From Think Progress
By Faiz

At approximately noon today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) took to the Senate floor to introduce his single-payer amendment. The amendment is 767 pages long. In an attempt to delay and disrupt the Senate debate, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) demanded that the Senate clerks read the entire bill.

Sanders demanded at least twice that the reading of his bill be dispensed with so that the Senate could proceed to a vote. But Coburn objected both times:

SANDERS: I would ask that the amendment be considered as read. …

PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE: Is there objection?

COBURN: There is objection.

SANDERS: …and may I ask me friend from Oklahoma why he is objecting?

COBURN: Regular order, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT: Regular order is the reading of the amendment.

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From Crooks and Liars
By Heather Wednesday

In a blow to the bill grinding through the Senate, Howard Dean bluntly called for the bill to be killed in a pre-recorded interview set to air later this afternoon, denouncing it as “the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate,” the reporter who conducted the interview tells me.

Dean said the removal of the Medicare buy-in made the bill not worth supporting, and urged Dem leaders to start over with the process of reconciliation in the interview, which is set to air at 5:50 PM today on Vermont Public Radio, political reporter Bob Kinzel confirms to me.

The gauntlet from Dean — whose voice on health care is well respsected among liberals — will energize those on the left who are mobilizing against the bill, and make it tougher for liberals to embrace the emerging proposal. In an excerpt Kinzel gave me, Dean says:

“This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. Honestly the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.”

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From Common Dreams
By Thom Hartmann

With apologies to Pastor Niemöller:

First they came for the banksters, and showered them with money and put them in the Administration in a way that was not change we could believe in.

Then they came for the military industrial complex, and sent more and more of our children to die in faraway lands that had never attacked us in a way that was not change we could believe in.

And now they’ve sold out our hope for a national health care system not run by millionaire gangsters in suits. And who is left to speak for us?

President Obama is playing the Bill Clinton game of throwing people a bone and telling them it’s steak. Perhaps he’s doing it because he thinks it’s his only choice; perhaps it’s because he’s surrounded himself with Bill Clinton advisors (and Hillary as Secretary of State); whatever the reason, while it worked for Clinton, it won’t work for Obama.

It worked for Reagan, and for the first Bush, and even worked somewhat for George W. Bush.

But it won’t work anymore. Here’s why.

From 1929 until the 1980s, most Americans were “high information voters.” They were paying attention to politics. The Republican Great Depression of 1929-1938, World War II, the Korean War, Kennedy’s election, and the War in Vietnam were all Big Events that caused Americans to pay attention. Americans of that era needed to know what was up in Washington, DC, because they felt the consequences directly.

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From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferious email backlash — easily — was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama’s occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House — hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama’s campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn’t pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party — rather than the GOP — will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage. Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this — the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional “centrists.” Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start — the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”

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From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

By bowing to Senator Joseph Lieberman and his obstructive pals in both parties on health care reform, President Obama has confirmed what Republicans always say about Democrats: They simply aren’t strong enough to govern. Or at least the Democrats elected last year—and their colleagues in the Senate leadership—don’t seem to be.

Their moment of truth came when Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and self-styled tough guy from Chicago, urged the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to strip out the most progressive aspects of the proposed health care reform bill in order to appease Mr. Lieberman. Unless the Connecticut senator got his way, he threatened to join a Republican filibuster—conniving with a political minority to kill reforms that a majority of Americans has wanted and needed for decades.

Neither Mr. Emanuel nor his boss possesses the courage to call the bluff of the reform opponents and urge a victory for that majority through the legislative process known as “reconciliation,” which allows the Senate leadership to stuff a sock in the mouth of the filibuster. Instead they have surrendered to the same forces that want nothing more than to frustrate and ruin them.

Not surprisingly, this spectacle of capitulation evokes disgust among many Democrats, surpassed only by the revulsion they feel as they gaze upon Mr. Lieberman’s self-satisfied grin. His inconsistency is designed not to achieve any principled outcome but to create havoc in the legislative process.

He now says, for instance, that Americans between 55 and 64 years old must not be permitted to purchase coverage under Medicare, as Senate Democrats wanted. But that is precisely what he endorsed when he ran for vice president with Al Gore in 2000, when he ran for president himself in 2004 and as recently as three months ago, when he gave an interview on health care reform to a newspaper in his home state.

Read more Weakness

From AlterNet
By Darcy Burner

The first rule of medicine is, “Do no harm.” The post-Joe Lieberman version of the Senate health care bill fails that basic criterion. Unless Democratic leadership steps up to fix this misguided proposal, our only recourse will be to kill it.

The fundamental failing of the newest Senate proposal is that it requires individuals to purchase health insurance, but does nothing to rein in what insurance companies charge. There is nothing to stop spiraling health costs from eating up an ever-increasing percentage of our national productivity.

The House bill has two major cost-control mechanisms: the public option and the 85 percent medical-loss ratio requirement. The Senate bill is on track to have neither, and nothing new to replace them. The Senate bill is a recipe for national disaster. If it’s that bill or nothing, I prefer nothing.

We all know America’s current health care system is failing — and it’s failing everyone, not just the uninsured. It is far too expensive: Americans spend 16 percent of GDP on health care and get worse results than countries that spend half that. Literally.

We need health reform that expands access to quality health care, abolishes unjust practices of insurers, improves value to the country, and puts us on a trajectory to continue to improve our health care system over time.

But the Senate has systematically stripped out nearly everything I liked about what was proposed in the early, heady days of health care reform. They have done so in order to please a handful of so-called centrists who care more about protecting corporate profits than protecting the people they claim to represent.

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From TruthDig
By Robert Scheer

Most Americans now know that Wall Street bankers are so greedy as to never be trusted, and I suppose it is a sign of progress that our president now seems to grasp the obvious. How depressing, though, that a man who was elected as a consequence of one of the boldest grass-roots populist campaigns in this nation’s history should now feel obligated to offer the disclaimer that “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”

But whatever his intentions, Barack Obama has in fact accomplished just that, to the immense anger of the public that elected him. Thus, it is understandable that, in his “60 Minutes” interview last Sunday, Obama lashed out at the ingrate bankers whose greed he had served but who have failed to seriously increase lending or forestall foreclosures and instead shamelessly pocketed the cash the government threw their way:

“They’re still puzzled why is it that people are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see,” he said. “You guys are drawing down $10 [million], $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it’s gone through in—in decades, and you guys caused the problem. And we’ve got 10 percent unemployment.”

But what did the president expect from those guys after he and his Republican predecessor were so quick to reward them so handsomely for their failures? In a reversal of the guiding principles of the meritocracy that informed Obama’s own success story, the president promoted, rather than flunked, the people who got it all wrong.

One of those was Larry Summers, who as Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary pushed through the radical deregulation that enabled disastrous Wall Street greed. But although Summers pocketed a cool $15 million from Wall Street in 2008 as he was advising Obama the candidate, he seems at last to have gained some awareness that the rules of the game he helped write now need to be changed. Speaking of the very bankers who once so handsomely paid him for his services, Summers, now Obama’s top economic adviser, told CNN: “Here is what I think they don’t get. … It was their irresponsible risk-taking in many cases that brought the economy to collapse.”

Read more Fat Cats

From The Consortium News
By Barbara Koeppel

While posting breathtaking profits in the last two quarters – Wells Fargo’s $3.2 billion, Citigroup’s $3 billion and Chase’s $2.7 billion – U.S. banks have figured out a way to squeeze some extra dollars from those who can least afford it, the unemployed.

Here’s how it works. In the past two years, states have been overwhelmed with unemployment claims. Always eager to serve, America’s banks offered a deal the states couldn’t refuse.

Sign a contract — which won’t cost you a dime — and send us your weekly unemployment funds, the banks said. In return, we’ll issue our VISA or MasterCard debit cards to your laid-off workers, on which we’ll post their benefits electronically.

Thirty states signed on with the usual suspects — Citi, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America — and some smaller ones, too. More states are lining up.

In a stroke, states dropped all their costs for printing and mailing checks. Andrew James, with North Carolina’s Employment Security Commission, told me that in the past year, his state saved a whopping $10 million. During the same time, Nevada saved $800,000, Maryland $400,000 and West Virginia $340,000.

But if the system is good for the states, it’s great for the banks. A February 2009 Associated Press article noted that Missouri’s Central Bank, which won that state’s contract, could reap $6.3 million this year alone.

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From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman

Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, recently had some downbeat things to say about our economic prospects. The economy, he warned, “confronts some formidable headwinds.” All we can expect, he said, is “modest economic growth next year — sufficient to bring down the unemployment rate, but at a pace slower than we would like.”

Actually, he may have been too optimistic: There’s a good chance that unemployment will rise, not fall, over the next year. But even if it does inch down, one has to ask: Why isn’t the Fed trying to bring it down faster?

Some background: I don’t think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we’re in. You can’t just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs — more than 100,000 a month — to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment.

How big? My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. It was basically a terrible report, which was reported as good news only because we’ve been down so long that it looks like up to the financial press.

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From TruthDig
By Joe Conason

From now on, the headlines about Afghanistan will be slugged “Obama’s War,” and perhaps that is fair enough given the president’s many endorsements of what he has called a war of necessity. It would be much less fair, however, to ignore the events that led us to this moment, when whatever choice he makes will offer no great guarantee of progress and no small prospect of trouble.

Those events began with the inexplicable decision by officials of the previous administration to allow Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other ranking leaders of al-Qaida to escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. At the time, as a new Senate report on the battle of Tora Bora recalls, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, decided not to augment the tiny contingent of special operations troops on the ground with sufficient force to capture or kill bin Laden and his deputies. They later claimed to be worried that “too many American troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency,” a rationale that can only evoke bitter laughter now.

None of the reasons offered back then for inaction at Tora Bora made sense after the outrage of Sept. 11, when the entire world, including the Afghan people, were cheering the U.S. invasion. The pattern of deception that later led to war in Iraq began with expressions of doubt by both Franks and Vice President Dick Cheney about bin Laden’s presence in Tora Bora — a doubt that none of the commanders on the ground shared and that always sounded more like an excuse than an explanation. If there was any chance that the perpetrators of Sept. 11 could be found in those mountains, then maximum force should have been deployed as rapidly as possible.

What we know now, of course, is that Cheney, Rumsfeld and President Bush himself were distracted from the vital necessity of victory in Afghanistan — which meant not only driving out the Taliban but installing a real government in their place — by their obsession with Iraq. Not only did the al-Qaida leadership escape, but so did Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, who returned to mount a threatening insurgency two years later, just as the Bush White House and the Pentagon were declaring “mission accomplished” in Baghdad.

Read more Legacy