They have produced a bill that virtually no one likes and many detest. There is, as d-day notes, little political upside for anyone in this bill. The Ben Nelsons and Blanche Lincolns never wanted to vote for a health bill in any form. Accomodating them has created a situation where they may still be Nos and a whole bunch of progressives in the House may be nos. This is looking like a debacle. Reconciliation may be the only way to save it.

And the Congressional Democrats could have put together a better bill, could have given the single-payer proponents a chance to be heard, to have considered ALL the options, but instead, they just rolled over for Obama, turned a blind eye to the back room deals, withheld important information, went along with the bamboozle.

Unions tentatively struck a deal Tuesday to exempt collectively bargained healthcare plans from a tax on high-cost plans expected to be used to help raise revenue for the healthcare overhaul.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern and United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger met with House Speaker Pelosi Tuesday, a day after labor leaders met at the White House to express their opposition to the excise tax.

House and Senate Democratic leaders are to meet with President Obama this morning at the White House to discuss health care. House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel said he hopes there could be an agreement on the excise tax as early as today after the White House meeting, but then conceded: "That's stretching the word `hope.' "

Exempting collectively bargained plans would appease unions that often offer expensive health plans in lieu of higher wages. The deal could also help Obama avoid breaking his promise not to tax those earning less than $200,000. Obama recently expressed a preference for the excise tax.

The excise tax could further be tweaked to ensure Obama's promise is kept for non-union workers as well.

Except, there's this potential problem:

Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the deal was not enough to bring him on board to support the excise tax on high-cost plans.

"It's setting up a divide-and-conquer situation here where some people are going to feel they're paying for other people, and they're all working," Grijalva said. "That politically is possibly the most dangerous thing Democrats can do is create that division."

"As I look back it was a waste of time dealing with [Snowe]," Reid is quoted as saying in a forthcoming New York Times Magazine piece, "because she had no intention of ever working anything out."

Although the real problem seems to have been Lieberman you would hope some lesson will be learned from dealing with her.

I say let this thing die and use what power Dems have remaining to regroup our party to decorrupt itself and get straight who the enemy really is at least as much as GOP -- the lobbyists and their bosses. We should consider (among other things) the cost of media buys for campaign commercials for which candidates have to raise campaign contributions nearly constantly. That air time should be free, and we need to find other ways to pay for other campaign expenses (travel etc) to break the cycle of corruption between candidates and media -- and the corporations who now finance the whole thing. We've had campaign finance reform before but candidates tend to ignore it (as Obama did) because they want to use their biggest financial guns unimpeded. Those financial guns turn out to be corporate guns under this scheme. We should revisit the campaign finance process and find ways to make it work because currently our elected leaders work for corporations instead of us. The HCR bill is living proof of that fact and it's essentially anti-democratic. Until we tackle campaign finance reform (and media reform as they intertwine in elections) -- and make them mandatory -- we'll never achieve successful reform in other spheres like healthcare.