Read Ezra Klein's piece in the American Prospect called "The Number-Cruncher-in-Chief" http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?arti cle=numbercruncherinchief

Sounds like the Congressional Budget Office came up with a terribly high Number for health care.  It surprised everybody including Hillary and the White House.  The number could have been much lower if using a different model.  That different model was unveiled by Wyden last year by working with the CBO.
So, the defeat in 1993 was not just because of Republican opposition.  Let's hope this time around the Senators realize what's at stake and not play king of the mountain.

I also negotiate for a living.  There are some producers that I can bottom line the price I want for a client, but others I have to start out high.  After a while, we come up with a fair price after a lot of jawing or we come up with a whole new price plan by eliminating hours or weeks or raising per diem etc.  We come to a consensus, not a capitulation aka compromise.  Both parties can then go about doing their jobs without rancor.

I've been in business a long time using that way of working.  But at the core of it all is a strong philosophy and a strong mission statement.  I believe that my clients deserve a very good wage.  Unfortunately in the U.S. respect from employers and others comes from making good money .  It's the chicken and egg.  I would prefer that they come to me and lavish a high salary on my clients because they see that they are indispensable.  Sometimes that happens. But more often than not I establish a fair price and then fight like heck for it.

I suggest everyone read Garret Keizer's "Crapshoot: Everybody Loses When Politics is a Game".  It's not about winning anymore, Mr. President to be.  It's about governing and leading.

Aw, the authoritarian father figure that so many Americans love.  Not me.  Had one Daddy and don't need another.  I would have preferred a tough fighter  to lead us out of this debacle, but we elected the "plays well with others" in the class.

So be it, but I am slightly encouraged by Harkin and the others.  If we need to fight out way out of the whole, I'm glad they have gone ahead to do some scouting and have tentatively held up the health care banner for the army of liberals to follow.

Dead on. If we really want change, we will start with reframing the debateand tossing out the whole Miltie Friedman flim flam.  It's pseudo economics.  Even a basically free market economist like Krugman has seen the light of the global flim flam of "The Shock Doctrine."  
This phrase particularly annoyed me:
"...that our economy takes into account not just the winners but also the losers in the economy.

Lefties should not use the word "losers" for our workers in the manufacturing and now the tech sector.  Bad frame.

Read "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein before donating, especially the chapter on the Tsunami. It will make you weep.   The fishing people of Sri Lanka are living in what amounts to concentration camps while luxury hotels replaced the middle class tourist hotels and the fishing shacks.    Doctors Without Borders would be my choice.  

I too have a crush on the Krugman.  Don't tell my husband.  Witty and bright with a Puckish quality that tickles me.   His book is very good defense of FDR and the New Deal.  

The gas tax vacation is way dumb.  Cut to the Revolution, please, pretty please.

My Dad is a pilot and always laughs at my terror in   swooping down into a tricky landing.  Pilots' ideas of safe are a tad different than mere mortals.

Yes, there is a difference.  Lying about legislative accomplishments is worse than remembering an event inaccurately, but basically truthfully. Al Gore going to a disaster area with a FEMA guy, but he just named the wrong city, as I recall.  

Basically she went to a dangerous place wherever the snipers happened to be.  

But saying that you "stood up to powerful interests" to protect the people of Illinois from nuclear leaks was reported in the New York Times.  He said it to win the Iowa caucus.  It fit his image, but it was a big old easy lie.  

Whoever gets the nomination, they will be in for the "exaggerator" attacks by the press.  So we better get our McCain whoppers ready to lock and load.

Yes, they all steal his message because they are talking to people on the ground and can see that people are freaking out over the economy.  So these other candidates are employing what I call "the spaghetti theory of politics" i.e. what ever sticks.

But John Edwards message comes from his heart and his gut, so he's the one that will follow through on the message and not abandon it when the going gets tough.

That's why the smartest thing to do is elect Edwards. The rest of them are fair weather friends.

There are real differences between Edwards and Hillary/Barack and he should nail that this evening in a town filled to the brim with union members.
I have no idea why he gave Barack a pass last week. Edward is wicked smart but he's not perfect.  But he's pretty darn close, so let's see where his adept trial lawyer mind is going.

Nelson Parry  on the new Sirius Left Dave Marsh Show said Hillary was financed by the arms industry  and Barack was "slipping into their clutches . He said Obama represented a "certain strata" of folks, not black people in general.

Edwards is the people's candidate. It is clear that he understands that nothing will change here or in the rest of the world with corporations in charge.
I don't want some insurance company deciding whether I live or die.  

Well, going door to door there were a lot more signs for "Hope" because we ran out of Edwards signs.  Was money an issue?  

John Edwards is the kind of person who has climbed to the top and will not pull the ladder up behind him.  He has always felt the strong virtue of rewarding work over wealth.  What has changed is his faith in the system.  He no longer believes in it and you can see the anguish in his face now.  For any of us who have experienced betrayal by a husband or a wife or a father or a friend, it is a harsh experience that can leave you scarred.

What I like about Edwards is that he has come through the betrayal a better man, not a bitter man.

Read Vincente Navarro on why he feels health care failed in the 1990's. He quotes Alain Enthoven (who worked for McNamara during the Vietnam War and came up with the concept of "body count" for military success - nice Alain): "the U.S. Political System is incapable of forcing changes in such powerful constituencies as the insurance industry." http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro11122 007.html

Such candid admission of the profoundly undemocratic nature of the U.S. political system was refreshing.The splendid opening of the U.S. Constitution, "We the people . . . ," should be amended with a footnote reading "and the insurance companies." Actually, Enthoven's statement came very close to Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, which defines democracy as a class dictatorship in which the corporate class controls the state. Empirical support in the U.S. for that statement is strong. But the statement is not 100% accurate. I lived under a dictatorship in my youth (in Franco's Spain) and I recognize a dictatorship when I see one. The U.S. is not a dictatorship. People in the U.S. do have a voice. Marx and Engels (and Enthoven) were not completely right: U.S. history shows that people's mobilizations can win the day.

"People's mobilizations"is what this diary is about.  Without the strong trade union and socialist movements of the 1930's, FDR would not have had to try to come up with a compromise that would work for everybody.  But he did.  It was called Keynesian capitalism.  Capitalism with a little soul and a little bit of a leash on it.
That is why John Edwards  says time and time again "I can't do it without you."  He can't.  He must have the power and the backing of the American workers behind him to try and crawl our way back out of the gullet of fascism (merger of corporations and the state).  We must crawl our way back to the center where the country wants to be.  

A term like "time out" should not be used for these bad and cruel trade pacts.  Because I was told to "take nap time" in the 1990's, I was asleep when corporatism was rumbling below the surface of our dot com and housing bubbles.  But reading Naomi Klein, Vincentre Navarro, listening to Thom Hartmann has got me wide awake.  Klein "digs in where other scratch the surface" says Studs Terkel about her book, The Shock Doctrine."  

Josh Holland has a piece on Alternet about his deep disappointment with Clinton and Obama embracing the Peru Free Trade Deal.  He says that the whole NAFTA model is flawed, not just individual trade pacts.  He quotes David Sirota:

"What's going on here," he said, "is that she is endorsing the NAFTA trade model, but saying that she has problems with certain countries' specific behaviors. And that's what's really telling. She is saying she has no problem with trade deals rigged to crush American and foreign workers on behalf of Wall Street, and that the only real reason to ever oppose that model is if there are other problems/complications with the specific country in question."

A new study shows that neoliberal trade policies have depressed "the wages of 70% of the U.S. Population". Independents, Republicans and Democrats are now against this free market flim flam.  So why support this Peru deal?  REad the rest  Holland's piece.  Citibank, Citigroup, and other financials stand to make a nice little killing.  And corporate democrats are hoping we don't notice.  Like we didn't notice in the 1990's. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss. http://www.alternet.org/workplace/67680/ ?page=3