These were not face to face meetings, rather they were fairly long and structured conference phone calls. One was held Friday Morning this week, and the other was early in Recess. Keith Ellison, member of both the Black and Progressive Caucuses talked about it on Almanac, (Minnesota Public Television) on Friday evening. He didn’t participate in the first one because he was in Sudan, trying to negotiate the return of some humanitarian NGO’s to Dafur, and couldn’t get connected, only to review the meeting later.

Ellison was pretty clear that Obama understood completely that most members of the Progressive Caucus were determined on the Public Plan — and would stick to the promise to vote no if it is not included. Since most members of the Progressive Caucus are single payer supporters, they made it clear to him they had already done their compromising. As he talked through with the interviewer the two conference calls — that came across very clearly. He was fairly certain it would be loud and messy all fall, but that it would get done by Thanksgiving, and the Progressive Caucus would vote for it.

Sadly, interviews about one member’s report of what happened in
Conference Call type meetings, done on public TV, doesn’t get much ink.

A Social Conservative Party would enjoy many of the same advantages and a few more, at the risk of it becoming the “socialist conservative party”. Again, the right has the challenge of disarming the SCP without harming their alliance with the theocrats.

Either way, it’s fine payback for transforming the word “liberal” into an epithet!

It would be better to force them to try again. However, for round 2, the price of support is an option for anyone to voluntary elect to have Medicare. No separate plan that is sort of like it. That is the price of selling us out and failing to keep a campaign promise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_strike

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…..ral_Strike

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1…..ont_strike

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dku-MFnIxaU

Our political worries here for the last decade or so have had more to do with fighting rear-guard actions against our own cadres of neo-cons, who periodically try to open our system up to “competition” from USian private corpses. We’ve been spending a lot of time trying to save what we’ve got, so we’re probably a bit defensive on that score. I’d be happy to know there are better ways to organize us, but last time I looked, something like 92 per cent of Canadians would take a lot of convincing to change what we’ve got now.

In my view, this is not to be seen as the mark of a polite silence on the part of those who disapprove of the French or the Dutch (my thanks to the earl for this furtherance of the point): it’s to be taken as a mark of ignorance. But of course we’re not, in general, ignorant, so I take the problem (ourproblem) to be more a drastic one: it seems that our very sources–the ones on which we depend, and with which we agree or disagree–are themselves uniformly ignorant of the French system.

I’m stunned by this–the more so since it only occurred to me when my wife pointed it out (she’s a physician with some experience in the economics of health care).

It’s not as if we’ve think that the French are wrong: it’s as if we never knew that the French existed.

He’s for some vague idea of “reform”,

He wasn’t vague at all in his town halls, at least the first ones: he is for a public option, an insurance exchange, and insurance reform.

Which makes his actual legislative strategy all the more cynical a betrayal. It took me a while to process, but he seems to be a politician who doesn’t mean what he says.