Correction: Bad Nelson and Holy Joe Think Up a New Excuse
The press, other members of Congress, everyone have to stop reporting over and over again that the Bad Nelson and Holy Joe “oppose” some aspect of health care reform.
Two key senators criticized the most recent healthcare compromise Sunday, saying the policies replacing the public option are still unacceptable.
Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) both said a Medicare “buy-in” option for those aged 55-64 was a deal breaker.
“I’m concerned that it’s the forerunner of single payer, the ultimate single-payer plan, maybe even more directly than the public option,” Nelson said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Rather, Bad Nelson and Holy Joe have simply “thought up a new excuse” to oppose real health care reform.
Until we stop pretending these two men are brokering in good faith, we will never get to the point in the discussion of how we get the best health care reform without some industry mole spiking the reform. These men will not support anything less than an out and out bailout of the health care industry, and to hell with the federal budget, and pretending they will just poisons the efforts of those bargaining in good faith.
Send “Bad Nelson and Holy Joe’ to one of the Free Health Care clinics. Think we could do a fund raiser to buy them tickets?
Eve over at Seminal has put many faces on the uninsured. Unable to link. So worth it to look at Eve’s amazing coverage
Here’s the link to one of Eve’s latest: “We’re dying slowly”, working Americans plead for healthcare.
Meanwhile, just a perverse admiring thought about insurance companies and the healthcare industry in general. They certainly found how to economize, when they realized they only had to buy off a couple of key Democratic senators (or one and Lieberman) to totally knife HCR. Brilliant. Hats off to the bean-counters — your stockholders will be plenty proud.
One thing you cannot overestimate in this political scene: the Democratic Party leadership could not organize themselves out of a paper bag, unless its money-raising or some other electoral business. But then, that’s what they were taught. And besides, there’s vacation this year at Martha’s Vineyard, or at Vail, or at St. Moritz, or that private island in Bermuda, and one can forget all the perfidy and betrayal and just let one’s hair out, and the dogs romp in the sun.
thanks. Traitor Joe and Nelson should be made to sit in front of Eve’s clips for a few hours. And then sent to days at one of these free clinics. Although given their cold $$$$ hearts doubt if they could feel any empathy
The proper experience for our ‘citizen legislators’ at the federal and at the state levels: attend such a clinic, and waiting in line like the other patients, actually receive health care of some kind.
Until this happens, for many of our ‘citizen legislators’ the viewing or attendance at such free clinics will be incomplete in effect.
Additional recommendation for proper experience: Travel to and from clinic site shall be at least 50 miles each way, in a worn out vehicle at least 15 years old, with no plastic, and no more than $50 for gas food and repairs.
Or in a crowded bus that runs once an hour, maybe. Or on a subway.
Whatever it takes to get them into the corwd of average citizens and out of their chauffeured-limo lifestyle.
I don’t know if it was reported here or at HP, but an attempt to set up a 3-day free clinic in Washington, D.C. is foundering because the owner of the hall (the Washington D.C. government) wants $77,000 (or more, it keeps going up) in rent for the event. I don’t think it’s Eve’s organization, but the cost is keeping it from happening (maybe deliberately?).
Oh my f***ing gawd.
Joining in the spirit of the thing? Not so much.
Surely there’s some other place that can be used?
Perhaps…a page from Eleanor Roosevelt, when the DAR refused Marian Anderson their hall – hold the clinic on the Mall, at the Lincoln Memorial, the steps of the Capitol….those belong to us!/s
Why is it that Reid needs 60 votes again? Why doesn’t he just ignore the spoiled brats?
That would be rude, something the House might do, but not the gentlemanly Senate. It’s rude only when a rube challenges its privileges.
How many hidden “Bad Nelsons” and “Holy Joes” are waiting to spring up if needed to further delay and ‘improve’ health care reform?
Given the amount of lobbying expenditures and campaign donations already made concerning this issue, not to mention the not yet exercised “quid pro quo” agreements that can never happen because they would be illegal… Ben and Joe must have a few as yet unrevealed like thinking friends in the Senate.
Harry might not be able to get 50 votes.
Would he admit his lack of power to get this bill passed in present form?
How has Harry explained the current situation?
As another of your post’s said, Holy Joe thinks up new, contradictory, excuses daily. He’s appealing to the authoritarian mind and the insuresters’ lobbyists, and so assumes his contradictions don’t matter as long as he’s tough and resolute. (He’s about as tough as the guy who thinks 20 minutes on a stationary bike is the same as competing in the Tour de France.)
Neither Nelson nor Lieberman explain why single payer is bad, though it’s obvious they think health care is as much a privilege for the few as saying “Go Cheney Yourself” in the Senate cloakroom.
These monsters accept bribes and deliver on them while demonstrating depraved indifference. Just our heroes doing
crimebusiness as usual.Amen!
Good ideas. The best CEO I ever knew spent a day once a month with a newbie salesperson, picked at random, going out with him or her on cold calls. Great way to stay honest and keep tabs on what it really takes to make a buck and take home the big bucks. Most of them spent that much time having their staff keep tabs on the value of their stock options. It’s pretty easy to tell the wheat from the chafe, if you bother to look.
OT: Paul Anthony Samuelson
WORD! I love it, thank you for saying that. That anyone is swayed by their excuses du jour proves (at least to me) the power of myths over facts, to jack electorates.
Mythic symbols, embedded in narratives, speak directly to our psyches. We don’t like to admit it, but we can be controlled remotely by carefully crafted myths. In other words, Fox News.
I wish it were as simple as a right-left thing. Sorry to say, even us know-it-all liberals aren’t immune to getting myth-jacked to hell and back, stuck with the bill both ways. As in, “Change we can believe in.”
What other myths do we fall for time and again? The myth that our most exalted public servants actually serve the public? The myth that the Democratic Party leadership gives a damn about working Americans? The myth that America is “exceptional?”
It bears repeating, even shouting: Myths aren’t the same as lies! A lie is a distortion of factual circumstances; a myth is a way of being in the world. What is left unsaid, yet is heard loud and clear, distinguishes a myth from a lie. Oddly enough, that unspoken voice, the one we all share (and you hear right now) speaks louder than words.
As in, “God bless America.” The unspoken half says, God damn the rest of you. “Support our troops,” or be a traitor. “Too big to fail,” or do you want to cripple the economy? “Disrupt, defeat, and dismantle al-Qaeda in Afghanistan,” “deny them safe haven,” or do you want another 9/11?
That’s the power of myth: It’s damn hard to argue with something nobody says, even though it’s heard loud and clear.
That’s why, for me, exposing the makers of electorate-jacking myths is job one. The great appeal of myths to propagandists is that, like advertising, they don’t have to make sense, they just have to move the product. Taking on their myths one at a time is like defoliating a tree one leaf at a time while claiming to be cutting it down.
I’m not sure what exactly the best method is, for exposing myth-makers. At the very least, what we’re doing here and now gives me great hope of our finding it.
O/T, can you say you are surprised? Iraq is to be a major player at the OPEC meeting later this month.
They get to destroy the constitution, they get to keep and escalate their wars, they get to buy and control the media, they get to wiretap and diminish our privacy and freedom, they get to bail out the banksters with taxpayer money without instituting the most needed regulation, they get to make a mockery of the judicial system and they get their puppet leader Obama to continue the insanity. You would think they would at least give the American People the healthcare they deserve. It’s like they are daring us to revolt.
Lieberman Rules Out Voting for Health Bill
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/health/policy/14health.html?_r=1&hp
In a surprise setback for Democratic leaders, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said on Sunday that he would vote against the health care legislation in its current form.
Mr. Lieberman told the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to scrap the idea of expanding Medicare and to abandon the idea of any new government insurance plan, or lose his vote.
A Senate Democratic aide, perplexed by Mr. Lieberman’s stance, said, “It was a total flip-flop, and leaves us in a predicament as to what to do.”
Doesn’t surprise me in the least, and it should not surprise anybody who has been paying attention, least of all that pathetic wimp Harry Reid.
Harry will probably say he was surprised. Why he thinks anyone would believe that, after the last couple of months of negotiational kabuki, I don’t know.
In a way this is not a surprise, and I can see how many here would think Joe is a traitor. Though, I think Nelson has been pretty straight forward. When Reid switched gears and came up with an almost completely new idea of changing Medicare, it doomed the bill–which I mentioned at the time to a prominent progressive columnist. Reason: a major change with little time to go through the implications of it. Second reason: the premiums given out that the 55 and up would have to pay were MORE than the premiums I am paying now for pretty comprehensive coverage. Who wants that?
At least the public option had been kicked around and the plus and minus of it were well known. It is Reid who blew it big time here. He really didn’t think it through. NO ONE is going to get a bill with a major change to Medicare through the Senate in one week. ESPECIALLY when that change has had no opportunity for hearings and other vetting.
The big surprise is that ONLY Joe has said he would vote against it at the moment.
Proposed a month ago, maybe.
I think this is Nelson and Lieberman getting back at the mirror.
What’s really weird is how the kabuki continues, even now. The fact is that the bosses in the Democratic machine do not want real health care reform. The country needs a third and maybe more parties to challenge the corrupt and bankrupt so-called ideologies of the Democrats and Republicans. Parties that are not beholden to the riches 1% of Americans. Parties that are not part of the oligarchy that condones torture, condones wars of aggression, condones dying and sick in our streets, who thrill at the thought that their so-called capitalism leaves children hungry.