And the DailyKos is against it:

Reid and Carper’s Plan B: Put Two Really Bad Ideas Together!

by mcjoan

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Wed Nov 11, 2009 at 11:12:04 AM PST

“So Harry Reid has allowed Tom Carper to come up with the “Plan B” on the public option if he can’t get 60 votes for opt-out. Carper’s plan? Combine the two worst ideas:

In states where private insurers fail to offer affordable coverage, Carper said the alternative would permit them to set up a non-profit board, likely appointed by the president, to offer insurance.

“That kind of approach might come close to hitting a sweet spot for a lot of people,” said Carper, noting the approach “addresses concerns about government-owned, government-run.”

The plan would be a form of a so-called trigger option pushed by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and some Democratic moderates. Moderates have been meeting to coordinate some of their efforts on the overhaul.

A triggered co-op! A trigger that’s never going to trigger to create a co-op that will never work. Seriously, this is their Plan B? Whatever happened to comprehensive healthcare reform? Whatever happened to providing affordable choices to all Americans?  Which leads to this nugget:

The Democratic aide said staffers have tried to keep Carper’s alternative quiet due to concerns that publicity could draw attacks from liberal activists, which could complicate efforts to line up support from the full Democratic caucus.

Ya think? Yes, liberal activists will oppose this because it’s utterly worthless. And we’re not the only ones who say so. Remember what the CBO said about co-ops?

(The proposed co-ops had very little effect on the estimates of total enrollment in the exchanges or federal costs because, as they are described in the specifications, they seem unlikely to establish a significant market presence in many areas of the country or to noticeably affect federal subsidy payments.)

They don’t do anything. Which under Carper’s plan is probably not so big an issue because if he’s using the Snowe formula for his trigger, the trigger will never be pulled. Which actually does make it a big issue again, because this option won’t do anything. This is not reform. It’s got all the substance of wet cotton candy.

I am really hoping that Reid has tasked some more creative thinkers than Carper on a solution to the public option issue. They’d be far better off just scrapping this whole Rube Goldbergian contraption, pass the insurance reforms and pray that they’ll work and then spend the $900 billion on expanding Medicaid and Medicare.

Or, getting serious about passing real, substantive reform in form of a public option that provides serious competition to the insurance companies through reconciliation. But don’t try to pass this weak shit tea off on us as reform.”

What this means is that Senator Reid is trying to find a kind way of throwing the liberals overboard on the public option — and DailyKos does not like it.

Senator Reid’s very qualified and really one of the best press guys in the city, announced yesterday that Senator Reid has filed the paperwork so the he will be able to proceed to the cloture motion on the motion to proceed next week.

This means that if Senator Reid gets 60 votes, he can bring the House bill up before the Senate.

If he does not get 60 votes, no bill comes before the U.S. Senate. Or Senator Reid may do what he did on the Doc fix — the unpaid for $250 billion Medicare spending bill — bring it up so it can fail — and then go back to the backroom to negotiate. Pretty clear and simple, yes?

For more information about what the future for ObamaCare will be, here is today’s video interview with Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) about his views of the Senate health care bill. Pay attention to the Senator’s quote “it’ll never get here.”

Then, turn off the sound, watch the interviewer and the Senator’s body language. What do you see?

1. Time.  Costa does not say it, but Senator Coburn is threatening to have the bill read, front to back, all 2,000 pages, prior to each amendment.  Hmmm.  Costa’s point is time is on the side of ObamaCare’s death by thousands of pages of text.

2. President Obama.  Can you say radioactive and toxic for moderate Dems running for re-election — ok, so I am paraphrasing Costa.

3. GOP Amendments.  Guns and immigration, guns and babies, guns and taxes, guns and spending, guns and Medicare cuts, guns and government control of your health care, guns and health care rationing — did I mention guns?  (OK, so Costa did not mention guns.)

4. Abortion.  (See entire internet on Stupak.)  For extra points, see Senator Nelson (D-NE) and Stupak amendment in the U.S. Senate.

5. The public option.  Ah, the liberal’s shimmering holy grail — its right there, but oh, I think I see it — but it is elusive isn’t it — See Google for “Senator Lieberman (I-CT) public option” — NOT.   

Not mentioned, health care rationing, immigration, death panels, health care databases (guns), taxes and spending.

Since Gallup regularly began using the generic ballot to measure registered voters’ preferences for the House of Representatives in 1950, it has been rare for Republicans to have an advantage over Democrats. This is likely because more Americans usually identify as Democrats than as Republicans, but Republicans can offset this typical Democratic advantage in preferences with greater turnout on Election Day. Most of the prior Republican registered-voter leads on the generic ballot in Gallup polling occurred in 1994 and 2002, two strong years for the GOP.

Particularly interesting is this amusing graph:

…and yes: the Democratic line does look uncannily like the trajectory of an airplane just after it has lost all power to the engines, mid-flight.  A real shame that this didn’t come out last Friday, huh?  There’s a bunch of Blue Dogs who probably would have appreciated the opportunity to factor this information into their long-term voting strategies.

The pro-abortion Members of Congress in the House, and pro-abortion groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood, rolled over and did not threaten to derail the bill because Speaker Pelosi asked them to do so.  So they played dead.

Senator McCaskill (D-MO) publicly said she could live with the Stupak amendment.

Senator McCaskill is not the Speaker of the House, and she was not so lucky — she did not get a free pass.

She was instantly pounded by pro-abortion forces.  Senator McCaskill has now changed her tune — she will not support Stupak in the Senate — all in the same day.

Pro-Abortion Forces on the Defensive

The precedent set by the Stupak amendment in the House has put the pro-abortion forces on the defensive.  They lost a major battle and are now reacting very aggressively.

They cannot allow a Stupak type amendment to pass the Senate.  It will make their position in Conference extremely weak, untenably weak.  It will lock-in the pro-life victory in the House.

If the Senate also passes an amendment, close to or like the Stupak amendment, then the bill coming out of Conference would force the pro-abortion groups to oppose the Conference report, and they would have to join with the Republicans to kill ObamaCare.

“The netroots remain very upset about the passage of Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-MI) amendment to the House health care bill, which prohibited insurance plans purchased with government subsidies from covering abortions. Liberal bloggers are calling it “the most expansive restriction on access to abortion Congress has passed” and warning that it will drive women out of the Dem party. Another blogger complains: “Apparently, even though it is not listed on his official biography and he has no apparent medical training, Stupak thinks of himself as a doctor and feels comfortable inserting himself in between millions of women and their physicians.” Meanwhile, lefty bloggers are working hard to ensure that the Senate doesn’t attach its own version of Stupak’s amendment to the Senate health care bill.

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Pro-choice organizations are taking a lot of heat from the netroots following the passage of the Stupak amendment. digby thinks NARAL “needs to hold [Pres.] Nancy Keenan accountable for being completely ineffectual over and over again.” DavidNYC argues that “if groups like NARAL and EMILY’s List ever want to start being effective,” they need to support primary challenges for Dems who voted for the Stupak amendment. Meanwhile, Jane Hamsher is urging Planned Parenthood and NARAL to score the House health care reform bill in order to “keep members of the Senate from coming out in favor of it.”
• After liberal bloggers (McCarter, Cooper, digby) criticized Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) for saying that she could live with the Stupak amendment being in the final health care bill, McCaskill came out against the Stupak amendment on her Twitter feed. Meanwhile, one lefty blogger estimates that abortion opponents lack the 60 votes in the Senate that will be necessary to attach a version of the Stupak amendment to the Senate bill.
• Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas is urging his readers to stop donating money to the DCCC, since “the bulk of the DCCC’s money” is going to go to Dems who voted for the Stupak amendment and/or against the health care reform bill. On the other hand, liberal bloggers (Empsall, Willis) are praising the vulnerable House Dems who voted for the bill.”

OK, so we need a mental diversion — so periodically I am going to post something totally unrelated to health care, just to give everyone a mental health break — kinda.

This “Are You Tired of Health Care Politics Yet” piece will appear on a highly random basis, but here it the first:

(In the words of Monty Python: And now for something completely different) today’s news that the Vatican is searching the Heavens for alien life follows previous announcements by the Vatican that belief in the existence of alien life and belief in Christianity are not incompatible.

Wow. Yeah.

So if you are the head of one of the world’s largest religions, and your leadership believes (presumably given the careful and slow nature of the Vatican, such a belief would be grounded in extensive research and fact) that alien life exists (while publicly stating alien life could exist), why would the Vatican be spending time and resources on this issue?

The answer is pretty straight forward, the Vatican is preparing for the day when the rest of the world knows — as opposed to believes — that alien life (that is intelligent visitors) exist.

The Vatican, and for that matter every other major religion, needs to be prepared philosophically and lay down a foundation of theology that is consistent with the existence of alien, intelligent life.

Simply put, the Vatican is preparing for the day aliens are revealed, or reveal themselves in an unambiguous manner.

Prudence dictates being prepared in this regard. Perhaps the whole Galileo Galilei inquisition thing has modified the Vatican’s approach to theologically disruptive discoveries.

(Also) looking at it through the other end of the telescope, the Vatican is preparing humanity for this knowledge by making public its efforts.

How do alien’s structure their society? Do they believe in God? (I think the answer is YES on that one, since they are intelligent — and oh boy, what fun that would be to tease the atheists on that.)

Do aliens use money? How is their society organized, are they a democracy? If not, how are resources allocated? Has technological advances in energy generation and space travel ended the need for working as humans do? Do telepathic powers re-define the political and economic structure of society — if everyone can read everyone’s thoughts?

My own view on the existence of alien life is that Earthlings will look back at the time when humans did not believe in the existence of intelligence alien life in same manner which we now look back at those who believed the earth was flat.

Wait, hold on, I think it’s EBE (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities) on the other line — uh, hello? (They want to talk, er communicate thoughts? on exopolitics.)

“More than 40 lawmakers vowed to oppose the final healthcare bill if the House language on abortion is not removed.

Reps. Diana DeGette (Colo.) and Louise Slaughter (N.Y.) led the group of Democrats in writing to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatening to withhold support for a final conference report if it strictly prohibits federal funding for abortion services.

“We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law,” reads a draft of the letter.  DeGette and Slaughter, who is the chairwoman of the powerful Rules Committee, also wrote President Barack Obama requesting a meeting on the issue next week.”

The pro-abortion Democrats may have two options: a) accept pro-life language prohibiting federal funding of abortions, or b) kill their own health bill.

In a thousand-cuts kind of bill, some of the cuts are self-inflicted. The bleeding now, over abortion rights, adds to the long list of complications for Democrats who are balancing tricky math on the Hill.

“An attempt at healing, though after the fact: “This is a health care bill, not an abortion bill,” President Obama told ABC’s Jake Tapper in an interview yesterday.

But the president is no longer quite right. The health care bill has become an abortion bill — and an immigration bill, and a tax bill, and a jobs bill, and a spending bill — not to mention the most significant re-working of the nation’s health care system in half a century.

The growing scope is a consequence of the scope of the president’s ambitions, plus the ever-expanding need to attract more votes for something that not everyone agrees is a policy or political winner. (How long before we hear from Republicans that health care reform is simply too big not to fail?)”

“The bill also could take America a step closer to bankruptcy. And for progressives in particular — for those who believe that government has a mission to help the poor and protect the vulnerable — that prospect should be alarming. If federal debt continues rising on its present path, hastened by a $1 trillion health-care bill, it is the poor and vulnerable who will be most harmed.”

This is also why some political risk analysts are connecting the dots between PelosiCare and the value of the dollar:

“If the Reserve Bank of India’s directors had any doubts about the wisdom of buying 200 tonnes of IMF gold — and likely dumping some U.S. Treasuries in the process — they had only to watch last weekend’s legislative activities on Capitol Hill. The proceedings provided plenty of reassurance that the move was a smart play.

“Nothing in the healthcare reform bill that passed the House of Representatives should give investors in dollar-denominated assets any confidence that U.S. policymakers are serious about tackling the government’s structural budget deficit.”

Amazing as it is that the Washington Post would be pointing out the obvious about the Democrats $1.2 Trillion health care spending plan, since liberal and progressive news writers have given aide, comfort and a criticism-free ride for those who are doing the spending.

It is apparent that there is no amount of money too high to spend for the House Democrats on health care reform. CBO confirms the amended House bill spends $3 Trillion.

But now Fred Hiatt has really stepped over the lines — he is “calling out” President Obama for his failure to cut keep his promise about the health bill spending and the deficit.

“True, the Congressional Budget Office has said that the bill is paid for. But the CBO is not allowed to count $250 billion in projected Medicare payments to doctors over the next 10 years, because the House — after first acknowledging that cost in its reform bill — decreed it had nothing to do with reform because lawmakers didn’t want to pay for it.“Nor is the CBO permitted to ask whether Congress will truly cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare programs in coming years, as the House bill assumes. History suggests that legislators will not be deaf to the complaints of seniors and those who treat them when it comes time for the axe to fall.

“As Post health reporter Ceci Connolly explained in a front-page story last week, the House bill also does not do much to lower costs.”

I asked a senior Senator who sits on the Committee on Finance when Congress has ever cut Medicare more than $100 billion, let along half a trillion — the answer was “never.” Will Congress make the cuts they say they will — answer: No. Then why is CBO accepting these promises — because CBO has agreed to let the cuts be paper ones, never real.

The Democrats have lost touch with fiscal reality, do not care about the cost of their bill and are especially giving the middle finger to all those independent voters concerned about spending and the deficit. The Democrats say they care about spending and the deficit, but they keep spending trillion after trillion. It is really ironic that Hiatt quotes a “progressive” budget analyst, about the debt, since progressives have been the ones pushing to spend trillions on health care.

In a nutshell, five percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product will be financed by debt:

“Under his plan, according to a CBO analysis, the government will be spending 24.5 percent of gross domestic product — the total value of the national economy — by 2019 while raising only 19 percent in revenue: a huge, unsustainable gap.

“In the kind of fiscal crisis that might ensue, as progressive budget expert Robert Greenstein said recently, “the risk is high that the people with the least political power in this country could bear a disproportionate share of the burden even though, by and large, they’re lower on the income scale.” The government would spend more and more on interest payments while likely stinting on college scholarships, inner-city schools, and, above all, aid to the poor and near-poor here and abroad.”

This is a surprise? The President lies about the debt and cost of his plan. CBO pretends — while protesting they are being forced to pretend — cuts to Medicare will happen that will not and never have happened. (A Democratic controlled U.S. House, U.S. Senate and White House will cut Medicare half a trillion — oh, we are really playing charades, is that it?)

The U.S. House leadership kept increasing the spending on their health bill without any limit, they just spent because they want too — and the U.S. House leadership lies about the cost of its bill.

We are living in a pretend land where we say everything is revenue-neutral and we promise not to go into debt, but our elected leaders are lying to the American people and to the world’s financial circles. When the editorial page of the Washington Post starts warning about moving closer to bankruptcy, and progressive budget analysts are warning about debt, you can bet things are really far worse than you can imagine. I guess their warnings are better late than never.

And now, even the New York Times is writing about some kinda, maybe, sorta fiscal concern and the powerless factions advocating it — versus the let’s spend to pass this bill White House faction that is winning the let’s pretend contest of fiscal fantasies.