The spineless stupidity of the House and Senate members who claim  to be Democrats is hard to believe.

The President has not been effective in governing on any level. Obama has shown no political intuition and has followed the advice of those who compromised and sold out. He paid no attention to the "lock" that Coakley was supposed to be, and was tone deaf to the impending backlash.

The Democrats are in disarray.  Healthcare was and is totally mismanaged.  The crucial problems in our economy have not been addressed and the Banks and Wall Street have not been disciplined. Mortgage program has been a total disaster plagued with unnecessary red tape and poor to  sloppily underperformed implementation.

The rest is too sordid for me to enumerate, but we have not had a President. We've seen an American Idol figurehead who doesn't react or intuit the needs of our people.

The House Dems will NOT buck the unions. If you REALLY want to represent those groups, then understand the reality - the Senate has to agree to a parallel fix of the excise tax via a reconciliation bill.

If you do not support that, you are standing in the way of the groups you are waxing lyrical over.

The choice the Democrats faced wasn't whether or not to fund expanded health care -- it was

You understand, of course, that good union jobs, in both the private and public sector, that offer good benefits and wages, are one of the best avenues into the middle class for the poor? Or don't you? You do know that minorities, African Americans and Hispanics, are more likely to be union members than whites?

When you screw Labor, as the party has been doing for 30 years now, you screw the poor. The less leverage workers have in the workplace and the political arena, the more economic insecurity and downward pressure on wages all workers experience -- and the fewer opportunities available for people to WORK their way out of poverty.

The reason being that they've been, and will continue to be, loudly trumpeting the injustice of those very things most of all-- the excise tax on middle class families, the Medicare panel and the reduction in Medicare funding.

And as a side note, the deal to give unions a bit of a break on the excise for a few years to give them time to renegotiate contracts has given them the perfect excuse to rail against the "special deal" for big bad unions at the same time they rail against the excise tax on non-union families.

My guess is that, instead, they will simply vote to cancel the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel,
and start over again with things like draconian "tort reform" and nationwide "competition," things that sound great to the average voter but which by themselves will enrich the insurance companies and drive policies to the lowest limits permitted by the most lax state in the union.

They may actually keep the individual mandate plus the ban on preexisting exclusions, albeit with much higher or no limits on premiums.

The problem with this healthcare bill is there's been no leader, a vacancy that's squarely the President's fault.  The Dem POTUS candidates were the ones who campaigned on their plans and made HCR promises.  If Kennedy had been well he would have taken that role for Obama but without him and with a President who has no genuine leadership ability --or interest-- this was failed before it started.

Go back to the debates and you'll see Hillary Clinton had a very clear plan for health care reform, she knew every element of it backward and forward, knew what she wanted to achieve and why, she was ready and eager to lead it.

Suffice to say, if any President actively pursued a Democratic agenda the Villagers would fight him, or her, tooth and nail.