Health Care Polls and the Unrepresented Left

Greg Mitchell asks a question today:

Obviously, he's correct about this. People have noted this fact from the beginning. There have also been polls saying this for a while. However, it's just now, finally, that people are listening. The reason people are somewhat shocked is that the left simply has no voice and cannot penetrate media coverage with facts. Because it's a favorite pastime of the MSM to claim the everything is good news for Republicans, we tend not to hear about these sorts of things.

Enough with the chicken jokes

A few weeks ago, Sue Lowden made a comment about how people used to barter with their local doctors (the infamous "chickens for health care" statement). Many bloggers and pundits whom I respect have taken this snippet and run with it.

Hilarious? Yes. Substantive? Not so much.

Weeks later, I'm still seeing references made to it on Twitter, blogs, MSNBC, etc. I'm here to say, stop it. There's such a vast array of horrible *actual* policy suggestions being made on the right that there's no reason to twist a relatively innocuous statement "Al Gore invented the Internet"-style and make hay out of it endlessly. That's Fox News territory and I'd like to stay out of it.

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.

"The prosecution rests."

(updated below)

via @DemWarRoom:

At 9am today, @SenatorReid yielded back the Majority's debate time - about 7.5 hrs - leaving only the GOP's 8.5 hrs

In other words, it's the Senate Minority's turn to make their arguments for or against the reconciliation sidecar (PDF), the final piece needed to close out this round of health care reform.  Expect dilatory shenanigans today in the form of spurious points of order and proposed amendments on wedge issues.

Update: Indeed, the GOP was able to send the sidecar back to the House with non-substantive points of order.  See Talking Points Memo for more coverage.

An Attack on the Legitimacy of the State, Democracy, and the Law

(updated below)

Ok, so many of us either joke or cry about the Tea Party and the Great Republican Death Spiral. I've often personally speculated that eventually, this will shift us to two new parties - the Libertarians/Blue Dogs and the Progressives. But a couple of things have made me wonder whether the danger is greater than we imagined.

Some perspective, please?

How did our discourse get to this point?

I'm really just sick of discussing this health care bill already. Yeah, it passed. Cool. But we've been talking about it for, counting the campaigns, three years. I'm sick of it. But what people are actually saying about it fascinates me (in some horrifying train-wreck sorta way).

Post-partisanship in the wake of health care reform

Today you'll hear lots of post-mortem analysis of the health care reform debate. Some of this talk will be about the "death of post-partisanship." Don't be fooled: post-partisanship was dead a long time ago and it wasn't Obama who killed it.

David Sanger writes of the passage of health care reform that

[I]n the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a 'post-partisan' Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering."

Sanger is mistaken.