8 September 09 (pm)

Posts
Here is rational Republican response to the Obama school speech.

Bad Political Reporting (from Nate Silver): don’t expect headlines to get it right:

“Obama is fast losing white voters’ support”.

A reasonable person might expect the punchline to be either that the manifest decline in Obama’s approval ratings is particularly steep among white voters, or that race-related issues are responsible for Obama’s current slump. A reasonable person would then click on the chart accompanying the article and discover…

That President Obama’s drop in approval ratings among almost every subgroup of white voters is between 9-11 points among white non Republicans and 12 points among white Republicans. The overall drop: 10 points. Duh.

Health Care

Paul Krugman: what should the President do during his speech tomorrow:

President Obama will give his big health-care speech tomorrow. Let’s hope he does it right.

What does that mean? It means not playing professor; it means not having the speech read as if it were written by a committee (like that woefully weak op-ed in the Times a couple of weeks back); it means showing real passion about health care, which has been sadly lacking so far. [...]

Oh, and about the public option: yes, it should be in the speech — and not just because it will lower costs. From personal discussions I know that the individual mandate really gets peoples’ hackles up,because they see it as a giveaway to the insurance industry (you may recall that many Obama supporters made precisely that case during the primary). Yet the individual mandate is necessary — so it’s crucial to have the counter-argument that look, people can choose the public option. Yes, some senators will fight against that option tooth and nail — but that’s for later.

What I hope Obama realizes is that this speech should not be aimed at Kent Conrad or Susan Collins. A national address is not where you do your backroom deals. This speech has to be aimed at regaining the trust of the American people. It needs to be something with vision and sweep, not an item-by-item detailing of what the administration is prepared to concede.

He notes that we should call the Republicans out on their claim that somehow they are the defenders of Medicare.

What about the public option:

Paul Krugman:

The first is that I suspect that Ezra and others understate the extent to which even a public plan with limited bargaining power will help hold down overall costs. Private insurers do pay providers more than Medicare does — but that’s only part of the reason Medicare has lower costs. There’s also the huge overhead of the private insurers, much of which involves marketing and attempts to cherry-pick clients — and even with community rating, some of that will still go on. A public plan would probably be able to attract clients with much less of that.

Second, a public plan would probably provide the only real competition in many markets.

Third — and this is where I am getting a very bad feeling about the idea of throwing in the towel on the public option — is the politics. Remember, to make reform work we have to have an individual mandate. And everything I see says that there will be a major backlash against the idea of forcing people to buy insurance from the existing companies. That backlash was part of what got Obama the nomination! Having the public option offers a defense against that backlash.

What worries me is not so much that the backlash would stop reform from passing, as that it would store up trouble for the not-too-distant future. Imagine that reform passes, but that premiums shoot up (or even keep rising at the rates of the past decade.) Then you could all too easily have many people blaming Obama et al for forcing them into this increasingly unaffordable system. A trigger might fix this — but the funny thing about such triggers is that they almost never get pulled.

How do we get a public option in? Robert Reich:

The White House is looking for a way to be in favor of a public option but also get enough Blue Dog Democrats — many of whom hail from swing districts and states, and therefore need some cover — to vote for it. One such cover is a Republican Senator from Maine, named Olympia Snowe. If she votes for the bill, Blue Dogs can calm their constituents — who have been worked up into a lather by the right — by saying “you see? Even a prominent Republican senator is voting for this.” [...]

The beauty of Snowe’s proposal is that it seems to offer Blue Dogs a way out and liberal Democrats a way in. Nobody has to vote for or against a public option. The public option just happens automatically if its purposes — wider coverage and lower costs — aren’t achieved. And the trigger idea seems so, well, centrist.

The problem is twofold. First, it’s impossible to design airtight goals for coverage and cost reductions that won’t be picked over by five thousand lobbyists and as many lawyers and litigators even if, at the end of the grace period, it’s apparent to everyone else that the goals aren’t met. Washington is a vast cesspool of well-paid specialists who know how to stop anything resembling a “trigger.” Believe me, they will. [...]

The best way to give Blue Dogs cover is for the President to explain clearly and boldly why the public option is essential to health care reform, and why he’s ready to veto any bill that doesn’t include it. That’s also the only way to give the nation a good chance of getting true health care reform. Hopefully, that’s what he’ll do Wednesday evening.

As an aside, Reich has a nice summary of previous attempts.

Here is a pessimistic view of what might happen.

President Obama’s stay-in-school speech (full video and transcript) – Daily Kos TV (beta)

more about "President Obama’s stay-in-school spee…", posted with vodpod

The Longer People Stay Married to Each Other…

Two items….

1. I had reported on the Peoria Health Care Town Hall. Barbara went with Lynn and me; Lynn is one of my political buddies and, like me, she is a hot head. So Barbara sat between us so we wouldn’t make trouble.

Almost all of the speakers were well behaved and listened to respectfully; there was one who started in on off topic things (illegal immigration, border control, super highways, etc.) and people in the audience yelled at him to get back on topic and to make his point.

Guess who was standing at the back and telling him to get back on point? Hint: it wasn’t Lynn and it wasn’t me. (yes, she had lots of company).

2. I got home from work yesterday and saw this:

No, I did not buy this nor did I recommend it; this was in no way my idea!

8 September 09 (still buggy)

Workout notes Gentle 4.2 mile run (39:30); I slept in and missed yoga class.

Politics I have to admit that I am mostly annoyed by some at Daily Kos; it appears that some there think that President Obama has a magic wand that he can wave but just won’t.

Don’t get me wrong: I completely approve of principled criticism (e. g., Paul Krugman from the right, David Frumm from the left). I approve of trying to put pressure on him to push for this policy or for that one. But I don’t approve of those who think that the President can just show up and “just do” things. It isn’t that easy.

Health Care Here is one of my biggest issues with the reptiles that we call “insurance companies”:

The untimely disappearance of Sally Marrari’s medical coverage goes a long way toward explaining why insurance companies are cast as the villain in the health-care reform drama.

“They said I never mentioned I had a back problem,” said Marrari, 52, whose coverage with Blue Cross was abruptly canceled in 2006 after a thyroid disorder, fluid in the heart and lupus were diagnosed. That left the Los Angeles woman with $25,000 in medical bills and the stigma of the company’s claim that she had committed fraud by not listing on a health questionnaire “preexisting conditions” Marrari said she did not know she had.

By the time she filed a lawsuit in 2008, she also got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and her debts had swelled beyond $200,000. She was able to see a specialist by trading office visits for work on the doctor’s 1969 Porsche at the garage she owns with her husband.

“I’ve had about 10 visits,” Marrari said of the barter arrangement that has proved more reliable than her insurance. “The car needs a lot of work.”

Rescission — the technical term for canceling coverage on grounds that the company was misled — is often considered among the most offensive practices in an insurance industry that already suffers from a distinct lack of popularity among the American public. Tales of cancellations have fueled outrage among regulators, analysts, doctors and, not least, plaintiffs’ lawyers, who describe insurers as too eager to shed patients to widen profits. [...]

In the only case to go to trial in California, an arbitration judge awarded $9 million to a beautician who had to stop chemotherapy for her breast cancer after Health Net dropped her policy. Company officials declined to comment.

In a pending case, Blue Shield searched in vain for an inconsistency in the health records of the wife of a dairy farmer after she filed a claim for emergency gallbladder surgery, according to attorneys for the family. Turning to her husband’s questionnaire, the company discovered he had not mentioned his high cholesterol and dropped them both. Blue Shield officials said they would not comment on a pending case.

Officials from three insurance companies told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee this summer they had saved $300 million by canceling about 20,000 policies over five years.

So if a public option puts these bastards out of business, I’ll celebrate.

Our Health Care Problems Are More Vivid When Presented in Colorful Graphical Video Form | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

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(from Cosmic Variance)

I should make a personal comment here: way back in 1999 I saw my doctor for a burning pressure in my chest. He told me the following: “I could stress test you but we’d learn nothing from it; a true positive reading is of such low probability that any positive reading would likely be a false positive reading. Your symptoms are classic reflux. I could do an upper GI series on you, but that would probably cause more pain or problems than it would prevent. So in this case, it is best to treat the symptoms and so I am going to give you an ant-acid. It will probably resolve itself in a month.”

And that is what he did and that is what happened. That was a low cost but effective treatment.

Yes, I still have this doctor.

Unions: as unemployment goes up, perceptions of unions goes down.

Computer issues/outages or instability of big sites: connection with the economy?

If outages are becoming more frequent, the economy may be at fault. The Association for Computer Operations Management (AFCOM), reported in December that half of all data centers it surveyed were planning cuts, and nearly 12% of the survey respondents said they believed service disruptions would increase.

Another warning sign comes from Uptime Institute data. The Santa Fe, N.M.-based data center engineering and consulting firm issues what it calls Flash Reports to its members when it sees a data center experiencing failures that could occur at other sites with the same kind of hardware. That hardware includes circuit breakers, batteries and UPS systems.

In all of 2008, Uptime sent out six Flash Reports, according to Ken Brill, Uptime’s executive director. So far this year, it has sent out 17 reports detailing equipment problems and it has four others pending. Brill isn’t sure what’s causing the uptick, but he believes it’s significant.

The drive for energy efficiency may be prompting data centers to cut back on redundant equipment and run their systems harder, exposing equipment flaws that may have been there all along, said Brill. Cutbacks are another possibility. “We’re not doing the maintenance we should be doing, and when you don’t do maintenance, you increase the probability of catastrophic failure.”

Ted Maulucci, CIO at real estate developer Tridel Corp. in Toronto, doesn’t see a systemic problem, even though he had to deal with an outage by a data center provider. He believes fiber-based connectivity is improving performance and stability. “Five years ago, it was not uncommon to experience the odd interruption, whereas today it has been pretty rock solid, other than the major failure that happened,” he said. [...]

7 September 09 (am)

Posts

Republican Family Values

UPDATE: In a press release from liberal activist group Progress Now, former Lt. Gov. Gail Schoettler slams Mitchell for his little ‘joke’–but also Minority Leader Josh Penry, as close to oversight as Mitchell has. Full release after the jump: says Schoettler, “As a former elected official who’s been subjected to behavior like Mitchell’s in the past, I believe that we have to call this out every time it happens, and we absolutely must hold elected officials who stoop so low accountable.”

Sen. Shawn Mitchell, as we’ve had the unfortunate duty of noting previously, has a bit of a, well, distasteful side. Here’s a little snippet of audio we were forwarded this week from the Pinnacol investigative committee hearings, chaired by the lovely and gracious Sen. Morgan Carroll.

Here is the audio of Sen. Mitchell talking about his imaging Sen. Carroll in her underwear.

This is nothing new for Republicans:

Now let me point out that consenting adults are free to tease each other in private all they want to. And yes, I love it when a female professional beach volleyball player’s butt hangs out of her swim suit. But to disrespect and humiliate a professional female in public or on the job is just plain wrong.

Health Care Yes, liberals are in no mood to be run over. Yes, the concern trolls say that President Obama has to resist such pressure.

As to what is really going on, this surprisingly good article from the Wall Street Journal talks about the ins and outs:

Much of the debate is over how to pay the estimated $1 trillion price tag. There also is disagreement over a public option for coverage, and how much businesses would have to contribute if they didn’t provide coverage to workers. What’s more, doctors are concerned because much of the cost savings is supposed to come from lower Medicare reimbursements for certain services.

Despite the confusion and contentious atmosphere, there are some issues that most sides appear to agree on — and many expect some legislation by the end of the year.
Agreement — to a Point

Lawmakers agree there need to be subsidies to help families pay for health coverage if it’s not available at work. However, parties disagree on who should be eligible for the assistance, how much that assistance should be and the minimum benefit level.

The House version would provide sliding-scale premium subsidies for families with incomes of up to 400% of the federal poverty level, or $88,000, but the Senate version tops out at $66,000, says Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focused on health-care issues.

Mr. Altman says there is consensus that the legislation should include provisions ensuring that insurers don’t deny anyone coverage or charge significantly higher rates because of pre-existing medical conditions, gender and age. Insurers already have agreed to many of these changes, as long as the legislation requires that all people have coverage.[...]

“If you’re in the employer system, there probably wouldn’t be that much change” to your insurance, says Kathryn Bakich, a senior vice president at consulting firm Segal. “But anybody in the individual market or [small-business] market would see significant changes in their ability to get insurance, how much it would cost and where they would buy it.”

Mike Langan, a principal at consulting firm Towers Perrin, says, “I don’t see the legislation having a negative impact on the quality of care. It leaves largely intact the current system.” That’s because the majority of Americans still get their health insurance from their employers.

That benefit — while provided almost universally at large companies — is voluntary, unless agreed upon in a collective bargaining agreement. The existing proposals would require most employers to offer coverage. However, there is significant disagreement over the penalties that employers would pay if they didn’t provide the coverage.

A proposal from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, for instance, would require most employers to offer health coverage and pay 60% of premium costs — or pay annual fines of $750 for full-time employees and $375 for part-time workers. The House proposal would require most employers to offer coverage and pay 72.5% of individual costs and 65% of family costs — or pay an annual fine of 8% of payroll. An earlier proposal to tax benefits appears to have disappeared.

Labor Day 09 Part I

Workout notes

2000 yard swim; routine (5 x 100 on 2, 10 x 25 drill/25 swim (fins), 10 x 25 fist, 25 free, 5 x 100 IM on 2:30).

I was somewhat slow; I don’t know if I was slow due to this “thing” that I have (watery eyes, scratchy throat) or just due to the weekend’s festivities.

Frogs

New species discovered in Papua New Guinea!

A team of biologists and filmmakers from the BBC have found strange spiders, a rat the size of a cat and a frog with fangs co-habiting in a pristine giant volcano in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.

The animals were found in the ‘lost world” of the Mount Bosavi crater, an extinct volcano so remote and inaccessible that no humans live there. Instead, an amazing array of exotic fauna has thrived.

Among them is the Bosavi woolly rat, an over-sized – but vegetarian – rodent that measures almost 3 feet long and weighs in at 3.3lbs.

Steve Greenwood, series producer for Lost Land of the Volcano, said that after scaling the volcano’s 2,800m summit, the team were rewarded by finding a wealth of new creatures.

They suspect they may have discovered up to 40 new species, including approximately 16 species of frog, one species of gecko, at least three new species of fish, 20 species of insect and spider and one new species of bat.

“Highlights include a camouflaged gecko, a fanged frog and a fish called the Henamo Grunter, so named because it makes grunting noises from its swim bladder,” Mr Greenwood said.

The photo of the huge rat is impressive:

(photo from the article)

6 September 09 (pm)

Football: I always look forward to this weekly column. It is fun.

Police and “judgment”. Here is a case of poor judgment; it IS possible to be “too safe”.

a kid tried to take photographs of a traffic light in a school zone, and a [...] Polk County cop [...] tried to stop him because of… you guessed it, fears of terrorism.

Surf to the article to see the colorful adjectives that I replaced by ellipsis.

Science and climate change Of course the denialists will have a field day with this: solar cycles might actually cause some cooling which might mask the longer term effects due to increased CO2 levels.

In short, there are many factors that affect the climate as the article explains:

I explained in a previous post that Solar Cycle 24 is late, and that it may contribute to global cooling. While this borrows a little time to deal with the effects of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, it is a loan from nature, not a gift. At some point the Sun returns to normal, and we’ll have to “pay back” the temporary cooling, plus the “interest” of the additional anthropogenic warming which will have accumulated in the mean time.

Here is an analogy: you might be developing a fever. But if, in the process of developing a fever you go for a long swim in a cold lake, a graph of your body’s temperature might show a momentary drop; hence the effects of what is causing the fever might be masked.

Republicans Versus Democrats Yes, Vaughn Jones had a radical past, and yes, he foolishly signed a nonsensical petition (9-11 related). Nevertheless, we backed down without a fight.

Had the situation been reversed, do you think that the Republicans would have backed down so easily? Hell no! They’d given us the finger and said “so what”. Our conscience is sometimes our worst political enemy.

Van Jones is a mainstream liberal. He got there by way of a far-left radical course that doesn’t sit well with the right. But, then, neither does liberalism. David Horowitz of Front Page Magazine is a right-wing conservative. He is a former Marxist whose parents were communists. He offered legal and financial assistance to the Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. Horowitz, like Jones, has renounced his early radical activities. The difference is, Horowitz is a darling of the right because his path led him to conservatism; Jones’s path led him to liberalism. But I don’t hear Horowitz being demonized for who he used to be.

Jones was right about this:

Of course, he didn’t give a good answer to this lady’s question; the correct answer, I think, is that the Republican political tent is much smaller than ours; hence they have more unity of policy than we do.

Science and Religion
Perhaps some of our critics are smart, but you couldn’t infer that from their writing:

Manzi begins by claiming that I have definitively ruled God out of the evolutionary process:

Coyne is an eminent evolutionary biologist, but here makes an enormous claim about the philosophical implications of science: that evolution through natural selection demonstrates that there is no divine plan for the universe. I think this claim is, in fact, a gigantic leap of faith unsupported by any scientific findings.

Wrong! What I have said — repeatedly — is that there is no evidence for a divine plan for the universe. There could, of course, be a divine plan that happens to coincide with The Big Bang, evolution, and all the materialistic processes we study, and we wouldn’t be able to disprove that. Deistic evolution, in which a god starts everything off and then retires, could be a divine plan, though of course it’s not the sort of divine plan that many religious people would accept. All that science can do on this front is to seek evidence for a divine plan of a certain type, and either support or falsify that plan. Some divine plans — for example, those that preclude innocent people or animals from needless suffering — have already been ruled out by science. Science has also dismissed any divine plan that involves an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god. Science and reason, then, can have things to say about Divine Plans.

“No evidence for” does not mean “disproved”. Coyne goes on to point out that many of the computer algorithms used to do searches, etc. all have a “goal” in mind (e. g., find things that meet this criteria) whereas natural selection has no “goal”; selection occurs when certain random mutations end up giving an organism an advantage in reproductive success. That is why our bodies are actually the result from numerous “jury riggings” rather than the result of some planned design.

Health care
One of the conservative face book members (who commented on someone’s thread) posted a link to a useful article:

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.

“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients.”

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.

The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours. [...]

He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.

“It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway.”

He added: “What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying.

“It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking.”

He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.

Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.

Ok, you say. That is a legitimate issue that should be addressed, and people who have loved ones who are thought to be terminally ill should take this into account.

But the person who forwarded this article said that this was evidence of “death panels” in Great Britain.

Come on. This is much more about the specifics of a particular program; if you drug up a very ill patient too much it might mask a sign of recovery. If you don’t drug them up enough, they suffer horrendous pain even though their hope of recovery is remote.

If you want to talk about death panels, consider this:

The absence of health insurance creates a range of consequences, including lower quality of life, increased morbidity and mortality, and higher financial burdens. This paper focuses on just one aspect of this harm—namely, greater risk of death—and seeks to illustrate its general order of magnitude.

In 2002, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimated that 18,000 Americans died in 2000 because they were uninsured. Since then, the number of uninsured has grown. Based on the IOM’s methodology and subsequent Census Bureau estimates of insurance coverage, 137,000 people died from 2000 through 2006 because they lacked health insurance, including 22,000 people in 2006.

Yes, Great Britain’s life expectancy is higher than ours (slightly) (by state: they rank 25′th, we rank 35′th). And yes, in terms of obesity, we are number 1, they are number 3.

6 September 09

Longish workout note
I got a late start (almost 8 am) and thereby missed a heavy rain. I did get stuck with the humidity. I did 17.x miles in 4:04; I deliberately took it easy.

A few notes:

1. The easier pace made most of the calf/behind the knee pain go away.
2. It was very humid at the end.
3. I forgot water; I did stop at two fountains.
4. Some runners chided me for waiting until the rain had passed to start.
5. Some little kid (toddler) yelled to her dad “There is a man who is running like a girl”. (I have a racewalk gait) The dad got her way quickly.
6. Some woman yelled something about my arms.
7. One tiny dog came after me..another one started to; the man apologized.
8. I saw rabbits, squirrels, a wood chuck and lots of geese.

My course: a mix of things; for the Peoria types:

Cooper past Bradley Park to Columbia Terrace. Then to Broadway, McClure, Bootz, Bigelo, Forrest Hill, which I took past Knoxville, past Wisconsin and turned on Monroe. I took Monroe to Peoria Heights to Marrieta (Cohen Warehouse), to Prospect. Then I took Grandview to …forget the name but I went past the golf course (up Bishop hill) to Harvard and then back on Lake. Lake to Prospect, down a side street and back on Central.

Then I took Central to Forrest Hill and then turned left to get to Prospect; turned through Glen Oak Park, on Perry down to the River. On the River I did one loop of the Goose loop and did a second partial loop and took the trail to the end. Then up Kumpf, left on the road past the Old Person’s home past MLK to Moss. Then Moss to Cooper and back home.

Humor For you men out there: have you noticed that being around an attractive (to you) woman robs you of a standard deviation of IQ? There might be a reason for that:

Men literally lose their minds when talking to women they find attractive, a new study finds. A group of Dutch psychologists—inspired to carry out the experiment after one of them forgot his address while talking to a pretty woman—tested the memory skills of 40 heterosexual volunteers before and after they spoke to attractive women. They found the men’s cognitive skills were seriously impaired after trying to impress the women, the Telegraph reports.

A couple of anecdotes:

1. A female colleague told me this joke: a mom was bathing her 3 year old son. He touched his testicles and asked “Mom, are these my brains?” She replied: “not yet, dear.”.

2. I was once doing a calculation on the board during a calculus III (multi-variable calculus) when a female in a tight white skirt walked by. I was momentarily distracted. A friend (Ph. D. in economics asked “did you get the calculation right?” I replied “yes” and we “high fived” each other!

It isn’t just attractiveness either; often it is what the woman is doing. I once got to a yoga class early; my teacher was there alone and facing away from the door. She was in this position and this is what I saw:

yoga teacher pose

She was slightly bouncing up and down and said “hi”. I had forgotten whatever was on my mind; I mumbled something unintelligible.

More notes: Lee pointed me to this Doonsbury Cartoon.

President Obama: one liberal points out that his record is already impressive.

I pointed out that I will not give up on his presidency, even if we fail at health care reform (as we might).

Teabagger Fail

Snarky Response (that some conservatives didn’t detect as snark…)

More political humor:

Hat tip to Billy Dennis.

Glenn Beck: Keith Olbermann is going after him. Here is a collection of some of his “greatest hits”.

I don’t know how useful that is; I’d rather Mr. Olbermann use his skill to pressure the President to do the right thing (as he is doing) and to twist the arms of some blue dogs.

5 September 09 (pm)

Health Care

Bill Moyers weighs in:

A woman who got shouted down:

President Obama met with Congressional liberals:

Responding to the Progressive Caucus’s letter and demand for a meeting on the public option, President Obama had a conference call with the leaders of the Caucus yesterday, and will meet face-to-face with them prior to Wednesday’s speech.

As for the conference call:

A variety of reports suggest that, during a conference call this afternoon, President Obama probed House progressives to see just how flexible their demands are.

A source familiar with the call tells TPM that Obama asked the group to define their red line when they talk about a “robust public option.”

NBC reports that Obama reminded the group that they enjoy the security of representing safely Democratic districts.

Digby adds:

According to Mike Viqueira on MSNBC, Obama told the progressives in congress on a conference call this morning that on health care, they need to worry about their fellow members in districts that voted with McCain in ’08. I guess he figures that those conservative districts are going to be appeased by some sort of “trigger” or a plan without the public option and that those guys in tough districts will be rewarded for making that happen.

I think that’s about as delusional as the teabaggers, frankly. If those McCain voters are upset about health care reform, the only thing that will appease them is total defeat. . . .

I think Obama has an exactly backward reading of the situation and Digby has it exactly right. This subject has swirled around the blogosphere this week, mostly following from a post from Ezra, in which he posits that the Progressives can’t “beat the Blue Dogs at their own game.”

The bottom line: the seats that will be lost if health care reform fails will be mostly blue dog districts. However if the progressives cave, the usually D districts might punish them. But the major deal will be in the Senate anyway.

As far as President Obama: he may well fail. President Clinton, President Nixon and President Truman also failed. I give him credit for taking this on; that took guts. But if he fails it might not be due to a mistake or a misreading or a bad strategy; he might fail due to the difficulty of the task.

But then again, he might not fail.