A good solid B+

[enzfan]

Barry's answer to what grade he would bestow upon the job he has done thus far. He is so full of himself. Pretty rosey assessment from someone whose job approval ratings have trended downward since he took office.

[SallyLightfoot]

Ridiculous, yes. Although it's also human nature. If you ask every CEO or corporate leader to rate his/her performance, they would inflate their scores dramatically-- even if they had presided over a bankruptcy or left the company in far worse shape then their predecessors.

[SallyLightfoot]

As far as the approval ratings declining, that isn't surprising given the wicked recession and high unemployment. St. Ronny got off to a similar start during his first term in office:

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/obama_as_reagan.php

[MARV]

Nice link, Sally. It puts things in perspective when we see how alike presidents / situations can be. On another note what do you think of the likelihood of the public health option being dropped from the health care reform bill? Is it already a done deal?

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[SallyLightfoot]

The public option is as dead as a doornail. Its alternative, Medicare Buy-In, was killed by Lieberman.

There is a lot of other reasonable stuff in the bill without the public option, but what's left is counter-balanced by shitty things like insurance mandates (a humongous windfall to the insurance co's), dubious cost cutting from service providers and pharmas. Without a public option, it's a mixed bag of crap that doesn't reform very much, and there's no new cost pressure on the insurance co's. Due to the mandate, the insurance co's pick up scads of new customers, health care costs continue to rise unabated (yay free-markets!) and insurance co's find ways to weasel out of the few concessions they made. It's a shit sandwich.

If they pull the individual insurance mandate from the bill, it [i]might[/i] be worth passing, but we'd still be spending 900 bn for not much change and no real reform. If the bill somehow does proceed, I propose that it be renamed the "[b]Joe Lieberman Corporate Insurance Welfare Bill[/b]" We can also thank a handful of other shithead democrats who are about as informed about healthcare policy as your average email chain letter-- which are written by republicans.

The only way forward, as far as I can tell is to use a Senate Reconciliation committee to pass the bill (hey, that's how Bush got a lot done), but to do that, they would need to completely reformat the bill and then re-legislate it. It would also need a green light from the White House, and it seems apparent to me that Obama is not a hardball kind of president-- he's more of a "facilitator" than a leader. Health care reform is likely dead, because Obama is a centrist who is indifferent to progressive legislation, and because corporate america owns much of Congress.

A good blog to read each day about the status of Health Care is Ezra Klein of the Washington Post.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/

And here's Matt Yglesias talking about the White House would have done if it really cared about this legislation:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archi ... aken-2.php

[SallyLightfoot]

From everything I've read, it sounds like a reconciliation process would also be fraught with problems, and a public option would not likely survive in the bill.

I have to say, the senate democrats and white house sure did a great job cocking-up this bill. Interesting that at time when the opposition is crowing about the deficit, the dems allow a critical bill that [i]reduces the deficit[/i] to be portrayed as the antithesis, and then water it down into a meaningless corporate handout. This rivals the job done on the stimulus (which was 50% too small, and allowed Congress to converted it into 40% tax cuts which do not provide stimulus), the bailout (which lent bzillions in exchange for almost nothing and huge executive bonuses) and financial reform (which won't break up the megabanks, and allows them to continue operating as insolvent zombies). Frankly, the only thing that would likely be worse than all of this would be the McCain/Palin administration-- which would have done virtually the same thing, but with more tax cuts.

[ghosty]

[quote][i]Originally posted by SallyLightfoot[/i]
<br>From everything I've read, it sounds like a reconciliation process would also be fraught with problems, and a public option would not likely survive in the bill.

I have to say, the senate democrats and white house sure did a great job cocking-up this bill. Interesting that at time when the opposition is crowing about the deficit, the dems allow a critical bill that [i]reduces the deficit[/i] to be portrayed as the antithesis, and then water it down into a meaningless corporate handout. This rivals the job done on the stimulus (which was 50% too small, and allowed Congress to converted it into 40% tax cuts which do not provide stimulus), the bailout (which lent bzillions in exchange for almost nothing and huge executive bonuses) and financial reform (which won't break up the megabanks, and allows them to continue operating as insolvent zombies). Frankly, the only thing that would likely be worse than all of this would be the McCain/Palin administration-- which would have done virtually the same thing, but with more tax cuts.
[/quote]

Business as usual. Thanks Washington![V]