And so the Dems continue to embarrass themselves by all but begging for the GOP to like them enough to join in the reform effort.

Ridiculous.

So, if the public option is going to keep the bill from passing the Senate on Third Reading and thus prevent it from even geting to conference, then the logical thing is to remove it temporarily from the Senate version and then re-insert it at conference.

Well sure, if it's an empirical fact that the public option can't pass the Senate, you can try to do it through conference.  I think even the moronic BTD grasps that point.  But nobody knows if it is true or not.

This comment also exemplifies what I call The Phonebooth Theory -- that is, at some point, Obama's going to ditch the Clark Kent glasses, step into a phonebooth, and emerge garbed as Progressive Superman. Na ga Happen -- though I'd love to be proved wrong.

Isn't that akin to what Barney Frank referred to as "having a conversation with a dining room table"?

It's about as productive.  

I wish that the Democrats would get this through their thick heads:  They are not your friends.  They are Republicans.  They might seem friendly, but that is just them flipping back at you what Ayn Rand said about relying on your good manners to avoid naming things by their true name.

My gawd. A "meaningful discussion" with Republicans? The Villagers, both "Left" and Right, are really pieces of work.

A Letter To Our Patients

The ___ is privileged to provide your cardiovascular care, and we are proud of the high quality services we provide to the Northern Virginia area. However, we are very concerned that proposed Medicare regulations, if implemented, will severely restrict our ability to continue providing all the services you have come to expect from us. Therefore, we are taking the unprecedented step of contacting our patients to alert them to the situation we face.

If implemented as proposed, the 2010 Medicare regulations will force cardiology practices such as ours to reduce services that we can provide in our offices. If these rules are put in place, many cardiology patients will have to go to the hospital to obtain imaging services, rather than having the tests performed in the office to be interpreted by their cardiologist with the results provided quickly back to the patient. Medicare patients will have higher co-pays, and everyone will have longer wait times for tests and results. Many of these new rules are based on incorrect data that the government has used to generate revised reimbursement rates.

We ask that you help protect your access to cardiac care by contacting your legislators in Congress. We urge you to visit www.guardingheartsalliance.org/ where you can learn more about what's at stake for America's cardiac patients. The website makes it easy to email your senators and representatives and ask them to intervene on your behalf with Medicare before it's too late. Only a few weeks remain before Medicare finalizes its regulations, so we hope you will go to www.guardingheartsalliance.org/ as soon as you can.

Cardiovascular disease takes more lives each year than cancer, accidents and diabetes combined. But advances in cardiology during the past 10 years have reduced heart-related deaths and the severity of heart-related illness by 27 percent. That's important, because the urgent need for this lifesaving specialty will increase 60 percent in the next 15 years as baby boomers advance in age and because the current shortage of cardiologists is expected to worsen over that time.

Please help us continue to treat our patients' cardiac disease and ensure that the strides we have made in fighting our country's Number One killer have not been in vain. Please contact your legislators today.

Thank you.

The physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, technicians and staff of____