Taking single payer off the table without a fight established what we are. Since then,

[Atticus]

we've just been haggling over our price.

We've sold a piece of ourselves to get Senator Snowe's vote so we would be allowed to even DISCUSS Health Care Reform.

We've serviced Senators Nelson, Lieberman, Baucus, Lincoln and Landrieu several times by taking out this or adding on that. Each transaction, we told ourselves and each other, brought us closer to that magic number: sixty.

As time passed without any real success at locking up that magic 60 votes, we apparently have become ever more willing to service anyone who offers any promise to help us pass SOMETHING we can hold up to the world and call health care reform.

Mary Landrieu needs a little sugar? Hey, darlin'---what are friends for?

Ben Nelson's buddies in Big Insurance offended by some aspect of a hard-won compromise that took weeks to hammer out? Ain't no thang, Ben! It's gone!

We're going to get what Corporate America and the oligarchy that owns it PERMITS us to get.

Can we pull up our pants and go home now?

[msongs]

1. nope gotta bend over to liebermancare before u can pull yer pants up lol nt

[katandmoon]

2. +1,000,000

[leftstreet]

3. Democratic Party Spinelessness is a Preexisting Condition

The party has suffered from it for years!

[nightrain]

4. knr. That's it exactly! Sadly. We're tuning in the picture more clearly now.

Looking for change...??

Nope, no change here...

[flvegan]

5. I voted for Kucinich. n/t

[tavalon]

6. I wanted this administration to help us get into a new line of work

I guess that was just too hopeful. I'd better take my kneepads back out of the closet.

[Davis_X_Machina]

7. I think being forced to pull a single-payer bill before it even hits the Senate floor....

...which is what happened to Clinton's HCR effort in '94 -- it wasn't single payer, and it didn't lack for votes because it wasn't single payer -- or having a single-payer bill lose on the floor 41-59, would also have established what we are.

[laughingliberal]

8. Starting with it, at least, as one option would have put us in a better negotiating position

Democratic negotiating strategy: Start by asking for a barely acceptable level of reform and compromise from there.

[Atticus]

9. That may indeed have been the outcome, but then we would not have had to worry about our reputation

or what diseases we may have picked up during "negotiations".

[Davis_X_Machina]

10. I think the reputational aspect...

...would have suffered considerably. Clinton's HCR failure was one of the factors leading to his emphasis on micro-initiatives (midnight basketball is the famous one) in the second half of his first term.

[Indenturedebtor]

11. Your reps are not spineless... they're there to make you think you have a vote

At the end of the day American Democracy without campaign finance reform and a free media is DEAD DEAD DEAD. Don't be a rube and buy in to their circus. There was never any real intention of doing ANYTHING that could possibly have hurt the insurance companies. The Ins Co's votes count and yours doesn't. Sorry.

[defendandprotect]

12. k i c k