May be people thinkin’ it, but out loud? Of course, maybe it just means you’re willing to engage with people, and I tend to avoid (in person, anyway).

Not a great hand to play there Obama. But you could at least stop the happy talk and show some balls and go down trying

This is what pisses me off so much about Obama, and about the endless apologists for him — the ones who say “he’s only been in office 7 months,” or “he’s only one guy.”

I don’t think any of us expect him to do this immediately or single-handedly. We do, however, expenct him to have some smarts, and to fight — not to make backroom, closed door deals with the “enemy.”

Unfortunately, Obama seems to have taken the wrong lesson away from the Clinton failure on health care. He decided not to present Congress with a plan [so as to not offend their tender egos], and to let them “build” it. As a result, he’s got the whole “herding cats” situation, plus “getting cats to construct something” plus “a lot of cat-killers on the loose.”

As several people have noted, he should have just come in and said, “we’ve got a ‘government system’ that works. It’s called Medicare. We’re going to extend it to everyone.”

That would have shut up the whole “government-provided health care doesn’t work” crowd, and would have put all those screamers [almost all of whom are ON Medicare] back in their seats. Are they really going to say that it’s fine for them, but screw kids and everyone else? [Well, yeah, they are, but it would diminish the force of their argument.]

Yep, this would have changed the meme from health INSURANCE to health CARE, and it would have pissed off the whole insurance industry, as they could watch their Evil Empire being threatened, but rallying against health insurers — their capricious decisions, their immoral compensation to executives, their endless and costly paperwork — would have been something that would appeal to a far wider swath of America, and would have been an easier row.

Oh, cost. Hey, a surtax on the idiots making more than $250K or $350K, and a “securities transfer tax” to hit the traders, ought to be a good start.

And how about putting the cost out there as “necessary to our national security,” and then cutting other stuff [e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq, TARP] to make room for it.

I am so, so disappointed in this man.

health care is not selling cars, or steel or airline tickets or even gasoline, it is people’s lives at stake; and while we debate and yell and scream and name call, 14,000 people will die this year alone from lack of coverage, many more people will lose their health care and many will be forced to file for bankrupcy because of medical bills.

while nothing as we learned from physics, is 100% efficient; social security, medicare, the VA, fdic and yes, even the postoffice, are government run programs that, for the most part, provide services most of us have come to depend and rely on – hell the military is a government run program.

BTW Gandhi never compromised his essential positions with the British ASFAIK. It was the other way ’round. The bans on producing local salt and cloth were dropped. The Brits eventually acceded to a plan for the gradual transfer of power to the Indians. Obama would have said…okay, in the interest of working with the British we”ll only produce salt and cloth every third month between sunset and dawn. And we’ll create a Parliament with the British controlling the House of Lords, and appointing the PM…but we’ll get a majority in the Commons and couple of Minister positions…maybe Religious Affairs, Transportation, and Public Works.

So much for either Satyagraha or “Bringin’ a Bigger Knife”

yes, we know there are bought and paid for blue tics who like the feeling of so much power, and there are those like baucus and grassley who have succeeded in delaying reform, and yes we know all the outrage has been played to and enabled by the msm; so the question is: what can we progressives do?

i hate the feeling, after all our hard work getting president obama elected, we are once again disenfranchised, flummoxed and handicapped by our own sense of fairness and right from wrong.