mstaggerlee,

I got the same email, but wonder if this will jeopardize the pending reconciliation bill, since it would change the language. That would force it back to the House.

What do you think?

@Mysterious Floating Head: you said: " we live in a holding pattern . . . Thirty Thousand feet up and running on fumes AND no one is going to pay for it."

- and we're out of peanuts and the bathrooms are backed-up.

Firedog Lake petition to reinstate the public option in the reconciliation package -

http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/bennetPO

The page linked above has a petition addressed to Senator Michael Bennet, who led the effort to determine that there were 51 members of the Senate who MIGHT vote in favor of a public option. It asks him to introduce a public option amendment as part of reconciliation.

GO SIGN IT - NOW!!!!!!!!!!!

(please...)

Waterloo . . . No.

Healthcare/Health Insurance Reform is now largely null and void . . . It has been reduced to a grousing point but breaks no one.

If it had been real HealthCARE reform, it would have been over for the Whigs . . . Uh, sorry . . . Republicans.

If they failed to pass anything, it woulda been over spineless, DLC-driven DEMs.

Nope, we live in a holding pattern . . . Thirty Thousand feet up and running on fumes AND no one is going to pay for it.

It isn't surprising that Nancy Hamsher would trash the bill, since she is pretty far off on the fringes. We don't live in a "perfect world"--I know, because I have to live in a world that has been pre-defined for me, and I don't see any awareness of that fact by people like Hamsher.

Thank you Don Williams!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/A-Nation-of-Wolves-and-She-by-Don-Wil...

@harry ashburn, thank you for sharing the article!

The Democrats have given us an inch, now lets keep working and get the mile.

Just in time to bypass another lurid rerun of “Law and Order: SVU” about crimes more heinous than mass murder, came the House debate and vote on the health care bill yesterday had more than enough drama to satisfy. I have to admit that I was not shy about expressing my outrage watching the brazen mendacity of Republican after Republican (almost all speaking with Southern accents) repeating ad nauseam the Fox News talking points, utterly devoid of detail or factual information, and quite unabashedly so. Democrats added much needed perspective (and respect) for the proceedings as one after another put a human face on the many failures of the health care system run by the insurance industry. Before Nancy Pelosi had her “history making moment,” we had to suffer John Boehner one more time decrying the lack of “comity” that he perhaps more than anybody else in the House was responsible for. Everything he said bore the stench of hypocrisy. It was, after all, the Republicans who refused to listen to the cries of the victims of the insurance industry. It was the Republicans who refused to debate and compromise in good faith; as Pelosi pointed out, the health care bill contained 200 Republican amendments, and their refusal to acknowledge this undercut whatever credibility their complaints could claim to possess. The assertion that the time was not “right” because of a down economy would have more credibility if we could believe there would ever be a “right” time for the Republicans, even in a “favorable” economic environment. We all know that in this country, change almost never happens in “good” times, and for Republicans there is never a “good” time to upset their corporate puppet-masters.

The opponents of the bill tried to make a great deal of hay out of the fact that the bill was a few thousand pages long. But if Boehner as the “leader” of the House Republicans minority didn’t bother to read the bill himself, then for him to have any opinion on it is worth only a few belly laughs and our contempt. The bill was long because people took a great deal of effort to think through every angle and obstacle that the insurance industry was sure to erect, given the fact that a simpler public option based on Medicare was not in the cards. Needless-to-say, neither the Republicans nor their constituency take much stock in thinking or reading, and even the simple seems too tough for many to grasp. They’d rather engage in incomprehensible petty bigotry and fears of “social engineering,” especially whites on the far-right fringe. We heard these people using racial epithets and holding signs “suggesting” the killing of pro-reform lawmakers, and one of their representatives scream “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, one of the most solidly anti-abortion Democrats who switched his no vote to yes. The Republican efforts to “clean-up” their image by attempting to fool people into thinking that they are not taking their cues from the voices of the far-right fringes one finds on Fox News and right-wing radio is continuously undercut by their refusal to cut loose this hardest core of their support. Even the “winning” talking point about first creating jobs for the jobless is undercut by the Republicans seeming lack of interest in keeping the working class without or with substandard health care fit to work.

There are obviously some difficulties in eventually implementing this bill, but we would only know what works and what doesn’t through the fire of experience. One can hope that a majority of the American people will (sooner rather than later) recognize that the president and Democrats have made this difficult and courageous move of passing health care reform for their benefit, and the Republican likely assault in the run-up to the 2010 elections is emblematic of their cowardliness in the face of their corporate and insurance industry paymasters who do not have the interests of working people in mind. Their unanimous “no” vote on the reform bill should serve as a reminder of their irrelevancy when it comes to issues of public welfare. As for Democrats, this long delayed gut-check should convince doubters amongst the public that the Democrats are the party best equipped to deal with the pressing domestic issues of today, and the future.

I challenge Thom to put together a three hour show on why he is optimistic about America’s future. The show will not only give us information but it will also improve our health. Thom, do you want to improve our health? Now you have a chance to be a force in better health for us. I have included an article that may help to motivate for improving our health.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/03/20/optimism-s...

Re: French Torture Experiment

We people of this world never learn from the history of ourselves. In the heat of the moment, we tend to follow the crowd, as the ancient Romans did in the Coliseum when they showed a thumbs up or mostly a thumbs down, to order the killing of the defeated gladiator. Do we still have this thirst for blood centuries later? Have we evolved since then? I believe we still have in our human brains a button that once pressed we all turn into savages (for example, look at Michael Savage (he he)). However, after it's usually too late, we have the ability reflect upon what we did and stop ourselves. This creates a cycle. History repeats. We need to stop this. What we need in our society is some sort of check and balance system, or feedback system, which tightly regulates our innate need for blood.