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Jpol, asked a great question about why Sestak opposed Kucinich's amendment on PA single-payer health care. Sestak has some strange explanation about how he opposes single-payer because it doesn't allow for more than one payer.
... keep the heat on!
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Per capita health care spending (2007):
United States: $7290
Switzerland: $4417
France: $3601
United Kingdom: $2992
Average of OECD developed nations: $2964
Italy: $2686
Japan: $2581
-- Bob Somerby
The text of HR676 (Medicare For All) as PDF (30 pages). The FAQ. Compare HR3200 with HR676.
Medicare for All would save $350 billion a year (study in New England Journal of Medicine).
In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told an AFL-CIO meeting, "I am a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare program*." -- Bill Moyers.
* Medicare For All.
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How any Democrat can get away with that
in a state that is the closest to passing state-wide single payer is beyond me.
Medicare for All is Civil Rights
lol
these people are so funny! i have to admit though, speaking off the cuff to hordes of hoi polloi all day long really is taxing. most people can't do it and do it well.
open left has been trumpeting sestak as their choice of opponent for specter for some time now, but iirc several commenters there were quick to point out that sestak isn't really all that progressive and only appears to be so when compared to specter.
In 10 or 15 years...
Open Left will favor someone more progressive than Sestak.
it only hurts when i laugh
that was funny, in a gallows humor way.
i really, really like paul rosenberg, but otherwise, that blog probably needs to rename itself open to becoming left someday.
Sestak isn't more progressive than specter...
....which really and truly sucks. I'd really, really like to be able to support a progressive alternative to Specter here in PA, but the bottom line is that Sestak is, at best, only a marginal improvement over Specter.
see! more progressive! stop whining!
hmmmm, at 2% more progressive per election, 6 years between elections, you could have someone twice as progressive in only 300 more years!
i can see why the logic of incrementalism is seductive, take slow careful baby steps as you back away from the cliff edge, but at some point you have to remember what keynes said about the long run, and start taking a few risks that might have bigger payoffs.
There's a problem with your analysis
Sen. Specter is elderly and he has health problems. He won't be running in 2016 regardless of how things turn out during the mid-terms. Rep. Sestak turns fifty-nine in 2010. If elected he'll have a good chance of holding office for twenty-four years and he'll be drifting rightward all the while, or as rightward as a retired admiral has left to drift.
the problem with my analysis
is that it's a totally tongue-in-cheek non-analysis.
the far right didn't take over the political system by running incrementally more right-leaning candidates, they did it by running far-right candidates every chance they got, until eventually there were enough of them entrenched in the system to hijack it.
the democrats need to so this too -- run lefties in every single race [and back them with real money], from dogcatcher to president, no matter how conservative the district appears to be.
So is mine
My comment is totally tongue-in-cheek too, sort of. The Netroots got jobbed here, maneuvered as they were into thinking that by getting excited over the Sestak challenge to Specter they were standing up to the Democratic Establishment. The Demlican Establishment wanted to make sure rank-and-file Democrats would not have time to recognize the rare opportunity the inevitable Pat Toomey candidacy presents them this cycle to get behind and win the primary and the general election with a pro-labor, pro-peace Democrat.
demlican!
heh.
ok, putting my serious hat back on for a moment... as for the netroots getting jobbed, i'm not entirely sure how to think of this.
ot1h, many in the netroots strike me as not all that liberal to start with [liberaltarian describes them well], so we don't have to move the politics very far left to make them happy with the rate of progress.
otoh, many good liberals, despairing of what was happening in/to the media, turned to the 'new media' to try to change the political discourse. a lot of these got snookered, but even so, many of them long ago settled for incrementalism.
i liked dean back in 2004 [i liked kerry better], but his use of the internet struck me as being much the same use that obama has put it to -- building a fanbase, rather than using it as a communication channel to listen to the people.
I thought Kerry would be the stronger general election candidate
But I preferred Dean.
i liked them both
and they were my top two choices, with kerry slightly edging out dean, but not by much. dennis kucinich is closest to my values, but i was still operating in pragmatic mode in the 2004 primary, voting for someone 'electable'.