I’m going to say one thing, based on what Sepharad said about O’s long, hard summer.  I don’t care, either.  If he wants to make the summer a little fun then he should start listening to people—AND LEAD. 

Michelle?  What is her opinion on health care, BTW?  Hillary had one when she was FLOTUS, we know that. 

And what about another person who speaks loud and clear, gets noticed whenever she opens her mouth, and is Obama’s biggest cheerleader—Oprah.  Since she so heavily and loudly backed Obama, what is her stance on health care?  Coming from a humble background she, too, should understand how critical the health care issue is. 

Oh, that’s right.  She’s got the pharmaceutical and insurance bloodsuckers as major, major advertisers.

There’s a lot of high-profile people who supported Obama that seem struck dumb suddenly on the issue of health care.

The Dems and Obushama (I like that bogi666) have no real intention of having a public option.  That proposal serves two purposes,

one is to get people who are for single payer to switch over to the “public option”, and thereby undercut single payer.

two is to get campaign funds from the insurance corporations.  i.e. the Dems and Obushama are leveraging the public option for power.

That’s the game.  It’s all about money and power.  Every “change” mentioned by Obushama, is an issue to be leveraged to the fascist corporate state.  Financial reform, where did that go?  It was leverage to the banksters.  So it goes.

The Dems need to deliver in a number of ways.  We really need a single payer one size fits all healthcare system. 

Anything less will result in basically the managed competion of the Clinton era.  The competition was on how fast the insurance companies could extract more money for premiums, reduce payouts for coverage and the drug companies managed to increase their profits while patients were choosing between food and meds.

People got feed up with the ultra fascists of the R’s and the facist lite of the blue dogs.  They fell for the sound bites of less government intrution, deregulation, and taxcuts.  Failure to preform will end up sending us further into Empire Building, but its not our Empire.  It is an Empire for the very few with all the politicians on the take and no Truth or regulation, just a synthesized story that really doesn’t fit.

If Obama does not deliver a public medicare health plan not organized by the insurance companies, I’m never voting Democratic again. No matter who is running or what they say. And I’m so sorry O. is having such a tough summer. Tell that to people losing homes, jobs, health coverage.

Replace Christina Romer and keep Larry Summers, etc.?  What’s the point?

Obushama and the Democrats cannot win without the liberal Democrats, it’s that simple. The so called public option on health care really does not address health care it only addresses health insurance. The public option is a set up for failure, it simply can’t work. With the insurance companies involved in engineering a “public option” they will engineer it in such a way so that they can then claim “we told you so, the government has no business meddling in health insurance. This proves government can’t work just like we said”. Obushama has to articulate his message and explaining the difference between health care and health insurance is where to start. The insurance companies morph the two to seem the same when they are not. As it stands now their is no health care industry, except Medicare, their is only a health insurance industry. The opponents mantra of “a government bureaucrat making health decisions for you” never continue on that it is an insurance company bureaucrat now makes that decision and get bonuses for denying benefits by rejecting claims. Just who has the bigger incentive to deny benefits to claimants? The Repubican Party claims that no health insurance is better than “socialized ” medical care. The Repubican answer to the American people about health care is EAT SHIT AND DIE!

The basis of the article is faulty.  The choice for Obama is simple, either he continues to get paid off by the banksters, insurance companies, weapons manufacturers, oil companies and prison builders, OR, he morphs into what he pretended to be when he ran for president.

My hope is that Michelle Obama will realize she married an educated, calculating, immoral, charming pi,p for the rich, and divorce him.  But then again, maybe,,,,,

Naturally Mr. O would like it if we would just stop thinking for ourselves and follow his submission to the ruling class and their interests.  I don’t think he’s going to get this from any sector of the electorate, though, and least of all liberals, progressives, or the Left.

Since much of the Right seems to have gone off the deep end, I wonder if we’re not going to see some new activity on the Left, plus a sort of revival of Perot-style centrist reformism, as competition for the apparently inept Democrats.  It’s very odd to see someone with Mr. O’s popularity run around kissing the rich folks’ butts so very thoroughly.  I don’t get it.

With all due respect to Mr. Dionne, the Democrats’ coming through on gun control—the Brady Bill and the much-ballyhooed “assault weapon ban”—played as big a role in the Democrats’ losing control of the Congress in 1994 as “the party’s inability to deliver on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign pledges”; maybe even a bigger role.

And that, BTW, is (as I see it) why Obama & Co. are leaving gun control strictly alone.

It gets worse, ardee.  This article in WaPo had all of the progressives—and I’ve discovered that includes me—really up in arms.  Until the Obama camp debunks this article in some way that is believable, I will have to assume these are Obama’s feelings:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/04/obama-urges-health-care-a_n_225716.html

I read this article two or three times to make sure I had it right.  The President of the United States telling advocacy groups that helped get him elected to stop “attacking.”  He says we should work with him to push his health reform plan through.  What plan would that be?  I haven’t read anything comprehensive out of the WH.  I have read the Kennedy/Dodd joke of a plan, which basically will put the nation on the road to the disastrous Massachusetts’ plan.

So the Prez asks us not to exercise our Constitutional rights.  This came out on the 4th of July.

Yesterday, I read Matt Taibbi’s current article in the Rolling Stone magazine. In the article, he reported that Barack Obama received $981,000 from the so-called health care industry while he was campaigning. Max Baucus, Montana; Ben Nelson, Nebraska; and countless other senators and representatives have also received obscene amounts of money, adding up to millions and even billions of dollars, from the same lobbyists and corporations.

This morning, on Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman reported, verbatim:

Report: Health Industry Employing Hundreds of Ex-Gov. Officials—

Here in the United States, the Washington Post is reporting the nation’s heath care industry has hired more than 350 former government officials and members of Congress to sway health care reform efforts on Capital Hill. According to lobbying records, three out of every four major health care companies have at least one former government insider on the payroll. Nearly half held positions under key committees and lawmakers including Senators Max Baucus and Charles Grassley. Baucus is chair of the Senate Finance Committee which is largely steering health care reform efforts. Baucus’s aides recently held a meeting with a group of lobbyists that included two of his former chiefs of staff. The Washington Post says the health care industry is now spending $1.4 million dollars a day on lobbying, totaling $126 million dollars in the first fiscal quarter.
———
To say the least, our elected officials do not represent “we the people,” we citizens, and in my mind, the phrase, “conflict of interest,” is an understatement. Can it be any more clear that we are not being represented by our elected officials?

More than 70% of the population prefers a government option to compete with the corporate programs—more to the point, people want single-payer and “medicare for all.”

The depraved indifference of our government, which includes our elected officials, minus a few like Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Barabara Lee, etc.—that 20,000 people, or more, die every year because they don’t have health care insurance, or don’t have enough health insurance, or are thrown under the bus as soon as they get sick is an egregious crime. Some lawyer, or group of lawyers, somewhere, ought to figure out an angle to take these crooks to court for killing innocent civilians, who are citizens of this country.

Obama may very well be trapped in a dilemma of his own making. He campaigned against Bush not McCain, he sought to expunge the taint that Bush/Cheney brought to our governance by calling for substantive changes to many policies and directions; government secrecy, for example, the war in Iraq for another. There was mention of reregulation of the financial community.

Now we see no such push, instead we have given away a trillion dollars to the same folks who crushed our economy for personal gain and any attempt to regulate use of those funds results in threats to give the money back and no regulation to speak of, we see a continuation, not an abatement, of government secrecy, we are increasingly trapped in Afghanistan and Pakistan and have yet to see what troop reductions in Iraq will bring.

As to health care, well, noone is speaking to any systemic change that will actually bring fiscal sanity to that industry. Further there appears to be no great rallying behind Obama from the halls of the legislature. His own party, despite the ability to ram through much correction and modernization, and not just in health care, waffles and hesitates, significant numbers even voting with the GOP on occasion.

The midterm elections might be sen as a bellweather, not only of Obama’s continued popularity , but of support for democrats who cannot get things done in Congress. In fact, the best thing the democrats have going for them is the unbelievable ineptitude of the GOP. But that may not continue, and a lie repeated often enough becomes as truth to the public.