It couldn't be that people are smart enough to realize that a big part of Medicaid is funded through state budgets, and that neither the federal or state governments, facing heeee-YOOOOGE budget cuts for years to come, will be able to provide funding for the newly eligible.

It must be that people - particularly at a liberal blog - just don't care about the poor.

I do not understand this argument about how hard it is to pull the health bill apart. It's easy as can be.

That's why they would have been better off enacting the GOOD PARTS now (Medicaid expansion), so voters could see results, and leaving the less good parts, that the insurance industry would support - the mandates, for negotiation on the regulations.

BTW - Now you have some issue with Chelsea's wedding cake?

pfffffffttt ...

Whereas former presidents typically devote their retirement to history-revising legacy preservation, Clinton is laudably doing the opposite -- and the nation will, hopefully, benefit.

It began with his congressional testimony last month. Discussing his administration's trade policy, Clinton admitted that it "has not worked" to alleviate poverty, as promised.

"It was a mistake," he said of his agribusiness-backed initiatives forcing impoverished countries to eliminate tariffs. "It was a mistake that I was a party to ... I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did."

Clinton didn't stop there. In a subsequent ABC News interview, he said that when it came to 1990s-era financial deregulation that so harmed today's economy, "I think [my advisors] were wrong, and I think I was wrong."

As for the politics -- party and personal -- of the '64 bill, while it's true that LBJ seems to have expressed those concerns (apparently to Moyers) about the Dem party losing the South, he also had to know that being a Southerner himself and with a prior track record of largely mod-conservative politics, he was going to suffer less politically for the bills than, say, a northern liberal Dem.  And frankly, it was a remark that gets overblown, because LBJ famously was not exactly a Party-oriented pol.  He was a Lyndon-oriented pol, period.

Similarly, in his first few years, with significant winds at his back to do just about anything to get the country back to work again after 3 brutal yrs of Depression, FDR didn't have to be a political genius or profile in courage to get done what he did -- which, it turns out, was a little less than expected.  Which is why I credit him less for the '33-34 legislation, good as it was but not as bold as it could have been, and more for the more robust legislation of the so-called Second New Deal of 1935.