It doesn’t matter what prominent Democrats were telling the base when they were trying to sell the vote. Just because a basically Republican health care law was passed by Democrats doesn’t make it some great progressive policy victory.

Translated LA Times: Today LA Sheriffs seized $234,000 worth of harmless products from small businesses in a move certain to harm their businesses, increase unemployment and withdraw money and trade from a lagging economy.

Sometimes you need a Rosetta Stone to translate the New York Times when it tries to unravel the moral muddle of the Obama Administration’s Afghanistan policy. Today’s example shows the Times hopelessly mired in doublespeak from the very first paragraph.

PhRMA got everything it wanted in the health care deal, and paid for it with $150 million in political advertising for Democrats. Harry Reid kept drug reimportation off the floor of the Senate until its failure was assured because it wasn’t part of the deal cut by the White House, and he was handsomely rewarded for his efforts.

If you ever wonder why American health-care costs are so dramatically higher than in the rest of the world, it’s partly a result of the corrupting influence of money in our politics and the dangerous conflicts of interest that plague the health-care system.

America is being strangled by unchecked corporate power, and it’s leaving a trail of dying cultures, communities and peoples. Seeing that, explaining that, fighting that, and yes, fixing that, is your job, Mr. President.

The Congressional Budget Office just revised upwards the projected cost of the new health care law by $115 billion, a law written, supported, and sold to Americans by PhRMA and the for-profit hospitals. Until Congress is actually willing to take on these groups directly, we regular Americans will continue to get ripped off. . . and our deficit will continue to increase.

Google apparently must not be working today. Either that, or Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher has yet to master this useful internet tool: Hamsher, meanwhile, drew the ire of many progressives when she led a last-minute assault on the health care reform bill. In trashing the bill, she invoked the $80 billion PhRMA deal, with which she [...]

Roll Call has crunched the numbers and come up with a truly eye-popping figure of $876 million spent by medical interests lobbying Congress during the health care fight: Medical interests alone shelled out more than $876 million in lobbying expenses during the 15 months beginning in January 2009 and ending in March, when Congress passed [...]

In this new world order of supercorporations who earn their phantom profits by investing in politics, it is the “small businesses” who are being stifled and frozen out. Building a better mouse trap no longer matters, because the Acme Mouse Trap Company is writing legislation that makes it impossible to sell yours. Acme can build the shittiest mouse trap in the world, and never have to innovate, because their market is protected, their failures are subsidized and they pay no taxes. That gives them more money to plug back into the political system, and the cycle begins again.