All Options Except

So, with it looking more and more like the GOP will take the Senate seat held by Teddy Kennedy for 47 years the Democrats are discussing all of their options to get their health care bill passed.

They are discussing the House passing an unchanged Senate bill so that there is no more voting in the Senate. They are discussing ways to eliminate the filibuster so that it can't be used. The Nuclear Option of passing all changes as "budget reconciliations" has been brought up.

So what option aren't they talking about? The one that Candidate Barack Obama promised, working with both sides to come up with workable legislation.

You would think that when your landmark legislation becomes the centerpiece of an election battle in a state where your party's registered voters outnumber the opposition 3-1 and you lose, that maybe that would be a sign. Well, you would unless you are a Democratic leader in either chamber in DC. In that case you put your head in the sand, and pretend that something else is the reason you got beaten.

Now, if the Democrats really want to hold their majorities come November, what they might want to do is start doing what their leader campaigned on. Hell, what they claimed would happen in 2006. Start working across the isle. If they decide that instead of doing what is becoming glaringly obvious as the will of the people, and ramrod their bill through with some hocus pocus sleight of hand they will pay with more than one seat come November.

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I wonder

I was just in Massechuetsetts last week, and had to smuggle in a bottle of wine from our favorite Wisconsin vineyard to one of my co-workers up there. There is no legal way for anyone but a liquor distributor to get booze to that state, unless you bring it in for "individual use". Weird. As I've written here before, it's the same state that doesn't allow the serving of doubles in bars.

Now that they no longer have to protect Teddy Kennedy from himself, do you think they'll loosen some of those rules up?

Too soon for such a joke? Sorry, I don't see; and never have; Mr. Kennedy as some iconic great grandfather of the Senate. He was a drunk, a womanizer, and a man who left a woman for dead to protect himself and his family name. Later in life, when his nephew followed his lead, he tried protecting him.

He was a man who railed against the rich not wanting to pay "their fair share", while he kept his money in offshore trusts to avoid the US taxes on it.

Ted was a man who couldn't believe people wouldn't want to stem global warming, but fought tooth and nail to keep a wind farm from his sight lines on Cape Cod. Wind farms are evidently for folks who can't afford a beach front compound.

Now the Senate, it a full blow version of hypocrisy wants to rename the Health Care Reform Bill after Teddy Kennedy. They claim his battle with brain cancer shows we need reform. What they don't say is that Mr. Obama's Comparitive Effectiveness Review Board would probably deem a 74 year old (his age when the cancer was discovered) to be too old for most of the treatments Kennedy recieved. There wouldn't have been enough "quality adjusted life years" available to Mr. Kennedy to make it a worthwhile use of scarce health care resources.

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