The Watercooler for 11/22/09 9:00 AM

Dr. Nancy Snyderman is going to owe him dinner. (and I haven't forgotten I owe you a drink Mike)

Iowa Hawkeyes v. LSU Tigers in the Sugar Bowl baby!

News Years Eve in the Big Easy sounds like fun.

one dream came true in the Senate last night, maybe my other fantasy vacation can too

I hope LSU didn't get knocked out of the BCS losing to Ole Miss.

It would be a great game.

bbl

as does DFA.

This bill isn't enough of his prescription, but insisting that the Democrats do this with no Republican votes if they had to - meaning every Democratic Senator holding the line - was something he and DFA have been pushing since shortly after Obama took office.

Activists have been hounding Nelson, Lincoln, and Landrieu to make them worry just as much about Democratic attacks as Republican ones.
So, Saturday, Nov 21, 2009 was a winning day for citizenship and America.

Now that the targeted Senators have consented for reform to eventually be signed into law, I agree that showing them a little love is order.

As for BFA, thanks to all for the wonderful real time threads yesterday. It was a great "place" to be.

Dear Senator Lincoln,

I am a retired teacher and librarian, and we considered moving to Arkansas, so while not a citizen of your state, I want you to know I watched the debates in the Senate yesterday for the entire day. 

Your speech was rambling, contradictory, and showed me that your chief concern was re-election.  You said  you weren't concerned about re-election a half dozen times, and your anger at the outside groups pressuring you was evident.

I wonder where your values are?  That your state has to have a free health care clinic tells me that people are suffering.  Yet, you seem to be supporting the status quo against the needs of your citizens. 

I was dismayed to hear your opposition to a public option and your echoing the Republican ideology of "motivating" lower costs.  How would you do this?

Our life is short.  You have an opportunity to create something that will serve the needs of people ethically, responsibly, and fairly.

Please Senator, think carefully about what you are doing, what your values are, and how so much suffering is inherently unfair, unjust, and beneath the values this country espoused.

Thank you for listening.

Pat Maslowski

absolutely the public pressure was essential, Jim and Howard will be trading high fives or fist bumps or whatever is the Thanksgiving greeting in the Dean family

I was thinking about that call I overheard Chris Dodd take from Ted Kennedy a couple Thanksgivings back now and how dedicated Dodd was to Ted's dream but which was just as much his own. not unlike the Dean Brothers, but it was the millions of us who kept pushing for decades, who demanded it of our primary candidates, who elected the 60, made Pelosi Speaker, and gathered on The Mall in January (and with linda b's help not once but twice with Warner and Webb)

I kind of see a calendar that has the President signing the Bill on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and that would be a good thing.

http://wonkette.com/412348/those-two-gals-will-let-health-care-reach-a-debate

Democratic Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu finally called their own bluff and announced at the last minute that they would, controversially, vote to allow the Senate to debate a piece of legislation it has spent most of this year crafting, to help provide affordable medical care to people. What heroes. Their procedural votes for their own party’s major bill cost the nation hundreds of millions of dollars in pork handouts. That’s how Serious About The Deficits they are.

The healthcare bill has a long way to go yet.

The Repubs will be offering tons of amendments to slow things down or actually improve the bill, still they won't vote for it.

Then a filibuster to pass the bill in the senate and proceed to a conference bill.

The conference bill won't need 60 votes for a motion to proceed in the senate--but as far as I can tell its passage can still be filibustered once it's on the floor of either the house or senate. 

Long hard iffy road ahead. Reed will have to keep all his ducks in a row as well as in good health.

...When we lost on health care in 1994, and then lost Congress in the elections because our base was so discouraged that they didn't turn out, it made Clinton and Democrats in general hyper-cautious about trying to do anything big or bold the rest of his Presidency. If we had won on health care, we would have kept Congress, and we would have emboldened Democrats to try other big things.

It is one of the most basic laws in politics: victory makes you stronger, and defeat makes you weaker.

You can fault Obama for some of his specific policy proposals, and for being too ready to compromise on some things, but one thing he has been willing to do is try to do big things,

and if health care goes down, the attempt to do big things will probably will stop -- climate change probably is given up on as too hard, financial reform gets weaker, efforts to create more jobs probably is given up on, immigration reform very likely gets shelved.

If a health care bill is passed...it will create the possibility of doing other big things.

For this reason:

That is: That more Americans would have been onboard if we had gone after a single-payer program like Medicare. Americans of all parties love the idea of having the security of a health plan like grandma has. It would be less expensive, too, and a single-payer bill would be easier and shorter to write, no complaints about a long, complex bill.

So, if this bill fails, the thing to do would be to immediately climb back on our horses and reach for the moon--propose, write and pass a single-payer, Medicare-like plan for everyone.

Scare the Republicans with that thought, and they might just support this healthcare bill:))

Moments after the vote to begin debate on the major health care legislation, a reporter asked the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, if he had spoken with President Obama.

“I was pretty well focused on getting the votes,” Mr. Reid said with a smile. “I took all senators’ calls but no one else’s.”

But there was someone else: Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the widow of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose life’s work in the Senate was largely dedicated to the issue of health care.

Mr. Reid first mentioned the call in an aside to Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of Mr. Kennedy’s closest friends in the Senate, as they stood at a news conference after the vote. While Mr. Kennedy was battling cancer, Mr. Dodd stepped in as acting chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and helped shepherd the health care bill through a committee vote in July.

“She believes that Ted was watching,” Mr. Reid told Mr. Dodd.

Asked about the call, Mr. Reid said that Mrs. Kennedy had telephoned him in the Democratic cloakroom just after the 60 to 39 vote, which allows debate to begin on the Senate’s health care legislation.

“She called right after the vote,” Mr. Reid said. “I’ll remember the call always. She of course was crying pretty hard. We both felt that he’s watching us tonight.”

[from NYT's Prescriptions blog]