Well, we know there's a problem when the only way that people can get Viagra is through spam on TPMCafe.

 

But seriously, is anyone excited about this legislation anymore?  Old Golden Decoy pointed out some positives -- it will bring many into the system, will end rescissions and will end pre-existing conditions exclusions. But as Robert Reich has pointed out it will also create no meaningful public options and for all but as few as 4 million Americans it will offer no alternative to what we already have -- private health insurance companies, most operating for profit.

 

That means that all the hassles you already have with your insurer -- paperwork, lack of transparency, fights over what is and isn't covered won't change.  The new legislation with still allow plans to charge high deductibles and premiums will continue to rise year after year.

 

What worries me is how the majority of the country will feel about this 4-5 years down the line. Most people are, for very good reason, not interested in the political process. They're not keeping score of all the horse-trading or about how the health care ideas have evolved since the campaign. They don't know all the compromises that have been made or why they've been made. What they see is that this was a major campaign issue, was debated in and around congress for more than a year and that the result, signed into law under pomp and circumstance didn't dramatically change things for them.

 

I guess there's one point of view that says, "Most Americans like their health care so seeing no change won't bother them."  But I think people will notice that their premiums went up and that they got nothing additional for it.  What do we tell them, that their premiums would have gone up more? That's not a great story for our side.

 

People like to say that we can't afford a huge new "entitlement." Even Democrats say that. So in our rush not to create new "entitlements" we've lost sight of the customer service aspect of government -- people need to see some benefit for the taxes they pay and they need to see positive results from government programs. It's no wonder that neo-Reaganites can campaign successfully on anti-government platforms when Democrats refuse to demand, usually for reasons of cost, that every government program creates tangible benefit for people up and down the economic spectrum.

 

It's funny though because evidence suggests that programs that create universal benefit (think Social Security and Medicare) become politically unassailable.

 

I understand why people support incremental reforms and the slow shift of society over time and I don't mean to dismiss those arguments because there is some truth to them. But, I would suggest that from the 10,000 foot view, it looks like society evolves that way but when you get down closer to the ground you'll see a lot of fits and starts that gets us there. Just like the stock market delivers 8% a year on average but with very lumpy numbers year-to-year society evolves over the course of decade but with major legislative events springing up from time to time (social security, Medicare, abolition of the draft, deregulation of industry...) Big events do matter. You don't get the long-term evolution without them.

 

It's not going to happen but the current health care legislation really should be scrapped. We need something big with tangible benefits for all and we need it now. It will be very hard to go back to this debate within the next ten years.

Clearly in light of the Fort Hood shootings we must have a national conversation about the role of the Muslim faith in American life, especially with regards to our national security and military service.

We must do this because, after each act of terrorism committed against a reproductive health clinic we have had deep and meaningful conversations about the role of the Christian faith in American life, especially with regards to our national security.

Oh wait, we never ever talk about the dangers of Christian extremism. But Muslims sure are scary!

The shooter might well have yelled Allahu Akbar.  So now we have to take the Muslim angle seriously say the very people who tell us not to judge Christians by the acts crazy people commit in the name of Jesus.

I know, the ads here come from an ad network and aren't selected by Josh but come on... this is a web site about national politics and I'm getting Bloomberg for Mayor ads?

This isn't actually a problem with TPMCafe, it's a problem with Bloomberg using his vast personal fortune to run for a local office.  He's going to spend $70 million this season and he won't even feel the pinch from it because he's worth billions!

Get this... I am a New York City resident and the first time I learned the name of Bloomberg's opponent, Bill Thompson, was IN a Bloomberg ad.  Bloomberg is so outspending his opponent that I only figured out his opponent's name because Bloomberg spent money to call him incompetent.

This just isn't right.  We all worry (rightly, methinks) about the influence of big donors on politics but we don't worry enough (in this age of plutocracy) about the tyranny of the self-financed campaign.  Indeed, I've even heard people argue that super rich candidates are a good bet because they have so much they can't be bought, neglecting the more pertinent question which is not who's "buying the candidate?" but "what is the candidate trying to buy?"

By the way, I recently saw a Bloomberg campaign ad on failblog.org, a Web site devoted to funny pictures of stupid things started by the people who (I think) invented LOLcats.  It's gotten ridiculous, guys.  We need public financing for campaigns at all levels and equal media access for anyone who can poll better than 10%.  The way wealth inequality has widened (and no knock on Bloomberg here, he is self-made and I respect that) we are in serious danger of letting billionaires buy whatever election they want. Even using TPMCafe to do it.

Okay, most of us around here don't support the Baucus bill but that's top be expected -- it wasn't written for us, it was written to win the support of the insurance industry because they're the ones that killled reform in the 1990s and they're ready to do it again. So, the theory went: get the insurers on board and you remove the most forceful opposition.

Well guess what, they got 90% of what they wanted out of Baucus and now the industry is not supporting it. Our side makes compromise after compromise with them and they turn on us the second they don't get their way.  This time the objection is that penalties for people who refuse to buy health insurance are too low.

Gee Karen Ignani, I'm so sorry that the law isn't toothy enough for you. How long would you like to have people incarcerated for refusing to buy your products?  Heck, let's execute them because that'll compel people to buy coverage and get us up to 100% covered by getting rid of the holdouts!

I think we've lost sight of how extraordinary the insurance industry's desire is here. If any other industry went out in public and said "Some people don't want to buy our product, their ought to be a law compelling them to" we would laugh in their faces. We would tell them to offer better products at better prices.

We've been debating the mandate around here since the primaries and I'm perfectly willing to just agree to disagree with some of you about it. But even if you think the mandate is the best idea around, you have to agree that it is, in fact, a subsidy.  You might think it's a great subsidy or one that will pay off but it is a subsidy and it's one that the health insurance lobby has thought a lot about.  The insurers are quite obviously convinced that if there's no public option available and the penalties for not buying from the private insurer are large enough that they will make money no matter what conditions are put on them as providers.  They claim they'll stop rescinding people's coverage, stop denying people with pre-existing conditions and will even give up caps on treatments so long as the US government forces people to buy their products.

This is why, by the way, the insurers are so against a real public option. It has to be their products that people buy.  No choices. Not even legally. And the consequences for not complying have to be serious.

Of course, in the Baucus bill as it stands, the consequences are already serious.  If you get caught without insurance the penalties are already high enough that you'd feel pretty silly -- you'd have no insurance and you'll have paid a fine that's more than what you likely would have spent on insurance premiums. Not good enough for the insurance lobbyists though. They want something draconian.

If we pass this mandate without a real public option then we're just writing the industry a check. But without the mandate, says the industry, everyone's premiums will go up because of the "Free rider" problem -- people won't buy coverage until they get sick!

Two things: First, we could solve that by regulating the premiums. We don't have to let them jack rates. Second, we don't actually know that there's a free rider problem. If there is, let the insurance companies document it and lets put their evidence up to scrutiny.  We're right now legislating based on an industry's self-serving and hypothetical claim.

There's a really good reason why the free rider problem might not manifest itself -- fear of serious sudden illness or injury.  Say you're walking around without health insurance and get hit by a bus.  How are you actually going to purchase insurance before the ambulance gets there? Exactly. Not an issue. People don't not have health insurance because they think they can get away with freeloading. They don't have it because it's unaffordable or doesn't offer enough benefits for the price charged. The real solution to the free rider problem isn't "make a law" it's more generous coverage at better rates.

But the insurance lobby doesn't want you to think that way.

Afghanistan is one of those things I just feel guilty about because after 9/11 I supported it. I thought it was a necessary war and that it would end quickly and would wind up bringing Osama bin Laden to justice and so far as the Taliban was concerned, I really thought that Air Force and Navy bombardment couldn't happen to a more worthy group of guys. I was angry and out for a quick solution to the Al-Qaeda problem. Oleeb thinks through the issue of what we should do now quite clearly here.

At no point in my early support for this war did I think that we'd be talking about this in 2009.  I was surprised, in fact, that we were talking about it in 2004. We tend to blame the continued Afghanistan war on the distraction we created in Iraq. While I agree with that, I've also come to believe that we blew it by invading Afghanistan in the first place. At the time it seemed we had no other options. But we did. We could have isolated and contained Afghanistan rather than attacking it and we could have led a global police effort to catch bin Laden and to disrupt Al-Qaeda, which I think would have worked.  The global community didn't disrupt the Italian mafia by sending in the Marines, it was police work that did the job. We treated Al-Qaeda as if it were a state power when it's really a criminal organization.

There are two reasons, I'm told, why we're still in Afghanistan and neither of them compel me to support this war or even to support a temporary troop increase.

The first is that leaving Afghanistan as a failed state is bad for our security. That failed states become havens for terrorists was the mantra of this decade and it seems to be right. But it's not as if there are no failed states other than Afghanistan.  Terrorists could as easily spring from Somalia as from Afghanistan. Are we to invade and occupy all failed states in the name of our security?

Besides, there's another problem with this: terrorists can also function, and function well, in established, stable states. The fact is, terrorism can flourish anywhere. There can be terrorists in Kabul but also terrorists in Toronto or in Columbus, Ohio. So I really don't buy the idea that pulling our troops out of Afghanistan exposes us to any danger that we're not exposed to already.

The second reason we stay in Afghanistan is that we're afraid of "looking weak" and losing. As much as I hate to admit it, American military power is important to our role in the world.  But are we a little too sensitive to the notion that people might realize the truth, which is that we can't do everything as if we were a nation of powerful magicians? What do we think will happen if we pull out of Afghanistan?  Do we think that terrorists are the world will decide that they can act with impunity?  That won't happen because the kind of power we have that they fear isn't the kind of power you use to invade a country -- they're afraid of Navy Seals coming to get them in the night or, more likely, afraid that they and everyone they know will be blown to bits  by a remote control plane when they throw their daughter a wedding. Does anyone seriously think that China is going to say "Oh look, the US pulled out of Afganistan, what wimps!" and then invade Taiwan?

Fact is, we don't have anything to prove on the power front and the world would probably appreciate it if we stopped acting like we did. Hence the Nobel for Obama.

We don't need this war, there are far better uses for the money and there are better ways that we can use our military to keep us safe.  Time to stand down and to let Afghanistan either stand up on it's own or... well, or not. I'm happy to leave that challenge to them.

Ezra Klein suggests today that a reasonable compromise on the public option would be to let states, by whatever legislative or administrative methods they want, opt out of offering a public health care option to its citizens.

I admit that this has some appeal.  It'd make some red state governors really have to put their political courage behind their convictions and it'd prevent the states from complaining that nationalized health care is being "rammed down their throats" or some such nonsense. This one could score some pretty big political points.

But it's entirely immoral. No governor should be allowed to stand in the way of an individuals who want to avail themselves of the public health care option. The option part of "public option" is supposed to stand for an individual's choice, not for a legislature's choice, a governor's choice or even a referendum.

We've already debased the public option by not making it available to every individual who would rather contract with the government rather than a private insurance company. To allow states to put up ideological road blocks in the way of people who might need or want the public option isn't a compromise we can live with.

That we're even having this discussion is proof of a compromise that's gone too far. Most of us were always happy to say "If you love your private insurer, keep them." That was a fair compromise from single payer. As soon as we compromised again and didn't allow the public option to be available to any citizen who would choose it over another we gave up too much. Let's not make that mistake again.

Looks like if there is going to be a public option it's going to have a trigger attached to it.  The public option, even a weak one, won't actually become available unless the private insurance industry fails to deliver cost savings or to cover everyone, though we all know that these simple metrics will be written so broadly and with so much wiggle room that the trigger will likely never be pulled. A trigger on the public option means no public option.

Fine.

So let's add a second trigger -- on the individual mandate.  The mandate exists because insurance companies say that if they have to cover everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions that people will refuse to buy insurance until they get sick.  It's called the "Free rider" problem and it's very compelling.

But it's also hypothetical.  We don't have any evidence that people will actually behave that way. For example, a lot of insurance policies won't let you make a claim in the first 3-6 months -- that alone creates a risk to not buying insurance until you think you're sick. What if you break your leg, you going to wait 6 months to get it set?

 There's an excellent chance that the free rider problem isn't actually real. But, who am I to judge? Let the insurance companies prove that it's a problem and if it is, by all means we can have a mandate to solve it. But, make them prove it.  And lets make the trigger rules at least as vague as the public option trigger rules will be.

At first I thought Bernard Avishai's post here was just provocative with a couple of over the top lines but the more I think about it and read the criticisms of my fellow commenters here, the more I realize that Avishai is really at odds with what most of us progressives want out of our government and our economy.

The first thing that has to be addressed is Avishia's condescending tone.  He talks about people with "not-quite-enough schooling, too much beer, too much TV," and the case study is really the charming tale of a mechanic who surprises Avishai by figuring out the inner workings of his super-sophisticated BMW. Everyone who knows me here knows that I have a sense of humor and that I'm not above picking on country bumpkins but that's only when they try to impose their morality on me.  Here, Avishai is trying to impose on others.

His conclusion is that we need a "mentor state," an idea that he promises to detail in a future post.  I'm going to hope for the best on that but I have to wonder to what this mentor state is going to teach.

Avishai emphasizes flexibility and networking. In the end, this will really mean constant work for everyone. Avishai describes what his mechanic did as a clever use of a communications network to solve a problem.  But what I see is a guy hustling for a job.  He goes to a network, gets 18 opinions about how to fix Avishai's car, shows Avishai the data and even offers to let him go to another mechanic or the dealer. Presumably, whenever our hero mechanic isn't fixing cars he's talking shop with other mechanics all over the world or taking training courses in new car design. He doesn't have to worry about too much beer and TV because he's pretty much always working (whether he's getting paid or not).

Now it used to be that if your employer needed you to learn a new skill you employer would teach it to you. But now you're much more on your own.  Your studying after hours, going to seminars at your own expense and you're not even getting a sure pay-off.  At work, you're giving 100% and then when you're not at work you're spending your energies trying to improve yourself as a worker.

How will the government mentor state work?  Thus far government job retraining programs haven't been all that successful. The job seeking lessons that people on unemployment must endure seem more like ways to punish people for collecting the unemployment assurance payments from the system they paid into while they were working. Presumably this government mentor state will have to teach people about technology and entrepreneurship.  But really, that's not going to do the trick. You can teach entrepreneurship all you want, what usually stifles people isn't a lack of guts or intelligence but a lack of access to capital.

So what it's really going to teach is the new work ethic.  Or how to kiss Bernard Avishai's ass so he'll let you fix his luxury car.

What's most dangerous about this line of thinking is that it holds the victims of this economy responsible for their circumstances.  Too much beer and TV when you should have been taking night school classes after work! At that point we're blaming the poor for their own problems even as we let 20% of the country hoard 80% of its wealth.

None of this is to say that the economy isn't changing or that there aren't new challenges ahead or that hard work is necessarily a bad thing.  We're a democracy, not an economy. I don't think Avishai quite gets that.

Bernard Avishai's post "Cooperatives: The Best Public Option" was really surprising to me, especially given Avishai's reputation as a business and systems thinker. Avishai admonishes liberals not to demand a single-payer style public health care option because size isn't all that matters in business. He's right that size doesn't matter in business. TPM can beat the New York Times to a story, for example and spend a lot less money doing it. News Corp. spent gobs of money on Myspace because Rupert Murdoch realized that a start-up could do what his empire couldn't.  Google didn't start out a behemoth.

So yes, Professor Avishai gets it. Upstarts can kill giants. This isn't new, it's just part of business and it's arguably easier now that barriers to entry in certain sectors have fallen. So, it is true that a small health insurance company could, if it found a way to deliver better care at lower prices, take on an insurance giant, but only if that smaller insurance company were going after the customers of the giants. A small company would take meetings with human resources executives and try to convince big companies to switch. Our upstart insurance company would fight tooth and nail every day to get new contracts. Our small insurance company would gladly take business from everybody. That's how competition works.

The public option has described by Barack Obama isn't open to all customers of health insurance.  It's only open to people who aren't already getting insurance through their employers -- part-time and lower wage workers or the self-employed. It's a "public option" mostly for people who have no other option. These people, lets remember, are uninsured.  So they are not customers of Aetna or United Health of Blue Cross. When they sign up for the public option, the insurers don't lose customers because these people are not buying anything from them. This is why McDonalds doesn't worry much if a vegan restaurant opens up next door. The vegans who go there were never going to buy food from McD's anyway.

So no, it's not about size, it's about accessibility. The way to bring competition to the private insurance market is to bring in a public option that is in constant competition with the private insurers.  Everyone should be able to tell their insurer "if you don't lower my premium, or offer better coverage... I'm walking" and they should have an alternative they can buy from.

If we passed a law that said that people can only eat at Burger King if there's not a McDonald's within three blocks of them then I don't see how you can meaningfully claim that Burger King is competition. This public option with health care is far worse than that. If you're already in the private system you can't leave for the public one. So it's not competition at all.

Professor Avishai, you really should answer this basic question: are we in competition if I can't take your customers?

The public option "trigger" has emerged as the great political cover-move of the health care debate where the government only extends publicly run health insurance to the middle class if private industry fails to offer more care at better prices. What the deadline is, we don't know.  How private company progress will be measured, we're not sure.  Our betters will work all of that out for us. One thing we do know is that it will create a sub-industry of lawyers and lobbyists who will be paid huge sums to make sure that whatever happens, the trigger is never pulled.

Politically, the trigger is a smart idea because it screams "We're being reasonable."  It will strike many on the left and right as fair.  Lets give private industry a chance. But we've already given them 30 years of chances and the situation's gotten worse.  Why do we need a trigger now? Shouldn't the industry have realized, for the last 30 years that the trigger of public health care has always existed because we could have created a public program at any time?

Every trigger supporter needs to answer the question: why more time now? It's not a perfect analogy but were this trigger really like the trigger of a gun, nobody could get away with abusing the gun owner the way that private insurance companies have abused the American public without the trigger finger getting itchy.

Just pull the trigger.  How many chances are these recidivists supposed to get?

Today, the President offered up some common sense ideas to help people save for retirement. It's hard to disagree with any of them (except one) but here they are: more "opt out" 401(k) type plans -- so your employer can sign you up and have you contribute 3% to a pre-approved investment option and can even increase your contributions as time goes on; let workers who leave a job with accumulated vacation time take compensation in a retirement account rather than as taxable cash; let people take tax refunds as government savings bonds.

The "Opt Out" plans are really problematic. Obama is right -- Americans are lousy joiners and if you sign them up when you employ them, they're more likely to save. It is effective policy but I have a couple of moral problems with it: 1) my employer should ask me before they do anything with my money, I shouldn't have to ask my employer to stop 2) what if these pre-approved investment vehicles (mostly lifecycle mutual funds or balanced funds) stink?

Everything else, I can get behind. Except that this doesn't go nearly far enough for most Americans.  For most workers the problem is that they don't make enough money to pay for current living expenses and to save for decades later. 20% of employers have stopped matching 401(k) contributions at exactly the wrong time.  If you lost 50% in stock funds in 2008 you need 100% gain just to get even.  The only way to get there is to invest more, ideally to have invested more after the market bottomed in March and the only way to invest more on a limtied budget is to leverage the employer match. But the employer match dissapeared for 1 in 5 workers at exactly the wrong time.

Remember, when the market crashed in 2000 the Dow and S&P didn't regain former levels until 2007 (and then promptly crashed again). The Nasdaq is still at less than half of its highs. Losses are not quickly regained, the only way to do it is to invest more.

We need to augment the employer match with a public match. The government should match any individual 401(k) contrbution up to 3% of salary up to $75,000 a year for an individual.  Yes, this is a vast new entitlement but it will save us money decades hence because it will be more expensive to deal with the problem of senior poverty when an entire generation tries to retire without guaranteed pensions of any kind (Gen X and everyone that follows will be in that boat).  People need help, their employers abandoned them and it's time for the government to step up.

People need to invest between 8-10% of their salaries every year. Most will only reach that level if they're getting their contributions matched and the money has to come from somewhere. People's personal balance sheets are too thin.

We also need an absolute commitment to social security -- more funding and yes, more generous benefits.  This year, because of temporary deflation, Social Security recipients got no cost of living increase.  But energy prices have been volatile. Health costs have risen. The costs of local services have gone up as city an state governments have had to raises fees sales taxes to plug budget holes... Living in 2009 really isn't cheaper than living in 2008 and the government knows it.

There's a lot right with what Obama said this morning but helping Americans save for retirement isn't enough. We have to view retirement as a right after a lifetime of work. Labor is not supposed to be a cradle to grave activity.

DanK and Stillidealistic and most everyone here contributed great thoughts to a very necessary "What are we doing here?" kind of discussion and while there will be no answers I learned a lot by reading everyone's thoughts. I'd also like to suggest, not originally I'm stealing from other commenters here that some of what we're dealing with now is the change in power.  Obama's presidency is still new. The Democratic party isn't easily steered in one direction. We're not all of us sure what we want to make of this moment and maybe that's a good thing because a sure mind tends to bespeak arrogance.

We are, however, ascendant. What can we do with it? Some ideas, take them, leave them, praise them or mock them.

1) Lets fight against the right's best arguments not their worst. It's fun and easy to take on Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh but is it worth it for us? We can waste a lot of time on some real drivel if we spend too much time on them. Also, their most ardent followers will not be convinced by us, they're dead-enders. But more than that -- I like some elements of right wing thought and I think we do best by ourselves when we take on what's best of the "Classical Liberal" traditions that the best thinkers on the right really believe in.  I like the conservative intellectual's faith in individual potential and their willingness to celebrate an individual's success. We can smartly point out, in those cases how society helps people succeed and realize their potential though. There are smart and thoughtful conservatives out there, lets take the discussion to them and lets let them challenge us. I definitely respect the intellectual conservative reverence for individual freedom when they are honest about it.

2) Let's not become yes-men for Obama or for the party leadership. They need to hear from us, even when it's inconvenient.

3) Keep a sense of humor. Nothing is too serious to joke about and being humorless technocrats is something we have to overcome in the public mind anyway.

4) Afghanistan and Iraq... lets not forget those wars because everyone seems to think they've gone away and it's freaking me out.

5) Wall Street -- lets not be done with that issue either. We're in danger of saying "TARP went okay" and moving on. Even our own Nathan Newman is falling for this.

6) Civil Rights. We still have to convince members of our own party that same sex marriage rights are the civil rights issue of this era. That's not over yet either.

7) Self interest. In the spirit of compromise, Democrats will quite often means test away great public services that people, had they access to them, would like. Every time somebody tells you that a public service should go to people at 3 times the poverty level or 5 times the poverty level say to yourself "why not 10 times the poverty level?" or "why not everyone?" One way to win support for our ideas is to start providing benefits for everybody.

8) Putting the deficit in perspective. $9 trillion over 10 years. Sounds like a lot. But even our currently depressed GDP is nearly $14 trillion in 1 year. In 10 years it'll be over $20 trillion. We have our own growth story to tell!

Anyway, those are some ideas. Some ways of thinking and talking and writing. Better get back to the day job... 

This morning I met with a former economic advisor to George W. Bush.  He's a nice guy and I'd just name him here except that I didn't plan on blogging about our meeting and didn't tell him I'll play it safe, not name him and just ask you to trust me that he's a Republican who worked for the president, is interested in politics and knows a thing or two about it.

At one point he mentioned Bush "ramming" something through congress, uysing party discipline to get his way.  Since we were having such a good chat I went ahead and vented my frustration at our side's seeming inability to do the same thing.  "Why does their 50 seat majority work and ours doesn't?" I asked.

His answer was interesting.

"Your southern Democrats have more in common with Republicans than they do northern Democrats."

Maybe it's true and maybe it isn't but the guy has dealt with congress and he believes it.  I think I believe it too and I think that the Republicans count on it.

Sometimes we on the left need to be told to calm the heck down.  We do get excited and when something really strikes a chord with us, we can get downright enthusiastic and even angry. Sometimes, we don't need to calm the heck down though.  Sometimes, we're right.  Sometimes, we don't win for having compromised and sometimes those who have told us to calm down need to come back and admit that we were right.

Joe Lieberman is a great example.  We were criticized for even supporting a primary challenge against him in 2006.  When the primary challenger, Ned Lamont, actually beat him Joe Lieberman ran as an independent and won his seat. Liberals who were criticized for supporting Lamont's challenge were then criticized for supporting the Democratic nominee during the general election.  It was all about the war, said the critics, but if you look beyond Iraq, Joe Lieberman is a good Democrat, one of the best in fact. We were told we were tossing a good liberal out of the club over one issue and even if it was a major issue like the war, we were told what a bad idea that was.

Lamont's supporters responded that Lieberman wasn't really all that liberal.  We knew, for example, that he was a social conservative. We knew this because of his anti-Clinton speech during the impeachment.  We knew it because of his over-the-top concern over the content of movies and video games.  We knew that the guy was no liberal and so we persisted.  Lieberman won.  And what did we get?  He endorsed McCain in 2008.  Another war thing, he said. Now he's pushing back on health reform.  We can't afford it, he says.  Why do it all at once?  In 2006 it was "don't dump Lieberman and our chance at health reform and the rest of our agenda over the Iraq War."  In 2009 here he is, getting in the way of the rest of our agenda.

Can we have an apology from our critics for that?

Lieberman, who was forgiven by the Democrats in 2006 and given the committee assignments he wanted also betrayed the civil libertarians on the left when he led the charge to gtrant immunity to the telecom companies -- something that then-Senator Obama went along with and another issue where folks on the left were told to simmer down and take it because, as odious as granting legal immunity to telecom companies who may have illegally betrayed their customer's secrets to the government might be, it wasn't worth turning it into a major electoral issue.

One thing I haven't seen is a good post mortem on the fall-out of giving legal immunity to the telecoms.  I do know this -- we're still not aware of the extent of the domestic spying program and we don't even know if it's still ongoing. Obama has so far done nothing to lift the veil of secrecy around this and the issue doesn't even seem to be on his radar. A lot of people around TPM thought this was an important issue last year.  We were told, not without reason, that we should eat the defeat on FISA because Obama would make things right later on.  But here's what we go: the FISA law revamped to make the program retroactively legal and... well... nothing else.  Seems like the time to have fought on that issue was back in 2008 when it wass being decided.

Now we're being told by some not to get all hung up on the public option for health care and there seems to be a good chance that we'll get a bill with something called a public option (maybe regional co-ops) that won't be anything like what the left envisions (a government program that you can choose instead of say, the Aetna your employer is offering) and we'll be told to eat it, at least more people will be covered.

It's not that I'm against compromise. It has its place, for sure. But the left needs to start extracting some gain for its compromises.  On FISA what happened was that the program was retroactively legalized and it continues and nobody will ever be punished for it. A truer compromise would have been: companies get immunity, program is halted, full accounting is made to the public. A compromise is when everyone gets something.

On healthcare, the public option IS a compromise.  It is square in the middle of our current system and single payer.  It's just a choice.

Or maybe it's time to just end the practice of lecturing the liberals.  The left wing of the party has just been right too many times.

People bring guns to their speeches.

I mean, seriously, WTF?