Quick Health Care Notes and Quotes

Noam Chomsky basically said he'd vote for the HCR bill despite it mostly sucking, echoing the thoughts of basically every progressive everywhere at this stage of the game. The "kill the bill" folks seemed to have backed off a bit once talk of reconciliation began, though no one could really explain why a public option backed by a majority of the country could be passed via reconciliation when the typical Democratic excuse was always "we don't have sixty votes."

Chomsky had a couple lines in the piece that I'd like to echo here, since it speaks to not just healthcare, but everything that's wrong with our country:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor added that it’s a damning referendum on American democracy that one of the most highly supported components of the effort nationally, the public insurance option, was jettisoned. He partly blamed the media for refusing to stress how favorably it’s viewed by the populace.

"It didn't have 'political support,' just the support of the majority of the population," Chomsky quipped, "which apparently is not political support in our dysfunctional democracy.... There should be headlines explaining why, for decades, what's been called politically impossible is what most of the public has wanted," Chomsky said. "There should be headlines explaining what that means about the political system and the media." 

I couldn't have said it better myself.

And just for fun, in the kind of bluntness I'd like to see more of in our discourse, Sarkozy welcomes us to a not-so-exclusive club.