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Bernie Sanders says "enough is enough", let's get Sen. Kennedy's bill from the Health Committee passed. As Keith and Bernie note during the segment, here is some of what Senator Kennedy is hopefully remembered for.

Olbermann: Meals on Wheels, AIDS research, other medical research, cancer research, nutrition programs for pregnant women and children, expanded uninsurance to the unemployed, occupational safety regulations. That's just the first few items on the list of things brought to this nation by Senator Kennedy. It is so long it is hard to imagine that there is an America living today whose body, literally body, is not in better shape than it would have been were not for this man. Correct?

Sanders: That is exactly right. I mean among so many other things, pushing Medicare, pushing Medicaid, pushing children's health insurance for eighteen million Americans today who have access to primary health care through community health centers. That program was developed by Senator Ted Kennedy.

Bernie goes on to explain that Kennedy felt that all Americans should have health care as a right of citizenship and how woefully behind we are with other industrialized nations with what we spend on health care compared to our health care outcomes.

As Bernie notes, what came out of the Health Committee was actually a decent piece of legislation and it would be nice to see the Democrats get on board with it and at least not filibuster the legislation if they could manage to get Kennedy's bill rather than the mess that's coming out of the Finance Committee on to the Senate floor for a vote.

Personally I'd like to see them force any of them to do an actual filibuster if they don't want to see some real reform get through. Make them go stand up on the Senate floor and defend the insurance industry profits until they're blue in the face if that's the line in the sand these guys want to draw. And let them break out the cots and diapers while they're at it.

I'm glad to see Bernie as usual being one of the ones speaking up about real reform means. We could use a whole lot more like him. Unfortunately I get to pick from the choice between right wing crazy and Republican-lite where I'm from.

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Jebus. Marsha Blackburn won't pull back from the fear mongering on "death panels" and it's even too much for Joe Scarborough to take. Blackburn actually says " but to have that heavy, long arm of the Federal government reach into something that is a very, very personal, personal decision is distasteful to me, and I think it is distasteful to our nation's seniors".

I've got two words for you Marsha. Terri Schiavo.

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Greta Van Susteren asks Michael Steele the question that should be asked of Republicans every time they claim they really care about "reforming" health care/insurance. Why didn't your reform it when you had control of the House, the Senate and the White House? Of course she forgets that we did get the Republicans idea of health care reform when they were in charge, with the giveaway to the big pharma in the form of Medicare Part D.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, what is this "bill of rights" that you've unleashed? And -- well, let me just start there. What is this "bill of rights"?

STEELE: Well, the "bill of rights" is really kind of a placeholder as we begin the fall discussion on health care. We watched at the beginning of the spring and summer the administration say we were going to have a health care bill by July 31 with no real input or discussion by the American people, let alone the Republican members of Congress. They were going to try to get it done by then. We raised some concerns and we talked a little bit more about it and laid out clearly what we thought we should be doing.

Town halls began to take place as citizens began to get ahold of it. And in the process of this discussion, the one thing that struck me that was being left behind was our seniors. When the administration's kind of slipped out there the idea of cutting $500 billion from the Medicare program with no indication of whether that's going to be cutting waste or if that's going to be cutting the substance of programs or what that was, I thought it would be appropriate to put a placemaker out here to very clearly delineate what we should be doing and how we should be doing it on behalf of the seniors as we begin this debate in the fall.

So I wanted to lay out about six principles that kind of talked about the -- you know, the doctor-patient relationship, the role of government, the decision-making process involving seniors or their caregivers, and I wanted to be as fairly clear as I could about it.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, but this -- so this is not an exact answer to the 1,500-page bill that the Democrats have put forward. This is sort of just your principles of how you and the Republican Party would like to see things proceed, so just broad-based principles, right?

STEELE: It's broad-based principles and -- and the Republican leadership in the House and the Senate will come back with the legislative, you know, bills and amendments to the HR 3200 or whichever bill the House and Senate are going to be working on, to put into law those guidelines or those protections, if you will, for our seniors.

VAN SUSTEREN: Are the Republicans sort of sitting back, waiting to see what the Democratic bill is so they can then punch some holes in it or rewrite it, or are they -- or are they writing their own, saying, Look, scrap the Democrats. This is the bill we should have.

STEELE: Well, I think -- well, this is -- that's a very good question, Greta, and I'll tell you why, because between the House and the Senate, there have been over 800 pieces of legislation and amendments to various bills introduced by Democrats in the House and the Senate that have been rejected outright. So they've tried that, writing the bill, if you will, or putting their input into the documents that have been produced, and it has all been rejected.

So I think in this instance, what I thought was, Let's put a placemarker in place, then let's just follow back up. And now that the rhetoric has heated up from the American people, maybe the House leadership will pay attention to what Republicans want to put on the table because, quite frankly, I'm sick and tired of all this conversation about all bipartisanship and bipartisanship that, when, in fact, the House and Senate leadership are not doing anything to bring Republicans to the table in any meaningful way, and the president is giving lip service to this idea, when he's not encouraging, and in fact, demanding that we work together in bipartisan fashion on this problem.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right. Now, I understand that a lot of Republicans want reform. In fact, most have said some reform is needed. I understand that they don't like the public option, or the government option. I understand that they say there's no bipartisanship. But can you sort of, you know -- you know, bring me in on the secret why the Republicans didn't do health care reform when they owned the House, the Senate and the White House? Do you have any idea?

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h/t danieljbmitchell:

In 1971, President Nixon proposed a national health insurance plan built on heavily employer private coverage. Senator Ted Kennedy proposed what would today be called a single-payer plan. In 1974, the debate had morphed into Nixon vs. Kennedy-Mills vs. Organized labor. Despite the prediction in the second clip shown, the result was stalemate rather than passage in 1974 or 1975.

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Ed Schultz goes through the poll numbers that show just how badly so many Americans are buying into the outright lies on health care/insurance reform that are being put out there. There needs to be a real debate about just what's actually potentially going into these bills where the public is going to end up on the short end of the stick and put at the mercy of the health insurance companies without the distraction of having to debunk this other nonsense as well.

Ed talks to Aaron Carroll, author of Don't Swallow Your Gum!: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health to talk about the hurdles with overcoming that misinformation.

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Keith has the run down on United Health Group's Stephen Hemsley who's leading the charge against health care/insurance reform and who was recently sending employees armed with talking points to attend protests and town halls. First up, his campaign donations from OpenSecrets: United Health Group Contributions to Federal Candidates:

House

Total to Democrats: $138,700

Total to Republicans: $100,500

Senate

Total to Democrats: $71,500

Total to Republicans: $58,300

Next we have the lawsuit they settled just one week before President Obama took office. Health insurer accused of overcharging millions:

One of the nation’s largest health insurers has agreed to pay $50 million in a settlement announced today after being accused of overcharging millions of Americans for health care.

The New York attorney general’s office launched an investigation after receiving hundreds of complaints about Oxford Insurance and its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, which claims to rely on “independent research from across the health care industry” to determine reimbursement rates. In actuality though, it relies on Ingenix, a research firm owned by UnitedHealth Group.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo says Ingenix has been manipulating the numbers so insurance companies pay less. In a just-released report, he contends that Americans have been “under-reimbursed to the tune of at least hundreds of millions of dollars.” Although UnitedHealth Group and Oxford Insurance were the only entities investigated, other major insurers use Ingenix, including Aetna, CIGNA and WellPoint/Empire BlueCross BlueShield.

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Good little torture advocate Joe Scarborough seems to think that anything the United States does is justified, if it works. I'd like to know just what Joe Scarborough and the rest of his guests would ever find objectionable enough that it finally goes over the line for any of them? Scar starts out feigning indignation for the poor demoralized CIA that got their feelings hurt by that mean old Amnesty International and the ACLU for letting the public know they tortured prisoners. He's completely unfazed by her report and at the end of course questions whether it's even true.

Mitchell: Well when they looked at the details and when they looked at some of the more gruesome aspects of this program, they say, they believed they had to uphold...

Scarborough: Now when you say gruesome, what are you talking about gruesome. Uhhhmm....

Mitchell: Well we don't know frankly. Pete Williams and I went through all this and we're told that we don't even know some of the worst cases that were still censored. So....

Scarborough: Well the cases we do know is somebody turned on a drill and made a detainee think that they were going to get drilled...

Mitchell: Well...

Scarborough: And then somebody fired a gun in an adjoining room. Have we heard of anything worse than that right now?

Mitchell: Yes we have.

Scarborough: What have we heard?

Mitchell: We've heard of threats to, we will bring your mother in here and we'll bring your children here and we'll kill your children when the children were in custody of the U.S. Military. So we will rape your mother in front of you. These are things that, this is not, you know, me talking. This is the Geneva Conventions. You've got a lot of...

Scarborough: We will rape your mother in front of you. Who is suggesting that was said by an interrogator?

Mitchell: Yes, exactly.

Scarborough: Okay. And when are we going to get that information released?

Mitchell: Well, we're not sure that we're going to ever get that information released. There are a lot of lawsuits out there and some of the plantiffs are still complaining, Amnesty, ACLU said what was released yesterday still has too many blacked out sections.

Scarborough: Okay. Andrea...ah...it is, this is absolutely fascinating.

Mitchell: It's a mess. There's no question it's a mess. And it's really damaging morale at the agency. There's no questions about that.

Scarborough: Listen, I personally believe it's a nightmare moving forward. I know David Ignatius has said as much. We're going to have him on and talk to him for about thirty minutes.

Scarborough and Richard Haas then go on to more or less say that the CIA cannot do it's job if they're not allowed to torture people, and carry water for that "torture saved us from terrorist attacks" canard.

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From The Ed Schultz Show, Jerrold Nadler says the appointment of a Special Prosecutor doesn't go far enough and that the law is that when torture occurs under American jurisdiction there must be an investigation of everyone who may have been involved and if warranted prosecutions. Nadler expressed concern that we aren't being aggressive enough and limiting the investigations too much. He also adds this:

Nadler: We are well into territory already, where because of the pardon of Nixon after Watergate and the people around him, because of in the Iran Contra, we're getting into territory where it becomes taken for granted that high officials can violate the law and get away with it.

Schultz: Yep.

Nadler: If high officials violated the law here, if Cheney did, if Rice did, etc., they've got to be prosecuted to show that no one is above the law.

I agree with his point that no one is above the law. I disagree that we're "getting into territory" where high officials take it for granted that they will never be held accountable for their law breaking. We're well past that point now.

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Rick Sanchez shows some footage of a woman pleading with Tom Coburn to help her at a town hall meeting because her husband has had a traumatic brain injury, and they can't get insurance for him. After Coburn says he'll help through his office that that we "as neighbors" ought to help each other and the idea that the government is here to help is inaccurate. Gotta' love Sanchez's response here.

What's interesting about that is that Sen. Coburn just essentially said the government is not the solution, but then you have to ask yourself. He just told her to come and see him, isn't he the government? By the way after helping her, what will he do about the other 46,999,999 who don't have insurance, and the thousands upon thousands of Americans who say they do have insurance but like her, they're not getting covered? We'll ask those questions.

Exactly.

h/t The Political Carnival

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It appears Chuck Todd didn't take too kindly to Jeremy Scahill's drubbing he received on Real Time the other night. From Glenn Greenwald:

According to Scahill (via email), Todd approached him after the Maher show and the following occurred:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me "that was a cheap shot." I said "what are you talking about?" and he said "you know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "that's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

Media stars are so unaccustomed to being held accountable for the impact of their behavior -- especially when they're on television -- that they consider it a grievous assault on their entitlement when it happens.

Check out the entire post where Glenn's got much more on some similar events going on lately besides just his own dust up with Chuck Todd. Joe Klein got into it with Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog who happens to be I.F. Stone's granddaughter. Glenn and Marcy Wheeler had an ongoing feud with Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. And now we've got Scahill and Todd's back and forth on Real Time.

Glenn summed all of this up much better than I could ever hope to:

Todd's condescending responses illustrate the same point as the above episodes with Klein and Ambinder: in the eyes of Beltway mavens, those who warned about and worked against the radicalism and lawbreaking of the Bush administration are the fringe, crazed, out-of-touch radicals. While Todd was fiddling around with pretty colored maps and fun polling games, Scahill was courageously investigating one of the most corrupt, dangerous and lethal private corporations in the world, yet it's Todd who understands and must solemnly explain the hardened realities of politics to Scahill, the confused and silly Leftist.

There's little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era -- and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible -- both in politics and the establishment media -- not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one's culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

In fairness to Chuck Todd, he was not one of the ones out there cheerleading for the war and I really liked him when I'd see him on C-SPAN's Washington Journal about every morning when he was working for The Hotline. He's a numbers guy. He was one of the best in the business at reading and sorting through the numbers on how our elections were going to turn out. I don't think coming to MSNBC however, has been good for Chuck Todd.

And now he's on there with the rest of them repeating the narrative of how terrible for the Democrats it would be if any investigations are allowed to happen, and if anyone from the Bush administration is held accountable. It's all politics to Chuck.

Here are my thoughts on that. One of the reasons it would be turned into a game of politics is because Chuck Todd and the rest of the beltway media would report it as such, instead of a legal matter. What Chuck Todd is relaying is what the Republican Party would like to see happen if the Democrats or this Department of Justice goes after the law breaking. It would be the choice of those in the media to validate the Republicans' sniping, which would inevitably follow (and already has for that matter), or to dismiss them as playing partisan politics in order to cover up law breaking for political gain.

Of course since the media was part and parcel in allowing the atrocities of the last eight or nine years, that's never going to happen.