduce spending on welfare), fix reimbursement rates and get decent coverage for all poor people and not some hodgepodge safety nets with tons of holes (it's not at all clear that single working age adults in poverty, for instance, will be able to get coverage under this in every state. Many states don't offer that now). It's just one of the examples of ways that progressives, by obsessively focusing on a "public option" missed the boat on working to reform the already existing "public option" foisted on the poor, which desperately needs it. And I'm sure we'll hear about how this is "at least a first step" and such... but there's absolutely no energy or pressure to fix healthcare for poor people. None. And that's not likely to change, whether this bill passes or not.

Hmmm...Who does this portrayal of Nelson remind me of? Oh yea, that's right! Chiat's description of Liebermann.

Those two were made for each other.

The Republican who talked to Senator Nelson was Nebraska Governor Hiney Man, who extracts his information straight out of the first part of his name. By the way, Hiney Man probably plans on running for Nelson's seat, and he published a scary scenario yesterday about the horrible consequences of providing Nebraskans with health care.

Shorter version: Nelson is a lying piece of shit.

So why is the WH complaining about "the leftists" acting badly?

Senator Nelson is teaching all of us how to act and get the red carpet treatment.

Nebraska has a population about about 1.8M people... slightly more than half the population of Chicago, less than a quarter of the people who live in the Chicago metro area.

Leaving aside the issue of fairness, we have simple probability to deal with. The chance that a smart, wise, caring, canny and politically able person will live in Nebraska and become a US Senator is less than the chance that such a person will live in Chicago and become Mayor.

This is very disturbing to me.