Mike Ross and his fellow Blue Dogs have been beating the rest of the House and Senate Dems about the head and shoulders everytime any sensible health care reform promises negatively to impact the near term deficit numbers. In particular, they declare the “public option” DOA, even threatening to bolt party discipline if forced to vote in its favor.

Frequently, their aversion to spending public funds is couched in flowery and ideologically ornate protestations about self reliance and liberty and such shit.

It turns out that Ross is ok with the public option closest to single provider, Medicare for everybody , just as long as we spend .more public money.:

“Medicare could be offered as a choice to compete alongside private insurers for those Americans eligible to enter the national health insurance exchange, but at a reimbursement rate much greater than current Medicare rates,”

Medicare is already 75% funded from the general fisc; Blue Dog Ross wants to add a generous surcharge, which will all fall to the puclicly financed portion, meaning higher taxes/deficits, all so that health care costs can be protected from reduction.

It’s nice when the running dogs of the rich and rapacious are stupid enough to show their true colors.

We are not alone who watch in horror as Prez morphs into Lyndon Johnson.

Somewhere, Colin Powell weeps.

Quiet as it is kept, if Alma had the stones of Michelle, the first black president would have been a Republican. The world might have been spared the nightmare that was George W. Bush.

Now it is time for Powell to redeem his enablement of “he by whom he was betrayed”. Only one man has the chops to corral the generals, the (bitter) experience of struggling thanklessly in quicksand, the stated doctrine which manifestly rules out the Clinton/Gates/McChrystal strategy, the gravitas to cow the crazies, and the martial prestige, frankly, to give Prez the cover he needs.

Meet (Five Star) General Colin Powell, Secretary of State & Defense, and theatre commander in Af/Pak.

As Lenny Bruce used to say of the trinity, “it’s like three in one oil.”

There’s something else, that I guess I should leave up to Bill Cosby to teach, but he won’t take my calls. That father Prez mentioned in the book title…the older black man who can advise him from inside his head…That guy is Powell, since pops is (and was from jump) gone,.

None of the Cheney Stormtroopers will look Powell in the eye and talk their shit., Alas, per contra to Prez they will. Thus he will give Prez something else that he needs.:

: An encouragement to limit his propensity for ingratiation via the promotion in his nterlocutor of stark amazement at the amount bullshit he will tolerate for the sake of politeness.