Let’s just be honest about all this, OK? Student loan reform is smart and 100% defensible in concept. The Affordable Care Act involved legislative compromise and must be watched carefully to ensure it achieves the promise that many liberals are touting this week. Rather than labeling it, we have to work to make it actually operate properly.

President Obama says nothing, even Social Security, is out of bounds for deficit reduction. This time he has to choose: average people or the rich. There isn’t some foolish compromise out there that will bring bipartisan support. There isn’t any way to triangulate against the dirty hippies. It’s us or them.

Harry Reid filed cloture yesterday on a short-term extension; and since he knew this was coming even before voting began on the reconciliation bill, that cloture could have been filed Tuesday. That way, the cloture motion would have ripened yesterday, and the motion to proceed taken. This would have started the thirty-hour clock at that point, and if the Senate pressed through and Democrats hung together, they could have either forced a lot of Republicans into a terrible vote or actually gotten this done by this weekend. And once cloture to end debate was invoked, Coburn would have buckled and given back the post-cloture time. But instead, this will become a political issue to wield during the recess. “Because of the GOP temper tantrum over health care, they blocked unemployment benefits for struggling Americans.” And that may be true. But there was a path to break that impasse, and the leadership chose not to take it. And there is collateral damage for that decision.

Bloomberg is the latest polling outfit to discover that the Teabaggers are deeply confused, ignorant people.

A while back Jake McIntyre wrote an interesting post (for which he was widely pilloried) noting that the same people who supported this bill were those who supported the Iraq war. Not a coincidence. The health care bill is a neoliberal victory, just as the Iraq war represented a neoliberal triumph. As willyloman said in a Seminal diary yesterday, neoliberalism is now being rebranded as populism, with the President acting as chief salesman. But in emails like this, and Nancy Pelosi’s trumpeting of the bill’s Heritage Foundation roots, it’s clear that the Democrats know what they’ve done. They have no intention of reversing themselves now. And they are consciously punching the progressive hippies whose messaging and ideals brought them their majorities in the first place.

According to the Arkansas State AFL-CIO, members are reporting that they’ve received phone calls from Blanche Lincoln’s Senate campaign that smear Bill Halter for receiving support from labor unions.

Yes, a progressive bill passed yesterday. One that liberals had been attempting for decades, one that confounded past Democratic Presidents, one that forced Congress to take on a massive lobbying coalition of politically powerful industries, one that looked nearly impossible at various points along the way, one that only made it through progressive advocacy and activism as well as a fair amount of political leadership.

So instead of providing an incentive for al Qaeda insiders to flip in exchange for special treatment, we instead push for indefinite detention for them (albeit detention softened by fast food). And we’re left with the kind of intelligence hack contractors can collect in the field rather than real inside information.

So the Senate went into recess, and they’ll “continue working” on an agreement with Coburn Friday morning. I don’t know if they’d actually go home without passing an extension or wait until the cloture clock winds down and do an actual vote. Regardless, this is not over yet.

Turns out Eric Cantor is a lying liar.