Weighing in on the side of progressives who believe the Senate health care bill should pass, Paul Krugman admonishes his political cousins to “take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago.” I rarely read Krugman. He too often breathlessly demands more government action....

RJ Matson, Roll Call This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

That’s what healthcare reform has come down to: Every person who is not a government employee, and who is too poor or too old, would have to purchase private health insurance directly or through an employer. Those that make less than the Federal Poverty Level (about $21,200 per year for a family of 4 living in the lower 48 states) and those over 65 who have Government Insurance through Medicaid and Medicare...

Jumping the Gun by David Goodloe The Daily Kos just can’t resist the bait. Of course, CNN helped. Apparently, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman hasn’t decided whether he will be a Democrat, a Republican or an independent when he seeks re–election in 2012. Based on Dana Bash’s report for CNN, Lieberman says it is “unlikely” that he will run as a Republican. “I like being an...

Mike Keefe, The Denver Post This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

I have read Jon Walker’s answers to Nate Silver’s “20 questions for bill killers,” and I don’t find them very convincing. Many of them — like the ones about the likelihood of getting a better bill through reconciliation — are based on little more than wishful thinking.

WASHINGTON — Here’s what Democrats need to ponder: Can they prosper in the absence of George W. Bush? His presidency was a tonic for Democrats and led to a blossoming of political creativity on the center-left not seen since the 1930s. No tactic, no program, no leader ever did more to catalyze the party than the rage Bush inspired. The whole effort was summarized nicely by the party’s...

Here is what he told a dazed-sounding Neil Cavuto at Fox (emphasis in original):

Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

As painful and depressing as it is to say so, I think Glenn is right about this:

A touch of farce is just what the Senate scrimmage needed, and Joe Lieberman provided it at yesterday’s White House meeting. While the President tried to get his dyslexic troops marching in the same direction for a final vote, the Senator from Self-Important Sanctimony made a bid for sympathy from the assembled colleagues he has been holding hostage. “What’s happening,” he said, “is not...

Hello there, it’s Dr. E here, deputy editor at TMV… and just as I came home from a four day sudarshan kriya meditation with my family, in came this piece on veganism by Mr. Elijah Sweete, who has written on TMV before, including a news story about a Governor seemingly trying to influence a panel inquiring into a death penalty case in Texas. Oddly, before I received this piece by Mr. Sweete on...

From Democrats who blame him for what seems to be its likely incarnation and for not fighting hard enough for what progressives sought.

The Reality of PTSD by Craig Barnes Many years ago when I served in the infantry, my closest friend was a young West Pointer named Burt. He was a first rate soldier. When we rotated out, I came home and Burt went on to Vietnam. He led troops in combat and won a Silver Star for heroism. A little while later, still in combat and still in the jungles, Burt won a second Silver Star. Almost no one ever wins two Silver...

Be a shame if anything happened to it. Patrick already weighed in on the story of how the White House is using the threat of closing a military base to twist the arm of Senator Ben Nelson on the health care bill, but there are a few more layers to this onion which need to be peeled away. First of all, bare knuckle, hard ball politics is nothing new in Congress, and both parties resort to these tactics from time...

He wants Senate Democrats to start all over, and use reconciliation to pass health care reform next year, because, he contends, without a public option or the Medicare buy-in replacement, the current bill isn’t worth passing.

Yesterday, Ezra Klein responded to Joe Lieberman’s cynical games-playing over health care reform by writing in his column that Lieberman “seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Here is the entire paragraph and the one above it for context:

Good-faith negotiations produce good compromises that move all signatory parties forward as a result of a new agreement. Worthwhile public and private policies, contracts, laws, decisions, and agreements require that foreseeable options, benefits, and problems are discussed openly and honestly. There must be a pervasive willingness by all participants involved to be flexible and to compromise because future...

The health care reform bill took a non-Joe-Lieberman-heated twist yesterday when Democratic Sen. Al Franken accused Republican John Thune of being highly selective, distorting facts and leaving some others out in how he characterized the bill. Here’s the exchange: Bill O’Reilly nemesis Franken was both loved and hated as one of Air America’s original talk show hosts. It’s likely the...

I suggested yesterday that Senate progressives would not be acting rationally if they killed their chamber’s health bill because it doesn’t go far enough — i.e., because it was tailored back from their vision of “great” to something “less great” in order to secure the votes of the Independent senator from Connecticut and/or the Republican senators from Maine. Nate...

It’s all about Joe Lieberman these days in the struggle to get health care reform passed, and that is exactly how Joe wants it. His latest play, as everyone who follows politics knows by now, was to announce that he wants the Medicare buy-in proposal out, and that he would stand with Republicans to kill the entire bill, via filibuster, if he did not get his way.

An animated editorial cartoon by the Washington Post’s Ann Telnaes is HERE.

Sen. Lieberman is at it again, frustrating the party with which he caucuses: In a surprise setback for Democratic leaders, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said on Sunday that he would vote against the health care legislation in its current form. This potentially spells the end of the notion (in 2009 at least ) of expanding Medicare to qualified individuals as young as 55. Now Senate...

Chiding his former colleagues to act and to act now, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of state of the USSR, has weighed in on the climate debate with this op-ed published in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a newspaper that he partly owns. For Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Gorbachev writes in part: “The latest scientific data on climate change is extremely disturbing. This is the last call. But even more alarming is the...

UPDATE: Taibbi responds to critics; details below. I just got done reading Matt Taibbi’s rant in Rolling Stone in which Taibbi tries to support a reasonable, basically unarguable premise — that Wall Street has gotten a free ride from the Obama administration, that the same corporate interests that created the economic crisis are being rewarded instead of held accountable, and that Pres. Obama has...