All Life Is Problem Solving

The solid front of Democratic Party progressives supporting the Senate’s health care form bill, has now cracked wide open with Howard Dean’s call to kill the Senate bill and start over in the House with reconciliation. Dean’s call hasn’t cracked open the floodgates among the Senate and House Democrats and in recent days people like […]

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Many progressives, even though they’ve been working for a PO-based health care reform bill, have 1) never given up Medicare for All as the goal of their activity, and 2) decided, in the first quarter of 2009, that Medicare for All could not pass the new Congress. They then reacted to their realization by concluding […]

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When the Democrats, at the start of the present session, organized the Senate without changing the procedural rule allowing for the filibuster, and requiring a cloture vote of 60 members to end one, they took on responsibility for giving Republicans and blue dogs inordinate influence over the legislative process. The filibuster is a long-standing tradition […]

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Olympia Snowe, our modern-day Hamlet, decided to vote in favor of getting the Baucus bill out of committee. This insignificant action in itself (if she had voted against the bill it still would have passed in committee 13-10), was celebrated by the MSM all day long today, as the coming of at least a bit […]

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Mike Lux thinks that the tide is turning on health insurance reform legislation and that “political common sense” is beginning to set in, and make an outcome with a robust public option much more likely. Mike says that Democrats are starting to look at the Senate Finance Committee bill and that it is making them […]

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I think Republicans and Blue Dogs understand the power of “no.” But I’m afraid the progressives in Congress don’t understand it, and that’s why they’re losing the fight for health insurance reform, have sustained partial defeats on the stimulus package, and credit card reform bills, and are moving toward a partial defeat on the cap-and-trade […]

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In President Obama’s weekly radio address yesterday he said: “Now, the source of a lot of these fears about government-run health care is confusion over what’s called the public option. This is one idea among many to provide more competition and choice, especially in the many places around the country where just one insurer thoroughly […]

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The strategy I outlined in my last post may not work out. There may be no HCR bill resulting from it. In that case, progressives ought to introduce a back-up plan offered just yesterday by Scarecrow at Firedog Lake, based in part on an analysis of Dean Baker’s. Scarecrow’s proposal has the following steps. First, […]

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The MSM commentators are now practically hysterical with joy. After months of giving a voice to the most ridiculous fictional stories about proposals for health care reform using the public option idea, they, along with the President’s incredibly inept messaging, have helped to move public opinion to the point where in some, though very misleading […]

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This morning, Michael Shear and Ceci Connolly at WaPo, with contributions from Anne Kornblut and Lori Montgomery, tried to get us to believe that the Administration was taken by surprise by progressives’ insistence on a viable PO being included in the Health Care Reform bill. This is an interpretation beyond naive, and also beyond imagination, […]

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