Mike Stark catches up with Blanche Lincoln in Congress and asks her if she'll join the Republican filibuster. She has been virtually silent throughout the whole health care debate and Mike does a great job of getting her to say something on the record. What she said of course was nothing.

Stark: Can you see yourself filibustering or joining a filibuster?

Lincoln: I don't even know what the bill is going to be and I'm going to do what I think is most important for Arkansans and that is to look at the bill, to see if it's going to be helpful to Arkansans and the country in expanding health care...

She knows what's going on in this debate and gives a typical non-answer about supporting the public option like many have given up to this point. We at Blue America are running a brand new ad all over her state starting today so we can help her decide that filibustering health care is not in any one's best interests except the health insurance corporations that she's taken huge contributions from.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post writes:

The squeeze is on for Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) on health care in the form of a new series of ads paid for by the liberal Blue America PAC that cast the Arkansas Democrat as bought and paid for by insurers. "Blanche Lincoln claims to fight for health care reform but whose interests does she really represent," asks the ad's narrator before noting that Lincoln has taken more than $2 million in campaign contributions from the health and insurance industries. The narrator concludes the ad by asking viewers to call Lincoln and "demand she allow an up or down vote on the public option." (This is the fourth ad paid for by Blue America targeting Lincoln this year.)

Polling shows Lincoln, who is up for re-election in 2010, holding relatively slim margins over a series of unknown Republican candidates. Lincoln's dilemma? How to walk the line between the conservative leanings of the Razorback State -- Obama took just 39 percent there in 2009 -- and the increasingly vocal and well-funded left within her own party who see the inclusion of a public option as a sine qua non for health care reform.

Her primary is the reason we targeted her originally and it's worked out very well so far.

Please help us continue running this ad and many more to come and join in on Blue America's Campaign for Health Care Choice. Donations are much appreciated.

And Digby writes:

Perhaps Lincoln should start worrying just a bit about what will happen if her Democratic base stays home. The numbers aren't looking all that good for her right now.

She's between little rock and a hard place but it seems to me that's easily solved at this point. She should vote for cloture, thus appeasing her base and then she can vote against the bill if she needs to appeal to neanderthals who want people to die quickly.

Believe me, none of her constituents will hold it against her. Most people think cloture is unpasteurized sour cream. And they like it.

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Donna Edwards tells her story of being a young mother without health insurance and how she is paying America back with her vote for health care reform.

Edwards: I collapsed and was taken to an emergency room. Without health care I was treated as one of those uncompensated and now it's time for me to pay the American people back with a vote for comprehensive health care reform. This bill will take the burden off of providers and Americans for paying the costs of uncompensated care and safeguards for the health of all Americans.

She's been a solid progressive voice in Congress. We need more like her. I watched the endless insanity of the Republicans in the House on full display all day and night Saturday. It made me sick, watching them line up like replicants, making sure they used the same talking points over and over again. When they talk about "freedom," all they do is smear what that word means to the world. C&L Annette emailed me and said we should start calling them the Republick Party. I like that.

You won't read much about their behavior during a crucial time in our history because the media shields the nuts who are loose in the halls of Congress.

Howie Klein writes:

I love Donna Edwards. Her short speech about why she was voting for health care reform made me cry last night-- and not fake Glenn Beck tears. Like Donna, there was a time in my life when I couldn't afford health insurance-- or health care-- either. Americans deserve better than predatory insurance companies thriving on misery. This is why America needs more members of Congress like Donna Edwards and less like Paul Ryan, Suzanne Kosmas and John Barrow

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So nice to see Sean Hannity isn't too concerned about ClusterFox being seen as an arm of the Republican Party with this latest hackery. On his Friday evening show on Fox he brought on Michele Bachmann to help promote her call for people to come protest the halls of Congress against the health care bill--as though they don't have enough problems with dealing with security as it is. If she wants people to show up in the Congressional halls next week, I hope they're showing up at her office to tell her to quit upping the ante with whipping up the crazies out there. The only time I've heard someone use the phrase "the whites of their eyes", it had to do with shooting someone.

Given Bachmann's lack of concern for her previous inflammatory rhetoric this is of little surprise. It seems she's not going to stop this stuff until someone gets hurt or killed out there. What's absolutely disgusting is the lack of will of from anyone in the GOP to tell her to stop it. While I certainly do not think that Michele Bachmann is hoping any harm will come to another member of Congress, she obviously is either oblivious to or just doesn't care what sort of response using this type of language might invoke.

From The Hill--Bachmann urges confronting lawmakers on healthcare bill:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is urging Americans to come to Washington, D.C., next week to roam the halls of Congress and lobby lawmakers against the House Democrats' healthcare reform plan.

The strategy aims at resurrecting the momentum Republicans enjoyed during the August recess, when many critics challenged their members of Congress on healthcare reform. Since then, Democrats have regained their footing and have captured some political momentum to pass a bill.

During an appearance on Fox's "Hannity," Bachmann on Friday night said the plan can be defeated, but only if critics make their case face-to-face with legislators.

Bachmann told conservative commentator Sean Hannity, "The clock is ticking 11:59 ...I've never done this before but I am asking people to come to Washington, D.C., by the carload and next Thursday at noon I'll be at a press conference on the steps of the Capitol.

"I'd love to have every one of your viewers to join me so we can go up and down through the halls, find members of Congress, look at the whites of their eyes and say, 'Don't take away my healthcare.'"

And from Think Progress--Bachmann Calls For Health Care Protest Rally In DC Next Week: ‘We’re Going To Have A Big Party’:

In an interview with the Washington News Observer, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) revealed that, next week in Washington, D.C., the right wing is trying to galvanize yet another mass protest rally against health reform.

Following in the spirit of the “tea party” protests in April and the Glenn Beck-inspired 9/12 rally, Bachmann announced, “We’re going to have a ‘house call’ and a big party out on the National Mall [next week], and we’re going to tell Congress what they can do with their health care bill.”

Fashioning herself as the leader of this mass protest, Bachmann exhorted everyone to “get off the couch, get in your car, get a van together, get a bus together, but get here! We’re going to have a ‘house call’ next week, and we need every American to be here.” She then issued this dire warning (infused with pop culture references):

The American people realize this is it. Just like that brand new Michael Jackson movie came out, ‘This Is It.’ This is it for freedom. If you believe in liberty, and if you’re rejecting tyranny, this is it. Dr. Mark Levin wrote a seminal book that really swept this country called Liberty and Tyranny. And that’s what this debate is about next week. Liberty and tyranny.

Newshounds also had a nice run down of the entire interview Bachmann did on Hannity's show and had this to add:

As the segment ended, Bachmann could barely contain her joy as she said that the Blue Dog Democrats “are clearly on the fence.” She added, “That’s why this is such an exciting opportunity for us… This is our liberty and tyranny moment. This is it! This is about patriotism and manning up. And if we can get Americans literally by the busload to come to Washington, D.C. next week, look their Member of Congress in the eye, pay a house call on Congress, and say ‘Don’t you dare take away my health care,’ … we’ll stop this.”

After another plug for her event, Hannity said, “Maybe I’ll have to show up and observe this so our cameras can see democracy in action.”

It's funny, but while Bachmann was crowing about patriotism and participation in democracy, and asking Americans from all over the country to visit different Representatives (not just their own, presumably), she refuses to accept emails from anyone outside her district. But you can telephone. So if you can't make it to Washington either to support the bill or to let Bachmann know she does not represent the country which consistently supports a public option for health insurance, you can call her office at (202) 225-2331.

Looks like we're going to see a push to open the public option. Get on the phones and let your congress creatures know you're behind it:

Sen. Ron Wyden has doubts about the scope of the public option plan announced Monday.

"I agree with Senator Reid that health reform should give Americans more options. Now, I want to work with him to ensure that all Americans can choose those options," Wyden said. "The bottom line is that the public option can’t really hold private insurers accountable if it is only competing for 10 percent of the insurance market, because private insurance companies aren’t going to change their business practices if 90 percent of their customers can’t take their business elsewhere.

"Real reform means empowering Americans to choose insurance that works well for them and their family, while rejecting plans that don’t. Including a public option is a step in the right direction, now let’s remove the firewalls in this bill that prevent Americans from choosing it," Wyden said in a statement.

[...][Jeff] Merkley, for example, said he would be unhappy if more Americans weren't able to select the so-called public option. As a member of one of the committees that wrote a health care bill, Merkley actively supported a government-option as the best way to maintain costs and provide greater choice. Merkley said in an interview Monday that he would press for any public option to be broadly available along the lines of an amendment he successfully offered in July when the bill was in committee.

Merkley's amendment is designed to give small businesses access to newly created health insurance exchanges that, in theory, breed competition by pooling the number of customers in a specific region. Merkley estimated that his amendment would allow nearly 25,000 more businesses – employing 485,000 workers – to enter the exchanges and 32 million people nationwide.
...

That amendment would increase the size of small businesses eligible for enter the national exchange that includes a public options. He also supports giving states the right expand the size of eligible businesses even more.

"What sense does it make to keep companies from going into the exchange?" he said.

TPM reports that Reid is close to pulling off senatorial support for the public option - and the White House wants Olympia Snowe's trigger option instead.

In other words, the White House wants the plan that won't work, so they can claim it's a bipartisan plan. Or is it that the administration wants a plan that won't really work, and they're using bipartisanship as a cover? Just asking the obvious question, here:

Multiple sources tell TPMDC that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is very close to rounding up 60 members in support of a public option with an opt out clause, and are continuing to push skeptical members. But they also say that the White House is pushing back against the idea, in a bid to retain the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

"They're skeptical of opt out and are generally deferential to the Snowe strategy that involves the trigger," said one source close to negotiations between the Senate and the White House. "They're certainly not calming moderate's concerns on opt-out."

This new development, which casts the White House as an opponent of all but the most watered down form of public option, is likely to yield backlash from progressives, especially those in the House who have been pushing for a more maximal version of reform.

It also suggests for perhaps the first time that the White House's supposed hands off approach that ostensibly allowed the two chambers in Congress to craft their own bill has been discarded.

High level White House officials have floated the trigger idea a number of times, and it seems they continue to do so, even at this, crucial stage of the health care reform process, when their involvement is greatest. That has senators who support the public option concerned.

UPDATE: Big Tent Democrat has another take. So does Nate Silver.

Nice to see Obama taking them on like this. I just wish he talked like this more often:

WASHINGTON — President Obama mounted a frontal assault on the insurance industry on Saturday, accusing it of airing “deceptive and dishonest ads” to derail his health care legislation and threatening to strip the industry of its longstanding exemption from federal anti-trust laws.

In unusually harsh terms, Mr. Obama cast insurance companies as obstacles to change interested only in preserving their own “profits and bonuses” and willing to “bend the truth or break it” to stop his drive to remake the nation’s health care system. The president used his weekly radio and Internet address to push back against industry assertions that legislation will drive up premiums.

The transcript is much more blunt:

A new report for the Business Roundtable – a non-partisan group that represents the CEOs of major companies – found that without significant reform, health care costs for these employers and their employees will well more than double again over the next decade. The cost per person for health insurance will rise by almost $18,000. That’s a huge amount of money. That’s going to mean lower salaries and higher unemployment, lower profits and higher rolls of uninsured. It is no exaggeration to say, that unless we act, these costs will devastate the US economy.

This is the unsustainable path we’re on, and it’s the path the insurers want to keep us on. In fact, the insurance industry is rolling out the big guns and breaking open their massive war chest – to marshal their forces for one last fight to save the status quo. They’re filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads. They’re flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions. And they’re funding studies designed to mislead the American people.

Of course, like clockwork, we’ve seen folks on cable television who know better, waving these industry-funded studies in the air. We’ve seen industry insiders – and their apologists – citing these studies as proof of claims that just aren’t true. They’ll claim that premiums will go up under reform; but they know that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that reforms will lower premiums in a new insurance exchange while offering consumer protections that will limit out-of-pocket costs and prevent discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. They’ll claim that you’ll have to pay more out of pocket; but they know that this is based on a study that willfully ignores whole sections of the bill, including tax credits and cost savings that will greatly benefit middle class families. Even the authors of one of these studies have now admitted publicly that the insurance companies actually asked them to do an incomplete job.

Olympia Snowe said she would vote for the Baucus bill and she did.

She has voted and the bill has passed 14-9.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) was the lone Republican to support the package. "My vote today is my vote today. It doesn't forecast what my vote will be tomorrow," she said, although her vote does keep her at the negotiating table and at the center of the health care reform debate. Snowe risked marginalizing herself with a no vote.

The year after both Truman and Clinton's failed efforts, the Republican Party retook control of Congress and any hope of reform faded to minority status. President Obama intends to avoid the same fate.

With the bill having officially moved through the panel, deliberations will migrate to the Capitol, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will huddle with Senate leaders to merge the finance bill with a more generous version from the health committee which passed earlier this year.

There are more votes to come in the Senate, so this thing is far from over.

And she is getting heat from the GOP for her vote and are looking to strip her of a chance at a chairmanship. Adam Green writes:

From The Hill, "Sens: Snowe may be risking a high perch on healthcare reform vote":

Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine) is risking a shot at becoming the top Republican on an influential Senate committee by backing Democratic healthcare legislation, according to senators on the panel.

..."A vote for healthcare would be something that would weigh on our minds when it came time to vote," said a Republican on Commerce, who said Snowe would otherwise be assured of the ranking member post if not for the healthcare debate.

Wow. The GOP is doing something to her that we've been asking Harry Reid to do to Holy Joe. Remember when we asked Reid to strip Joe of his chairmanship because he campaigned with McCain?

Harry told us that Lieberman is with the Dems on everything except the war?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Sunday he's still trying to keep Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman within the Democratic caucus despite anger over Lieberman's support of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

While he has opposed Democratic efforts to end the war in Iraq, "Joe Lieberman votes with me a lot more than a lot of my senators," Reid told CNN's "Late Edition."

Here's Joe attacking the public option.

Lieberman is a big NO on the Public Option, now calls it 'universal access' for health care. I'm NOT kidding

Lieberman has been standing in the way of health-care reform all along.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman affirmed on Tuesday what progressive health care reform advocates have long feared: At this juncture, he is likely to oppose a public option for health insurance coverage.
--
For Democrats, it was a shot to the gut -- the latest so-called centrist lawmaker from within their own party ranks speaking out against one of their most cherished aspects of health care reform. For all the angst Lieberman has caused within Democratic circles the past few years, he was supposed to be an ally on domestic issues.

He also joined the Republicans when they said they wanted to slow things down.

We want Lieberman stripped if he stands in the way of an up-or-down vote, but as usual the Democratic leadership refuses to dig in.

From Politico, "Dem leaders brush off the left":

Now, more than 79,000 people have signed a Progressive Change Campaign Committee petition urging Reid to strip the chairmanship of any Democratic senator who votes to filibuster health care reform.

The response from Reid’s No. 2, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.): "We’ve never done that. We’re not going to do that."

Durbin said the petitioners needed to "count to 60 and understand we need to be together, and there are times when we need to work out our differences."

"This is a silly and unnecessary distraction that is not going to happen — period," added a Senate Democratic leadership aide. "Given how important this is to the rest of his agenda, it is up to President Obama to help the leadership to hold the caucus together."

The GOP threatens Snowe and the Dems do nothing to the appeasers of the obstructionist right. It's infuriating.

It's all about that up-or-down vote, and it's something we need to push hard on, as Digby says:

Anyway, those last comments probably tell us where the filibuster issue is, in my opinion. The leadership aide says that Obama needs to step up to twist those arms, which one assumes from the comment, he is not doing. And Dick Durbin, who is Obama's staunchest supporter in the Senate, is basically saying that nobody's going to play hardball. So, there you have it. At least for today.

As I've been writing for a while, it's all about cloture. There's no need for them to vote for the final bill, they just need to allow their president and the people of the United States to have a simple up or down vote on health care reform. And there is a cluster of egos in the centrist caucus (not the least of whom is Holy Joe) that is getting ready to stamp their little feet and hold their breath until they turn blue unless someone, goddamn it, finally understands that they are the most important people in the world.

Please sign Adam Green's petition to Harry Reid:

I'd expect weakness from Reid and lameness from Lieberman/Bayh/Landrieu. Dick Durbin being completely unstrategic -- I wouldn't have expected that as much. Shame on him. Tomorrow, the PCCC delivers our petitions to Harry Reid telling him to get a backbone. Sign it here.

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Chris Matthews is getting all hot and bothered because liberals in Congress and from the netroots are pushing hard to get a public option included in health care reform. That's called legislating, Chris. It's a long, hard process sometimes.

The Village really gets upset when dirty f*&king hippies get uppity and speak out on issues that matter. Villagers don't care that America voted in Obama with a mandate on health-care reform. Villagers don't care that America rejected conservatism, which practically caused the world to almost spin off its axis. It's getting to the point that Tweety is pulling stuff out of his pie hole because he hates us so much. And apparently Tweety forgot that "the left" was elected in droves in 2008. "The Left" is not a fringe teabagger, tax evading group, it dominates the House of Representatives. Here he is on Andrea Mitchell talking about Obama and Afghanistan and see where Tweety goes with it all.

Matthews: Everybody is doing their politics here. She represents San Francisco and she represents, I know the Speaker's role. you have to respond to the nosiest elements in your caucus, and the most passionate and apparently, I assume just knowing the Democratic House, the voices she's hearing from every single day are the left who want out. Now this president never promised to get out of Afghanistan. And he's not gonna...

He never promised to pull out, that was the good war, the necessary war. Oh, by the way he never ran on the public option. Somebody's got to tell these people on the left and the netroots and some of our colleagues, yeah, he might like the idea of a public option, he may prefer it. He didn't run on it. He didn't get elected for it. So this idea that he somehow betrayed a left wing mandate is nonsense.

Where to begin. Why is it OK to attack Nancy Pelosi for representing San Francisco? What did they ever do to Bill O'Reilly and Tweety? Aren't they part of the US of A too? That she is from the Bay Area somehow minimizes the fact that she's the Speaker. On Afghanistan, he's right. President Obama did not promises to withdraw from there. That's why we on the left have to put pressure on the administration or we could be there for decades.

But President Obama did campaign on the public option., It was part of his health-care plan that he unveiled in the primaries. I asked Ezra Klein to verify it for me and he did.

Berkeley's Jacob Hacker, who was the first to persuasively articulate it; to the Economic Policy Institute, which fleshed out the specifics; and to the Campaign for America's Future, which took the lead in selling it to advocacy groups and the presidential campaigns. John Edwards picked it up and made it central to his proposal, and the other candidates followed suit to protect their left flanks.

And I found that Paul Krugman has it also.

The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health care plan.

Tweety needs to apologize to President Obama, the netroots and the liberals in Congress who he just smeared in this clip. We are fighting for real health-care reform in America and not some mythical-bipartisan Beltway compromise bill that is completely useless to all the real working families that the Villagers like to pretend they speak for all the time.

(h/t Heather at Video Cafe)

Again and again, these issues arise that could have been solved by a straightforward push for a single-payer, government-run system. But that, of course, would have required a political system that didn't have corporate sponsors. It's painful to watch them tie themselves in knots, trying to rationalize the death-for-profit system:

Any health-care overhaul that Congress and President Obama enact is likely to have as its centerpiece a fundamental reform: Insurers would not be allowed to reject individuals or charge them higher premiums based on their medical history.

But simply banning medical discrimination would not necessarily remove it from the equation, economists and health-care analysts say.

If insurers are prohibited from openly rejecting people with preexisting conditions, they could try to cherry-pick through more subtle means. For example, offering free health club memberships tends to attract people who can use the equipment, says Paul Precht, director of policy at the Medicare Rights Center.

Being uncooperative on insurance claims can chase away the chronically ill. For people who have few medical bills, it is less of a factor, said Karen Pollitz, research professor at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.

And to avoid patients with costly, complicated medical conditions, health plans could include in their networks relatively few doctors who specialize in treating those conditions, said Mark V. Pauly, professor of health-care management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

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A glimpse of reality managed to peek out between the lines of B.S. that largely constituted Bill O'Reilly's weekly conversation with Bernard Goldberg on Tuesday.

Goldberg: I think the guys at the White House, the political guys at the White House, say, 'You know, you have a couple of people here on this network who if their lips are moving, if their lips are moving, they're bashing the president.' And then the entertainment network, as Juan Williams said, the run the 'So You Think You Can Dance' instead of the president's speech to Congress. And I think these guys are saying, 'You want to play like that? You want to play like that, Fox? We can play like that too.' And, and, and --

O'Reilly: Yeah, but that's immature. It hurts them.

Goldberg: I agree. I agree. I agree.

It's nice of O'Reilly to finally acknowledge that the treatment of President Obama by his network is immature. That's probably the kindest description -- after "absurdly biased," "hateful," and "a journalistic travesty" -- one is likely to apply here, but it'll do. Fox's coverage of Obama has been worthy of a network run by eight-year-olds who like to stick out their tongues. (See the latest Time cover for more of that.)

And so perhaps for the White House to respond in kind is equally immature. But O'Reilly's glass palace isn't such a great place from which to throw these particular stones.

And the whining and kvetching. Oy! What a bunch of crybabies these people are.

O'Reilly then lists the Fox anchors who don't bash Obama with every breath (he calls it "giving Obama a fair shot"). It's a short list. Then he asks: "How many fair shots do you need?"

Which sort of begs the question, "Why not all of them?"

Really: Why should anyone have to absorb the barrage of cheap shots that's part and parcel of the Fox treatment for Democrats? Good on Obama for just saying No, at least this time around.

One constant theme which needs dealing with is the idea that the country is more conservative than liberal and that centrists are needed to hold off horrible conservative things from happening.

More than that, this is an argument for oligarchy. What I see is that the majority of people, in poll after poll, want single payer. A huge majority want the public option, yet odds are decent you won't even get that.

When people talk of left-center coalitions the center part include a large number of Senators (like Diane Feinstein) who won't do what the majority of their constituents want them to do. At this point centrist = captured by monied interests.

Odds are if Obama wanted single payer, the House could pass it. It'd be close, but they could get it done. The House is the more representative body of the two bodies, the Senate is deliberately retrograde.

When I look at the US what I see is a banana republic, because it doesn't act like a democracy. I see people who think that the Senate, or even the House, actually does what the American people want. Again and again, Congress does things that the majority disagree with. In 2006 the Dems were elected to end the war in Iraq, for example, and refused to do so (though again, the House at least went through the motion, the Senate didn't even make an effort). Oh, Congress will sometimes do what the majority want—when that's what it was going to do anyway.

The plan to fix this is simple enough and always has been.

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(Tip O'Neil - always wondering when Reagan was going to leave the pony)

In the 1940s up to the 60s we had that segment of the Democratic Party known as Dixiecrats, the ones who appeared to have no party unity and seemed to march to their own sets of erratic drummers. Now we have the Blue Dogs who, much like the Dixiecrats, seem incapable of following their party affiliation and are, for some bizarre reason, intent on undermining what they were elected for in the first place. But I almost forgot about the Boll Weevils of the 1980s, those conservative Democrats, like their brethren before and after who almost always voted with Republicans and actively supported Reagan programs.

There's been a lot of talk of late about recriminations for the Blue Dogs, particularly with their seeming contempt of the party that brought them there.

It appears Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neil had much the same predicament on his hands during the Reagan Years with the Boll Weevils. It cost the party quite a lot during those years, especially since the Republicans had adopted a lock-step approach, much as they do now.

Here is a "Face The Nation" episode from June 27, 1982 featuring Tip O'Neil and a panel of CBS reporters asking about the current state of the Democrats on the Hill.

O’Neil: “Approximately 90 percent of the Democratic party has always stayed with us. Through the years . . . we never needed the Boll Weevils, we always had twenty-five or thirty Republicans, moderates and liberals, particularly from the Northeast of the country who always voted with the Democrats. We lost 43 Democratic seats last year, And so the discipline in our party has been good. Now that the Boll Weevils haven’t been voting with us . . but for thirty years they have been voting with us. The Republicans interestingly, have voted in robot step – all of those Northeastern and city Republicans , they have voted the . . .the Republicans have also had better discipline than they ever had before. Now, there are those who want to criticize the Boll Weevils and say we should punish them. That the Speaker should remove them from the committee. Our day of reckoning is the week of . . . the first week in December of every other year when we meet to formulate the rules. That is the particular time when we elect the members to the committee. That is the time for the people to stand up, if they want to write in to the rules of our caucus that you must go along with the rules as offered by the leadership, the previous question and things like that and punish somebody for that reason . . it’s not in our rules at the present time. Secondly, I’ve seen punishment along the line. I saw a man leave our party and go to the Republican party and get elected and take a Democratic . . .I saw a man removed from the second spot in the committee to the last spot in the committee, go home and become the Governor of his state. Punishment hasn’t worked out there, to be perfectly truthful. But the interesting factor – it’s in the caucus where these things should be done. There is no way in which we can remove a man from a committee. Because it goes from the policy committee to the caucus. And after the caucus it then goes to the floor, it’s a perfunctory matter when it goes to the floor. But in order to remove a man you’ve got to start where you finished. You’ve got to start and remove him from the committee by a vote of the Congress, and that’s an impossible thing to do”

Although the circumstance are different, my guess is O'Neil had much the same problems as Pelosi does now.

That unwillingness to dance with the one what brought them there.

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Wendell Potter repeated to Ed Schultz what he said in his testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, that Max Baucus' bill is a joke.

Wendell Potter warned that if Congress "fails to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to the president might as well be called the Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act."

Here is some of the hearing today. Potter on the Baucus "Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act".

Potter on co-ops and why they won't work.

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Who better for Bill O'Reilly to get a "fair and balanced" opinion from following President Obama's speech to Congress than serial liar Karl Rove? Media Matters has the run down on this one.

Rove advances "glaring misstatements" and "distortions" in criticizing Obama speech:

Purporting to examine President Obama's health care speech, Karl Rove claimed that while discussing "the so-called lies and misstatements about his proposal," Obama "made a series of very glaring misstatements or distortions." In fact, it was Rove who was advancing falsehoods and distortions.

[.....]

Rove distorts "what people were concerned about" regarding "panels to kill off senior citizens".

[.....]

Contradicting CBO, Rove suggests "most companies" will "dump the coverage" under House bill.

[.....]

Rove distorts Obama statement to claim he is "not shooting straight" on deficit.

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Howard Kurtz is still playing water carrier for the Bush administration and their WMD lies used to justify invading Iraq and when called out for it by Daniel Ellsberg who says he'll name names as to who in the Bush administration knew better what does he do? Why try to change the subject of course!

Ellsberg is the subject of a new documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers which debuts this week in New York, Los Angeles and at the Toronto Film Festival.

KURTZ: Do you think that the Obama administration is getting as much pressure from the press as it should, particularly compared to previous administrations, say the Bush administration?

ELLSBERG: None. No administration has gotten the pressure that it should from the press on this point. We got into Iraq with as much deceptions as occurred in Vietnam, a generation earlier. A performance by the press no better than we saw of pressing behind the lies of the administration than we got during the Johnson administration when I was in; nor did we get a single person within the administration, the Bush administration now, who saw that the adventure into Iraq was going to hurt our counter-terrorism efforts, hurt our security, and was violating the Constitution in terms of treaties. Another example would be treaties on torture and our domestic laws on torture. People who saw that clearly, not one of them leaked to Congress, or to the press.

(CROSS TALK)

KURTZ: Obviously, there were conflicting opinions and conflicting evidence, for example on WMDs. But let me come back to this.

ELLSBERG: No, pardon me.

KURTZ: Go ahead.

ELLSBERG: When it came to lying -- when it came to lying about the nature of the evidence that the evidence was unequivocal, that was as much of a lie as saying that evidence of the attack on August 4th, on our destroyers, was unequivocal. Yes, there was --

KURTZ: You're comparing the Bush's building of the case to go to war in Iraq, with Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf war incident, just to be clear.

ELLSBERG: I am, indeed. It's exactly the same in the performance not only by the president, but by all of the people who knew that it was a disaster. And I could name names there, if you want.

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