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FireDogLake Napalms ObamaCare

By: Dan Perrin (Diary)  |  December 16th, 2009 at 08:49 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

It is clear after watching this video, there is more driving the left’s opposition to ObamaCare than just that the public option is out. For example, Hamsher said in this interview that Senator Lieberman was acting on behalf of the the White House for drug companies and insurers, after she attacked the bill for raising the costs of heath care. (FireDogLake agrees with Howard Dean: Kill the Senate Bill.)

According to The Hill, Senators Feingold and Sanders have still not said they will vote for the bill. Burris has said he will vote against if the bill does not contain the public option.

From a purely power-politics point of view: the left must have at least one or perhaps two Senators represent their view of killing the bill if they want to be taken seriously in the future. If they roll over and play dead, or can not produce one No vote, they will never be taken seriously again (and will be viewed as a paper tiger) — especially given the fact that there are plenty of serious policy beefs the progressives have with the Senate ObamaCare bill.

The progressives are likely making a shrewd political decision: on one hand this bill is so unpopular that it will hurt the cause of health care reform and their push for a single payer system if it passes, and on the other hand, the bill is so bad that it is better to leave the status quo and use the health system’s existing problems as a pole vault to pass a single payer system. From their point of view, it may take longer, but in the end, it is a much smarter strategic decision.

My guess is that the progressives will post more than one NO vote from within the Democratic Senate caucus, and ObamaCare will die.

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COMMENTS

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  • Jack_Savage

    I think leftists will come to the conclusion that their nose is finally under the tent and that they would be complete idiots to torpedo this bill. They will regroup and push for a public option later. It will pass and be reconciled, and the last nail in America’s coffin will be hammered.

    • Dan Perrin

      but I think they are being true to their principles in their opposition to this dog of a bill, ObamaCare.

      And I truly do believe it is in their political interest to kill the bill.

      • earlgrey

        I just hope Roland Burris gives them some trouble to delay it enough so that maybe some conservative dems come to their senses. That is our only hope.

        • Dan Perrin

          How are they going to pass this bill?

          They need 60 votes, and cannot even figure out how to get 60 votes.

          • conservativemusician

            Now that they have him on board, doesn’t it make it more likely that this thing passes, even though libs are not getting all that they want out of this? Are there other complicating factors with other Dem senators that we don’t already know about?

          • http://www.suvstrategery.blogspot.com SoFiMil

            …or at least make it impossible to get a senate vote before Christmas? Even without the other defections Reid is facing, it would be impossible to get to 60 without Kerry in the well of the Senate.

    • ottomustaine

      Actually the commies are concluding that w/out the public option or Medicare expansion this bill does *not* put their nose under the tent. Further, they are concluding that the provisions that remain in the bill are harmful to consumers and a big giveaway to health insurers. They likely have very different reasons than we do for thinking the bill is harmful to consumers, but nevertheless that’s what they believe. They would accept all kinds of harm to consumers if they thought they were getting the camel’s nose in the tent. But they have concluded that there is no camel’s nose left in the bill. At this point I think the true believers on left and right could come together to kill the bill. The “coming together” part may be farfetched, but as a practical matter that may be what will happen.

      • Dan Perrin

        Nice.

      • Jack_Savage

        The goal of the commies is to put insurance companies out of business so the government is the insurer of last resort. Or in other words, break the window so you are called upon to fix it.

        This bill will not do that, but it will begin the process. Once something is given by the government, it develops a consituency and can never be taken away. They know that. They will add provisions, which will add consituencies, and the chaos that develops over the next decade in the health care and insurance industries will be “solved” with single payer down the road.

        They break things so the government can fix them. They have never been held accountable, and they know they never will be. When it hits the fan, this crowd will be long gone when the ticking time bomb of another entitlement goes off. Anyone remember who voted for or pushed Social Security? Medicaid? Medicare? Exactly.

        There is no way – no way – that Democrats will come this far and not pass anything.

        • Dan Perrin

          and between the White House caving on the public option, and Lieberman forcing their head into the mud, they are really at pissed off beyond measure.

          They are not kidding, they want the bill dead.

          • earlgrey

            According to Sherrod Brown a lefty senator who indicated he would support the health care measure. The left may be mad, but does that mean the Senators wil listen?

          • Dan Perrin

            Who listens to Brown?

          • Jack_Savage

            Using the internet, meet-ups and Olbermann to leverage themselves far beyond what their real power is, and most politicians know it.

        • ottomustaine

          I agree they tend to break things through government intervention, then call for more government intervention to fix what’s broken. But I really believe they do that out of sheer economic ignorance rather than deliberate policy. They assume, as an ideological matter, that whatever is broken must have been broken by capitalism, and can be fixed by the gov’t. It’s a form of faith, evidence be damned.

          But that’s beside the point.

          The point is they believe the bill is a boondoggle for insurers because it forces consumers to buy from them. They further believe that in the absence of a public option or Medicare expansion, the “monopolist” insurers will get fat by gouging the consumer. My solution to whatever health insurance monopolies or near-monopolies may exist is interstate competition. Their solution is government “competition.” They really seem to understand that if they don’t get their “solution” much of what’s left in the bill really makes things worse for consumers and better for insurers.

          Never underestimate liberals’ hatred of health insurance companies.

          • Jack_Savage

            We agree that the main focus is the liberal’s hatred of capitalists, in this case insurance companies.

            Perhaps I give the commies too much credit – if it were me, I would keep the insurance companies alive with my hand firmly on the plug, waiting for the dust to clear before I declare them no longer useful and yank.

            However, I see your point – if their hatred is so blinding, and their stupidity so massive as to not give what seems like an inch to the insurance companies, there are two scenarios:

            1) In order to prove their power, they embark on a jihad against the Bought And Paid For wing of their own party, which will result Senators caving, no bill passed and Mutual Assured Destruction for Democrats, or….

            2) The Senators ignore the nutjobs, vote for the bill and nutjobs realize how utterly impotent and marginalized they are. Politically this is a far better thing to do if you are a Senator – they are now having to deal with a certain fellow who stared at the nutjobs and kicked their little rear ends in Connecticut, and hasn’t forgotten about it. Let the nutjobs screech – what are they going to do, become Republicans?

            I will agree that as the bill stands now someone on the other side takes the shaft BIG time, but I think scenario #2 happens. Delicious either way, though.

          • erod

            you can read the comments at these nutty sites like KOs, HuffPo and MSNBC their base is beyond pissed. And now a CT dem is calling for Liebermans recall: http://www.nationalreview.com/onthenews/?q=MTMzM2MyOWJlMmZjODMzNGViMmQxMjg3ZjdlODZjZmE=

            Seriously, you should really read the comments on these sites: THEY ARE MAD and some are calling their reps. I don’t doubt their power to organize, look at 08 and 06.

            My brain tells me that something may pass, but my gut tells me that massive unpopularity on both sides of the aisle will doom this bill.

          • erod

            you can read the comments at these nutty sites like KOs, HuffPo and MSNBC their base is beyond pissed. And now a CT dem is calling for Liebermans recall: http://www.nationalreview.com/onthenews/?q=MTMzM2MyOWJlMmZjODMzNGViMmQxMjg3ZjdlODZjZmE=

            Seriously, you should really read the comments on these sites: THEY ARE MAD and some are calling their reps. I don’t doubt their power to organize, look at 08 and 06.

            My brain tells me that something may pass, but my gut tells me that massive unpopularity on both sides of the aisle will doom this bill.

    • farstar99

      As always, Democrats whine and stamp their feet, but in the end they’re wussies.

      They’ll back whatever Obama does, no matter what.

      They’re spineless hypocrites, grubbing for power.

      ANY power to make them feel less like the unremarkable, unwanted failures that they are.

      • Dan Perrin

        they do not even know what to put in the bill to get to 60 votes, let alone have the language for the 60 votes.

  • bk

    Isn’t she the one who said the Komen Foundation should fire Hadassah Lieberman? Over 500,000 women a year die worldwide from breast cancer, but apparently Hamsher feels that’s less important than having those like Lieberman who help the cause pass a FDL purity test.

    Can’t we say Hamsher is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year?

    • Dan Perrin

      that would kill hundreds of thousands of innocent babies.

    • tankertodd

      Insurance companies make thin profit margins. They’re protecting what little they have. Go to any online finance website and do the math yourself. There are many companies that make way more profit than insurance companies.

      Drug importation? How does that contain costs? Drug companies will simply raise the Canadian prices. DUH!!111!!!11!1 Or worse, they stop innovating, which means no frikking cure for cancer, Hamsher! Let’s put Karl Marx in charge of healthcare innovation, Jane! From the guys who brought you the Trabant, breadlines, and gray barracks for housing, here’s your new advanced treatments for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, etc. Of course only the elites who live on your stupid Fire Pig Lake will get decent healthcare, while the rest of us eat cake.

      • countessolenska

        I think an official policy of drug importation from Canada or other places seems like an insult to America and is just plain weird. Maybe I don’t understand the whole issue.

        I also don’t know why insurance companies should be exempt from anti-trust laws. Ben Nelson favors the continuation of this policy, but I think we should toss it.

        If the Democrats were to make the bill more amenable to Republicans, they wouldn’t need all 60 of their caucus. I don’t know if that is possible though.

        I believe the race to get it done before Christmas has been relaxed, so we’ll see.

        • bk

          Democratic Senators from states with large drug company presence were against it. Imagine that.

          • Richard Mullins

            Both the Dorgan amendment and the Lautenburg amendment when down in Defeat. The Dorgan amendment die a harder death than the Lautenburg amendment.

        • tankertodd

          The drug importation thing is a result of the fact that because other nations have price controls on drugs, that the price Americans pay is disproportionately high. Remember that patent drugs have to recoup the billions invested not only in its development, but cover the costs of all the other efforts that failed. Because the fixed cost of a drug is high and the variable cost (i.e. cost to produce a pill) is tiny, you have this model. We either need to extend the drug patent lives or establish similar price controls with the express purpose of forcing other countries to pony up more. Ultimately, government is the cause of the problem, not the solution.

          I didn’t know insurance companies were exempt from anti-trust laws. It might have been a compromise given that they have to live with federal plus 50 states worth of state regulation. I would guess they would give up their exemption in a heartbeat if you could simplify all the cockamamie regulations they live with.

      • Section9

        Rand, bless her atheist, S&M addled heart, decoded these people years ago. People like Hamsher don’t care about the facts. They care about power.

        Nose in the tent? More power for liberals.

        This has nothing to do with facts. It has to do with power.

  • cari

    If we’re sitting here considering how the bill will be changed later if it passes, aren’t the Democratic senators who are opposed to the bill aware of the same thing? Won’t they be careful enough to ensure that the language of the changes they want in order to support the bill will be difficult, if not impossible to change at a later date, ie, no public option or funding for abortion? I have a hard time believing they’re willing to be satisfied enough to vote for an unpopular bill only to have what secured their vote in the first place carved up in committee.

    • Dan Perrin

      “it passes” part, first.

  • Castor

    Dan,
    From your mouth to God?s ears!

  • Dan Perrin

    and many people do not understand this:

    to amend the bill, it takes 60 votes.

    So, first to change the bill you need to know what to change it to, in order to get the 60 votes.

    The Dems cannot even figure out what policy items need to go into the amendment to change the bill — let alone come up with the legislative language and the score to go with the language. The language they cannot figure out.

    How can you write legislative language for an amendment to get you 60 votes if you do not know what to put into the amendment?

    And if you do decide what goes into the amendment, and you write the legislative language, you still need 60 votes on the Senate floor.

    Oh, and then there is the little item of the White House saying that they will not move on health care after the New Year, because everything is going to be about jobs, jobs, jobs.

    And ObamaCare will pass because?

    • erod

      hell to give everyone everything they want. That is why the bill will implode.

      Dan do you think Obama’s pep talks have lost their luster with these guys? It seems like some are flipping him the bird on this compromise and he doesn’t have the power he once had.

      • Dan Perrin

        lock-down mode on public statements on health care — it was making things worse.

        If you look at the USA Today graph of Obama’s job approval rating, it is almost straight down.

        The fact that Obama called everyone in the Dem Senate caucus to the White House and it had no apparent effect is symptomatic of the single thing I keep repeating, and will again:

        OBAMACARE IS A POLITICAL FAILURE. ITS POLITICAL FAILURE WILL LEAD TO ITS LEGISLATIVE FAILURE.

        The Dems have been delusional about health care — and the leading Jonestown Kool-Aid brigade officers are President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid and Chairman Waxman.

        Their arrogance has made them miscalculate massively, and they refused to review their assumptions that were wrong from the get-go.

        http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/presidential-approval-tracker.htm

    • AngryMatt

      Dan,

      As we saw last night, no even remotely controversial amendment (left or right) is getting through the regular amendment process. It’s all being written by Reid’s office based on what he’s hearing in the cloak room and what his caucus is saying on television and to liberal blogs. He’s walking the tightrope and letting the sideshow of amendment voting go on while dealing with the only amendment that matters. That’s why he has needed 60 confirmed votes before even writing the legislation and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so.

      But bear in mind we were hours away from a deal after the Medicare buy-in was in place and then when it was dropped, allegedly anyway, so don’t think that the Dems can’t come up with a deal. They still have nearly all the cards here and only their incredible inability to govern the country and their own caucus is keeping ObamaCare from becoming law.

      As for the anger on the left, folks it is real. Go read DailyKos. Go read FDL. Go visit DemUnderground. These people are off the rails angry, despite the fact that Obama campaigned against a public option and an individual mandate they think he’s screwing them hard. He’s really not. But one thing we and the lunatic leftists can agree on here is that the individual mandate needs to go and go now. The bill as it is now is absolutely a huge tax that goes straight into the pocket of insurance companies and, though I don’t hate insurance companies like the wacko left, they sure as hell should not get a huge subsidy. Ripping out the individual mandate makes this bill less dangerous for the republic as well in terms of impinging on our freedoms. So maybe we can publicly meet the fruitcake left on that one while still pushing to kill this thing in its entirety. It should would make for a great interview to see Erick and Kos agreeing on burning the mandate to the ground.

    • Mayhem

      If Reid can’t amend the bill through the regular means, say through a manager’s amendment, can he just introduce a new bill altogether?

      • cari

        Can you please explain how the manager’s amendment works? Does it trump or take the place of amendments offered by other senators, and how many votes will it need?

        • Dan Perrin

          have been that any amendment needs 60 votes, or the amendment is withdrawn.

          These are the rules of engagement, so to speak, for ObamaCare in the Senate.

          The 60 vote margin is simply the reflection of the reality of the Republican filibuster.

          So, the manager’s amendment — which is really the real bill — needs 60 votes to become the replacement for the bill now on the floor.

          But the Dems can not figure out what to put in the manager’s amendment (the real bill) to get 60 votes.

          And all this talk about changing the bill to pull the public option out to keep Lieberman — is just talk. The bill has not changed.

          You need 60 votes to change it. These “deals” are just concepts of adding this or subtracting that to get to 60 — then you have to write the language, score the language, bring the language to the floor and then, hopefully (pls) McConnell will start objecting to any unanimous consent requests having to do with creating the rules of engagement to consider the manager’s amendment.

          • bk

            Why wouldn’t they ask Lieberman to write the amendment with the understanding that every Dem will vote for whatever he comes up with? The left is claiming that Lieberman keeps moving the bar, so the solution seems simple.

            Why aren’t they doing it that way?

            Then they could do the same with Nelson.

            Oops they already tried that and buried what he wanted.

      • Dan Perrin

        NO.

        • Dan Perrin

          NO

          is the answer to the question, can’t Senator Reid just introduce a new bill.

          The new bill will be the managers amendment, but in order for it to replace the bill now on the floor, it needs 60 votes.

  • AngryMatt

    One final item I must point out is that FDL, Kos and Dean aren’t advocating to kill the bill and then move onto something else. They want to kill the senate bill and then move onto a bill that can be pushed through reconciliation. They want a smaller bill that expands Medicaid and Medicare massively while dropping the individual mandate and the regulations on private insurers.

    I don’t think many of us on the right are for preserving the status quo; we want reform but free market reform. Expanding Medicaid and Medicare goes in the opposite direction of that and saddles us with a much bigger deficit as well.

    So please do keep in mind that even while the Dem alliance is cracking up, if the left wins they’re just strategically withdrawing from the sinking political ship that is ObamaCare and then launching a new assault, and one that could potentially be MUCH easier for them to pass.

    • cari

      wouldn’t it also be much easier to repeal or defund?

      • stixxxnstones

        Entitlement programs are near-impossible to kill.

        “Actually, a government program is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see in this world.”

        Book of Reagan, Chapter 19, verse 64.

        • cari

          but they tinker with Medicare and Medicaid all the time. Expanding an existing entitlement vs. creating a brand new one seems the lesser of two evils, IF something passes…

    • Dan Perrin

      so, the while the appetite for change is still there, everyone needs a little R & R for the troops to let off some steam and refit, re-tool their weapons and ammo up.

      My view is bring it on, later, after the New Year.

      • cari

        Reid said yesterday that they’ve been trying to “improve” healthcare since FDR. Doesn’t sound to me like their side is sick of healthcare!

        • Dan Perrin

          they are sick of health care.

          • janis

            they pass something with “Health Care Reform” on the front page, so they’ll have to pony up something for him to grade himself higher on.

            Although at this point, even the left is giving him F’s. What a wonderful Christmas present it is to see them all eating their livers over this skunk of a subject. I’ll be happy to send them a box of Ritz crackers to keep on snacking.

          • Dan Perrin

            that has 60 votes — but this stupid “something will pass” view is so uninformed.

            They have a massive political failure on their hands because they believed things that were not true, and even when faced with the truth of health care politics they could not change.

            They have been irrational and are now reaping the whirlwind.

          • janis

            was joking. Yes, they’ve had a failure on their hands for months now, but it didn’t stop them. They kept it moving along anyway. And that has been patently stupid and unproductive for them. Yet they would never stop and never back down.

            I don’t discount their ability to keep being utterly irrational and reaping an even bigger disaster than they have so far. It’s been their record to date, after all, so why not keep shooting themselves in the foot? For those of us who assume that they will try some kind of bill, even if all it does is screw over some identity group in the far off land of Wyomin who all happen to have the last name of Cheney, it’s an assumption because of what they’ve done so far.

  • penguin2

    and taxes remain part of the bill, if the public option/single payer is gone? Considering that the supposed benefits of the bill do not kick in for 4-5 yrs, and they collect all this money, how is it justified to collect these funds? And won’t that be even more of a problem, than before, people have to pay more now for benefits that are not scheduled to start for a while.

    Again, it appears that the Dems are promising the foolish people the same pipedream of “gas in their car and mortgage payments,” only to have them wake up find out they still have to pay their own bills, or be out on the street. In the case of this HC reform bill, whatever health care you had, if in a government program like Medicaid, they will wake up and find themselves getting less than they get now, because they are sharing the limited resources of health care with so many others. The travesty of this Dem HC bill, is how in the end, if passed, or even a version of it along the lines of government takeover, we will all be affected, but the poor and minorities who already feel they do not have as much as the rest of us, will actually be harmed more.

    Just yesterday I heard about states that are already in shortfalls in their Medicaid budgets, and cutting back on free breast cancer screenings for poor women. The states took the government recommendation at their word and now are going to be able to apply it, and who is hurt the poor or those dependent on government health care.

    http://blog.al.com/live/2009/12/alabama_13_other_states_cut_fr.html

    No one seems to understand, there is only one pie, and only so many ways to slice it up, even if you make it a large pie vs small.

    Sorry, did not mean to get long winded, but these points, IMO, represent the true evil of government sponsored/rationed care. If we could stop with the welfare state of dependence, I believe more people could improve their lives. This is not about the truly needy being neglected or forgotten.

    • bk

      If these bills reduce the deficit as claimed, why wouldn’t they reduce the tax increases to make it neutral?

      • Dan Perrin

        they need 60 votes to change the bill.

  • Dan Perrin

    I do not have all the answers.

    • penguin2

      I hope you didn’t take it amiss my question. I actually realize the Dems are just sleight of hand artists with lots of corruption mixed in and they do not tell the people the truth. If they really cared about the people and true health care reform, they would be doing it entirely differently, including tort reform, allowing insurance to be carried interstate, etc. And I guess they will collect the money and do use it for other things, as they’ve done before.

      But I do think you know quite a bit. :)

      • Dan Perrin

        ;)

  • Swamp_Yankee

    Kos, Hampster, Dean, …

    What a parade of losers.

    • Dan Perrin

      acting in their own political interest.

      And, regardless of the fact that I disagree with them, at least they have courage.

      I hate cowards. Really, I cannot stand cowards.

      • AngryMatt

        Despite the much lower approval rating, it’s still pretty ballsy to get out there and bash Obama as a traitor to the “progressive” movement and call for the destruction of your own party’s legislation because it’s worthless. That kind of clarion call carries huge risks for their legitimacy as “leaders” but it also hurts the folks on their own side.

        If there’s one thing we conservatives are good at it is closing ranks. If Kirk is the nominee in Illinois it won’t be our first choice, but we’ll back him. Same for Simmons in CT. We deal with the personality clashes in the cloak room, not out front, and we realize when the primary fights or committee fights are over, it’s time for all good men to support our side unless it is egregiously wrong (like NY-23). That’s how you govern your caucus and the Dems have never understood that.

        It’s certainly courageous to oppose this bill from the left and be dead serious about it, but it’s not particularly smart unless you think your fallback option will be better and will work. That’s where I think Dean and Kos are right now.

        • bk

          Whether they get 98% of what they wanted or 80% of what they wanted, they act like they gave away the store and the horrible evil GOP made out like bandits.

          If they eventually pass something, the Dem attitude will be “You guys screwed us on this, so we’re going to make you pay bigtime when the next bill comes up!”

      • Section9

        The Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, and the WH for that matter, has a larger obligation to the Nation and its posterity.

        Truman, for his part, stood up to the negativism and tendency towards isolationism in post war America to work with Arthur Vandenberg in the Senate and push through the Marshall Plan with his secretary of State, George C. Marshall. Ike, in his time, worked with Sam Rayburn and LBJ, to help pass several defense appropriation bills and the Interstate Highway Act.

        In each case, these Presidents and Congressmen were acting in the larger national interest and were thinking decades ahead. I don’t see that here. I see people thinking in the narrow political interest of the Democratic Party. I don’t see courage.

  • neoavatara

    The irony is that progressives may do what tea parties could not: kill this bill. Don’t be all that surprised.

    http://neoavatara.com/blog/?p=9100

    • Dan Perrin

      I like it.

    • http://stixblog.com Black River Wolf

      The Dems are more divided than the republicans by far. The only thing that keeps them together is abortion. Other than that,they are a bunch of single issue voters that stay together just to keep abortions legal and easy to get.

      I was thinking the Dems implosion would come during the elections last year.

      • Richard Mullins

        They really don’t like each other and if one amendment goes down the one who’s amendment that gets killed they in turn kill the other amendment. As long as this happens, we’re safe from ObamaCare.

        • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

          Your fellow democrat legislators are not your Bud’s, more like a pack of sharks just waiting for you to show a moment of weakness.

    • bk

      Won’t it? They never seem to let the truth get in the way of what their spin machine churns out.

      • AngryMatt

        This might have been a problem if a majority of the public supported the bill, but poll after poll says that while the public wants SOMETHING done about health care, they think this bill is bad. They like some provisions that may make us conservatives queasy, but their overarching fears about the deficit and making their own family’s care worse (and they’re right to have those fears) is what is just devastating this bill.

        Frankly, I think the GOP can make huge political hay out of this if they can kill the bill and then immediately move to implement free market reforms. The Dems will want to move on, but if the GOP leadership presses the issue and repeatedly gets out in front of the public with its own ideas once ObamaCare is dead and buried, I think the people will see conservatives are more than obstructionists. The Dems will obviously never allow a vote on any GOP proposal, but it would be good politics to make such a move as it clearly demonstrates that we’re not for the status quo but we’re even more against what the Dems want to implement.

      • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

        …and right now, about as punishing as the comfy chair.

        • janis

          obstructionism is a feature, not a bug, and it’s worth votes at this point. Goes back to so many here who have said that being the Party of No is the best move they could make now.

          • Dan Perrin

            it will be good for Republicans, because so much of the voting public is so opposed to the bill.

            Therefore, the media will not give Republicans the credit, but the credit for killing the bill will go to the left.

          • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine
          • bk

            They should be ready to trot out ads showing Dem defeats of amendment after amendment that 90% of the public would favor.

          • Dan Perrin

            and note the date:

            http://www.redstate.com/dan_perrin/2009/08/16/the-democrats-irrational-political-behavior-on-health-care/

            This is most reasonable psychological assessment of what the Dems have don on health care.

            Lead by Speaker Pelosi and President Obama.

          • janis

            reading of Sander’s 700+ page amendment. The games have begun….

            Go Repubs! Make them cry.

          • Dan Perrin

            really, BIG FUN

          • janis

            take on this is that is shows ” perhaps the clearest indication that Democrats are picking up momentum” on passing the bill.

            Wow. Way to make champagne out of lemons, guys!

          • Richard Mullins

            It’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. Coborn objected a few times and one time Sanders asked him on the objection.

          • izoneguy

            Is when some of the language from these amendments start leaking out. Most libs STILL think Obama is going to GIVE them FREE healthcare. Most of them don’t have a clue that they will end up in jail.

          • Richard Mullins

            They have a tag team of readers of the amendment. I think that it sstay on the long end of time. This is going to cut in Lautenburg’s bed time(85 yr old man).

          • Richard Mullins

            Sanders is going ballistic right now. No Coronal Sanders, you did have a prayer when it come to you and you’re socialist ilk are going to stand.

        • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

          regarding the punishment of the “comfy chair”…starring Reid, Pelosi, and Obama

          Republican opponents should be eagerly anticipating the advent of the Democratic Inquisition.

          • Dan Perrin

            I’m a big Monty Python fan. NICE

  • WarEagle01

    I would have no idea what is really going on with this POS bill if it wasn’t for you.

    • Dan Perrin

      in this little drama…

  • http://www.the41stvote.org rcov092

    n/t finally they let the pit bull loose.

    • Richard Mullins

      The start on this began with Coburn’s objections to the Sanders amendment at first. I must say it’s going to take awhile to get through this.

  • http://www.the41stvote.org rcov092

    should be ready to vote sometime between May and August.

    • Dan Perrin

      until the Dems finally realize that they need to kill it off themselves because it’s destroying them politically.

      But that would be rational.

      And on health care, the only constant has been that the Dems have been irrational.

  • martellus

    If the public option and abortion payments are taken out of this and the rest is passed then you have 1,811 pages of legislation that will grant the government complete control of the Health Care industry.

    The liberals for all of their protestations will pass this bill. They get 95% of what they want and they get to slip the last two pieces in afterwards basically using the argument that well we have this much go the last 5 yards for the public option.

    In regards to abortions they are confident that if they get this much the courts shall mandate that not providing for abortions will be discriminatory.

    • Dan Perrin

      out of the bill.

      They need 60 votes.

  • erod

    “He was cautiously optimistic” about getting health care done, to me that is very bad news for the Dims. That quote translates to, “Well this thing might not get done.” For a narcissist like Obama, who believes that he has the power to bend the will of any obstacle he faces and always have a positive outcome in the end. That “cautiously optimistic” quote should serve as a sign of weakness. We are making them bleed and they are hurting. This healthcare monster is weak in the knees: their base isn?t happy, we?re not happy, members of their party (Congressman, Senators and party leaders) aren?t happy. Dan?s right this is a political failure.

    THIS IS OBAMA?S WATERLO, DEMINT WAS RIGHT! THEY CAN SEE IT ALL AROUND THEM!

    They see it in the polls for healthcare, his approval rating, the tea parties, states saying they want to secede and will not be participating in Obama Care. The narcissist is failing!

    He isn?t God! He isn?t anything special! He?s just a two bit Chicago thug! And being a Chicagoan and seeing my fair share of Chicago thugs I can tell you that that sort of style doesn?t work well on the national level.

    We are winning this fight even though the MSM and the Dems would have us think otherwise. Just remember pride comes before the fall.

    • izoneguy

      Much better than Obama’s B+, who the hell grades themselves anyway?

      • erod

        :D

  • http://www.the41stvote.org rcov092

    this is even better than reading the amendment. Awesome, what would Amy Miller say? Trendy?

    • Dan Perrin

      oh well