To put it another way, the Republicans did make suggestions this year, but they were bad ones and they went nowhere. In 17 years are the "neo-progressives" going to claim them as progressive reform?

I can see future campaign ads by Dem politicians.

Elect more Democrats so we can "fix" what we f*ucked up in 2010.

I can only agree with MO Blue below:

I'm so excited that the Democratic Party was able to pass Republican "Enrich the Insurance and Pharma Industries" legislation and pass it off as "health care reform."

To which I will add that without a public option, this bill should not have been signed. Obama said as much last July. But what he says shouldn't be taken literally or seriously. He likes to blow smoke. And a considerable portion of his devotees enjoy the fumes.

I also would add that there is the matter of women's reproductive rights - compromised by strange men and the men who like strange men.

In the blogosphere, it seems to be, "whatever it is that allows them to keep their access open, the mainstream gigs coming with regularity, improve their chances of being quoted in the mainstream, and stay firmly in place on the pedestal their audiences have placed them on."

That the centrist nature of this bill should be proclaimed so as to destroy the extremist Republican position.

That the extreme Republican position succeded in dragging the policy to the right which is why they must be confronted and defeated before we can make greater progress.

That label's kind of a neat psychological trick, when you think about it.

I mean, they're essentially authoritarian-minded people with a passive individual temperament and a strong preference for some semblance of decency and higher reasoning in the government's character (which is why they're drawn to the Democratic Party).

From a party perspective, they're great allies.

And we're as stuck with them as we're stuck with their incredibly ignoble and far more dangerous counterparts in and around the Republican Party.

YORK (AP) -- AT&T Inc. will take a $1 billion non-cash charge in the first quarter because of the health care overhaul and may cut benefits it offers to current and retired workers.

The charge is the largest disclosed so far. Earlier this week, AK Steel Corp., Caterpillar Inc., Deere & Co. and Valero Energy announced similar accounting charges, saying the health care law that President Barack Obama signed Tuesday will raise their expenses.

...
The telecommunications company also said it is looking into changing the health care benefits it offers because of the new law. Analysts say retirees could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers as a result of the overhaul. link

I really mean to ask this of the "access" progressives, not those influenced by them.

Suddenly, the blogosphere and some pundits' columns are filled with all sorts of inside scoop on just how Republican the ObamaCare/RomneyCare bill is.

All hail Heritage! Or, how Heritage got Obama to get its health insurance plan passed.

But, as Brad Delong wrote, the Heritage heritage could not be admitted prior to the bills passage bcz then Dems would not have been able to hold their noses long enough to vote for the POS.

Oh, and AEI told its rightwing commentators to STFU about the Romney-esque nature of the Senate's bill, Obama's BHIP-PPP (Big Health Industry Players' Profit Protection Plan)/RomoneyCare/HCR (High Corporate Returns) legislation.

Robert Reich said the bill does not come out of the New Deal or the Great Society, but from Republican ideology. No wonder Obama was so full of praise for St.Ronnie in the primaries.

Obama's legislation comes from an alternative idea, begun under the Eisenhower administration and developed under Nixon, of a market for health care based on private insurers and employers. Eisenhower locked in the tax break for employee health benefits; Nixon pushed prepaid, competing health plans, and urged a requirement that employers cover their employees. Obama applies Nixon's idea and takes it a step further by requiring all Americans to carry health insurance, and giving subsidies to those who need it.

So don't believe anyone who says Obama's health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama's health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.

Also, praising it as Clintonian means what exactly?  Clinton, despite the '93 tax bill, was an abject failure as President because he allowed the seeds of financial disaster to be sown right under his nose.  HE is the one whose administraton should have stopped the derivative madness, nipped it in the bud, when their single brightest team member warned them clearly.  Clinton, for everything I like about the guy, was an inexcusable fool in this vital area.

Sorry, we can do MUCH better than constantly looking backward at a President who, while decent in many respects, failed miserably to protect the nation economically when he could have.  He kept a charade going.  Perhaps a more progressive charade because of his tax reform, but it was a charade just the same.

Must be getting pretty crowded down there.... lol

1. Doesn't that mean the 1993 Senate Republican HCR bill was also Clintonian?
   
2. And doesn't that mean the 1993 Senate Republican HCR bill "achieves liberal ends through market means" just like the Obama HCR bill does also?  So the 1993 Senate Republican HCR bill was sort of liberal?

My feeling with this Ezra post is that he's living in an alternate reality where Mass. Gov.-era Mitt Romney is President.  That's just pretty clearly not going to happen.  Why?  Because their base would never, ever, EVER allow that to happen.  And the Republican base gets what it wants.  If Romney was President we would be seeing a bill where we could buy insurance across state lines, deregulated and exploitive in all its glory.

I thought she had a chance but one of her opinions is now up before the Surpreme Court and will likely be reversed... In Quon, she held that a police officer had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the pages he sent using a departmental pager.  The department had a written policy that the pagers were strictly for departmental use and all pagers could be accessed by the department.  Wardlaw held that an informal oral policy by a supervisor trumped the written policy.....

She also wrote an opinion last year holding that tasers are a significant level of force that must be justified by a strong governmental interest.

Rumor had it she was being vetted last year for the Souter seat.

She would have been great on issues of personal liberty.  I thought she could be confirmed because before taking the bench she supported Republican Richard Riordan as Mayor of LA and had worked for mega firm O'Melveny, not exactly a socialist outfit....

Worked on Bill's transition team and was appointed by Bill to the bench...

She was heavily involved in local politics....She would be a bold progressive....and perhaps that shows too much now to be confirmed....

Challenged by a young man in the audience who shouted several times, "What about the public option," a liberal-backed proposal for the creation of a government-sponsored plan to compete with private insurers, Obama said: "We couldn't get it through Congress."

the opposition of Republicans meant they had to keep their liberals onboard, and that cut against trumpeting the conservative structure of the legislation.(Ezra Klein)