So, perhaps both will stay.

These are existential style questions I love, but when it comes down to Earth, it's hard to see how it matters. If we want it to matter, then we have to be willing to make choices that show that it does. But Americans, on the whole, aren't about sticking their necks out, sadly.

Have you ever seen the movie The Great Debaters? Very good movie that gets that message – about the reticence of so many even in the face of such obvious crookedness.

Not trying to be sanguine, just saying – if each of us were able to resist all the mitigating we inevitably do when we finally make decisions, the world would be a very different place.

Anyway – I don't see how anyone can really see anything but someone who'll go the way the wind blows in Lieberman now. It's very very unfortunate, to be honest.

I certainly hope so. I know his poll numbers have taken a dive recently. I really hope after the final health care reform bill is passed, the Democrats take away his chairmanship of Homeland Security, but I'm not counting on it.

She won too. It was great. (I get sworn in on 1/13/10).

I had seen his remarks earlier, and J. Spencer's laudatory note about his comments about “21st century Republicans” and I thought to be fun this evening, I'd go back and find the comment about the “which” question someone asked on-line, because I laughed.  (I divide the GOP or conservatives into the two camps of “economic” or libertarian or Whig conservatives, and traditionalist-authoritarian or “social” or Tory conservatives and would see this as the big split if the Duopoly ended someday and the GOP were broken into at least two parties.)  I looked but I couldn't find it.  It went something like this:

“Which Republicans?  The religious-nut Puritanican gun-crazy ones, or the corporate ass-kissing ones?”

(Merry Christmas, late, Father Time.)

Republicans have opposed it, but have been powerless in addition to being dysfunctional.

As for this,

“Obamacare is welfare for the insurance companies.”

Bash 'em all you want, but you also miss the key. This is incrementalist federal takeover. The insurers are allowed to remain as part of health care for now. They are to be subjected to more constraints and other legal attacks that drive them out of the market. (The “public option” was always meant to displace and replace, or “crowd out,” the private sector; not everyone was so feeble-minded as to have believed the various “competition” and “keep the insurers honest” pieces of nonsense.) As a general rule, so long as the insurance model and the bogus notion of comprehensive or general health care as “insurance” remains with us, that's as long (at most) as the insureres can be expected to remain. For now, it's easier to regulate heavily and gradually replace the private sector, while retaining as much of it as possible now so as to be able to reengineer it to conform to what some want under complete federal control (if not complete ownership) later. This has always been right before us and easy to grasp.

They're always understandable (or should be).  Tempered?  I confess to striking (back) hard this year.

“I think you go for a bit more hyperbole than I might in describing each side”

The Dems have been overreaching this year, going too far left — the mainstream never voted for that.  They have had their way this year with legislation, and have muscled the GOP aside.  It's the Dems' year alone, the Dems' legislation alone, and the Dems' responsibility for it alone.

The GOP continues to be dysfunctional.  They don't even put up what amounts to a fight at being suppressed in crafting legislation.  (Getting their cooperation to leave Washington by Christmas doesn't count.)

“a democracy depends upon all the stakeholders engaging”

They've tried, but been prevented by the Dems.  And don't forget the question of with their trying, how competent they are.  That's aside from the rush to write off as “obstructionist” anything they seek that is a compromise, or what the Dems essentially are offering or seeking too, but less of it.  (Or that is written off just because it has “R” stamped on it rather than “D”)