We are very quickly becoming a banana republic in which the only legislation that can make it through our esteemed Congress makes possible the looting of public funds by private interests, war-making, or both. This will not end well...

No, what this is really about is setting up Democrats for "failure." They desperately want to stop any progressive reforms whatsoever, otherwise people will start to realize there might be another way that might actually work. They especially want Obama to fail, even at the expense of American working people and families.

And Obama is on the stump, desperate to characterize this legislative POS as a "win" for the Democratic team.  Chump.

What he doesn't seem to get is that this may have been the only opportunity he would ever have to guarantee himself a 2nd term.  All posturing aside, what needed to happen was for a legislative package to emerge that (a) was accessible to people who needed it, and (b) that would have an immediate and tangible benefit for them.  That isn't what happened, or even a remote possibility of what's going to happen.

This was uninspired, unimaginative, and sadly... not unprecedented.  Thorougly predictable. 

Grade:  The most minimum score possible in an F without it being a zero.  What is it that you get for signing your name when sitting for the SAT and not answering a single question?  That.

____________________________

Calling to the underworld. Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls.

Folks, you seem to be missing the point.

Obama is proving himself a true crusader, a man with a great deal of spine. Despite all this carping by the people who actually voted for him, he will indeed stand up for the rights of the people he sees as his constituents. But he sees his constituents as the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies, who paid for his campaign and the campaigns of the Democrats in Congress (the Republicans, too, but that's another matter).

So Barry O really is standing up and doing what he sees as right: transforming the public demand for healthcare reform into a lovely Xmas basket for Big Inscos and Big Pharma.

Perhaps Mr. Obama has done what he really campaigned on, which was to press forward into the vast and imperfect middle ground.  Given the amount of vitriol spewing from both left and right over this legislation, I'm beginning to believe that Obama is doing what I expected of him from the outset.  

Had he actually done what the liberals demanded and the conservatives feared, what we would have right now is exactly nothing.  No bill. No change, whether you believe in it or not.  Health care reform would be dead as a doornail and untouchable for another 20 years.  If there are shortcomings in the current bill (and rest assured there are) its passage will be a game changer, and I believe that it will open up the opportunity to revise and refine over the coming years, because the longstanding stalemate over the status quo will have ended.

The political question moving forward will be whether or not the liberal wing of the Democratic party will choose to eat their own young, just like the Palin-led conservative wing of the Republican party eats their own impure brethren, or if the Democrats will realize that they've actually gotten a win here.  Do you really want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

If we're not going to have a robust public option, take away the individual mandate and we'll call it even.

Exactly! I don't see how forcing people to buy something they can't afford will help.

In a recent Newsweek article touting the Cleveland Clinic, there was mention of the high cost of processing insurance claims from "thousands of different health plans from hundreds of insurance companies all over the country".

whatever else a government-run health-insurance system would accomplish, it would impose a uniform billing system on the current one, in which clinic's 2,000 doctors require 1,400 clerks to handle their billing.

I was excited when this process of healthcare reform was first brought up, now I am just hoping they don't make it worse for those of us that have to find and pay for their health insurance out-of-pocket, i.e. not covered by an employer's plan.