Arkansas Blog

True representational democracy has died in this country. The governing institutions in Washington are a thinly veiled corporate oligarchy. Doesn't matter if it's Blanche Lincoln, Vic Snyder, Michelle Bachman, Al Franken, or whomever. All are only interested in serving their major funders. You and I are screwed. With high probability, this vote will demonstrate that yet again. On the upside...it might be a good time to invest in the insurance industry!

I think that the odds favor pelosi. The Senate is another story.

Heads, we lose; tails, we lose.

If we could bring James Madison back to life and he could see what is going on today there is no doubt in my mind that we would name nancy pelosi as the greatest threat to Constitutional government.

It's a rip-roaring debate, almost like the House of Commons.

Oh, please, that isn't about debate. It is just a show for the folks back at home and for the base. The votes are probably pretty much done. No one is convinced one way or the other because of these show boating verbal one-way streets.

beauragard - I think it's going to be a close vote, and some arms are still getting twisted in there. Some of those congressmen will look like contortionists by the time the vote occurs.

I agree with the close vote and arm twisting. I'm not one that gives much credence to the 'independence' of the blue dogs. On the climate bill they folded to pelosi and I believe they will fold on the heath care bill as well. However, I think that the Senate is an all together different ball game.

I don't get the hatred for Pelosi. So what if she's from California. Dick Cheney is from the depths of hell and Republicans could not worship him more.

If Jesus were to return, and run on the Dem ticket, Bo and his buddies would be crucifying him too.

First of all, I don't recall any use of the word 'hatred' in any of the posts in regard to madam pelosi. I just believe that she has created a bill which is blatantly unconstitutional and has the potential to lead us into national bankruptcy. Medicare, medicaid and social security are unfunded liabilities and on the verge of insolvency. Instead of dealing with those obvious realities she leads us on a road of even more unfunded liabilities. The CBO estimates are of a bill that starts raising revenue five years before the bulk of the program starts paying benefits. It is a fiscal farce that will result in a situation that we will not be able to ignore down the road. Eventually the chickens are going to come home to roost. When they do it will be too late for our children and grandchildren. They will curse us for what we are doing to them. Madam pelosi will be the chief architect of our doom.

tele---leave the Lord out of this. One day you will stand before him and have to give an accounting of your mocking his name.

Personally, I hope we get it through. Beau and those like him, vocal as they are, have been shown to be the minority time and time again, even in Arkansas.

As for everything else, my friend and I had a talk last night about the US and the notion of Corporate Personhood. Look up the precedents involved. It was the 18th century equivalent of a typo that gave all these rights to "corporate entities" (i.e. Corporations). I don't think we will get a fair shake til the only things we count as people are people. Corporate "personhood" ends up causing so much trouble because it is only motivated by profit, with no reguard for the consequences (vis Health Insurance, Pollution, etc...).

My friend said that the end of the corporate state would likely only happen after a bloody struggle (and no, he wasn't advocating one...); personally, I hope we can do it politically. Even after all the crap I've seen in politics, I still have enough patriotic hope that we can get our act together without bloodshed.

Here's hoping.

I've been watching the debate off and on all day on the MSNBC Internet site. It sounds like the same ole thing....Democrats proclaiming this a great day and a historic vote. Republican Cult members moaning that life is over if this bill passes. Every vote I've seen today went the Democrat's way. Hopefully at the end it will be a victory for the Democrats and all Americans even those stinky ones who trust insurance companies over their own government.

I'd expand on beau's advice and warn anyone speaking ill of Buddha, Mohammad, or Wilford Brimley. They might join with God, forming a 4 member Death Panel that shoots acid in yer eyes for speaking ill of any of them. A team of Supreme Beings is a horrible thing to contemplate, especially after yer dead and out there floating around in vapor form.......oh god....I've scared myself!

"we would name nancy pelosi as the greatest threat to Constitutional government. "

Lordy. Gotta have a demon.

For Beau

OLBERMANN: Good evening from New York.

An elected Republican official today is leading a protest on the west steps of the Capitol that compared health care reform to Nazi death camps and encouraged mindless harassment of and possibly violence against the government. Not tea baggers anymore, not demagogic commentators, an actual congresswoman inciting a hateful rebellion against the rule of law and order. Her name is Michele Bachmann.

Our fifth story on the COUNTDOWN: As if that were not bad enough, Ms. Bachmann today joined by the House minority leader as well as countless other GOP representatives. This orgy of veiled threat and not so veiled racism of white power minority rule now fully the province of the Republican Party. Welcome to the coup!

Congressman Bachmann staging what she tried to claim was a spontaneous meet-up of opponents to health care reform, in 25 buses paid for by the AstroTurf group Americans for Prosperity, could be considered spontaneous. An estimated 4,000 people today answering Ms. Bachmann's call, bringing with them on those buses, not just their misunderstanding of health care reform but also their hatred of President Obama, as well as pure hatred, period.

Lee Fang of ThinkProgress.org taking these photographs of a sign that reads "National Socialist Health Care, Dachau, Germany, 1945," superimposed over the horrific images of the corpses from Dachau. Other signs are slightly less shameful but many in no way related to health care.

Congresswoman Bachmann urging these people to rebel.

>

Bo-regard, surely even you can see that's a harsh accusation against one political figure.

I figure this quote is from you too: "we would name nancy pelosi as the greatest threat to Constitutional government. "

Didnt people say the same thing about Lyndon Johnson when Medicare, Head Start, Social Security, etc., were being created?

DBI, you went and got me all confused. Wilford Brimley gets on one of my very last nerves. Could you substitute him with someone dead in there if its not too much trouble to ask? After all, he is the only one on your team of four who could still be found in a phone book and stuff like that. How about Bear Bryant? I guess he just came to mind because Im watching LSU/Alabama while Im working. And hanging out here when I determine that I deserve a break.

OH NO!!! ohmygod! DBI, are you meaning to imply that Wilford and Nancy Pelosi are having a torrid affair??? is that code?????

The Bay Area district should dump Pelosi and elect A. D. Norton to replace her. He is a perennial candidate for Mayor of San Francisco, a native of Snowball, Arkansas, and a punk rock pioneer in our state. When the Sex Pistols played their concert in Memphis, he snuck in without paying - which is the right way to do it.

If they are, tina, willford is not getting a very good deal. Too much botox for him might mean an insulin high and put him into a coma.

>>Didnt people say the same thing about Lyndon Johnson when Medicare, Head Start, Social Security, etc., were being created?<<

Maybe even worse. Back then I was an R as in Young Republicon. Raygun scoured the nation talking to women's groups, they vote more reliably and more often, telling them of the evils of Medicare. He made TV ads. It was the end of America as we knew it.

In another 10 years Republicans will be debating how to strengthen the public option, just as they did with
Medicare. Americans have little respect for history and their media managers wish to keep it that way.

.

Anyone see any irony in the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Richard M. Nixon, all true Republicans, were some of the strongest supporters of Universal Health Care??

How were they supporters and what do you mean by 'universal health care'?

>>Anyone see any irony in the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Richard M. Nixon, all true Republicans, were some of the strongest supporters of Universal Health Care??<<

To that list add Demo President Harry Truman.

Eisenhower once called the "extremists" in Texas who sought to undo and destroy Social Security, "very stupid."

I'll stand by my comments. If Jesus returned we'd crucify him again, and the charge would be led by the teabagger mobs.

I'm not mocking, I'm rebuking those who turn their backs on the "least of these" and worship the god of money and greed.

The way we treat the poor and the sick -- especially when so many other countries have found a way to provide health care for all citizens -- is the way we treat Jesus, as he reminds us.

I've been watching C-Span all day (Except for the Arkansas game) and I find it amazing that the Republicans can't even cite one thing they don't like about the bill except "it's going to cost too much."
WTF??? Where was their outrage when Bush LOWERED taxes and then spent us into the poorhouse ?
The Republicans have been wrong for a hundred years on health care, but this crop of jerks takes the cake!

Teleplayer, Im not sure that even Jesus could stand to put up with group health insurance in the USA today. He would probably get His coverage elsewhere.

just a little levity.

wilford brimley uses botox? Has anyone told him yet that apparently its not working?

Looks like Drudge was right about the huge fines and imprisonment penalties for uninsured persons contained in Speaker Pelosi's legislation. Several members of Congress have cited those penalties, and none of the bill's supporters are denying it. Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi won't release the text of the bill until after the vote.

>>Several members of Congress have cited those penalties, and none of the bill's supporters are denying it.

Gee, nobody denied that little green men landed in Chickenopolis last week and had sex with the mayor's wife as some nutcake who picks up tin cans and walnuts on my street told everyone he saw.
Therefore it must be true. No refuting a lack of refuting.

We like ol Earl, give him clothes when he needs them, share fook, but rarely pay him any mind about politics and little green men.

fook=food.

Sharing "fook" makes for a more interesting comment, eLwood.

Saddling our children and grandchildren with an onerous debt is not kindness or noble. It is shameful and done by cowards. They will never be able to pay it off and it will result in a drastic reduction in the standard of living.

Fook? Jaysus, eLwood, you sound like fookin Bono Vox, but it still looks like fookin Drudge wuz right. Fookin brilliant, mate.

I liked the South Ca-linky Repub about 6;30 who said the proposal would be too costly because the penalties for going bare were too low to prevent people from going without insurance until they got an illness then getting coverage.

His "speech"/"statement" seemed rather ill-coordinated with the doom-meisters that are promising IRS fines of up to a quarter million and five years in jail. Clik.

From the C-Span I've watched, I get the impression that every Republican would give their first born child to prevent any health reform bill of any stripe passing tonight or any night until 2012 or 2016.

They are voting 192 yea 28 Nay

HR 3962 219 Democrat Yea 39 Nay 1 Republican Yea (New Louisiana Republican Representative Cao)

Bo-retard says: "Saddling our children and grandchildren with an onerous debt is not kindness or noble. It is shameful and done by cowards. They will never be able to pay it off and it will result in a drastic reduction in the standard of living."

Where were you when we cut taxes under Bush and then spent and spent and spent on the useless, including an immoral war whose cost dwarfs this bill and would dwarf complete and universal coverage of the entire population?

Perplexed - Slurs that demean persons with disabilities are not cool. Please visit www.r-word.org

Arkansas Blogger, thanks for pointing out my insensitivity and I apologize to our blog community. I caught "troll-itis" and responded inappropriately.

This is just silly:
"Speaker Pelosi won't release the text of the bill until after the vote. "

The bill has been available for several days now, free to download and look at as a PDF. If you didn't know that, then you weren't paying attention. The Repubs asked for it, and it was released so they could give it a look-see for something like 72 hours.

Of course, THEIR bill only gave about 72 minutes for the Dems too look at. Talk about a double standard. It went down in flames, as it rightly should have.

Perplexed - Thanks for your reply. Don't feel too bad, it's a common problem in our society because many so many folks use the word, but if we become aware of the issue about it, good people like you will understand and things will get better.

Not being able to afford this as reason to not institute changes is a lame excuse.

If $750B some dollars can be funneled to a bunch of financial elitists with little to no hope of ever seeing that money again then we can fund a program that overhauls a broken and dysfunctional industry that provides the same health care from the rich and powerful to the homeless.

I say keep working on getting that financial bailout loan paid back as a means to help fund health insurance overhaul. How about voting on some bills to make that happen?

rablib - I've looked in a lot of places, like thomas.loc.gov, the Ways & Means Committee, and the Speaker's web site, and the only version of the bill I can find was an older version from October 29th, before Pelosi's changes were incorporated. The October 29th version doesn't contain the penalty clauses, among other things. Some of the Republicans on the House floor were complaining that even they couldn't get a copy of the bill they were voting on. The Democrats were obstinate in refusing to allow anyone to see it.

If you have a link to an up-to-date copy the bill voted on last night, I'd be grateful if you could provide a link to it.