your two cents? You sell yourself short, Oleeb:)

Some very interesting points here. Leader, not head lecturer, especially.

On one hand, I'd love to see another "enough" speech by the President, like the one he gave at the convention last August.

On the other hand, I'd like to see his easy going demeanor at town halls. Disarm people's anger. Don't fight the opposition's myths about his health care initiatives with fire. Dissolve them by chuckling a little about them. Point out how nonsensical they are, like when he told the story of the woman who didn't want the government getting involved with her medicare--he smiled a bit, sometimes you just have to laugh, really.

I mean, "death boards to decide the fate of the elderly"??

This is some very imaginative fiction.

The opposition is trying to make Obama out to be this angry all powerful dictator who wants to make your life miserable by imposing the "big bad" government on everything you do.

I've said in other comments that the Democrats need to pound the facts. They do. And hard.

But I think at least part of what Obama needs to do is go out there and be himself. Just talk to people.

yes, I agree. By the way, whatever happened to the notion of government-protected health care? Brought up in other conversations on this site?

I think the main thing is that he needs to be talking about what the plan is and not what it isn't.

Yes. That's classic Lakoff (Don't Think Of An Elephant). Whenever anyone says "there are no death panels in the bill" the phrase that lingers is "death panels" and it remains associated with the bill. Countering lies can be tricky stuff.

Lakoff was on my local prog talk station over the weekend and he mentioned this as one -- but, unfortunately, only one -- of the mistakes Obama and the Democrats have made in the health reform fight.

I've heard the number 18,000 used several times by Bernie Sanders as the number of people who die annually because they have no insurance and/or for whatever reason cannot obtain the healthcare they need to survive. Over a million people annually file for bankruptcy protection because of medical bills (by far the leading cause of bankruptcy filings).

Good to see ya Libertine!

Maybe a conservative-to-english-dictionary is in order:

Free market--a market in which insurance behemoths are free from any and all competition.

Public option--Democrat plan that puts a Washington bureaucrat between a patient and the insurance industry's massive profits.

Although I sympathize with the "don't think of an elephant" concept, I think it's possible for this "death panel" idea to also go the way of the birthers: it becomes so ridiculous that any Republican approaching mainstream begins to fear being associated with it. Granted, many will still embrace it (or be noncommittal on it), just as with the birth certificate issue, but I think the Republicans have gone so far off the deep end with the "death panel" bit that perhaps with a wee bit more rope they could finish constructing their own personal death panel.

if americans are so stupid that they oppose a govt. health care plan, then they don't deserve one. in europe where i live, people have voted for politicos who have given them "socialized" medicine. that's because during election campaigns there is no talk about Jeebus or fake "family values".
while the GOP demonizes "socialized" medicine, i'd like to remind them that every member of congress enjoys a govt. run socialized health plan. i haven't seen any of those hypocrites opt out of that program and switch to private insurance.
hypocrites all! and the voters are so ignorant they keep voting these troglodytes back into office. ya gotta be smarter than that if you want to protect your interests and get a better health plan.

The president is doing exactly what he campaigned on.

The four bills currently making their through committee are being fashioned in a bipartisan fashion and in line with what he said he wanted to accomplish with health care reform. The House bill will always bee more reflective of the majority while the Senate will be more of a consensus. The vast majority of the provisions in those bills that are likely to make it into the final legislation are just about exactly what Barack said during the campaign as outlined in the link above.

I would suggest that you accept the fact that there is no way Congress is going to change overnight in the fashion that Obama campaigned on as being a worthy goal, so a realistic expectation probably wouldn't include C-SPAN in the Congressional Committee process anytime soon. If we are able to get there in the next four years, great, but you legislate with the Congress you have and not the one you need.

When Bush rammed through the Patriot Act, no one in Congress had read that one either and it had profound impacts on our Constitutional rights far beyond some common sense changes to our health care system before it bankrupts the country. I would say the process has been very transparent and the proposed legislation is fairly simple to understand and all of it is available online for review. Read any of Fred Moolten's blogs or commentary. He is pretty well versed in its specifics and none of them are ideological in nature. In fact, they are quite conservative and moderate given the urgency of the problem.

A smart, pragmatic conservative should be supporting these plans if he truly cares about the fiscal health of the country. It doesn't really sound like you have read the legislation, but I have and it is far from liberally biased. If it wasn't, do you think all the liberals around hear would be so pissed? We cannot continue with the status quo, which is basically all our republican leaders are offering right now.

Sorry, but President Obama has a much better plan for health care reform than the GOP has seen fit to offer.

Thanks, we do not agree on policy but we do agree the bill is not liberal. And I do oppose it.

The worst thing about it is that it is underfunded so it cannot deliver. Maybe he gets reforms that bring down costs sometime in the future, but maybe not. Big deal change requires big deal money up front. So there will not be enough money in the fiscally neutral bill. When did anything fiscally neutral ever do big deal change? The usual suspects, the working poor and the lower end of the middle class, will carry the burden mandated to buy a policy they cannot afford which does not really deliver on care. They will be appropriately disillusioned and wonder once again why it is that the Democratic Party is not on their side.

Well, sure but the Democrats are falling all over themselves assuring their friends the teabaggers that they'd never ever offer anything so awful as single payer.

Totally disagree with this assessment of the current legislation. The idea that single payer, as written in HR 676, was any more fiscally sound than what is currently on the table requires a very skewed reading of the legislation.

Well of course you are correct. But my point is simply that there is a way that is less, not more costly.

I agree, Oleeb, and I think he took a step in that direction today in New Hampshire. He was cool, commanding, forceful, and authoritative.

I actually think he will win this battle, although exactly what he will win has yet to be determined, and in any case, will not address the issues outside of insurance that I mention above. He is currently hampered by the fact that there is no single proposal he can tout, because they differ from each other, and none is likely to be what Congress eventually passes.

Finally, I think Obama understands timing. He isn't trying to score all his points in the first quarter of a 48-minute basketball games, while letting the opposition dominate the second half, ater he has exhausted himself.

He campaigned on transparency and bringing together all sides of an issue.

Stop bringing up Bush as a comparison. That's like saying Obama should get an "A" as his grade in class because he is following a buffoon. I couldn't give a rats ass about the Patriot Act right now.

If you think that the process has been transparent and easy to read, then I have a bridge in Manhattan I'd like to sell you. You can't say with a straight face that Obama or anyone in Congress has actually read the full legislation that they're trying to pass

Well, since there isn't actually a single bill yet, I am not quite sure how you can make this estimation. You are making assumptions that are every bit as illogical as the ones republicans are making from the other extreme.

As usual, the people on the TV whom you take as gospel try to come up with "clever zingers" when they utterly fail at a substantive level.

"None of your objections actually exist except in your imagination."

"Oh, yeah?! Well, well...Oh, yeah?! OBAMA'S DOG!!!!!!!"

Oh, and they already got the dog a couple months back.

Single Payer is not economically sustainable as written and it would not be nearly as pain free as you suggest.

The government can't even run Medicare in a sustainable fashion and it only covers a fraction of the country at 80% payout of negotiated rates. It is a ridiculous system that was inadequate to our needs at the time it was passed and is now the single payer foundation we should trust?

There must be a reason why only a handful of industrialized nations have opted for pure single payer systems that killed off the private insurance industries.

You still don't respond to the facts, which I linked to.

You also don't respond to the fact that single payer systems are not inherently more stable or sustainable than the other forms. You simply assert that it is true as if that ends the discussion.

The only single payer bill currently under discussion is not economically sustainable or politically viable.

Crazy bastard? Hehehe...I do kinda resemble that remark, don't I? Out of my brain on the 5:15... ;-)

Doing well Gary. I kinda go through phases where I float in and out of here (artappraiser has commented on that fact)...but I always find my way home seeing this is the only place I talk politics, great people and great discussions. How you doing?

Here you go again with the logic of "Well, since Bush rammed thru the TARP, then it's OK for Obama to ram through healthcare". Again, two wrongs don't make a right.

Healthcare has nothing to do with Obama? I guess that's why he's taking such a backseat and not saying anything, not making any town hall appearances, etc. I understand what separation of powers is but that doesn't mean that Obama isn't involved in the process.

I referenced the "immediate collapse of Medicare." Not sure what you expect.

Public systems are inherently more sustainable, because they require less money to operate.

I still don't understand why you place such importance on political theater. The right does it as well.

When it became clear an agreement wasn't going to be reached, the president was happy to allow the process more time to reach consensus. Which it appears to be doing. No hair-splitting involved in objectively examining the way this debate is taking shape and the bill that is the most likely result of those trends.

We The People need to pay attention to the plans being offered rather than the illegitimate explanations being sold by the Talking Hairdos on TV.

It's not theater. Obama wants to very complex bill through Congress way too quickly.

Zero control, huh? I guess that's why he's on the phone with party leaders so much discussing healthcare. Are you just mincing words again? Would you agree that he has "influence" over Congress?

I never said he controls the committee deliberations or anything else of that sort. You are putting words in my mouth. I objected to his trying to rush something through, which he was doing by putting pressure on Congress to pass it before the August recess.

You were the one who used the word "control" in the first place. I was just responding to your point. I never said he had control of the process/committee deliberations.

You're not sure how a President can ram something through. So I will tell you how. Because he has influence over the process. He is the President and he has lots of power. He picks up the phone and calls Henry Waxman..."Hey Henry, would you like me to get out on the campaign trail for you? That would probably help your re-election next year, wouldn't it? Well if you guys stop dicking around and get a bill passed before August, I'm sure I'll have an easier time finding spots in my busy calendar to get out there and speak at your campaign rallys."

Is he actually writing the bill? Of course not. But he is putting a lot of pressure on Congress to move way too quickly. That's why I objected to your "zero control" comment about how quickly Congress moves. If that were true then he wouldn't be wasting so much breath talking about the urgency to pass something quickly. If he had no control over how quickly Congress moves, then he wouldn't have been so vocal about how quickly Congress needed to pass the Stimulus bill. He would have just shut up and sat back since it didn't matter what he said.

PS: What I did was quote you as saying Obama is ramming stuff through Congress and then turned around and said I brought the notion of "controlling" Congress into the debate, when that was clearly your point from the beginning and is backed up by this email.

Of course I understand that a president can and does exercise a certain amount of control (I prefer influence) over the agenda of Congress if they have the majority. As much as you apparently can't take responsibility for Bush, he was constantly "ramming" shit through Congress with very aggressive techniques.

By way of comparison, Obama has been basically hands-off while Congress worked to find a consensus bill. Which will never happen if grassroots republicans don't even bother to read what is being proposed and react accordingly. Nothing in the current measures is overly liberal, despite your hyperbole and distrust of Obama. A man who has done nothing to earn that distrust while the last administration betrayed it over and over again.

I think it is long past time you took a good long look in the mirror and decided what is really important.

Already answered.

You have raised other people's objections to the bill on numerous threads, none of which were accurate readings of all the proposed legislation and instead offered partisan analysis in soundbite form.

If the entire text of all the bills are available online then a transparency argument makes no sense, which is what led me to believe you hadn't actually read any of them. Pushing Congress to pass something quickly is something all presidents do, so that seems a stretch as legitimate criticism, though I will agree that I would have preferred a much more deliberative process starting on January 20.

Unfortunately, the republican caucus has dictated Obama's pushing Congress because they have turned reasonable objection into partisan obstruction.

You should try to spend your time understanding the constructive and substantive arguments I do make rather than being so concerned with semantics.

See how condecension can work both ways?

I am not putting words in your mouth. I am reading what you say and responding accordingly. If I misunderstood, please feel free to correct that misunderstanding, but assuming some sort of nefarious plot of twist your words is a little to paranoid for my debating preferences. I do enough of that already with the democrats at TPM without having to debate conservatives in the same fashion.

I am making a good faith effort to understand your points and any misteps in tone or presentation can hopefully be forgiven due to the impressive nature of communicating via the web.

I am simply trying to understand your actual objections to the solution rather than the process. The process is going to take years to change, but the solution we drive from it are very relevent and seem to be missing from this actual discussion.

And I disagreed with your objections to the process, asking instead for you to focus on solutions. The process will not change, so bitching about it is a waste of time.

He campaigned on making all the information available to the American people and that is what he has done via numerous avenues.

You want him to wave a magic wand and make private Congressional committee hearings and cabinet discussions broadcast on CSPAN. That is unreasonable and unrealistic and nothing you would expect of a republican president.

Provide a single quote where Obama promised to make all legislation deliberations available on CSPAN. You can't because he didn't. To date, he has been much more transparent than any president in my memory and I suspect that trend will continue.

You would object to Obama saying the sky was blue, which is why these inane conversations continue.

Link? Context? That seems to be a statement of a goal he would like to achieve, which all campaign promises are. He could hardly be expected to deliver on everything all at once, so I again maintain that you have unrealistic expectations based on the available facts.

Are you still saying that I can't provide a quote where he said he would televise negotiations on C-Span? I guess you were wrong about that.

Context? It was on his campaign trail where he talked about how he would conduct healthcare reform. He said he was going to do it but so far hasn't. Unrealistic expectations? I'm only expecting him to do what he said.

For your reading pleasure:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/71584.html

http://www.breitbart.tv/naked-emperor-news-obamas-mother-of-all-political-lies-and-the-town-hall-mayhem-it-caused/

"Provide a single quote where Obama promised to make all legislation deliberations available on CSPAN. You can't because he didn't"

Better luck next time, Jason.

I didn't simply change the subject Mister One Track Mind. I told you were naive to expect that outcome within the first six months of him taking office and then explained why.

I also disagreed with about the relative importance of some off-the-cuff remark about putting Congressional negotiations on C-SPAN. I would never expect him to follow through on that "pledge" because it is ridiculous.

Obama has pursued as much transparency as the system and his priority list has allowed. He has been head and shoulders above any president, ever, and uses information technology facilitate that dialog with We The People.

You are proving yourself to be an ideologue instead of a thoughtful conservative with reasonable points and consistent standards no matter which party is in control.

You are still wrong despite providing quotes. Whether he said it or not is immaterial to you being wrong.

Here's what you said:

"Provide a single quote where Obama promised to make all legislation deliberations available on CSPAN. You can't because he didn't"

You were wrong.

Well that would be the first time you said you were wrong. And you only need to say it once before I stop pointing it out.

Yes you did say that multiple times but only once said you were wrong. Thanks for admitting it. You spoke so certainly that Obama never made such a claim when it was something he said often on the campaign trail.