Where are the Old School Democrats? Obama needs HELP!

"As for the Democrats, they have been both pragmatic and moderate, despite all the claims that this plan is "left wing" or "socialist." It is neither."

Democrats have NOT been pragmatic and moderate. Obama had to negotiate this bill behind closed doors with health industry and biotech CEO's. That's how "moderate" it is from a (genuinely) Democratic perspective.

The truth is as follows: Obama is a conservative Republican himself. To win his election, like the elections of Diane Feinstein in CA, he had to change his party label, which Diane does from election to election.

Of course, as this author himself admits -- single payer is the RIGHT way to go. Given the logic here that the Republicans will vote NO on anything Obama produces, why is the common sense maneuver to push through single pay AGGRESSIVELY not happening? It's because of what I've stated over and over again and a fact admitted in this article: Obama legislates, thinks, and feels as a CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN.

It's not just the Republicans, as this author observes, who've moved so far to the right that they are barely recognizable, as Republicans; the Democrats have done exactly the same thing.

SO what we have here, from a higher point of view, is a solidly Republican congress. You have the Republican scavengers, hateful of all government on the severe right, and then you have the rest of the Congress: moderate right wingers who are neo-liberal free market (solidly Republican, like Max Baucus) worshippers keeping government participation at an absolute minimum. We have a whole slew of Democrats who as a central feature of the political philosophy want to reduce government's involvement in all spheres of life. The reason"? It's a central tenet of neo-liberalism that government is inherent evil, "the problem" to be overcome. It's Adam Smith all over again.

Here's what we need: a return of the Democratic party of the 60s, Democrats who have faith in "big government." We need a return of the social state, only done better than it ever has been done before, as we see in GREEN and WAR FREE Scandinavia.

We need an Oval Office and Congress filled with Bernie Sanders-like-politicians. Otherwise, it's "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Why Are Democrats Fighting for a GOP Health Plan?

FRIDAY 19 MARCH 2010
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Why Democrats Are Fighting for a Republican Health Plan
Friday 19 March 2010

by: E.J. Dionne Jr., Op-Ed

Washington - Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health care reform, and Republicans will vote against it.
Yes, Democrats have rallied behind a bill that Republicans -- or at least large numbers of them -- should love. It is built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.
Republicans have said that they do not want to destroy the private insurance market. This bill not only preserves that market but strengthens it by bringing in 32 million new customers. The plan before Congress does not call for a government "takeover" of health care. It provides subsidies so more people can buy private insurance.
Republicans always say they are against "socialized medicine." Not only is this bill nothing like a "single-payer" health system along Canadian or British lines. It doesn't even include the "public option" that would have allowed people voluntarily to buy their insurance from the government. The single-payer idea fell by the wayside long ago, and supporters of the public option -- sadly, from my point of view -- lost out last December.
They'll be back, of course. The newly pragmatic Rep. Dennis Kucinich was right to say that this is just the first step in a long process. We will see if this market-based system works. If it doesn't, single-payer plans and public options will look more attractive.
Republican reform advocates have long called for a better insurance market. Our current system provides individuals with little market power in the purchase of health insurance. As a result, they typically pay exorbitant premiums. The new insurance exchanges will pool individuals together and give them a fighting chance at a fair shake.
Republicans now say they hate the mandate that requires everyone to buy insurance. But an individual mandate was hailed as a form of "personal responsibility" by no less a conservative Republican than Mitt Romney. He was proud of the mandate, and also proud of the insurance exchange idea, known in Massachusetts as "The Health Connector" (the idea itself came from the conservative Heritage foundation). Romney had a right to be proud. As governor of Massachusetts in 2006, he signed a bill that is the closest thing there is to a model for what the Democrats are proposing.
Don't believe me on this? On The Wall Street Journal's opinion page earlier this week, Grace-Marie Turner -- criticizing Romney from the right, it should be said -- noted the startling similarities between the plan he approved and the one President Obama is fighting for.
"Both have an individual mandate requiring most residents to have health insurance or pay a penalty," she wrote. "Most businesses are required to participate or pay a fine. Both rely on government-designed purchasing exchanges that also provide a platform to control private health insurance. Many of the uninsured are covered through Medicaid expansion and others receive subsidies for highly prescriptive policies. And the apparatus requires a plethora of new government boards and agencies."
She added: "While it's true that the liberal Massachusetts Legislature did turn Mr. Romney's plan to the left, his claims that his plan is 'entirely different' will not stand up to the intense scrutiny of a presidential campaign, especially a primary challenge."
What does it tell us that Republicans are now opposing a bill rooted in so many of their own principles? Why has it fallen to Democrats to push the thing through?
The obvious lesson is that the balance of opinion in the Republican Party has swung far to the right of where it used to be. Republicans once believed in market-based government solutions. Now they are suspicious of government solutions altogether. That's true even in an area such as health care where government, through Medicare and Medicaid, already plays a necessarily large role.
As for the Democrats, they have been both pragmatic and moderate, despite all the claims that this plan is "left wing" or "socialist." It is neither.
You could argue that Democrats have learned from Republicans. Some might say that Democrats have been less than true to their principles.
But there is a simpler conclusion: Democrats, including President Obama, are so anxious to get everyone health insurance that they are more than willing to try a market-based system and hope it works. It's a shame the Republicans can no longer take "yes" for an answer.
E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group
All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

The Lies of Karl Rove

Joseph Goebbels, the leading propagandist of the Third Reich, believed in the power of the lie; the greater the lie, the greater the power. Goebbels would have loved Karl Rove's "Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight," a pastiche of lies, fabrications and distortions designed to rehabilitate the record of the Bush-Cheney years. There are too many lies to treat in this one column, but his greatest lie is that the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq if it had known there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there. Its corollary is that the administration did not lie about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
In fact, the Bush administration mounted an intense six-month campaign to make sure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) produced "evidence" of WMD, and then made sure that such players as National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell parroted the administration's big lie to the American public and to the international community. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their acolytes Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Karl Rove desperately wanted to go to war against Iraq for reasons that have never been explained. As a result, they created and employed a strategic disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the American people of the need for war. Goebbels would have beamed.
This is not the first time the United States has manipulated intelligence to make a case for war. It happened prior to the Mexican-American War to support the policies of President James Polk, the Spanish-American War to support the policies of President William McKinley and the Vietnam War to support President Lyndon Johnson. But the Iraq war marked the first time that the White House mounted a full-court press with such zeal to take the nation to a war that was unneeded, illegal and immoral. Rove and Libby were key operatives in a programmatic "marketing plan" to justify the war, which included the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose husband had dared to challenge the case for war; the phony intelligence documents produced by the CIA and DIA; and the public commentary linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and Iraq to al-Qaeda. Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card has already admitted to the marketing plan, which was introduced in September 2002, because "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
In the summer of 2002, the White House Iraq Group was formed to convince public opinion at home and abroad of the need for war against Iraq. The group met regularly in the White House situation room and the regular attendants included Rove, Libby, Condi Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley. At the same time, Cheney and Libby began meeting directly with analysts at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, an unprecedented procedure. The purpose of these meetings was to garner the intelligence justification for a pre-emptive war to remove Saddam Hussein in order to make a case to the Congress, the American public and the international community. In July 2002, the chief of the British MI6 intelligence service, Sir Richard Dearlove, after several meetings with CIA Director George Tenet, warned Prime Minister Tony Blair about the American misuse of intelligence and the public relations campaign to justify war. Dearlove concluded that "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," and that "military action was now seen as inevitable."
A major aspect of Rove's "marketing plan" was to leak unsubstantiated and flawed intelligence (supplied by Iraqi defector Ahmad Chalabi and his minions) to the press and then offer authoritative White House confirmation of the leaked information. The White House selected Judith Miller of The New York Times as the key recipient of these leaks. Miller had a front-page story in the Times on September 8, 2002, citing administration officials as claiming that Saddam had acquired aluminum tubes "specifically designed" to enrich uranium. On the same day, Cheney told "Meet the Press" that "we know with absolute certainty" that Saddam was "using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." Four days later, President Bush took the aluminum tubes claim to the UN General Assembly. The issue was central to Secretary of State Powell's UN speech in February 2003.
Rove and Libby were also central to the outing of Plame, a CIA operative, whose husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, refuted Cheney's charge that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger. The outing of Plame was designed to embarrass the ambassador and to keep other officials from testifying against the White House's case for war, which required a nuclear dimension. Rove was not indicted for lying about the outing of Plame, although Libby's lawyer, Theodore Wells, argued that Libby was a scapegoat to protect Rove. Cheney charged that the White House was failing to "protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy this Pres asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others." Cheney ultimately scratched out "this Pres" and substituted "that was."
Rove, of course, was not alone in these efforts. He had help from CIA Director Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who lied to Secretary of State Powell about the sources for the secretary's speech to the UN Security Council. He benefited from CIA senior analysts such as Robert Walpole and Paul Pillar, who helped to craft specious documents such as a National Intelligence Estimate and a white paper that were used to influence the Congressional vote on the use of force authorization in October 2002. As the chief of the CIA's largest analytic office Alan Foley told his senior managers, "if the president decides to go to war, it's our job to supply the intelligence to allow him to do so." Foley's comments took place only several days after Tenet assured President Bush that gathering intelligence support for a public case to go to war would be a "slam dunk."
At the Pentagon, Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky created the Office of Special Plans (OSP) to circulate intelligence that even the CIA did not believe was credible. According to the Pentagon's Inspector General, OSP's major mission was to provide the White House with so-called intelligence to make the case for war. Feith regularly briefed the White House on this disinformation in August and September 2002 and then passed the "classified" findings to Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard. The OSP had close links with the Defense Policy Board, whose members - particularly Richard Perle, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich - peddled the OSP's disinformation to high-level opinion makers at home and abroad.
There were many CIA and Defense Department puppets in this effort, but two major Geppetos in the White House: one named Libby and one named Rove. Perhaps that is why the Rove memoir is titled "Courage and Consequence" and not "Truth and Consequence."