Holden will put his finger in the wind

Do progressives really want the Senate Health Care Reform Bill? The house vote on the senate bill Is the final vote; Obama will sign it into law and there will be no reconciliation.

I’m sure there is a lot of pressure going on behind the scenes on a lot of the unknown Stupak gang. That includes Rhambo and the WH, Not just from Pelosi.

I believe the Senate Dems have at least 50 comitted to reconciliation including the WH. this is pretty much a done deal.

I am not sure that the Dem’s know how to goveron

the mandate, forcing Americans to buy insurance from anti-trust corporations, and the Democrats lack of understanding of its perception in the public, as unamerican, is indicative of the reasons they are to be replaced in 2010

White House still trying to get the House to pass the Senate bill, eh?

*yawn*

Things are at the point where the politics of passing the bill occlude the contents of the bill. Obama really screwed up in negotiating for his health care reform, but is what’s on the table good enough as a basis for long-term reform? Yes, Democratic leadership sucks hard. But will narrowing the margin of their majority with a bloodbath election embolden them to govern better? I really doubt it. They’ll draw the wrong lesson. While I don’t buy Obama’s argument that progressives are to blame if his crappy bill fails, isn’t there some positives to passing it?

It strikes me as curious that Kucinich is being lumped together with the likes of Herseth Sandlin and Peterson. Running with an anti-progressive crowd there, Dennis.

isn’t there some positives to passing it?

Well, they say prayer is good for the soul, and so when they pass it you can pray that the insurance company whose policy you will be obliged to buy will follow the law and pay off your claim rather than just paying the (rather paltry) penalties specified in the law for not doing so.

So there’s a positive.

Turning us into corporate serfs belonging to Anthem Blue Cross with the IRS working for the insurance companies (but paid for out of our tax dollars) is no foundation for reform, unless this is to lay a foundation of the United States becoming even more corporate controlled.

“…. isn’t there some positives to passing it?”

No. Passing the Senate bill is like deciding you want to go from Chicago to LA by heading for New York. It is the wrong direction.

The Senate bill will put an additional $300 billion into the hands of the private insurance companies that are responsible for the problem in the first place. How many more lobbyists and Congressmen can they buy with the 25 or 30% of that that goes down the drain in administrative costs?

And Indie is correct. There will be no reconcilliation if the Senate Bill passes first.

And of course, this time they are being asked to vote for the Senate bill. Which lacks the public option that was in the House-passed bill.

Great piece, DDay.

We should find a way to graph this.

This article is a bit out of date. “No” vote Eric Massa resigned this weekend. That subtracts one “no” vote and drops the total needed to 216.

“the Congressional Budget Office.
The nonpartisan agency said yesterday the deficit will remain above 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product for the foreseeable future while the publicly held debt will zoom to $20.3 trillion, amounting to 90 percent of GDP by 2020. By then, interest payments on the debt will have quadrupled to more than $900 billion annually, the report said.’

Your HCR just got ‘eated’.

HCR appears more and more like just the best ruse to keep the folks attention away from the criminality on Wall Street, which continues moving middle class America unabatedly towards ruin.

If the media (ANY MEDIA!) would teach the history of ‘bucket shops’ in 1907 and apply that to wall street today things would change in a hurry and for rich people it would not be pretty.

what are “bucket shops”?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2009/06/03/bailing-out-the-bucket-shops/

They were typically small store front operations that catered to the small investor, where speculators could bet on price fluctuations during market hours. However, no actual shares were bought or sold: all trading was between the bucket shop and its clients. The bucket shop made its profit from commissions, and also profited when share prices fell.
Today its called credit default swaps. Same scam updated name and scale thanks to Bill Clinton and John McWar making it legal in the late 90′s.

oh,
thanks!

Your welcome. Please tell folks. People need to know and understand that AIG is still using peoples 401k money plus all the tens of billions plus of tax money we gave them to keep their bucket shop open. And AIG’s shop is tiny compared to Goldman Sach.
Goldman’s new scam is loaning money to big cities with everyones property taxes used as collateral. Then selling credit default swaps betting on the city’s credit ratings. If a city’s credit rating falls the swaps pay off with tax money from the city and the fed. All the while Goldman collects fees from the city (120 million on 600 million borrowed over and above the interest on the loan in the case of Nashville,TN.) plus fees on the swaps and if it blows up Goldman taps the fed for more of that zero interest tax money so they can pay off the rich folks that bought the swaps at 100 cents on the dollar. AIG used bail out money to pay off their swaps (bucket shop bets) in 08 at 100 cents on the dollar. And so far they keep getting away with it.

I watched Stupak on Hardball last week and he quoted some pages in the Senate bill and made the claim that it would allow federal funds to go toward abortions and that Pelosi was not telling the truth in the WH health care summit when she said it wouldn’t, and that is why he is reluctant to support the bill. I happened to be sitting at my computer and immediately pulled the bill off the net and looked at the pages he cited. He is full of shit. Nowhere in the pages he noted was there any mention of abortion or any other mechanism whereby federal funds would go to that procedure. Then I searched for abortion in the bill and found a considerable amount of the legislation is to deny federal funds for abortion. So how we deal with morons like Stupak is a dilemma. I think once it is ‘splained to him he will vote the right way.

Final point-If we don’t get legislation passed this time it won’t come again in most of our lifetimes. Once we have a law then it can be modified. This is not the time to say my way or the highway. Don’t give the republicans the moral support they don’t deserve. The President is doing all he can with a bunch of moral and paid for cowards in he Senate.

clamberite you are so right. These same cowards that refuse to do right by us with health care are also the bag men for the wall street bank robbers.

I’m convinced Pelosi has the votes. She’s talking to Stupak mainly so she can cut loose some members with tough re-election fights. Stupak will settle for the Nelson compromise plus a symbolic vote in the House.

To Stupak (and his C Street masters)
A womans right to choose = bad
Gay hookers for the pope = good

(Spread the word about bucket shops http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

“If we don’t get legislation passed this time it won’t come again in most of our lifetimes. Once we have a law then it can be modified. This is not the time to say my way or the highway”

clamberite you are wrong. The health industry, which is running out of paying customers, has been shopping the same “grand bargain” for years. It consists of guaranteed issue in exchange for a strong individual mandate. That deal will always be available. The question is what else do we get. Strong regulation? Public option? Medicare buy-in? We are no closer to any of those things if this reform effort passes. On all counts this is a failure for the American people.

For those worried about this bill failing – tough. People are under no obligation to endorse a sick joke of a bill because the President was too much of a coward or sellout to stand up to a bunch of morons screaming about the public option being a government takeover of health care while complaining in the same breath that single-payer Medicare would be cut. This mandated parasitic industry subsidy is garbage, and it’ll be “fixed” the same way NAFTA was “fixed” once they passed it – never. It doesn’t address the elephant in the room in that private for-profit insurance is exactly what’s wrong with the health care system.

Shit, it’s not even like Obama was being expected to persuade the public about something on which public opinion was against and change their minds. He was being expected to stand up for something the public was overwhelmingly in favor of (a public mechanism to compete with private insurance) against an industry that was profoundly unpopular (the private insurance industry.) Talk about blowing a shot into an open net.

This same crew of legislative geniuses whose ability to strictly regulate the insurance industry is being counted oncounting on as the entire basis of the bill (since a market competition mechanism for remedying the situation was explicitly and completely removed in the public insurance option) are the same crew who, as we speak, can’t even figure out a half-assed way to regulate the financial sector that just did the financial equivalent of blowing up the world a year and a half after they did it.

Sorry bmull I have to agree with clamberite. If the weak spineless sell out dem’s don’t get this done then dem = wuss will taint every election for years. I believe if HCR don’t pass this month in some form we are looking at losing congress this fall and the white house in 12 for at least 20 years. Above all most Americans hate weakness. Look at what happened when Carter was labeled as weak it took 4 elections to win back the white house and that was with a right wing bubba (Bill Goldman Sach Clinton).
Get ready for redneck rule again folks if this fails.

Dem = Wuss, and the prospect of losing Congress and White House, is already the conclusion people have come to and likely result because of the way this joke of a bill was put together – selling out the parts the people liked, never standing for anything, kissing Lieberman’s toes, bribing the likes of Nelson, Landrieu and Lincoln, and using the IRS as an enforcement mechanism as a threat to make people buy from an industry as popular as Carrot Top.

Democrats being viewed as weak is already baked into the result whether the bill passes or not. Wouldn’t have been if the President had ever stood for something instead of labelling what people wanted as a sliver of reform but that was his decision, it certainly wasn`t ours.

Your Bucket Shop info is a delight to read and learn about!!!

I’ve been REAL informed from reading this blog, and the Story Of Deep Capture.

CDS’s, Phantom Stock, Hedge Funds/Hedging, Selling Short, Selling Naked Short . . . the seamy underbelly of Wall Street is laid out start to finish in incredible detail, and the story brings in the mob, government officials, the MSM, and more.

Rotten to the core, top to bottom, are our corporations and elected officials and all in between. NONE of which are serving we the people, only the 1%.

As it stands in the Senate, yes, even in The House where the PO was and is too weak and not broad enough.

However, we DON’T know yet what, if any, modifications might come down in favor of we the people.

And every day that election clock ticks closer to November, the momentum swings back to center and in favor of progressivism. Sure, the swing to center is a BIG ASS SWING, but hey, it’s better n NO swing at all.

So we wait. And keep pressure on!!! LOTS of pressure! On Senate, House and WH.

You DO realize that if a piece of shit HCR bill passes, imposes a mandate with NO competition/Robust PO, then the progs and young folks who GOT Obama elected will dump him, the Senate, House and WH in ’12?

So, passing a shit piece is NOT going to save any elections by ANY means!!!!!!!

False meme yer spreading here . . . just sayin, don’t feed the false memes.

I’ll add, the right wing will ALSO beat the shit out of the GOP too, for passing a mandate without any real help for the masses. So that’s gonna twist and fuck up ALL polling and electionioneering all to hayall!!!

Gonna be the HARDEST and UGLIEST election to track ever, in ’10, and likely in ’12.

Anything that gets 30 million more poor people real health care and gets rid of pre existing conditions is a lot better than nothing. It should not be left up to only the sick,old, and disabled to pay for it.
The disabled right now are being kicked off Medicare at a break neck pace and left to bear the burden of Medicare premiums co-pays and deductibles on a small fixed income. At the same time getting a 1099 on it. To me being a liberal means doing for those that can’t do it for themselves not every man for himself.
Health care like any social program will only work if everyone shares in both the cost and benefits.

http://www.deepcapture.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

Kicked off medicade … sorry spellcheck got it wrong.

Sorry off topic … Two things that are really pissing me off today.
1) ‘LED TV’ there is no such thing! There are LCD TV’s that use led’s as backlight. LED TV is about as real as clean coal.
2) “Works on a PC or a mac” Thats horseshit! 99% of all this ‘works on a PC’ is a huge LIE!!!!
The truth is its works on a ‘Windows PC’ NOT all PC’s. This LIE started with mickeymousesoft as an insult to Linux users. There is a lot more to computers than 100% unsecure law enforcement backdoors call the mothership every 90 days spyware malware worms trojans over 900,000 known unfixed security holes raw sockets vbs scripting ActiveX no real root steaming pile called windows.
And to those that think Linux is hard never had to use regedit.
off soapbox

Anything that gets 30 million more poor people real health care and gets rid of pre existing conditions is a lot better than nothing.

Well, this bill doesn’t get 30 million people real health care. It legally requires 30 million more people to buy health insurance from a private, profit-maximizing oligopoly, of which the poor people whom you speak of will have to resort to buying policies with high co-payments and deductibles – policies they can’t afford to actually -use-.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
I’m with Kucinich.
Kill the Bill.

Me too.

Exactly. There is a difference between providing health care, and providing health insurance. There are plenty of folks right now with insurance that still can’t afford procedures because of copays, deductibles, and stuff just not covered, and every year there are bankrupties due to medical bills, and most of them had health insurance.

This guy sounds like an administration official trying to sell this POS plan. Well, if you think this bill will EVER get improved, you’re either lying or naive, because once the health insurance industry has been mandated that every breathing American citizen become it’s customer, then they will be even stronger, and future modifications become harder, probably impossible.

So, this effectively means that this bill becoming law, strenthening the insurance industry, and therefore actually killing chances of real reform in the future. So if you support passing this bill, then you support effectively killing any chance of single payer. And you own that.

I am not sure that the Dem’s know how to goveron

Neither am I.

I can only hope this bill fails. Amazes me how so many people were against the Senate Bill and now is flocking to it like its the best thing since sliced bread. I am sorry but the fact I would be forced to carry insurance without a public option for competition or that I would have to pay 300% more for preexisting conditions does not enamor me to this bill. Perhaps if people voted to oust both the democrats and the republicans we would get decent people, or at least our consciences would be clear. However, I am sure many would say “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” bull, just give the good not the crap.