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Senator Rockefeller pointed out that there was a gigantic loophole in the Baucus bill that would leave half of Americans subject to potential discrimination by private insurers. Apparently due to existing federal law, large companies can call themselves “self-insurers” even though they provide coverage through a major insurance company.

There’s a new problem that just cropped up for the ethically-challenged Blue Dog, Rep. Mike Ross, on the heels of news reports about his possibly illegal pharmacy sale to a major pharmacy chain with a major stake in health insurance reform. It seems that CREW, an ethics watchdog group, has just filed a complaint with the Justice Department.

The Hill reports that President Obama was booed when he brought up the Baucus bill at his health insurance reform rally at the University of Maryland.

Rep. Mike Ross, who flip-flopped on the public option and has authored an amendment that seems like a copycat of Max Baucus’s no-good, terribly bad bill, has been in secretive talks with a Republican, Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), for weeks. Guess what? Rep. Boustany’s the one that’s scheduled to give the GOP address to President Obama’s speech tonight.

Becerra on Thursday made it clear that he would be prepared to follow the president down a road that is short of his vision for a perfect healthcare system.

”They’re for the most part, I hate to say, brain dead, but they’re just looking to raise money from insurance companies and promote a right-wing agenda that is not really very useful in this whole process,” Stark told reporters on a conference call.

Steny Hoyer, patron saint of the Blue Dog Democrats, just got off a conference call with reporters in which he said that in order for the health bill to pass the House of Representatives, that the public option would be tossed overboard as an essential part of the package.

In a town hall meeting with his constituents, Senator Conrad pushed his co-operative plan, and said that he would vote against the public option in any Senate health care package.

The upcoming August recess, which begins later today, is when Members of Congress go home to meet their constituents, listen to them, attend local community events, and brag about their legislative accomplishments like cocky roosters in the hopes that their constituents will vote them back into office. These lawmakers also work hard to hold fundraisers where lobbyists, likely from the murder-by-spreadsheet insurance industry, will attend to bribe these lawmakers into voting against the pending health care legislation in the House.

It’s why we at Firedoglake were working so hard to prevent this from happening by pressuring Members of Congress not to go on vacation before dealing with health care reform. Then the Blue Dog Democrats threw a revolt, demanded that Henry Waxman listen to their demands since they had seven of their members on the Energy and Commerce Committee ready to block the tri-committee health care bill from passing out of that committee. The Democratic leadership ended up giving in to the Blue Dog Democrats without consulting the rest of the Democratic caucus, such as the much-maligned congressional progressives, on what they thought.

It’s why we at Firedoglake need you guys more than ever to make sure that these 57 progressives stand firm in their opposition to any legislation that comes out of the conference process that does not contain a strong, robust public option.

Gabrielle Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat, wrote an editorial in the Arizona Daily Star, about the need for health care reform that includes a strong public option that lowers everybody’s costs and competes with private insurers. Here’s an excerpt from her editorial about the public option: