I had a dream.

I've been reading and listening to all the arguments made who are for and against the supposed new Senate health-care compromise bill that Harry Reid has sent to the CBO to be scored before they present it to us. Even as we see the Senate shut down because politicians don't want big PharMa to take a hit, thanks to an amendment being pushed by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to allow for the reimportation of pharmaceutical drugs from Canada.

I've talked to a few sources myself and Greg Sargent's account comports with what I've heard as well. It's confusing because it's been kept secret, and so staffers didn't know what had transpired at the end of the day. I have heard from sources today who said it's not as bad as was first thought, but the bottom line is that we'll know soon enough. Harry Reid knows it will be impossible to spin it when it does surface so why the chicanery? Anyway, the process is still a long way from being over and Congress should not take a single day off until they have a great bill finished before the New Year. They can at least act like working Americans for once instead of crying about working weekends. This new bill is not the final bill that will eventually be voted on to reform our health care system. The House is very much in play although the Senate seems to think that they alone are the Guardians of the Gate and they have to weigh in and not let it get watered down into a bag full of beans.

The committees have to be appointed by Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid as they head to conference and now it will fall on them to finalize the health care bill that will be voted on.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a champion of the public option has said he will not vote for the Senate bill as it now stands while Americans still favor the public option by a wide margin in the newest polls. Howard Dean has found some comfort in the idea of expanding medicare to cover people fifty five years old.

It appears that committee heads George Miller, Henry Waxman and Charlie Rangel of the House probably will be part of the conference coming out of the House, and I say let them do their part to strengthen the bill against the pressure from the Senate side so that when it comes out of conference the ConservaDems like Baucus, Landrieu, Conrad and Lieberman will be faced with two choices. Either act like our elected politicians that are representing Americans or be exposed as health insurance shills and if the bill is to go down then put it on the shoulders.

Let President Snowe use her fantasized veto pen to sign away our health care. Let Lieberman have to cast the vote that will kill a historic day in American politics.

Let Ben Nelson get in front of the cameras and explain to people like the thousands who were being treated at the Kansas City free clinic, with the incredible help of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann who had nowhere to go for care and tell them that he had to kill health care for them because he valued the profits of the health care industry over the well being of their families.

Let the ConservaDems go down in flames and burn to ashes with the bill if they choose to abandon the campaign promise that President Obama ran on and the mandate they rode in on with his victory in November.

We will keep fighting to make this bill a better because it won't be us that abandon the American people.

It will be the members of the House of Lords who value their positions of power over the less of us, the same as us and the more of us that inhabit this great country. It it by their pettiness that America regresses. It is with their utter contempt for the people that elected them that health care reform will fail. And all of America will know you because we shall speak. And all of America will despise you because they will know. Even those that oppose you will begin to suffer as the months go by and they too will realize that your cowardice has hurt their families even in their blindness to reality.

A Scarlet Letter will forever be burned into your foreheads for all to see.

Howard Dean writes at DK why he's so encouraged by the Senate healthcare reform bill. And remember, unlike us, he's actually worked on providing universal care:

Medicare is a government-run, single-payer system. What the Senate is working out could move the ball forward, if people under 65 will -- for the first time -- have the option of signing up for such a program under certain circumstances. The specifics of those circumstances matter a lot. The under-65 pool should not be limited to high-risk people only, and subsidies will ultimately be needed for those who cannot afford the premiums.

The other groundbreaking piece of the current Senate proposal is that a significant number of Americans over 55 who do not have access to health insurance today, would be able to get it within six months of the final bill being signed. Of course, more reform and access to choices are needed. However, this proposal moves us in a very good direction. The realities are Congress rarely passes reform that is not incremental and it is important that the increments they pass are headed in a direction we ultimately want to go. Expanding Medicare would do that.

The proposal to expand the Federal Employee Healthcare system could also be a step in the right direction. While I am not a fan of the private health insurance market, with the proper regulations, this could work. The OPM has done a reasonably good job of running the current plan, but Senator Rockefeller’s proposal to require insurance companies to spend 90 percent of their revenues on healthcare is absolutely essential.

This is the Medical Loss Ratio amendment that Jay Rockefeller and Al Franken are working on. It's the most important piece in this compromise. Without it, it won't work.

We must continue to work towards a system that gives Americans real choices. The truth is America already has a socialist system (the Veterans Administration with 25 million people). We already have a single-payer system (Medicare with 50 million people). And we already have a private insurance system (with almost 50 million Americans uninsured). The American people can reform healthcare by making real choices, but Congress must let us have those choices.

Both the current Senate proposal and the House bill will give us choices that Americans did not have before. The central problem will be that not enough Americans will have those choices. So while we may be able to take big steps in the right direction – the fight for healthcare reform does not end here. We must continue to pressure Congress to pass real reform.

This might not be as bad as I first thought. Now, keeping in mind that this is not the final version, I'm linking to stories about the Senate healthcare bill here, here, here, here, here and here.

News reports state that Howard Dean was working behind the scenes to push the Medicare buy-in as a compromise (just as he suggested when I interviewed him a few months ago).

I do think it's possible to get good, affordable coverage without the public option - under some circumstances. Bill Clinton told us as much when we met with him back in June, pointing out how French and German plans included regulated private insurers.

The Franken amendment setting a mandatory medical loss ratio is about the only thing they could do that would work as well as a public option in creating competition - and it's in there.

And it's certainly a win for our side if it turns out that people aged 55 to 64 can buy into Medicare. Of course, none of us know what those actual premiums look like because Medicare is so heavily subsidized for its current population. Here's the estimated premium. My guess is, once people get into the plan, they'll start lobbying their reps for more subsidies - and to open the plan up even more.

One of the problem areas that's a national disgrace is how the handicapped have to wait a couple of years before they can get Medicare coverage. It would be great if something in this bill fixes that, but we don't have the details yet.

Oh, and the Chamber of Commerce and the GOP will hold a press conference today urging Congress to scrap the entire bill and work on lowering costs. (Not your costs - their costs!) My rule of thumb is, if the Chamber hates it, I'm for it.

So there I was, driving to my friends' house for dinner and babysitting last night when Howard Dean called me.

I'd been scheduled to talk to him after his appearance at the Philadelphia Free Library yesterday, but there was some kind of miscommunication and it didn't happen.

Anyway, he apologized for the mix-up and we had an interesting discussion. (Remember, none of this is verbatim. I was driving while we talked, and I've reconstructed as best I can.)

The first thing I said was, "Every single problem you described at today's talk, logistical and financial, could be solved with single payer."

His response was along the lines of "And your point is?" As in, let's deal with what we have in front of us, I suppose.

So then I asked him what he thought the strategy was behind the administration starting the debate with the public option instead of single payer. "I think it was a terrible mistake," he said. "I think they were worried it would be called socialism." (Naturally, I agreed.)

Let's see. What else? He said the reason the focus of the campaign is on the finances of health care is because Obama was actually put in the White House by the under-35 voters, and while they're socially liberal, they're very conservative on the deficit and are convinced they won't be able to count on things like Social Security.

"You don't have to tell me," I said. "My kids are Ron Paul fans." He laughed and said, "Then you understand."

"Tell them if this bill doesn't pass, their sick parents will have to move in with them. That ought to do it," I advised.

(And I said that while the under-35 votes may have put Obama in the White House, I suspected the bulk of individual contributions came from baby boomers and he might want to look into that.)

I said the real problem with the current health care system was a matter of human dignity. I told him about a friend who's struggling with brain injury and has been turned down three times for Social Security disability. "They keep telling her she can work, but who's going to hire someone who doesn't know ahead of time if she'll be too sick to work?" I said.

He said yes, there's no question that the present system was a nightmare for the chronically ill or handicapped.

I told him I was really hoping the bill's final version included lowering the Medicare age to 55, "since I turn 55 next week."

"I'd like to see it lowered to 50, that would make a lot of sense," he replied. We talked about how it would lessen the cost burden on employers and increase the chances of the over-50s getting rehired.

We also discussed the positive ripple effects we could expect from the public option - that it would lower the costs of auto insurance, and take work-related injuries out of the worker's comp system.

I talked about the strange Beltway bubble and asked if people working there really understood what was at stake out here.

He said no, it wasn't my imagination, the people in the Beltway really do live in a different universe - "especially the Senate. It really is like a club," he said. He corrected himself: "No, it is a club. And they're most concerned about their personal relationships with the other Senators, and then everything else. It's very strange."

Don't they understand how angry everyone is out here? I said. "If they put us in a position where we're paying more money for less coverage, it's going to be war." He said no, they really don't - although he keeps trying to tell them. He said we're looking at a real political disaster if they screw this up. "Because I'm on the outside, I get to say those things," he said.

Dean says not to worry about the Baucus bill, that the final version won't look anything like it "but everyone's sort of tiptoeing around, no one wants to say it out loud. They have to pass a bill out of Finance first, and then they'll change it."

I told him the perception from here is that the Baucus bill was the one that had the White House approval, and he said, "I can understand why you have that perception, but I don't think so at all."

I told him many of us despaired of any real change, and he reacted immediately. "You absolutely shouldn't be thinking that way," he said. He believes there's a "95 percent chance" of a real public option, and if there isn't one, the bill shouldn't pass.

No point to throwing billions of dollars to the insurance industry if we don't get the public option, he said.

"Do you think the people working on this bill actually understand that?" I said. "Maybe I'm being cynical here."

"Yes, they do," he said. "The bill was basically written by the insurance industry. I do think they know [it's a giveaway]." He said it was written by two former insurance industry lobbyists, they knew what they were doing.

But the good news is, he really does believe there's going to be an affordable public option, and all this will be a moot point.

I told him a lot of us were counting on him, and if he told us to support the final bill, I'd feel okay about supporting it.

Here's hoping.

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The resignation of Van Jones was a "loss for the country," according to Gov. Howard Dean. "I think he was brought down," Dean told Fox News' Chris Wallace.

John Amato:

Howard Dean said he spoke to Van Jones and said...

Well, he was told by the people waving clip boards around that he was signing something else and I think that's too bad.

Digby writes:

I would hope that these leftist extremists like Color of Change will think twice before they go after an upstanding company like FOX News because the lesson here is that somebody is going to pay a big price for doing it. In fact, it probably would pay to keep a close eye on the FOX gasbags from now on to get an idea of which groups or individuals have offended the network and get rid of them before anyone has a chance to make a public stink. It would save everyone a lot of time and trouble.

We have members in the Republican party like the Michelle Bachmann's that say and do insane things all day long, but they just get a pat on the back from the media and say thank you, may I have another.
The Washington Post actually let a little truth slip into their article about the FOX witch hunt.

But there's more to this story than just the usual Lani Guanier human sacrifice ritual:

Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck all but declared war on Jones after a group the adviser founded in 2005, ColorofChange.org, led an advertising boycott against Beck's show to protest his claim that Obama is a racist.

This is yet another example of Fox News annihilation strategy against anyone who criticizes them. And it works.

It's kind of ironic that they constantly accuse Obama of being a "Chicago" politician when it Roger Ailes who adheres to the classic dictum from The Untouchables:

Malone: You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way!

Murdoch and Ailes have made it quite clear that if you mess with Fox they will unleash the crazies. They're taking Van Jones' scalp to send that message. He won't be the last. It's not a coincidence that the Washington Post put this surprisingly insightful paragraph far down in the story. In fact, I'm a bit surprised they let it slip through at all.

Comedy Central's roasts are pretty funny, but there's nothing like the original Dean Martin roasts. This clip, which features Foster Brooks "honoring" Don Rickles, is a classic.

Open thread below...

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Wow. Imagine that. Someone on Fox News attacking a child, a funeral, Howard Dean, and universal health care in one fell swoop. Bravo Laura.

Transcript:

INGRAHAM: But tell me why you think it's okay for people to be up there on Capitol Hill saying do it for Teddy? Why is that okay?

SKINNER: Well, I'll tell you why. You said are they using this -- Ted Kennedy's death? Ted Kennedy himself called it, health care, the cause of his life. Okay. So it's not using it, Laura.

And here's what really bothered me during this debate over the weekend on the radio. And we were all talking about it is that you had these moving eulogies by Orrin Hatch at obviously the services, but McCain, and Mitch McConnell saying, and even FOX News, the coverage said lion of -- liberal lion crossed party lines. Everybody said how wonderful and how he crossed party lines.

Now that he's gone, they can't see how health care can get passed because he's not there to do it. That's like using him as an excuse to bury health care reform along with him. You're eulogizing him and saying he went to your mother's funeral.

INGRAHAM: Well.

SKINNER: You loved him, but you can't do what it is he's done his whole career.

INGRAHAM: Right.

SKINNER: .not a single one of his dear friends can do what he's done.

INGRAHAM: But that's - right. That's not quite accurate though because over the last several months clearly, the Democrats haven't been saying let's do it for Teddy. Let's do it for Senator Kennedy. He's struggling for his life. And let's fight for it. I didn't hear that a lot over the last several months.

So only after his death, and after the polls show that the public basically doesn't want this whole Obama care thing, do they think okay, the whole rebranding, the first two times around hasn't worked. So now we're going to try this. And let me just play -- we have a sound bite of one of the prayers at the mass on Saturday. This is the funeral mass. And this was one of the Kennedy grand kids during the prayers. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For what my grandpa called the cause of his life, as he said so often, in every part of this land that every American will have decent quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege. We pray to the Lord.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Nancy do you think that that adorable little boy came up with that on his own? It mean, it sounds like it's right out of Howard Dean's speech or something. Come on, this was politicizing the funeral.

SKINNER: But you know what? I've been -- I was there, Laura, at the convention when Ted Kennedy actually gave his last speech. And he was bed- ridden before he even gave that speech. So I'm telling you, he said this is the cause of my life. Everybody - 1960s.

INGRAHAM: Who cares?

SKINNER: .I've been working on this.

INGRAHAM: Nancy, who cares? Who cares that it's the cause of his life? It's a sixth of our economy.

SKINNER: It's not just.

INGRAHAM: It's not a tribute to one man. This is our future.

SKINNER: Right.

INGRAHAM: This is our liberty and our freedom at stake.

SKINNER: That's why he worked on it.

INGRAHAM: It's not about Ted Kennedy.

SKINNER: What the calls are for, Laura, is for bipartisanship. If he crossed the line -- for Nixon, he got Nixon's cancer institute passed. And Nixon didn't want his name on.

INGRAHAM: Right, we're going back to Nixon for the bipartisanship.

SKINNER: He's done no child left behind. He's done lots of things. It's not about ted Kennedy. This is the thing. If we're going to look at a compromise on health care, which that's what everybody is talking about now. The far left wants single pair universal. That's gone. The far right wants the status quo. Well, these people are saying.

INGRAHAM: Far right?

SKINNER: (INAUDIBLE) for the American people.

INGRAHAM: Yeah. How about 55 percent of the country? Far right? I mean, I don't think that's necessarily working now when you look at these polls. It's broad based opposition. But Nancy, we appreciate it very much.

Mother Jones: Back to Basics

Mugsy`s Rap Sheet: Bi-partisanship is a crock

The Satirical Political Report: Cheney claims detainee torture was merely 'end-of-life counseling.'

Texas Observer Blog: "We Hate the United States": Secessionists rally at Capitol while Perry stays home

Unfogged: A few news items that caught my eye

Open Left: Who could've foreseen the housing bubble? Dean Baker, that's who - in 2002

As someone recently said, what planet do they live on? Chuck Grassley and Ken Conrad fall all over themselves praising their co-op proposal, while Howard Dean, the Last Semi-Honest Man, calls it out as the political theater it is.

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty tired of these expedient political solutions to real-life problems. After reading Matt Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone piece on health care reform (no link yet), I now understand just how thoroughly the Blue Dogs screwed us on the public option and I would cry no tears if it disappeared in its present form:

(CBS) Former Vermont Governor and doctor, Howard Dean said the health care co-operative proposal is purely for political strategy and has not worked in the past on "Face the Nation" Sunday.

"That proposal is a political compromise, not a policy compromise," Dean said. "No one knows what it would look like and when it has been tried in the past it mostly hasn’t worked."

Dean, a strong advocate for the public insurance option, said people need the choice of a government-run plan to compete with private insurers. He argued that because private insurance companies are investor-owned, they are spending less money on health services and more on equity.

Medicare, Dean said, "is by nature much more efficient" because currently seniors can move, leave their job and get sick without having their coverage discontinued.

"Everybody over 65 has it and the question is 'Why don't we open up that program,'" he said.

[...] Dean said "we are getting pretty mixed signals from Senator Grassley. … I think the Republicans owe it to this country to give us a clearer sense of what they will and will not support."

Senators Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, appeared earlier on "Face the Nation," saying that the public option plan would not find enough support in the Senate. The co-op solution, they said, would be the only hope for a bipartisan agreement.

Dean also said the $600 billion dollar House price tag on health care is "reasonable" because it is less than we are spending in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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It looks like Tom Ridge's lastest revelations in his book have given Keith a chance to say he was correct when he did his series on the Nexus of Politics and Terror. John Dean weighs in on the criminality of what Ridge has admitted to in his book. He thinks Ridge gave himself some wiggle room since he said he only believed the terrorist threat level was being manipulated for political reasons, and did not say he knew it to be a fact.

It's so nice to see all the dirty f@%#king hippies were right about this, huh? It will be interesting to watch the Villagers try to explain why they didn't report on something as plain as the noses on their faces back when this was going on. Other than Keith, I don't recall any of them speaking out about it other than to repeat the government propaganda. I'd also like someone to ask Tom Ridge why he didn't resign when he first knew this was happening.

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Howard Dean on MSNBC's Morning Meeting on whether there should be a public option in the health care reform bill.

Dean: The public option is really the only way to inject the kinds of things that the President wants and I think the Secretary was wrong when she said it's not essential. It is essential. You don't have reform without the public option. I guess I'd even disagree with the President. To say it's a sliver of the bill, it's true, technically it's a sliver of the bill. There's a lot of other stuff in the bill, but without a public option you're pumping $60 billion a year into the private health insurance industry, and I think that's an enormous mistake and hardly qualifies as reform......

I don't think the President can sign a bill which puts $60 billion dollars of tax payers' money into the private health industry, and that's what this bill would be without the public option, so I hope that he wouldn't sign that bill. I don't think he'll get a bill like that because I don't think the House will pass one.....

....My advocacy would be for this. If you're not going to have a public option, then don't call it health reform. Strip all the money out of the bill and just do something we did here in Vermont about fifteen years ago, guaranteed issue and community rating. Require insurance companies to insure everybody. Stop them from kicking people off and don't let them charge huge amounts of money for sicker patients.

That's not health reform. It's insurance reform. You won't do much for the uninsured but you will make the health insurance market work better for the people it does work for. And you know, that's an incremental step and I wouldn't want to throw that out, but I'd strip the money out of the bill because this is going to be and expensive bill and if you're not going to get reform then you shouldn't bother with the expense.

Amen Howard.

Howard Dean on Morning Joe this morning:

"The president knows very well that you aren't really going to have health care reform without a public option. But he also knows he has to get this out of the Senate," Dean said on "Morning Joe." "He's got a very important member of the Finance Committee, Kent Conrad, who doesn't want to vote for this bill if it's got a public option in it. And he knows he's not going to get any Republican votes, of any kind. So at the end of this day, this bill is going to be written by Democrats. It's got to get out of the Senate. And you only need a few Democrats to take out the public option."

He added that with Republicans unlikely to support any version of health care legislation, he had no doubt that the final reform bill would be passed with the help of reconciliation, which means Democrats need only to muster 50 votes in the Senate rather than the usual 60.

Dean told RCP earlier this year that a health care reform bill without a strong public option was pointless. "If it doesn't, all we have is the same old stuff, and I don't think it's worth spending $634 billion on what we've already got," he said.

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Countdown's Worst Person's with winner Michelle Bachmann. Runners up Lou Dobbs and Rudy Giulani.

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Does anyone else think Howard Dean sounds like one of the few honest voices out there when it comes to health care reform? Howard breaks down why the President chasing after Republican votes in the name of bipartisanship is a really bad idea.

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(h/t David for helping with this post))

Newt Gingrich debated Howard Dean on ABC's THIS WEEK over health care reform. Gingrich helped destroy it in 1994 and is an expert teabagger from way back. He quickly jumped in and supported Sarah Palin's disgusting Face Book comments when she says that her son with Down Syndrome would be put up in front of Obama's death panel and be killed if health care is reformed are just like two peas in a pod. Stephanopolous argued that the euthanasia talking point is completely made up and is not even in the bill, but Newt, the "Marrying Man" doesn't care what's actually in the bill because he'd never do that, he just attacked the evil government as the boogie man.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Those phrases appear nowhere in the bill. The only thing...

GINGRICH: But...

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... but let me just explain what's in the bill and then get you to respond to that. The only thing in the bill is they would allow Medicare to pay for what they say is voluntary counseling on end-of-life issues.

GINGRICH: I think people are very concerned, when you start talking about cost controls, that a bureaucracy -- we don't -- you're asking us to trust the government. Now, I'm not talking about the Obama administration. I'm talking about the government. You're asking us to decide that we believe that the government is to be trusted.

We know people who have said routinely, well, you're going to have to make decisions. You're going to have to decide. Communal standards historically is a very dangerous concept.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not in the bill.

GINGRICH: But the bill's -- the bill's 1,000 pages of setting up mechanisms. It sets up 45 different agencies. It has all sorts of panels. You're asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there clearly are people in America who believe in -- in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.

When were Americans against the government trying to help controlling the costs of health insurance? That's more Beckerwocky coming from the teabagger King.

Transcript of ABC's THIS WEEK below the fold:

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