Hell has officially frozen over. After more than a decade of hyper-partisanship and knee-jerk, reactionary opposition to the other, the entire political spectrum of Meet the Press's roundtable panel--Markos Moulitsas, Joe Scarborough, Ed Gillespie and Tavis Smiley--all agree on one thing: the health-care reform bill sucks. There's the vaunted bipartisanship Obama sought.

Laughing off Whiter House adviser David Axelrod's spin of the historic (and not-as-bad-as-it-seems) nature of the bill, Markos points out that all this bill does is expand an already broken system, a proven failed program in Massachusetts. Scarborough adds that for all the White House talk that the insurance companies hate the bill, there is no regulation that Congress didn't capitulate on after pushback from the insurance lobbies and if they hate it so much, why has the value of their stock gone up so much recently? Former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie can barely contain his glee at the thought of the seats the GOP will pick up, because of this bill, and Smiley notes that Candidate Obama's rhetoric doesn't measure up to President Obama's actions and bemoans the incrementalism mentality:

I do believe that you have to stand on your principle. With all due respect to the White House and the President, who deserves who deserves great credit for taking this issue on and pushing further down the field than any other seven Presidents have done, you still have to ask, where is the principle that we started out with, and how firm have we stood on that principle? I thnk the danger for this White House is this: that the President and his team appear to be incrementalists. I warned the last time I was on this program, quoting Dr. King, about taking “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

I love that line, and it resonates as much today as it did when Dr. King tried dissuade those who wanted to take an incremental approach to civil rights and segregation.

The sad thing is how clear this is to us here outside the Beltway, and how badly calculated this was to those inside the White House. And I don't think this was some malevolent intent on their part, but just a triangulating, DLC/Centrist move that completely didn't take into account that we now inhabit the post-Clinton/Bush era. I don't think there's any question that the White House must accept responsibility for the lameness of the bill--although they'll never do it publicly and risk giving more fodder to the GOP media--Feingold and Webb are already pointing fingers.

And at this point, I don't know what can be done to make this better. Tempting as it might be to thrown in the towel, the ramifications of that politically (you throw a bone like that to the GOP and nothing will get through Congress next session) will be a nightmare, and besides which, there's no guarantee they'd be able to achieve anything, much less anything better on a second go-round. So all in all, I have to agree with Joe Scarborough, as much as it deeply pains me to do so: we've been screwed.

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Wow. This is unusual. Ed Schultz does something you rarely see, criticize someone from his own network. Ed brings in Markos Moulitsas to respond to Chris Matthews insult of the netroots yesterday where he said we're not real Democrats and back-seat bitchers. John offered to debate Matthews yesterday. I wonder if we'll hear anything else from him on this now that Schultz had Moulitsas on. If Matthews wants to lob insults, I'd like to see him try to debate those he was insulting to their faces. I'm not holding my breath though. Good on Ed for giving Markos a chance to respond.

Moulitsas: You know in 2003 after ah--when Bush landed his plane on the aircraft carrier, behind the--spoke in front of the banner that said "mission accomplished", Chris Matthews had an entire show based on that event where he thought Bush was fantastic and he said "everybody knows that we won the war, except for a few critics". Well I was one of those few critics. People like me and the netroots were some of those critics and it turns out that we were right and the beltway conventional wisdom was wrong. And once again we're in a situation where people like Chris Matthews don't learn from these mistakes. They're sort of trapped in this bubble and and they think that they know better. The fact is most of the editors on Daily KOS either have worked on campaigns or worked on Hill staff and of my readers, I would venture to say the vast, vast majority knocked on doors, gave money, made phone calls on behalf of campaigns. They worked and they vote and if Chris Matthews is worried about us working and if he thinks that we're not Democrats, well then he really should be worried because he's got a thing coming.

[...]

Moulitsas: You know ActBlue is an on line clearing house for contributions to Democratic party candidates. In the last four years we have raised $115 million through ActBlue... a $115 million. Now that's not a bunch of kids in the back seat donating $115 million, at an average donation of about $30. So we're talking little dollars here and there. There's a lot of us. We're engaged. We're involved and we want a party that represents the American people and a government that represents the American people, not insurance companies, not big business and clearly we're not quite there yet but we only started this battle a couple of years ago. We're still fighting.

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Markos Moulitsas joined Keith Olbermann to discuss the President's decision to escalate troops in Afghanistan and the political implications if he does not start to withdraw troops before 2011. Keith asked Kos for his reaction on the latest news that the Senate has finally come to a tentative agreement on the health care bill and the AP report that the public option is out, the Medicare buy-in is in and the bill is being scored by the CBO.

Moulitsas: I think I would have to see the details to really have a full understanding of what's going on but I've been under the assumption for a while that the Senate is the non-functioning governmental body. It cannot do its job which is to reform and improve the lives of Americans.

It is broken and it's completely bought and paid for by the insurance companies and I think it's indicative that we just found out today that the insurance companies are claiming victory on this battle --supposedly not over -- they're already claiming victory because they're going to have a mandate forcing people to buy their crappy products with few restrictions on their ability to do the sort of business practices, the unethical business practices that have created this problem in the first place.

Olbermann: Any hope in that Medicare buy-in?

Moulitsas: Well the initial reports are that it's what, 50, 55?

Olbermann: 55.

Moulitsas: Yeah, 55. It doesn't do anybody under 55 any good and in fact what it seems to do is it takes away some of the most expensive potential customers from the insurance companies, the older, and gives them, basically off to the government. So we need something that applies to all Americans, not just the elderly.

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(h/ Heather)

Tom Tancredo stormed off the set of the Ed Show when he was debating health care with Markos Moulitsas. Poor baby.

It all started when Tancredo started trash-talking the Veterans Administration, at which point Markos brought up his chickenhawk past. He got angry and tried the standard conservative whine, realized he was better quitting while he was behind, and then stormed off. The truth hurts, right Tom?

As a Republican student activist, Tancredo spoke out in favor of the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of Northern Colorado in June 1969, he became eligible to serve in Vietnam. Tancredo said he went for his physical, telling doctors he'd been treated for depression, and eventually got a "1-Y" deferment.

Too many of these cowards discuss our troops when they themselves refused to serve when they had the chance. Here's Jed Lewison:

A few minutes ago on The Ed Show, Tom Tancredo tried to make the case against government health care by claiming that the Veterans Administration is unpopular with U.S. military veterans. The only problem for him was that he was up against Markos...who is one of those veterans, unlike Tancredo, a pro-Vietnam War chickenhawk who got a 1-Y deferment.

When Markos pointed out that Tancredo was (a) wrong about the Veterans Administration and (b) not qualified to speak for veterans, Tancredo exploded in anger, demanding an apology. Markos did not oblige, and Tancredo stormed off the set.

Funny, too, how the most thin-skinned of the wingnuts are the same people most prone to making vicious, uncivil, frequently racist and xenophobic remarks. Tancredo, after all, is a guy who claimed the National Council of La Raza was just like the Ku Klux Klan, and called Sonia Sotomayor a racist, and told the people of Brownsville, Texas, that they should build the border fence on the northern side of their city.

And then goes whimpering and whining off the stage when he gets a clean shot to the gut with hard facts. There's a street name for that, but this is a family blog.

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Richard Wolffe talks to Markos Moulitsas about the recent poll from Research 2000 for Daily Kos showing that the Republicans have a real problem with their southern base.

Wolffe: We're going to get to your poll in a minute, but I wanted to ask what you think the political calculation is for Cantor as he distances himself from the birthers, and then bashes those who challenge the birthers.

Moulistas: Well I think most people would recognize, even Republicans, that there's a certain percentage of the Republican base that's a little off, that's a little crazy. I just think they didn't want anybody to know it's half of them. I mean, you know, that's crazy, so it's a problem for them because what they're realizing is that they are a southern regional rump party, that their leadership is heavily based in the south, and the rest of the country is sort of looking at them and wondering "What the heck is going on down there?".

Wolffe: So do you think now we're at a point where Cantor or maybe a certain segment of the GOP want the whole birther thing to go away now? Is that what's happening?

Moulistas: Oh, absolutely. I mean for a while it, you know, as long as nobody knows about it, then they could sort of feed it. They could introduce legislation in the Congress quietly to sort of appease this rabid, radical right. But suddenly now this is a national story because it's getting credence. You have Lou Dobbs on CNN making it his personal crusade. You have Fox News obviously pushing this very heavily, talk radio. And you're starting to realize that you have Republicans are going on campaign swings and they're going on television and they're doing interviews, and they're being asked about Obama's birth certificate. And it's really not the kind of thing they want to be asked about. It's not the kind of thing they want to encourage.

They go on to discuss the racial element behind the birther movement and the lack of moderate Republicans left in the party and how being forced to cater to their crazy base is going to hurt them nationally.