I think Ben Nelson (D-NE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), the whole Republican caucus, President Obama, who decided to not fight for a public option, and everyone else in Washington who shares responsibility for killing the public option deserves a nice big campaign contribution from Hemsley.

Dennis Kucinich is getting slammed by the people he once counted among his friends. Why? Because he is sticking to the one thing progressives supposedly had been fighting for – the public option. Radio host Ian Masters talked with Dennis to get his side of the story.

Let me get this straight. The Senate will pass a public option if the House will. And the House will, because it already did. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t allow it. So the mortal enemy of public-option backers is . . . Dennis Kucinich.

[T]here is an orchestrated, active, full-court press to discredit and silence anyone who tries to point out the responsibility the president bears for crafting this bill. I’m surprised that the editor of the Nation would take part in it.

Great video — please post to your Facebook wall and RT on Twitter — this needs to go viral

“The moral imperative for our time is clear. Anyone whose guide in public policy is conscience, anyone who argues that faith and religious traditions should direct our actions, such a person must stand for universal health care in America,” Rabbi Fish concluded. “It happens we are all also citizens of Connecticut. That fact leads us to ask you Senator Lieberman, what is it that you stand for?

Today on Hardball, Jim Cooper was on to discuss the Stupak amendment and how the House and Senate can work through it to reach a compromise. He had a long conversation with Chris Matthews about how conservative Democrats needed this vote to sign on to the bill. He said that people were confused about how to best maintain the Hyde Amendment status quo, among other things. He said that the bill is likely to be changed, and that the Senate could choose to move it away from the Stupak amendment in the end. He chastised the Rules Committee for distributing language that the Stupak Amendment codified the Hyde Amendment when that was the language from Stupak himself, and he said that the amendment would in fact, for the first time, restrict indirect taxpayer subsidies of reproductive choice services, rather than direct ones. He said that employers get a deduction of health care expenses on corporate taxes, and yet the Hyde Amendment doesn’t cover that employer-based health care even though there are indirect subsidies for it.

He talked like a college professor, weighing the pros and cons from afar, without mentioning that he voted for the Stupak Amendment.

On a rousing and lovely day in DC, the Billionaires for Wealthcare thanked the thousands of teabaggers who had arrived on billionaire-funded buses. As they protested, we profited–and we love them for it!

Enrollment in UnitedHealth’s private plans is falling, but the Medicare Advantage business is just fine. If they can get Congress to make everybody buy their insurance, they can really make some money.

Threats to private healthcare insurers? Single payer leading to socialism? As the House and Senate move further in on their dissection of healthcare reform, we had our own house call from Dr. Howard Dean.

The special interests, all aligned against the urgent needs of the American people, are spending $1.4 million a day so that they will prevail and we won’t.