That's the title of a recent OpenLeft comment from The Big Hurt. Continuing:

they don't care about bipartisanship

they just use it as a front for their corporate sellouts

What else is there to say?

[I won't quote a private email discussion, but I'll summarize it by saying that the poster made a suicide request by stating that "any stick to beat a dog"-style argumentation is justified. That's a rule 5 violation, for which the penalty is banning. -- lambert]

* * *

A new fall guy is emerging from the health care reform ruins. Circus progressives, better know as pseudo progressives, such as BTD at Talk Left and Digby have started to blame president Emmanuel for caving in to industry without Republican buy in or aiding, the enemy, Snowe in her attempts to water down reform.

Don't remember voting for Emmanuel for president, consult your physician it may indicate for early Alzheimer.

Harsh, but true:

People don't go to demonstrations or marches to be talked to death, they don't go to be harangued, they don't go to listen—God forbid—to poetry. They show up because they want to do something, they want to do something themselves, they want to take symbolic action. Part of what made ACT-UP so successful back before it was overrun by the same sorts of fuckwits and yahoos who ran yesterday's rally and march was that ACT-UP didn't waste your time. There weren't many speeches at ACT-UP actions—they were called "actions" for a reason—and certainly no poetry. If someone spoke, they said, "This is why we're here, this is fucking unacceptable, and here's what we're going to do about it." Then the ACT-UPers shut down the FDA, put a condom over Jesse Helms' house, throw peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the governor of Wisconsin, etc.

"People who took the time to show up at an ACT-UP actions were presumed to be on the right side of the issue and therefore not in need of indoctrination. If someone wanted to listen to speeches—or make them—he or she was welcome to come to long, weekly process meetings, where positions were hashed out and actions were proposed and discussed, shot down or endorsed. But when it came to the actions themselves people felt it was important not to waste the time of the people who showed up. Because if you did, if you alienated people by wasting their time (and lots folks were at ACT-UP actions were dying and so didn't have any time to waste), they were unlikely to turn up at the future actions."

The same critique is true for blogs. It's all well and good to provide commentary and analysis, but gosh it would be nice if more posts in the blogosphere were followed up with 'click this link and find out what you can do about it.' Sending an email or making a phone call barely count, in this respect. Sending a check, going on a Volunteer Vacation, and/or knocking on doors while there's still time, does.

You can see all five parts of the video at DKTV.

It's no secret I've not always agreed with Olbermann, but on this, I think he's right. Furthermore, I think he's telling the necessary, if inconvenient, truths that no one else will speak publicly.

Part one introduces the Special Comment on a personal note:

If you haven't seen it yet, go watch all five parts.
If you have,   Read more…

To appear in this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section:

George McGovern:

But what seems missing in the current battle is a single proposal that everyone can understand and that does not lend itself to demagoguery. If we want comprehensive health care for all our citizens, we can achieve it with a single sentence: Congress hereby extends Medicare to all Americans.

...

We recently bailed out the finance houses and banks to the tune of $700 billion. A country that can afford such an outlay while paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can afford to do what every other advanced democracy has done: underwrite quality health care for all its citizens.

A commenter at The Agonist explains it all in a few well-chosen words:

Henry Ford was a tight old bastard,

but he paid his workers twice what he had to, because he understood the people making the product had to be able to afford to buy it.

The irony here is those squeezing labor, here and in China, are destroying their collective market. Not only the market for manufactured goods, but the investment markets based on manufacturing. The economy has to have a convection cycle of rising assets and precipitating benefits, or it breaks down. Healthy labor is healthy consumers. How hard is that to figure?

Marcia Angell, former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, doesn't like where health insurance reform is going.  She claims the current reforms being discussed by the White House and Democrats in Congress(clearly, Republicans are too busy creating Obama's Waterloo moment to worry about the rapidly rising cost of health care, much less the plight of the uninsured and underinsured) amount to "throwing good money after the bad".  Angell makes a strong argument for reforms by targetting what doesn't work, and building on what does.  She lays out the argument opposing current proposals for health insurance reform from the left of the left of the left.

Roger Ebert:

My mistake was writing from the pragmatic side. I should have followed my heart and gone with a more emotional approach. I believe universal health care is, quite simply, right.
It is a moral imperative. I cannot enjoy health coverage and turn to my neighbor and tell him he doesn't deserve it. A nation is a mutual undertaking. In a democracy, we set out together to do what we believe is good for the commonwealth. That means voluntarily subjecting ourselves to the rule of law, taxation, military service, the guaranteeing of rights to minorities, and so on. That is a cheap price to pay.

An excellent post by Violet, with a great cartoon.

Teaser:

It’s not a question of trusting goverment. It’s a question of using government for what it’s best at, which is managing shared resources and doing things which require society’s collective action. Government is just society imposing its will as a group. Good for building roads (and pyramids and water irrigation channels and rockets to the moon), setting standards for food safety, pooling funds to pay for the indigent, making sure everyone gets healthcare. (That last thing is something we know from studying every other industrialized nation in the world; we don’t have to guess.)

These are the things for which private enterprise is not suitable or is inadequate.

Is the era of new politics over? 

Via the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Given hardening Republican opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of the minority’s cooperation in approving any overhaul, and are increasingly focused on drawing support for a final plan from within their own ranks.

snip

William Greider sums it up. Go read.

Barack Obama mainly did this to himself. To avoid the accusation of socialized medicine, he intentionally shrouded his objectives in bureaucratic euphemisms like "public option." What the hell does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. The vagueness allowed anyone to fill in the blanks and anxious people did so in apocalyptic ways. The original idea, after all, was making something similar to Medicare available to anyone between childhood and old age who was either shut out by high prices or abused by insurance companies policing the system.

Jane Hamsher kicks stupid's butt here:

As Emptywheel notes:

Look at what was happening here. Mitchell was trying to talk down to Jane, to suggest that she was being naive for suggesting that Bayh, and not progressives, should back down and accept the public option. In doing so, Mitchell was committing journalistic fraud--anyone presenting these issues and pretending this is about Bayh's "conservative Democrats in his state" and not his wife and donors is simply committing journalistic fraud. So Jane turned it on Mitchell, suggesting Mitchell was the stupid one.

I am still waiting for Blue Cross Dems to come out doing their insurance corporation choreographed Kabuki dance to explain how flipping a few Senators is impossible but flipping a hundred House Reps. is easy...

Finally, some are beginning to see the FAIL in front of their eyes. But I must say, what the hell took you so long? First, the Obama "reform" fiasco should have been obvious since last year when he did everything from repeatedly calling his plan "universal health care" when it obviously wasn't to demonizing universal mandates, including running Harry & Louise ads. But if that wasn't enough (and it should have been!) Obama also kneecapped single-payer from the beginning of his "reform" efforts as president. Why else would he do that unless health care wasn't what he was fighting for?

A quick review of what has survived an unbecoming process of deal making exposes the dismaying reality. For starters: no public plan; no wealth tax to help pay for cost incurred; no right for the government to bargain with Pharma on drug prices; no meaningful enforcement mechanisms to ensure that vested, for profit interests comply with whatever undertakings, explicit or tacit, that they have made. What do we gain? Not much. A commitment that everyone must be insured, yet with a much weakened employer mandate to accomplish it. An elimination of the most egregious practices of insurance companies re. e.g. pre-existing conditions, arbitrary termination of coverage. Some small subsidies for the working poor. These last are minimal. Someone earning $20,000 a year will get no subsidy unless insurance premiums reach $2,400 -- according to the Finance Committee bill. Good luck all you folks who work for $10 an hour -- you'll need it.

Paul Krugman today lays it all out: how Big Government has been what has stood between us and a 1930s-style Great Depression (even as he acknowledges that they could have done a better job of it). Some excerpts: (but read the whole thing!)

I heard you say that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression. What saved us?

The answer, basically, is Big Government.

So the government fixed things? Does everyone go back to work tomorrow?

Just to be clear: the economic situation remains terrible. We haven’t yet reached the point at which things are actually improving; for now, all we have to celebrate are indications that things are getting worse more slowly.

[...]

To be fair to the Obama administration, it's clear their top priority is saving corporate profits so it's not "technically" a FAIL from their point of view.

Susie nails it.

Catherine Austin Fitts. I just can't excerpt this and do it justice, so I hope Ms. Fitts doesn't mind if I quote it all:

What we are watching price out through the political process is life vs. death. More specifically, the financial value of the life and death of various groups and ages of people vs. the life and death of large banks and corporations.

In a market economy, if a person’s skills become outdated, the theory is that they will be encouraged by their need to generate income to learn new skills or change.

If a large bank or corporation can no longer generate revenues to cover its operations, likewise the theory says that it will change. Management will invent new products and services, cut expenses, renegotiate with creditors through bankruptcy or shut down.

However, in a bubble, the people and the corporations and banks all avoid change by going to the government and coming up with thousands of ways to keep their operations afloat using government funds so they do not have to change– government programs, subsidies, contracts, credit, guarantees, regulations and so forth. This is why I start my case study on how the system really works with that old New Jersey street saying - “Make a law, make a business.”*

Changing the laws, however, does not change the real world where fundamental productivity continues to count. So over the last twelve months, after many bubbles, there was not enough for everyone. So we made a decision to shift most, if not all, of our remaining resources to the large banks and corporations.

What this means is that if people do not need the products and services of the banks and corporations, rather than let them die, we are going to use government and central banks to simply take money from people to keep a bank or corporation alive without customers or markets.

The example of his first 100 days (thank you Lambert) below gives us an idea.

What he did was create immediate relief. What he had that the current President lacks was a compliant Congress, although he too faced a Supreme Court hostile to helping the poor.

Look again at what Roosevelt achieved:

Here:

If they can wait ten years for a plan to phase in, they can wait 'til next year to pass a better bill.

and here:

I wish you guys would quit talking about what kind of breakfast meat or lunch meat is going into the healthcare bill. Look, there is no meat, it's all gristle.

Bingo.

Historiann has a great post:

US Constitution or Democrats: which one is working as it should? Can you guess? I knew you could!

Yeah, the NYT is reporting, but that doesn't invalidate the worth of the projects.

LINDEN, Tenn. — Critics elsewhere may be questioning how many jobs the stimulus program has created, but here in central Tennessee, hundreds of workers are again drawing paychecks after many months out of work, thanks to a novel use of federal stimulus money by state officials.

Tennessee's Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen, says he'd build a Works Progress Administration for his state

SocProf has a wonderful post up by that title. In it she ties together various threads about the insidious effects of the lionizing of Finance and the devaluation of other professions, and the concept of the No-Fault Society (previously mentioned here).

As one category is elevated and exempt from normative sanctioning and accountability. Some other category is taken down the totem pole and their activity is degraded and subjected to more intensive mechanisms of accountability.

According to a local TV station as late as last night there were 45 signatories to the petition, whose creator is quoted by the Avalanche-Journal thusly:

Walter Schaller, a Tech philosophy professor since 1986, said Friday he decided to take action because "with the emphasis on ethics the university has adopted, a guy that misled Congress is not the kind of person we want to represent Texas Tech."

The petition protesting Gonzales' appointment as a visiting professor in political science isn't a secret from the college's chancellor. Not surprisingly, Texas Tech University Chancellor Kent Hance has said he'll go ahead with the appointment. Hance, Tech's third chancellor and the first alumnus to serve the university in that position is a lawyer and a veteran politician. .
The A-J gives some more details on Schaller's petition and position regarding Gonzales:

The petition cites two main reasons for opposing Gonzales' hire: because the chancellor should not hire faculty and because Gonzales' record is questionable. The attorney general resigned from his post amid controversy in 2007.

"It is unclear what Gonzales has done that makes him deserving of employment at Texas Tech. Does he have a noteworthy academic record? Does he have a record of publishing in law reviews? Was his service to his country particularly distinguished?," the petition reads.

Hance's hiring of a "good friend" is in conflict with Tech's "Statement of Ethical Principles," according to the petition, which calls the chancellor's involvement in selecting faculty and the "celebrity hire" as "troubling."

The document goes on to list Gonzales "ethical failings," including: frequently misleading Congress and the American people; rejecting the Geneva Conventions; denying the constitutional right of habeas corpus; and showing more loyalty to President George W. Bush than to the Constitution.

"I tried to document all of the charges against Gonzales," Schaller said, citing a 2008 Department of Justice report and a 2009 Inspector Generals' report investigating Gonzales' surveillance programs as his information sources.

Once the signature gathering process is finished, Schaller said the petition will be delivered to the chancellor's office.

Since Gonzales has already been hired, Schaller said he does not expect Hance to withdraw his offer or the former attorney general to decline the appointment.

"Since Hance said Gonzales may have an opportunity to stay on beyond the first year, I think it's important that faculty raise their voice now," he said.

Guns Up, Professor Schaller!! I hope more members of the faculty with join you and others who find this objectionable will not just speak up with their voices but with their pocketbooks (curtail donations to TTU).

Here:

Jane Hamsher wants me to sign this petition telling Congress they should pass healthcare reform before they go on vacation. I want a petition saying they should pass single-payer or go to jail for the massive fraud they are perpetrating against us.

Yeah, that's about it.