yeah but, Reid, Obama and Pelosi are not threatening to filibuster the keystone legislation of their own party as is Lieberman (and maybe Conrad and Baucus). On the big picture you're probably right, especially in that Reid, Pelosi and Obama could crack the whip on the Blue Dogs and they don't. Also, they could strip Lieberman of his seniority and committee assignments and of future campaign funds, but they haven't done that either. Since he is contemptuously torpedoing their ship, you have to wonder why they sit still for it.

Thanks, samrat.

Donna has been a strong fighter for single payer.

I sense, however, that she does not understand the extent to which her support (and that of the PDA) for mainstream liberal Democrats undermines everything she claims to be fighting for. These PDA types spend time and money electing the very people who plunge the dagger into single payer.

Can you spell S-E-L-F-D-E-F-E-A-T-I-N-G?

The PDA points its vacuuming device to the left of the Democratic Party and sucks the credulous progressives into its institutional swamp. It is NOT an indepdendent alternative to the mainstream Democrats; ity runs "left" interference for them. It is made up of people who like to think of themselves as "progressives" but really want to be Beltway "players," people with access to the corridors of power, who get invited to all the "right" symposia, garner the good speaking fees, travel in the right cocktail-party and restaurant circle with the "insiders" whom the PDA types impotently but politely chide from the "left."

The PDA says all the right things and then lies right down and calls on people to vote for the very politicians that it knows full well will betray its professed agenda time after time.

The PDA is, for the Democrats, what Lenin once called "useful idiots."

Thanks for the comments. I am so looking forward to your next steps in the fight to make sure we can get to healthcare for all. It will take all of your intelligence and more of mine (apparently) to get there.

Donna Smith, American SiCKO

Ms. Smith your authenticity, your integrity, and the sheer force of your heart putting words on the sheet and feet on the street is well known here and widely respected.

Your comment about circular firing squads touched a subject I have had intense personal experience of in Mad America. As a young adult in San Francisco from '67-'77 I lived in the Western Addition (lunar landscape produced by deliberate Federal, State, & Local Ethnic Cleansing called Urban Renewal). It was a time in which the Federal and State programs that were designed to help working people were turned on their heads into cutting blades to slice working and poor people into gobbets of bloody flesh called profits. I also lived for a time in a racially segregated ghetto called Bayview Hunters Point, Dogpatch to the locals. Blacks on one side of the street. Whites on the other. Black Bar. White Bar. Thought I was in Chicago in 1883. People put out street lights with a .45 and Police, Fire, Ambulance, Bus, and Taxi service ended sometime around 7p-9p. This came after several of the locals set up a free fire zone and invited the Police. They came. They didn't return, after dark. It was very hard to see people in pitch dark. Seeing Black people in the pitch dark was near impossible. Now of course they and we have infrared detection, they didn't. Here's the point.

When humans feel humiliated, enraged, impotent; when they see that every hope of a decent life of quality, quality as defined by them has been ripped out of their hands and mangled by well-heeled laughing monsters; when they cannot even touch the ones who torture their daily lives - they turn it on each other. They turn it on the ones who try to help. That was 35 years ago. The patterns have now become dominant as has the rage. Those good folks were the first on the Pig Wheel at the For Profit Slaughterhouse as were their brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles from Seattle to Detroit, to Philly, and Boston. They were not the last. Only got the insulated white folk to eat now. Misdirection. That's why Kibuki theater on EFCA, Iraq/Af-Pk, the Bail Outs, and "Health Care Reform". Greatest single transfers of wealth in the shortest possible time ever seen in at least 4000 years. This is the End Game of a 40 year campaign for the richfilth animals to take back and lock down "their country" as it was originally designed to be, The Roman Slave Republic - ruled by feral patrician clans of richfilth slave holding animals - acting with complete impunity from the at large population - just like now. Seen any Bush Era prosecutions yet? Even a whisper of a hint about War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity?

Crazy old world, crazier new world.

Donna--
Please point to one post where anyone has called you a "sellout"!

To the contrary, I and others have repeatedly congratulated you on your unflagging single-payer activism.

The most important form of solidarity is not fake talk-show-style flattery but mutual and constructive discussion about the best way forward.

This is a matter of emphasis. When you write articles singling out Baucus and Lieberman and thereby tacitly absolving Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, you are fostering a misleading--indeed, false--narrative about the true causes of the failure of health-care reform in Washington.

The truth is that even if the most robust public option now being considered were to pass, Obamacare would be a sham--it would neither significantly increase affordable coverage for the uninsured nor control costs. And, by mandating the purchase of the extortionate product of the private insurers, it would actually be A STEP BACKWARD.

So why write articles implying that Lieberman and Baucus are impeding the passage of health reform? What they are impeding is already a farce--it is Obama, Reid, and Pelosi who are impeding the passage of real health reform by attempting to crush single payer and foisting this lobbyist-written boondoggle on the American people and fraudulently calling it "reform."

Where are your articles calling Obama and the mainstream Democrats to task for this elaborate consumer fraud, this betrayal of the American people? It is they, not Baucus and Lieberman, who are the main villains of this Beltway melodrama, but you seem to give them a free pass by focusing on the Blue-Dog sideshow.

That is constructive criticism. We are all on the same side. But if some of us are misdirecting their fire, are tacitly implying that Obamacare would be a step forward, then those people need to be called to account--even if you, an admirable single-payer activist, are one of those people.

Instead of indulging in melodramatic breast-beating and overkill ("You called me a sellout!"), why not calmly address the issues that have been raised to you?

You entreat others to comment constructively and rationally--the same good advice applies to your comments and responses as well!

No one believes you are a sellout; some of us believe that you misdirect you fire in a way that takes too many of the main culprits off the hook and fosters a false narrative about the realities of Obamacare.

I hope that you will address THAT point, not the irrelevancy you have invented as a way of avoiding it.