People don't shop for medical services on the basis of price, clinics that do abortions aren't engaged in price wars, and I know of no evidence that medical outcomes in general are in any way tied to the cost of the facility in any case.

Bona fides alert: I am vehemently, passionately pro-choice.  I am opposed on general principles to the Stupak/Hyde crapola because it takes us one more step towards accepting the idea that the government can decide how and when you can get access to abortion and who pays for it.

But as long as Hyde is the law of the land -- and it will be for a long, long time -- public funds are never going to pay for abortions.  Whether or not Stupak or Nelson is in the bill won't change that one bit.

...those who were banished from DK for being too pro-Hillary or something came here so they could treat others in the same manner they perceive they were treated over there and somehow feel better about themselves.

This IS almost entirely the blue dog's plan, remember?

Stupak and other efforts to limit abortion for poor women isn't "progress," financing "reform" by endangering the health care benefits of working people isn't "progress," adopting failed conservative ideology in regard to cost containment isn't "progress." Nor, in light of all the ways this plan fails middle class Americans and fails to address the real problems in our health care system, is promising easy-to-repeal (perhaps never to materialize) subsidies and expanded Medicare funding.

There is a difference between compromise and being taken for a fool, between real reform and window dressing.

Given a choice between trusting Kucinich or Axelrod I'll take Dennis every time.

Just seven minutes into Glenn Beck's hour-long interview of Eric Massa on Tuesday evening, things had already gone very wrong.

Conservatives had hopes that the now-former Democratic congressman from Upstate New York, who resigned abruptly under an ethics cloud, would deliver the goods about corruption and strong-arm tactics in the Obama White House and Congress. But instead, Massa served up an icky new confession.

"Now they're saying I groped a male staffer," he volunteered. "Yeah, I did. Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn't breathe and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday."

Beck looked aghast. "Was your wife at that one?" the Fox News Channel host asked.

"No, this was in a townhouse; we all lived together, all the bachelors and me," Massa explained. "My chief of staff had a conniption and said, 'You can't live there, that's not congressional.' "

Beck tried to move the conversation in a different direction, but his guest resisted. "Let me show you something," Massa proposed, proffering a book with photos of bawdy Navy rituals from the days when he was a sailor.

"You're going to show me tickle fights?" Beck inquired.

"I'm going to show you a lot more than tickle fights," Massa promised. Beck put on his reading glasses, then judged that the images should not be shown on television. "It looks like an orgy in 'Caligula,' " Massa asserted.